The rags to riches tale of a larger-than-life romance of over seven decades
Me & Issy is a love story about how a troubled and deprived child chanced to meet a man who worshipped her, brought her a fantasy life of four boys and extraordinary opulence - and banished her self-doubt. She in turn was awestruck and mystified by his acumen and daring during his founding of the Four Seasons Hotels.
Beginning with her childhood in North Toronto, in a very Jewish home surrounded by non-Jews, Rosalie enchants us with anecdotes about her family, Isadore Sharp's family, and the growth of their own in the light of the expanding Four Seasons chain. How did she go to the Ontario College of Art & Design while simultaneously raising four rambunctious boys? How did Issy open hotel after hotel with only his collateral of confidence and charisma? Rosalie is a rapt follower of his astonishing success and the first fan of his legendary town hall talks to 40,000 employees.
And with success came tragedy. The devastating death of their son Chris shook them, but they coped. Here, all of Rosalie's life is opened up for viewing, the good and the bad, the success and the failures, but especially her inspired romance with Issy. In the words of their second eldest son, Greg, "Their mutual love and respect growing stronger over the past 69 years is as extraordinary as it is beautiful."
The Quebec-chartered "Nomad" chapter of the Hells Angels had two specific goals: to monopolize the Quebec drug trade; and to expand that trade across other parts of Canada. Their war against rival dealer gangs escalated to a boiling point, taking the lives of dozens of gangsters and innocent people as it played itself out openly on Montreal's streets.
Little did the Nomads know that at the height of achieving their goals, they would also be months away from a lengthy police investigation to shut them down. The trials that followed revealed seven years of conflict and murder initiated by Maurice "Mom" Boucher, the man who was at the epicentre of this war.
One criminal trial in particular turned out to be one of the longest in Canadian history. It meant convincing a jury to accept the notion that a biker gang works on the same principle as a pirate ship - even the cook knows what their common goal is.
The "biker trials" brought out informants on both sides of the conflict, who, for a variety of reasons had turned on the gangs they had previously sworn loyalty to. Their testimonies revealed the arrogance of the Nomads in their pursuit of a monopoly over Quebec's illegal drug trade. Now, Cherry reveals the inside story of the biker culture and the biker trials.
Rifke (Rosalie Wise Sharp) grew up in North Toronto, which felt to her like a foreign place because there were no other Jewish families there in the late 1930s. Yiddish was spoken in her household, and the food, dress, and customs of Ozarow - the Polish shtetl (small Jewish town) from which her parents emigrated - were all maintained.
Rifke's peers took lessons in tap-dancing, ice-skating, the piano, and the flute; activities that didn't translate into the Yiddish vocabulary at the Wises, where only hard work, no nonsense, and book-learning were permitted. Rifke secretly decided to pass as a Gentile, joining a bible class and the Christmas choir. She did not bring home friends, in case they were witness to a Jewish ritual like the koshering of meat. Rifke was guilty about her pursuit of Gentile activities during the war time, when her mother was frantic with fear that their family in Poland was being slaughtered by the Nazis.
In high school, Rifke's life changed when being "a freak" translated to being "eccentric" and "respectable." It was there that she met and married her soul mate Isadore, who worked in the construction business, much to her parents' disappointment. Prosperity, took time; however, Isadore's audacious dream to build a world class hotel chain, The Four Seasons, came to pass. In this memoir, Rosalie Sharp casts a wry and self-deprecating look back on her childhood, with anecdotes about the chance events and comic ironies that make up a life.
