Blunt, buoyant and bountiful, she was always known as Bluma. A dogged fundraiser and networker, she had a flinty sensor for injustice and intolerance, a lifelong love of the arts and a passion for fixing things, people and the world.
Irreverent and possessed of a wicked sense of humour, she loved to say that her husband, Bram Appel, made the money and she spent it. A friend once said the Appels were involved with everything but racehorses; Ms. Appel shot back: "Bram says you can lose more on plays." On their 25th wedding anniversary, Mr. Appel gave his wife a spectacular ring, but she, with his permission, took it back to the jeweller and spent the money on a play, instead. "He's lucky I didn't ask for extra money," she joked.
"She wanted to help society, but I can tell you this," Ms. Appel's elder son, David, said yesterday. "If she had gone into business, anybody who backed her would have made a fortune. She knew everybody and she could get into any door, but she used all of that for philanthropy or to support interesting cultural causes."
A non-conformist, Ms. Appel "created spaces and places for herself where she didn't have to compete with others," said long-time friend and colleague Patrice Marin Best. "But I also believe she was gifted with a kind of foresight or intuition. Because she was curious and she read very widely, she was always picking up snippets of things and thinking about how they fit together."
"She was very effective," former federal politician Marc Lalonde said yesterday, commenting on the breadth of the causes and issues she supported. "She could not see a problem and remain indifferent to it. She was a marvellous example of commitment to the public good."
Her father, Jack Levitt, came from Vilna, Lithuania, and her mother, Dora, from Kovna, Russia, probably around 1905 as Jewish emigration from czarist Russia surged because of wide-scale repression and fear of pogroms. Her father, who made a living initially selling photographs on Montreal street corners, went into the textile business and eventually formed a prosperous company called Town Hall Clothes. The youngest of four children, Bluma (which means flower in Yiddish) grew up in a hard-working, socially conscious environment in Outremont.
She learned French at a young age (and later mastered Spanish and Italian), and was friends with a young Pierre Trudeau. She was also involved in the same little theatre group as Herbert Whittaker, the late theatre critic of The Globe and Mail.
She went to high school in Montreal but never attended university. In a speech to the Canadian Club in April, she said she had refused to take the entrance examinations for McGill University in 1936 because, "being Jewish, I needed straight A-plus to qualify." Since B-minus was good enough for anyone else, this struck her as unfair. So, even as a teenager, she possessed a hatred of intolerance, a theme that wove through the many disparate parts of a hugely complicated life that embraced politics, the arts, health care, social justice and international human rights.
In 1937, she was introduced to a young chartered accountant named Bram Appel at a hotel in the Laurentians, north of Montreal. He had a canny head for numbers and a good eye for investment opportunities. Because he had trouble finding a job, he started his own company, then helped to found a high-tech firm based on the clean filtration systems invented by scientist David Pall, a friend from his student days at McGill.
The Appels married on July 11, 1940, and had two sons, David (1941) and Mark (1944). As a young wife and mother, Ms. Appel made a career out of volunteering. "I learned early on you enter every door open to you," she said in her Canadian Club speech. "A locked door particularly intrigued me and I never gave up looking for the key."
