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In 1948, with communists cementing control of Budapest, Kati Rekai stood on the banks of the Danube saying goodbye to her mother, Helen, and to the land of her birth.

To her mother it didn't seem to matter that the city lay in ruins, Ms. Rekai recalled years later in a memoir. With tears in her eyes, she asked her daughter: "How could you leave this beautiful city?"

Yet leave she did - along with her husband, John, and two young daughters - landing in Canada in 1950 after a circuitous route, a fair share of hardship, and a bit of luck.

In her heart, however, Ms. Rekai never really left Hungary behind. Instead, she worked tirelessly to bridge the gap between the new world and the old, a passion that took many forms and eventually earned her the Order of Canada and de facto status as Canada's literary ambassador to the world.

"My mother was the ultimate problem solver," daughter Julie said. "If anyone came from Hungary, if they had a problem, they had her number."

Helping new immigrants was, in fact, a family affair. Her husband, John, a surgeon, along with his brother Paul, a physician, established Toronto's Central Hospital. (It eventually merged with Wellesley Hospital and was then subsumed by St. Michael's.) Groundbreaking at the time, it provided services for immigrants in many languages and catered to diverse ethnic food preferences.

For Ms. Rekai, running a newcomer hotline and helping out in the hospital was just the beginning of her bridge-building endeavours. She went on to become a weekly commentator for The Hungarian Show on CIAO Radio and a columnist for the Hungarian-English cultural magazine Kaleidoscope, as well as a founding member of the Canadian/Ethnic Media Association, director of the Hungarian-Chamber of Commerce, and chair of the foreign affairs committee of the Writers' Union of Canada.

When Expo 67 came to Montreal, she felt bad that the many foreign visitors to Canada had little of educational value to take back to their children. In the determined fashion for which she was well known, she decided to remedy that situation. Thus was born the Adventures of Mickey, Taggy, Puppo and Cica , a series of children's guidebooks starring four furry multicultural friends who travel the world and welcome visitors to Canada.

"It was a simple but magnificent concept," said David Crombie, who as Toronto's mayor at the time championed the books. "But it was not just her writing. It was her involvement with organizations that contributed to the culture of the city, and always with that kind of a plural lens."

Kati Rekai was born on Oct. 20, 1921, in Budapest, one of two children of Desider Elek, who managed a hog-breeding operation, and his wife Helen. After graduating from high school, she married John Rekai, when she was 18, and had two children, Julie and Judyth.

The Second World War was hard on the people of Hungary. In 1948, after the country was declared a socialist republic, Dr. Rekai and his brother were pressured to join the Communist Party. They decided instead to emigrate, managing to do so just before the border was closed.

The family started out for Pakistan, where the doctors had been promised jobs. They got as far as Paris by train, only to find that the jobs had been filled by others. They struggled to survive on $150 - the cash they had with them. They lived in an unheated apartment for $1 a day, did the laundry by hand in the kitchen, visited soup kitchens and waited for a break.

They looked to the United States. Unfortunately, there was a quota system for immigrants and a pecking order, in which Hungarians were nowhere near the top. The doctors were turned down by 49 hospitals.

Hope came in 1950 in the form of a chance encounter with a Hungarian acquaintance who had connections at the British Consulate and helped them get visas to come to Canada.

When the phone rang asking them if they could come to the consulate, "We didn't go, we ran," Ms. Rekai later wrote.

After a 12-day voyage, they landed in Montreal, only to learn that the doctors could not practise in Quebec because they were not Canadian citizens.

So on they travelled to Ontario, where the doctors prepared for exams at the College of Physicians and Surgeons because their Hungarian medical licenses were not accepted. Finally, the family had found a home.

"Kati was very proud of the level of acceptance that occurred here in Canada, for all different communities," said Madeline Ziniak, vice-president and general manager of OMNI Television.

But, at the same time that she fully embraced Canada, she felt it important for members of immigrant communities to retain some of what they had brought with them from other cultures, especially language.

"She was a believer - as many of her generation were who came in the 40s and 50s, before multiculturalism was captured as a national policy - in a vision of equity and the importance of retaining your heritage and making sure that that was translated into good Canadian citizenship," Ms. Ziniak said.

Ms. Ziniak, who now chairs the Canadian/Ethnic Media Association that Ms. Rekai helped establish, remembers how she worked hard to gain the group's acceptance at the Toronto Press Club, once a bastion of anglophone males.

After her books started to sell, Ms. Rekai took her multicultural message of tolerance on the road - the global road.

Beginning in 1989, through her work with the Writers' Union and the Canadian Society of Children's Authors, she organized 20 cultural exchange trips to help Canadian writers gain worldwide exposure. A tireless organizer with infectious enthusiasm, she made travel arrangements with educators and bureaucrats, got hundreds of writers and publishers to donate books and periodicals and then talked airlines into shipping them for free.

"She had connections everywhere," said Sonja Dunn, a Toronto writer and performer who accompanied Ms. Rekai on some of her many trips. "And she never said something couldn't be done."

Ms. Dunn remembers with great fondness being with Ms. Rekai at Lanzhou University on the Silk Road in China at a time when the only book in its Canadian Studies program was an early novel by Margaret Atwood.

"Their interest in Canadian literature was very great," Ms. Dunn said. "We were treated very well."

By the time their week-long visit was over, the fledgling Canadian Studies program was equipped with much more Margaret Atwood and books by many other Canadian writers.

There had also been some serious goodwill and cross-cultural bonding created with The Red River Valley , a song the Canadians were called upon to lead many times, as it was the only English song the Chinese knew.

Other memorable moments in their travels included hauling rain-soaked books off the tarmac in Cuba in the middle of the night and being wined and dined by Fidel Castro.

In Ukraine, they met with writers in a heritage building equipped with a beautiful ceramic stove donated by the Ignatieff clan.

These programs prompted the Toronto Star to call Ms. Rekai "a one-woman band for CanLit."

Indeed, as a result of Canadian Book Exhibitions Abroad, many Canadian authors ended up being translated into a wide variety of languages.

"[Kati]was a gentle and loving person and loved by all," Ms. Dunn said. "She was a true ambassador and a philanthropist."

Kati Rekai

Catherine (Kati) Rekai was born on Oct. 20, 1921, in Budapest. She died on Feb. 1, 2010, in Toronto. She was 88. Ms. Rekai, predeceased by her husband John, leaves daughters Julie Rickerd and Judyth Nuttall, their husbands and five grandchildren.

Adventures in diversity

The inspiration for the three dogs and one cat featured in The Adventures of Mickey, Taggy, Puppo and Cica came from Kati Rekai's backyard.

Mickey, a German-born shepherd, was named after a family dog, as was Puppo, a native malamute born on a Manitoba reserve.

Cica, a French tabby, was patterned after the family's cat; Taggy, an English beagle, was named for a neighbour's dog.

The four peripatetic friends had lots of other buddies far and wide, representing a multitude of ethnic identities.

They welcomed newcomers to Toronto with tours of Craigleigh Gardens, Fort York, Bloor Street, the Hockey Hall of Fame and many historical sites. An entire book was dedicated to the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, where their creator was a volunteer.

They visited Ottawa, Montreal and Brockville, Kingston and the Thousand Islands.

They travelled the world, learning the secret of Proust's famous madeleine in Paris, discovering the Delphic oracle in Greece, attending the opera in Italy, playing hockey in Switzerland, and learning to make strudel in Vienna.

A trip to Budapest was particularly important. There they learned about the history of the Magyars, the architecture of churches, bridges and palaces, about the destruction of war and how the Turks brought paprika to Hungary.

They ate a special cake called Rigo Jancsi (named after a Roma musician), gooseliver sandwiches, cherry soup, and of course, goulash.

In all, they were featured in 20 books translated into many languages, including Chinese. Worldwide, 300,000 copies of their adventures have been sold.

Their final adventure, published last year in anticipation of the Winter Games, was exploring British Columbia.



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