The train was starting to pull out of the station when a young woman screamed out the window to the couple who waved to her from the elegant platform. "Give me back my baby. I want my baby back.." By the time the couple agreed to let go of the infant-girl they had adopted only seven hours before, the train was clearing the platform. As they ran faster and faster to catch up to the moving car, they passed the infant Malka to her mother through the speeding window.

Had it not been for that last minute pass through the window, Malka probably would have been one of the millions of children exterminated in Auschwitz, where the couple who had adopted her perished.

These photos are all that remains of the large family that perished in the holocaust; only these photos and the stories survived.

The irony is: The young mother believed, as did most everyone around her, that her infant daughter would be safer in Europe than in the Middle East, where she was heading.

Israel at that time existed only in the realm of dreams dreamt by pioneers like that young woman, Malka's mother and father. Because they were aware of the danger and difficulty awaiting them, they had thought their infant would fare better with her adoptive parents.

Twisting the irony further: A daughter of pioneers in Israel, Malka is recognized as a pioneer in her own right, in the country that has adopted and embraced her as a beloved daughter: Canada, where she is considered to be a major force in bringing about the change in perception that saw the immigrant, the ethnic, the newcomer, not as aliens, but as importers of vitality, hope, daring, ancient and avant-garde sophistication, humor, and culture.

From that speeding train window to the tent flap of a Bedouin in the Sinai desert, Malka Marom has entered life through whatever opening or crack that fate has allowed. Concerts, documentaries, novels are just a few of the creative treasures with which she has emerged.

As a child Malka had the leading role in the first movie filmed in Israel -- the first glimpse the outside world saw of a nation reclaiming the remnants of her survivors. In her early teens a window opened up when Malka was invited to perform on the huge stage of the Dalia Folk festival where she took part in the creation of what is considered today: Israel's folk songs and dances.

Malka was still in her teens when she married a Canadian, moved to his homeland, birthed two children in two and half years, and thus created two windows to the future. Shortly after that, while Canada was closed tight to world music, world dance, world culture - to anything, and all too often to anyone stretching beyond the strict confines of English or French mores -- Malka opened a crack in that hermetic door when she danced a lead role in the performance of Ancient Roots ( India's, Bali's, and Israel's.) She blew the door wide open - for good - when she and Joso Spralja formed the singing duo "Malka and Joso." They sang folk songs of many lands in fourteen languages.

"At a time when folk singers sang as if detached from their bodies and emotions, Malka & Joso came on the scene oozing sexuality and passion," recalls the painter Helen Lucas. "Theirs was a partnership that legends are made of..They made quaint and nostalgic songs of the past refreshingly contemporary."

"Many of their renditions became classics," says master guitarist Eli Kassner. "They made an immediate impact on the concert scene and went from success to success to become world famous."
Their first album, Introducing Malka & Joso, recorded by Capitol EMI Canada, and released in both England and the United States, garnered rave reviews and outsold many of the label's English-language albums.

"In 'The Great Folk 'Scare' of the Sixties,' Malka & Joso were a rarity among those great artists," recalls Shelly Schultz, president of the William Morris Agency in New York. Malka & Joso's second album, Mostly Love Songs, came out in late 1965 -- just as the duo won an RPM Award as the year's Best Folk Group. Their third album, Jewish Songs, featuring Hebrew and Yiddish songs, proved to be another bestseller. Their fourth, Folk Songs Around The World, featured the best of the tracks from the Malka & Joso recordings. It was released in Britain, France, Holland, and Italy. In the fall of 1966, Malka & Joso's "A World of Music" TV show followed the Saturday night tradition, "Hockey Night in Canada." The weekly CBC series took the duo's international repertoire into the living rooms of the nation.

"(Their) show projected an image of cosmopolitanism that is, let me say it, perfect." said the critic Robert Fulford, in the Toronto Star.
Malka & Joso Forever, a CD retrospective of their songs was released by EMI in 2001 to rave reviews. "Andea Bocelli could learn a lot from Joso," declared the Globe and Mail. "But Joso probably would not have been as effective without Malka's alto. sung in such an intimate heartfelt way as to make it seem like the sound of drying salt tears.(or) full throated, like a field worker with both feet in the soil."

Being a single mother of two young boys compelled Malka to stop singing 'til all hours of the night in clubs at home, let alone in concert tours. When the Malka & Joso duo dissolved shortly after the dissolution of her first marriage, Malka continued on her own, to open the door to other artists from all points in the world. She wrote, hosted and sang in the weekly CBC Radio program: Song Of Our People, and the weekly City TV show: Mosaic.

One night, after taping one of her shows, Malka stopped for a quick cup of coffee at the Riverboat. On the tiny stage stood a girl whose blond mane covered up her face, shoulders and chest while her mini skirt revealed legs stretched to tomorrow - and until tomorrow, it seemed, the girl would still be tuning her guitar. Malka's cappuccino was brewed, served and sipped, while the blond being was still tuning her guitar strings. Malka was halfway to the exit door when the guitar tuner started to sing: Both Sides Now, then - after another bout of retuning, The Circle Game, Michael, I Had A King.
"Who is this amazing singer?" Malka whispered to Bernie, the owner of the Riverboat. "A nobody, a waitress named Joni Mitchell," he replied. After she completed her set, Malka went over to Joni Mitchell and with great excitement she said, "What a huge talent you are, as great, if not greater than Bob Dylan."

"Really?. Do you really think so?. Do you really think the songs are good?." Joni said, glowing in delight and genuine surprise. A few years later, when the whole world knew how great Joni Mitchell's talent, Malka's four-hour interviews with her, broadcast on CBC Radio, were nominated for the Actra award. As was Malka's interview with Leonard Cohen - in which his initial reply to Malka's question was to slip his hand under her skirt. The broadcast starts with her embarrassed and surprised laughter, but after that. his two-hour conversation with Malka, like Joni's, afforded a privileged insight into the mysteries of the creative process and life in music. As did Malka's conversation with Jilles Vinault, Nana Mouskouri and Pablo Cassals (which Malka recorded only three months before the legendary cellist died at age 94.)

From her unique vantage point as the outsider on the inside, Malka interviewed the mythic one-eyed Israeli general, Moshe Dayan; recorded her documentaries, My Jerusalem and The Holocaust, both of which won the nomination for the Actra; her radio documentaries, "The Music or Israel," "The Music of Mexico," as well as her eight-hour radio documentary about the American Dream, "The Bite Of The Big Apple," which earned her not only the nomination for the Actra, but the prize itself.

A twist of fate led Malka to the Sinai desert where she recorded her documentary The Bedouins, which won the Ohio State Award, as well as her Desert Diary, which was also nominated for the Actra.

It was during her journey to the Sinai that her novel Sulha was conceived. For weeks and months at a time during the next ten years in which she conducted the research for her novel, Malka lived in the nomadic tents of five different Bedouin tribes in the Sinai and the Negev deserts. Once, after a five-month stay with the Bedouins, she found herself unable to make the transition back to life in Canada. Living and sleeping by the fireplace of her Toronto home, she cooked over the open fire, brewing tea and coffee as she had been taught by the Bedouins - and wrote the first pages of her novel Sulha.

"The Desert is a place where good and bad are wedded like sun and shade, where a stranger is always received and always shut out, a place where the common language is often silence or guns, where the horizon is wide and the boundaries narrow." Leora, in the Novel Sulha.

A portion of Sulha won the Ontario Arts Council Award for the most promising work of fiction in progress. Upon its publication in Canada, the literary critics lauded the novel: "Sulha is a splendid hymn to love, dignity, honor and duty. The riveting tale unfolds in. what will surely become one of the surprise hits of this literary season." (Globe and Mail) "In this, the first step of what promises to be yet another distinguished career, Marom has found yet another way to leave her music echoing in our memories." (Vancouver Sun) "Marom powerfully and lyrically evokes a people and a country in the grip of obsession. The heat and chill, smells and sounds, and paradoxes of the desert mesmerize; sand sifts from our clothes even after the book is done."(Quill & Quire) "Marom has created something much more powerful and daring than yet another war novel. She has created an original and unforgettable novel of peace." (Vancouver Courier)

The Nobel Peace laureate, Elie Wiesel, praised Sulha as "One of the most poignant and inspired novels to have emerged from modern Israel's harrowing yet exultant experience." And The Jerusalem Post stated: "Rare in the avalanche of books on the Arab-Israeli conflict, most of
which take a stand, "Sulha" gives every side its say in the infinitely
complex situation." "I refused to make it simple, life is not simple, love is not simple, nor is forgiveness, reconciliation and peace. especially in the Middle East,' Malka said in the Jerusalem Post.

Sulha has also been published in Germany and Greece.

At present Malka is working on her next novel. And though her new novel is still a closed secret, the rest of her archives -- in music, dance, broadcasting and literature -- are housed in the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library at The University of Toronto, where they have been an open secret since the start of 2002.

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