My great-aunt founded the National Ballet of Canada. I have known that sentence my entire life. But I don’t think I ever understood what it actually meant until now. Her name was Celia Franca. She was born Celia Franks into a poor Jewish family in London. She reinvented herself, crossed the Atlantic at 29 and built Canada’s national ballet company in approximately ten months. She did not arrive with money, an established institution or an easy personality. She arrived with artistic vision, discipline, learned charisma and an almost frightening conviction that Canada needed what she could build. She became celebrated, feared, difficult and impossible to ignore. Seventy-five years later, I am going through her history, recreating her portraits with my sister and trying to truly understand what she built. An inspiring ferocious woman! zushagoldin #celiafranca #ballet #jewishstories nationalballet