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Aline Gubbay: Historian Of Montreal Dies

Aline Gubbay, the historian, architectural photographer, author and social worker who chronicled the social and architectural history of Westmount and Montreal in four books, died in her apartment of pancreatic cancer Friday.

She was 85.

...

In the preface to Gubbay's last book, A View of Their Own, The Story of Westmount, the city's former Mayor Peter Trent described her writing as "a delicate work of love" that "deftly limns the city's gentle history and modestly allows places, characters and buildings to speak to the reader directly. "

Marilynn Vanderstaag, a columnist with the Westmount Examiner said Gubbay was "a great, gracious graceful lady, so detail oriented."

"She not only wrote, but she published, photographed and promoted her books," Vanderstaag said,

"She always carried her books in the trunk of her car. She was a photographer and always had darkrooms to develop her pictures in her house."

A silk merchant's daughter, Alice Helfer was born in Alexandria, Egypt on June 20, 1920. Her mother was Turkish, her father, a Russian Jew from Georgia.