But Sally’s experience during the war had made her more willing to be with people who weren’t “her own kind,” and she had many other friends as well. She worked for many years as a stenographer, helping to put her Benjy and Sharon through college and watching in admiration as they developed careers and began to have families of their own. She then enjoyed many years of retirement with Harvey, still happily married to him even though he would always groan whenever she began to sing.
Harvey died in 1999. Sally still lives in her own apartment in Edmonton, where she can sing whenever she wants, but somehow never gets around to it, and where she has frequent visits from Benjy and Sharon, her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren.
During Sally’s childhood, her pa received a number of letters from his brother Izzy, the one who had returned to Latvia after deciding he didn’t like Canada. Izzy had married, and had two daughters. He wrote about his life as a Cohen in the Jewish community of Riga, which seemed to be doing well even after the USSR took over the country in 1940. But the letters stopped coming soon after the war began and the Germans occupied Latvia in 1941. After the war, Sally and her family did everything they could to try to contact Izzy. But they never heard from him or his wife and children again.
Historical Note
In the early 1930s, Toronto was not the multi-cultural city it has since become. Canada was still a proud member of the British Empire, with much closer ties to Britain than it now has as a member of the Commonwealth. Eighty percent of the population of Toronto was of British origin, and even Jewish Torontonians tended to think of themselves as proud British citizens. As Benny suggested, much of the city — the mayor’s office, the police force, and so on — was run by members of the Orange Order, a society for the preservation of Protestant religion and culture that originated in Northern Ireland and that encouraged strong negative feelings about non-British immigrants. There were huge parades in Toronto every year on Orange Day, July 12, with eight to ten thousand marchers and a hundred thousand spectators.
Jews, the largest non-British group in the city, represented just seven percent of the population, and prejudice against them was widespread and socially acceptable. In 1925, an editorial in the most conservative of the large daily newspapers, the Telegram, said, “An influx of Jews puts a worm next to the kernel of every fair city where they get hold. These people have no national tradition.… They are not the material out of which to shape a people holding a national spirit.”
When World War I started, there were about a hundred thousand Jews in Canada. But from then on, the Canadian government made immigration to Canada difficult for anyone considered “foreign” — especially anyone not white, English-speaking, Christian or with a British background. In his diary, the Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King wrote that he wanted “to prevent Jews or other undesirable people from getting in” to Canada, and during the 1920s, it became increasingly unlikely that a Jew from Latvia or any other European country would be allowed into the country. As the 1930s progressed, Canada admitted only a small number of Jewish refugees fleeing from the Nazis — fewer than any other country in the Western world.
But even Jews already living in Canada faced prejudice. Very few Jews were accepted into university programs to become doctors, lawyers or teachers — they were kept out by quotas that limited their numbers; many golf and social clubs accepted no Jewish members; many businesses did not employ Jews. Places of business posted signs saying No Jews Allowed or Gentiles Only, and the Zhurnal, the Yiddish-language newspaper in Toronto, reported a sign at a private beach saying, No Jews or Dogs Allowed.
For these reasons as well as for their own comfort, Jews in Toronto did tend to “stick to their own kind.” They rarely left their neighbourhood to the west of downtown, around the Kensington market. There, they could find kosher butchers and delis, a variety of synagogues, Jewish social clubs and organizations, many clothing factories owned by and employing Jews, and a lot of other Jews who had come to Canada from all over Europe and spoke many different languages but shared one — Yiddish. There was even a Yiddish theatre, The Standard, at Dundas and Spadina. There were also settlement houses like St. Christopher House, located at the end of Leonard Avenue in a house that had once belonged to the wealthy railway engineer Sir Casimir Gzowski, before the neighbourhood changed character and became a home for Jewish immigrants. The settlement houses were missions of Christian churches with the overall goal of producing converts to Christianity, but St. Chris was also concerned with teaching immigrants Canadian ways and with giving them some useful skills and a social life. Among other activities, it had a playschool, after-school girls’ and boys’ clubs, sewing classes, athletic teams, a choir, a consulting nurse, well-baby clinics and English classes.
Because of their restricted opportunities, Jews were particularly hard hit by the Great Depression, which started with the crash of the New York stock market on October 24, 1929. A panic led investors to try to sell all their shares, prices fell drastically, and many stocks lost their value in an extremely short time. The stock market crash led to bank failures around the world, falling prices for most goods, massive wage cuts and unemployment. Because so much of its economy depended on exports of raw materials like lumber, Canada was hit hard by the collapse of world trade. The economy fell further than that of any nation other than the United States, and it took longer to recover — not until World War II began in 1939.
Unemployment rose from two percent in 1929 to almost thirty percent in 1932. With so few jobs available, many men began roaming the country, stealing rides in boxcars, constantly moving on because nobody gave them work or welcomed them — including the places they had come from, when they tried to return home. By 1932, there were as many as seventy thousand men riding the rails across Canada. While many people complained about the expense of supporting those less fortunate than themselves, every city and town had soup kitchens, and many charitable organizations and local governments developed “relief” schemes, handing out money, clothing and food after carefully making sure that the recipients were really needy. Many people resented the nosiness of relief inspectors, and felt that accepting relief was a sign of failure. It was only after the bad times had gone on for a few years that the federal government finally took action in 1932 and opened work camps for men who were single, unemployed and homeless.
In the garment industry that employed many Toronto Jews, wages and working conditions had always been poor, and the Depression made things worse. Many workers joined labour unions and various left-wing political parties, including the Communist Party, taking the advice suggested by Karl Marx in his Communist Manifesto, commonly stated as: “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.” Some of the prejudice against Jews in Toronto came from the belief of many Gentiles that the Jews represented not only a different religion, but also a threat to Canadian society and its entrenched politics and values.
The successful revolution in Russia in 1917 that overthrew the tsar and replaced him with a Communist government not only encouraged those who hoped for similar revolutions in other countries, it also led to the emergence of right-wing groups firmly opposed to power being taken away from those who already had it. Fear of Communism helped bring the Fascists to power in Italy in 1922 and the National Socialist Party, the Nazis, to power in Germany in 1933. Once in power, the Nazis, who believed in racial purity and had a particular distaste for Jews, immediately began to restrict the activities of Jews, boycotting Jewish doctors, lawyers and stores, banning Jews from government jobs and teaching positions, encouraging moves to dismiss Jewish managers and musicians, removing books by Jews from bookstores and libraries, and condoning violence directed against Jews.
The Toronto papers reported all these events in Germany, and knowledge of them encouraged both fear in the Jewish community and approval of the Nazis among various other Canadians. In Quebec, Adrien Arcand, who led a French nationalist movement and called himself the “Ca
nadian führer,” considered French-Canadians to be “an honest and upright race which does not want to submit any longer to the exploitation, thievery, perfidy, immorality, filth, corruption, and Bolshevik propaganda of the sons of Judas.” Arcand remained a supporter of Nazism throughout his life, and was a mentor to the Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel in the 1960s. While Nazism was less prominent outside of Quebec, it had supporters across Canada.
Nevertheless, the events of 1933 involving the Swastika Gang, the events at the Beaches, and the riot at Christie Pits were rare — perhaps the only instances of large-scale race-related violence in modern Canada.
Once the heat wave was over, the confrontations stopped. While many Canadians sympathized with the Nazis or simply disliked Jews, their anti-Semitism expressed itself more in attitudes and restrictions — in refusing to accept Jews fleeing from Germany before the war, or survivors of concentration camps after the war, for instance — than in outright violence. Until well after the war, anti-Semitism remained an undercurrent in Canadian life rather than an openly declared policy.
That was obviously not the case in Europe, where the Nazis were responsible for the massacre of millions of Jews and other people they considered undesirable — including, as Sally’s family later learned, the murder of twenty-six thousand Jews in Latvia’s Rumbula Forest near Riga in 1941. We have to assume that families such as Uncle Izzy’s would have been among them.
Images and Documents
Image 1: Most of Toronto’s Jewish population lived in the Kensington Market area in the 1930s.
Image 2: Originally a mission of the Presbyterian church to the poor area near the Kensington market, St. Christopher House offered programs to help neighbourhood families and immigrants deal with poverty, poor health, illiteracy and discrimination.
Image 3: A homeless man sleeps on a park bench in Toronto — a common sight during the Depression.
Image 4: People who couldn’t pay their rent could be thrown out onto the street with their meagre possessions.
Image 5: Many people across Canada had to depend on soup kitchens, such as this one in Montreal.
Image 6: Many farms in Canada’s West failed because of the drought.
Image 7: Many men were forced to seek work elsewhere because of the drought.
Image 8: This scene from Annette St. Public School in 1936 is typical of a Toronto schoolyard in the 1930s.
Image 9: The Book Room at Boys and Girls House, part of the Toronto Public Library. It drew international attention as the first children’s library in the British Empire.
Image 10: People throng the Midway at the Canadian National Exhibition. The Ex continued to draw big crowds even during the Depression.
Images 11, 12 and 13: Some Canadians were very intolerant of Jews. Two signs (top and right) are from Ontario. The photo at the lower left is from Quebec.
Image 14: The Balmy Beach Canoe Club building. The club had a “Swastika Club” in 1932.
Image 15: Toronto’s Evening Telegram page dated August 1, 1932, reports the displaying of swastikas, which triggered the Christie Pits riots.
Image 16: An image of a baseball game at Christie Pits in 1922, showing the ball diamond and the steep sides leading down to the playing area. The land, formerly a sand quarry, was converted to Willowvale Park after 1910.
Image 17: The 1931 Harbord Street Junior Champions Baseball Team. A number of the players were also on the 1933 team.
Image 18: Canada in 1932–1933.
Image 19: The Kensington market neighbourhood, known as the Jewish Market in the thirties. The market was in the area generally bounded by Oxford Street, Baldwin Street, Augusta Avenue and Spadina Avenue.
Yiddish Glossary
anti-semit: anti-Semite
bar mitzvah: religious initiation of a Jewish boy of thirteen
bupkis: nothing
cheder: a room or school where Hebrew is taught
chuppah: a canopy under which a Jewish bride and groom make their vows
dreidel: four-sided spinning top
farshtunkener no-goodnik: stinking good-for-nothing
gefilte fish: small cake of chopped fish and other ingredients
gevalt!: cry for help; “Oy gevalt!” would mean “God help me!” or “Oh my God!”
gonif: thief
gornisht: nothing
goy: a Gentile; anyone not a Jew; adjective is goyishe; plural is goyim
Hanukkah: eight-day Jewish holiday that usually falls in December
hechsher: stamp to indicate something is kosher
kayn aynhoreh: “Thank God”; the literal meaning is “no evil eye”
kibitzing: chatting or joking lightheartedly
kosher: Jewish law regarding food
kugel: baked dish, savoury or sweet, of potatoes or noodles
kvetcher: complainer
me shlugt yidn!: They’re beating up Jews!
mensch: an admirable or honourable person
meshugge/meshuggeneh: crazy
oy: exclamation of alarm
Passover: the Jewish spring festival marking the Israelites being freed from slavery in Egypt
Pesach: the Passover festival
Rosh Hashanah: festival celebrating the Jewish new year
schmaltz: melted chicken fat
seder: Jewish service/dinner at the beginning of Passover
Shabbes: Jewish sabbath
sha shtil: shut up
shaygetz: a negative term for a non-Jewish boy
shochet: person authorized by a rabbi to slaughter animals in a kosher fashion
shul: synagogue
sitting shiva: gathering together in someone’s house and mourning together
shmendrick: someone of no account
synagogue: the building where Jews assemble for religions observance or instruction
trayf: any food which is non-kosher
trombenik: braggart; a loudmouthed troublemaker
Yid: if pronounced “Yeed,” a Jew; mispronounced Yid” (like “kid”), an offensive term for a Jewish person; adjective is Yiddishe
Yom Kippur: the Day of Atonement, following the Jewish new year; the most solemn day of the year
zayde: grandfather
Acknowledgments
Every effort has been made to trace ownership of visual and written material used in this book. Errors and omissions will be corrected in subsequent updates or editions.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following:
Cover portrait: (colourized) courtesy of Joyce Zweig.
Cover background: Detail (tinted) from People eating at a soup kitchen, Library and Archives Canada/PA-168131.
Image 1: Jewish Market Day, Kensington Market, Toronto, Ont., 1924, Metro Toronto Reference Library, T11552.
Image 2: St. Christopher House, Toronto, Archives of Ontario, F 1075-13, H 1363, M.O. Hammond Fonds.
Image 3: Unemployed man sleeping on park bench, City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 4636.
Image 4: Eviction from a slum, City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 8030.
Image 5: People eating at a soup kitchen, Library and Archives Canada/PA-168131.
Image 6: Threshing machine during Depression years, Glenbow Museum, 2291-2.
Image 7: Transient man riding the rails, Glenbow Museum, NC-54-3604.
Image 8: Cluster of schoolgirls, skipping, 1936, City of Toronto Archives, Globe and Mail Collection, Fonds 1266, Item 39567.
Image 9: Room at Boys and Girls House, Toronto Public Library, photo from City of Toronto Archives, SCN268-1998N.
Image 10: Crowd scene on Midway, September 1, 1925, City of Toronto Archives, Globe and Mail Collection, Fonds 1266, Item 6127.
Image 11: Gentiles Only sign, found at a resort northeast of Toronto, ca. 1935, Ontario Jewish Archives, photo 6161.
Image 12: No Jews Wanted sign at Jackson’s Point, ON, 1938 (detail), Ontario Jewish Archives, photo 1181.
Image 13: Canadian Jew
ish Congress.
Image 14: Balmy Beach Club, Toronto Public Library, Repro # 974-11-2.
Image 15: The Evening Telegram, August 1, 1932 (detail), Sun Media Corp.
Image 16: Willowvale Park – Baseball, May 13, 1922, City of Toronto Archives, Series 372, Sub Series 52, Item 1011.
Image 17: Harbord Street Collegiate Junior Champions, September 6, 1931, City of Toronto Archives, DPW52-1492.
Images 18 and 19: Maps by Paul Heersink/Paperglyphs. Map data © 2002 Government of Canada with permission from Natural Resources Canada.
The publisher would like to thank Dr. Irving Abella, co-author of None Is Too Many, and Dr. Bill Waiser, author of All Hell Can’t Stop Us: The On-to-Ottawa Trek and Regina Riot, for vetting the manuscript. Thanks also to Barbara Hehner for fact-checking the manuscript.
Dedicated to the memory of my grandparents, Bessie and Samuel Berkan and Esther and Max Nodelman, who had the courage to leave the old country for a new home, and who somehow managed to raise their large families (six Berkan and eight Nodelman children) without a nickel to spare.
Not a Nickel to Spare Page 13