About the Author
Perry Nodelman’s character, Sally Cohen, lived in a time and place very much like that of his mother and father when they were young. “And so,” he says, “I hit on the brilliant idea of interviewing my parents about their childhoods and what they remembered of what it was like to be young and Jewish in Toronto in the early 1930s. Neither of them had been at Christie Pits during the riot. But both had been Jewish in what was a surprisingly intolerant city in the early thirties, and both knew what it was like to be poor in the Depression.”
Perry’s father, he recalls, was always a great storyteller. “He talked of things like the white tuxedo his mother bought him and the band that resulted from it, with much drama and great gusto. As a teller of stories about himself, my father had what I think of as a hyperbole complex — if he’d once swum across a pond and came second in a race, he’d tell us about how he swam across Lake Ontario using just one hand and was given a gigantic trophy by the Prime Minister, who told him he was the best thing since sliced bread. But there was always a little truth at the heart of his stories. Many details of Benny’s life came from my father’s stories of his childhood. It saddens me that he died while this book was being written, and never got to learn about Benny.”
Sally herself very much springs from Perry’s mother’s stories. “She, too, was one of six girls. Her mother and father had emigrated from Latvia in the early years of the twentieth century. Her family lived a few blocks from the Kensington Market and her father had a truck and bought vegetables from farmers to be sold in the Toronto markets.… My mother was able to give detailed answers to my questions about things like what her family typically ate for supper and how the shochet killed a chicken and what happened on a normal day in school.”
After Perry’s mother read the first draft of his story, it took her some time before she could bring herself to talk to him about it. “I imagined it was because she was mad that I’d misused her memories and told a different story about someone else. But when she finally did talk, it turned out she had been deeply affected by the story and the intense memories it evoked. It brought many things back to her — not all of them pleasant.”
As the story and the Historical Note describe, Toronto in the 1930s was not racially tolerant. “Both my parents told me that there had been a sign that said No Jews or Dogs Allowed at a private beach somewhere near Toronto,” Perry says. “But while the Toronto Jewish newspaper the Yiddisher Zhurnal did report such a sign at the time, and while other people who spoke of these years in later life also had firm memories of it, there’s no actual archival evidence that the sign existed. It might have just been a rumour that floated through the Jewish community — but if so, it was an only slightly exaggerated version of the many actual No Jews or Gentiles Only signs that we know for a fact were common.”
Perry’s father obviously passed on his love of story. “I like reading, thinking, making things up,” Perry says. “As a child, my favourite game was making papier-mâché puppets and cardboard-box stages and putting on shows for my brothers.”
Perry is professor emeritus of children’s literature at the University of Winnipeg. For years he was the editor of Canadian Children’s Literature/Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse. He is the author of The Same Place but Different, A Completely Different Place and Behaving Bradley, and co-author, with Carol Matas, of the “Minds” series beginning with the book Of Two Minds. His books about children’s literature include Words About Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books and, with colleague Mavis Reimer, The Pleasures of Children’s Literature, a textbook used in universities across North America and elsewhere. Not a Nickel to Spare was shortlisted for the McNally Robinson Book for Young People Award.
Author’s Note
While the characters and events of Not a Nickel to Spare are fictional, I based many of the details and incidents on my parents’ memories of their life in Toronto in the thirties. I am grateful to Lonnie Nodelman, who died in 2006, and to Dorothy Berkan Nodelman, for their willingness to share their fascinating stories and for so many other things.
While I consulted a number of books and articles, my knowledge of the events at the Beaches and Christie Pits in 1933 comes mainly from two sources: Cyril H. Levitt and William Shaffir’s The Riot at Christie Pits and the 1932–1933 issues of the Toronto Daily Star. The ready availability of the Star archive on the internet (http://thestar.pagesofthepast.ca/) made my task much easier and much more interesting. Browsing in it, I even found my own birth notice.
I learned much about the effects of the Depression from Pierre Berton’s The Great Depression, 1929–1939 and Barry Broadfoot’s Ten Lost Years. Some of the more thrilling events in the life of Benny Applebaum are based on ones the boxer Sammy Luftspring reports in his autobiography, Call Me Sammy.
My thanks to Bob Desroches for visiting the market and the Pits and bringing back visual evidence, to Carol Matas and Sandy Bogart Johnston for careful reading and good advice, and to my family — Billie Nodelman, Josh and Jenny Nodelman, Asa Nodelman and Jeanne Hudek, and Alice Nodelman and Zach Brown — for listening to me go on and on about the riot and not threatening their own uprising.
— P.N.
While the events described and some of the characters in this book may be based on actual historical events and real people, Sally Cohen is a fictional character created by the author, and her diary is a work of fiction.
Copyright © 2007 by Perry Nodelman.
Published by Scholastic Canada Ltd.
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ISBN: 978-1-4431-2403-4
First eBook edition: October 2012
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