I Have a Story to Tell You (review)

I Have a Story to Tell You comprises the transcripts of interviews with 37 Jewish Canadians who originated from Eastern Europe, most of whom worked for many years in the garment industry in Montréal, Toronto and Winnipeg. The interview subjects were mostly born in the 1890s and early 1900s, and arrived in Canada between 1905 and the late 1920s as children or young adults.

The interviews were completed in 1974 as part of Seemah Berson’s research for a Master’s thesis in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, on immigrants’ experiences. She taped the interviews in Montréal, Toronto and Vancouver, and finished her thesis in 1980. While Joshua Gershman and Jim Blugerman, at least, were interviewed by Irving Abella, Ruth Frager, and others, Seemah Berson deserves much credit for taping and transcribing her interviews with Jewish-Canadian garment workers, few of whom are evidently alive today.

About three years ago, as a result of her growing sense of responsibility to the interviewees who had been so generous, Berson transcribed the interviews without alterations. She wanted to convey the impression in this book of the interviewee talking informally with the interviewers and readers. Almost all the people inter-viewed (17 women, 20 men) were on the left, not only because a socialist vision was common to union workers in the garment industry, but also because Berson’s contacts originated from secular and left-wing elements of the Jewish community in the mid-1970s.

The interviews confirm many familiar staples of the working-class Jewish immigrant experience, as analyzed in Ruth Frager’s Sweatshop Strife: Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Jewish Labour Movement in Toronto, 1900–1939 (Toronto 1992). Most of the interviewees came from harrowing conditions in Eastern Europe, largely from imperial Russia before the 1917 revolutions. Dire poverty and violent anti-Semitic pogroms helped to push out Jewish migrants, as did the desire to avoid Tsarist army service. Russian military officials during World War I regarded Jews with suspicion in the face of German incursion and occupation. Early deaths of parents and siblings are a common thread in the recollections. One woman, born in Gomel in 1899, says rather painfully that “[l]ife was very complicated and it was a very bad childhood. It was cruel, and…nothing to talk about. I don’t want to discuss those things.” (51) The interviewees also remember the immigration process as extremely unpleasant: dirty conditions, lack of food, seasickness, and seemingly endless train rides to Canadian destinations. Families were commonly divided between Europe and North America for long periods of time.

During her graduate research, Berson was preeminently interested in exploring why Jewish immigrants gravitated to the needle trades, and some of her interviews offer insights into the connection. Many Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were needle-trade workers as youths before they left for North America. While typically most of the work was done at home or in very small shops, many Jews did have some industrial experience, which was often lacking in other immigrant groups who came from a more rural background. Parental or school training in sewing, as well as family connections, helped ease entry into the field, often via unpaid apprenticeships. Once in Canada, many felt that they were not strong enough to work in heavy industry. But in the deskilled, industrialised environment increasingly dominant in the Canadian garment industry, limited skill levels in a particular aspect of production were relatively easy to acquire. As Jim Blugerman recalled, “you didn’t have to learn for long a trade because there was the development of technology and production …. the technology and development of the know-how is split up.” (143)

Above all, as Blugerman, Gershman and other inter viewees stated, kinship, friendship or local old-country ties (landsmen) were crucial factors in job contacts and recruitment. Because so many “manufacturers, foremen, and important tailors, designers and so on, happened to be Jews, they would bring in Jewish immigrants to work...