Joe Salsberg: A Life of Commitment by Gerald Tulchinsky (review)

I first met Joe Salsberg in the early 1950s. My father owned a small dairy restaurant on Spadina Avenue deep in the heart of Toronto’s Jewish garment industry. Every Thursday afternoon when I arrived home from school – we lived above the store – there would be a huge lineup of workers outside waiting to get in.

Thursday, I knew, was Salsberg day at Abella’s Lunch. Precisely at 4 he would take a table at the back of the restaurant and spend the next few hours meeting his constituents. My job was to serve them coffee and donuts. Even then, as a seven-year-old, I knew there was something very special about this man. Charming, charismatic, respected, larger than life, he had it all – except for one detail: he was a Communist at a time when the party was distinctly out of favour.

But to the men and women of the St. Andrews constituency who kept electing him to the Ontario legislature, as to those who had previously elected him to Toronto’s city hall as an alderman, it didn’t matter. JB, as he was widely known, was simply above politics. He was their spokesman on every issue, their representative to the non-Jewish community, their leader even though most were opposed to Communism. He spoke their language, fought for them when no one else would, and seemed to know everyone. He was the classic ethnic politician.

In this enthralling book, historian Gerald Tulchinsky reminds us of Salsberg’s colourful career and his remarkable contributions not only to the Jewish community but to Canada’s trade union movement, to the Communist Party, and to the expansion of civil and human rights in this country. There was scarcely a national issue in the twentieth century in which JB did not play a pivotal part. And as Tulchinsky points out, his ideological positions often changed dramatically. But so did Canadian society, and Salsberg was constantly struggling to reconcile his Communism with policies that he knew were necessary to advance the interests of workers, Jews, blacks, and others he cared about but that were often contrary to party ideology. It was a struggle he ultimately lost, and he resigned from the party in the 1950s and devoted the rest of his life to Jewish cultural activities and campaigning for Israel.

His is a fascinating story, and Tulchinsky is up to it. As the author of several books and articles on Canadian Jewry, he was the perfect choice to tackle the biography of one man whose life mirrors the immigrant Jewish experience in Canada in the last century. His vivid writing brings to life this immensely talented politician, while providing us an exquisite insight into Toronto’s Jewish community, which Salsberg represented for so many years.

Though Salsberg was a highly complex individual fighting to sort out so many competing values, I think Tulchinsky is absolutely right in concluding that above all else he was a “mensch,” a “stand-up guy,” a person of dignity, integrity, and compassion who cared more about social justice than ideology. Yet this did not prevent him from undertaking unforgiveable acts of deception. As late as 1953, well after he had learned of Stalin’s murderous record against Jews and others, Salsberg praised him in a long and passionate eulogy in the Ontario legislature, even though he suspected that his own days in the party were numbered. Tulchinsky’s explanation for this peculiar behaviour was that Salsberg was “a flawed man” still taken in by the mystique of Communism even after learning of the Soviet Union’s genocidal policies. He is probably right.

This book is an important reminder of why, to two generations of Toronto Jews, Salsberg was a folk hero. The men and women lining up every Thursday outside Abella’s Lunch scarcely cared about his flaws or his politics. They saw him as their champion. His was a remarkable career, and this is a remarkable book, to be not...