I Have a Story to Tell You

Abe Smith

35 Abe Smith was born 10 December 1898, in a little village about eight miles from Gomel [today Homyel], near Kiev, in the Ukraine. He arrived in Canada in March 1925. I had known Abe and his wife Rose Smith for many years by the time I interviewed them in their Vancouver apartment on a sunny afternoon in 1974. Abe Smith died 18 May 1991. I WAS BORN IN 1898 in Gomel—actually, in a little village about eight miles from Gomel. I lived there all my childhood. It was a little village and there were a lot of peasants. The peasants lived in their houses and we lived— it was our house but it was the landlord’s territory, in a compound, like. We had a whole house to ourselves. The peasants were generally nice to us. Not all the time. They were hooligans you know. The landlord had cows, so we got milk from him. The water we used to get from a well and then later we had a pump to get the water. We had seven brothers and two sisters. I went once with a Gentile friend off mine—supposed to be a friend!— we went to swim and he tried to be smart and he grabbed me in the back, and we were naked you know, and the water wasn’t clean, too—the cows used to go in there—he tried, he tried to drown me you know, in a joking way, but I see he means it, so I hit him in the face like that and I hit right in the eyes and he falls down in the water and I ran out and I was running, without clothes, over an orchard, across the highway, to run home, and I got rid of him. I must have been about ten years old then. By trade I was a watchmaker, so I was allowed to live in any city in Russia .17 So I lived in Kiev. There I met a fellow. He was a German fellow and was working for the secret police, like. And we used to go out every night, Abe Smith  you know, for walks in parks, to talk and other things. (I want to tell you, when I was in Kiev three or four years ago, I went to that park where we used to go and meet.) So one time that fellow comes to me and says to me, There is going to be tonight a pogrom. And he says, The pogrom will start at twelve o’clock and all the streetcars and the buses will stop and the pogrom will begin. I lived in a place where Gentile officials from the government were in that same place. Anyway, twelve o’clock at night, I climbed on this place where was a lot of green stuff growing. I push my head under and I don’t hear nothing. I was glad but I was disgusted. I came next day to that fellow and I said,What the hell are you trying to pull? You told me there’ll be a pogrom, and this and that. He says, There was a student, Golboff was his name, and he’s in charge of to make that pogrom and just at the last minute he changed his mind and he called off the pogrom. So that’s why there wasn’t a pogrom last night. But once—I’ll tell you a story—when I was going on the boat in the spring to Kiev, there was a women dressed in black and she was sitting by me down there and she was going,“Oy,oy,”and started talking like she had nightmares. So I woke her up and I say,You are troubled by something? That’s why I woke you up. She doesn’t know me and I don’t know her. So she tells me a story what the bandits did.You know the bandits?18 The bandits were on the boat and they took her father and mother and they tied down the hands on the back and they throw them in the water. And she looked like a Gentile, that girl, so they let her go. They didn’t know what her connection was. So she thinks about what happened to her father and mother and she cries and has nightmares. There were a lot of other things like that going on. I’ll tell...