I Have a Story to Tell You

Pauline Chudnovsky

80 Pauline Chudnovsky was born in 1900 in Scitzenitz, near Kiev, in the Ukraine. She came to Montreal in 1921. I had the great pleasure of talking to Pauline in 1974 at the Baycrest home in Toronto, where she was residing. Pauline Chudnovsky died in 1986. I CAME HERE TO CANADA in 1921, in April, and the time was a terrible time then—it was a crisis. People were out of work and life was terrible. Why I came here is a lot to tell.We went out of Russia because of the pogroms of the pre-Revolution and because people were very militaristic.A very terrible struggle went on in the country where I was born. So we were young— myself and my husband—and we decided to go first to Romania. I was born near Kiev, in Russia, in 1900. I am now seventy years old and you know where I am now! [Baycrest]. We went through quite a time. It was very unpleasant and yet we were young and we were homesick a little bit and so we were married in Romania—in Kishenev, they called it—and then came to Canada.30 I suppose I am getting mixed up and telling you about the circumstances in Canada at that time. The needle trades started to organize. They built an industrial union. The head office was in Spadina Avenue and we had to go to the union every week. There were people there who were gifted to organize unions—very talented people. This was right after the First World War. The First World War, I guess, was in 1914, and then the revolution in Russia in 1917, and the immigrants from all the countries came to Canada, to the United States. People were just travelling to get away from something to get better, but whether they got better is a very big question. When I came my husband was unable to find a job because both of us were pharmacists from the Old Country. There we worked in one drugstore. Pauline Chudnovsky  It was a government drugstore. In Russia there were different laws than in Canada. It was very hard for Jewish people to be educated; because they are Jewish it wasn’t so easy for them! So we went to look for jobs. In the meanwhile we were married in Romania and I went to a drugstore to work there for a while, and then my husband’s brother from the United States thought that we were going to live with him and his family and he sent us affidavits and money to go there. But by the time we reached the border from Romania , the quota was filled and we weren’t allowed to go in. So we corresponded with people in Canada. At that time in Montreal, Quebec, there lived an uncle of my husband. He was the editor of a paper and he sent us affidavits to Antwerp to come to Canada. My oldest son, Ben, was born in Antwerp, Belgium. (Maybe this makes some kind of sense what I am telling you because sometimes I am forgetful and I have to think.) We stayed in Antwerp for five months and we arrived in Montreal.We lived in Montreal for eighteen years.We looked for jobs, but the law is when you emigrate from one country to another you have to go to school again in order to be able to possess the language of the country; otherwise you can’t get a job. We didn’t know the language here. So, in the meanwhile, time wasn’t still and two years later I gave birth to Hymie, our second son. My husband was looking for jobs. He found a job in a cleaning factory cleaning and dyeing, where they needed a chemist. The factory was a FrenchCanadian factory—I think the name was, maybe, De Chou? Something like that. And it was a kind of factory where they didn’t hire very many Jewish people afterwards. So he worked there for three years as a manager and was fired. My husband didn’t think that he was from the chachabatoni—the best folks in the world—but he thought that he had a right to be proud of our nationality! So he didn’t work at that time because people liked to assimilate to a stage that it is even a shame sometimes. Assimilation is very nice, but they deny themselves—meaning...