I Have a Story to Tell You

Lil Abramowitz

113 I interviewed Lil Abramowitz after talking to her husband, Albert, at their home in Toronto in 1974. Lil was born 25 May 1907, in what is now Austria but was then Poland. For 123 years, Poland had been partitioned by its imperialist neighbours: Russia, Prussia (then Germany), and Austria, finally regaining its independence in 1918. This event was followed by six wars, fought concurrently, by Poland between 1918 and 1921, before a reborn Poland emerged. Lil Abramowitz came to Canada on 21 October 1928. She passed away on 17 January 2003. She was ninety-six. I CAME FROM POLAND. I’m born in Austria, but during the whole mishmash of the wars and all that, Poland took over the last bit of the war that they had in 1921, and they chased out the Russians, the Bolsheviks at the time.Poland took over and that is when I started my schooling.I had my public school during the war and in between. I left to come to Canada … oh, that’s a big story! I didn’t want to come to Canada. I wanted to go to Paris. That’s why, when I was in high school, I took French instead of English, because some of my girlfriends’ sisters were dress designers in Paris and they wrote such romantic letters about Paris and all that. So all of us kids decided that we will all go to Paris and kill the English and take the French course! Greek mythology was a compulsory thing, Latin was something you had to do. But you had a choice with one of the other languages. We chose French. My mother and my younger sister, one of twins, didn’t want me to go to Paris. According to my mother, I was too young. I was under twenty and I would be all alone there. She decided that if I come here to Canada—there Lil Abramowitz  were two brothers, an older sister—they would sort of look after me. But it wasn’t so. I came to Canada and I was on my own. My first job here was as a saleslady in a dress store. I worked many hours: from nine to midnight.As a matter of fact, he [pointing to Albert] used to wait for me to pick me up and take me home. They started to pay me eight dollars. The first week I got eight dollars and then they gave me ten dollars and in a few weeks time I got fifteen dollars. I made more money there because the dresses, let’s say, were priced ten dollars a dress. If I sold a dress for fifteen dollars, then half of the five-dollar commission I had to divide with my bosses. Oh, I made more, the highest maybe was nineteen or twenty dollars, depending on the week and if I worked that late. The store was closed on Saturday. Friday I finished at six. The stores were closed until the next day after the Sabbath was finished; and then I used to go in. During all that time I went to Harbord Collegiate for one year. I don’t know whether Al told you how we met. I’ll have to go back a little. I came here 21 October 1928. I don’t know why we lived on that particular street. I didn’t like that street where my brother lived because I had already lived in Lemberg, Galicia, a big city, in posh places, and my friends also did so. This was such a gloomy and dark street. Albert took me along to look the place over—what he’s going to build soon. And I thought, I sort of felt … I don’t know what it was; whether it was my upbringing, the environment I was in over there … I had a very beautiful environment, social environment, of course, and the home I came from … those things. My mother was a very religious woman. A rabbi’s daughter. I was brought up without a father because he was killed, he was shot and died of the wounds a few weeks later. This was in 1918 on 11 November, just the day that the First World War stopped … I believe that was the day. This was at the time our oldest brother, Velvel, came home—he was in the war. One son was lost already. Velvel was in Vienna or Budapest at the time. However, pogroms...