I Have a Story to Tell You

Molly Klein Goldsman

Molly Klein Goldsman  Molly Goldsman was born in 1925. I talked to her in the summer of 1974 in the backyard of her home in Toronto, where she still resides. Molly is the daughter of Sylvia and Abie Klein. She generously agreed to share a memory or two of life in the early days when she lived with her parents. YOU REMEMBER THE POVERTY but you really didn’t know you were in it because everybody else that you lived with had the same problem. I know I didn’t see very much of my father because he was always … if he wasn’t working, he was on strike; if he wasn’t striking, he was picketing for better working and living conditions; and frankly speaking, whenever I meet people now who are a little bit ashamed of their background,I’m not ashamed to say to them that I am very proud of the fact that my father took a stand. At least he did something! Oh yes. My father was very active in the union. Up until the time he was old enough to know different he was a religious man. But when he was in a position to see what was happening, to see the poverty, he became a rebel and he wanted to do something about it. First of all, his father was very religious and to such an extent, where to learn was a big thing, especially for the orthodox. But I guess my father’s background was not a cultured one but somehow he rose above it. His sisters and brothers were not at all like him. He wanted to learn. He was self-taught. When it came to political history, no one would know anymore than he did. And he would predict things that would happen.And they did happen many years later. And we would remember, Gee, if we had only listened to Pa. He knew what he was talking about! Politics and the situation, the human situation, was always present. He would come home from work. He would try to tell us what was going on. But when you are young you really don’t absorb it all. 163 164 i have a story to tell you It wasn’t until later on, when everything that people like him had fought for was denigrated by a new influx of immigrants after the Second World War—people would be hired for a lower wage and the people like my father were sort of out in the cold. And, of course, these people were getting older too. If it were not for the fact that my father happened to be a friend of the boss (this was at Tip Top Tailors), who was a big philanthropic man in the city, and they sort of had an understanding—he liked my father because he was bright and he could talk to him—my father would have been out of work a long time before he finally did retire. My father was a bit of a rabble-rouser. He tried to tell the people that things were not right, that the new immigrants were not getting enough money and that they shouldn’t work for so cheap, that sort of thing. Here’s an incident from those hard-working days. My father brought home from work tickets, piecework tickets: every time you did a job, they would tear a ticket off the garment. He would turn these tickets in at a certain time during the week, and this is how the payroll was made up. So, of course, the faster you worked, the more money you made. But one night we were all asleep and my father came barging into the bedroom—I think all the children slept in one room—he was looking for his week’s worth of tickets from sewing pockets—he was a pocketmaker. He couldn’t find them. No one could find them. One of the younger children had flushed them down the toilet! This meant no week’s wages. No money. No food. What can I tell you? ...