I Have a Story to Tell You

Mary Kevalko

215 Mary Kevalko was in a seniors’ home in Montreal when I talked to her. She was born in the Ukraine in 1899, and came to Canada as a young girl of thirteen. She didn’t have much of a childhood, as she helped her mother run a grocery shop and tried to learn at night school. As with so many other Jewish immigrants, Mary ended up working in the needle trades. I’M FROM THE UKRAINE—my name is Ukrainian: Kevalko. We came in 1912 right before the First World War—because in 1914 already the war started, and I don’t know anything about it.What I know is from the papers. I was interested to know everything—but we came before the war and the revolution which was in 1917–18. When we came here to Montreal in 1912, I was thirteen years old.Where we lived, in the Old Country, I was very happy there. It was full of flowers and trees. It wasn’t a big city—not on a farm but a small city. And because I wasn’t so old I didn’t suffer so much. But in 1911, my father died. I had brothers here, who went away four or five years before; and they wanted my mother and me, and my younger brother, to come here to Montreal. I came first. Montreal at that time—it was a very small, a very funny city: no sidewalks, no electricity. In 1912 there was no electricity! We had gas lamps: little lamps with gas—don’t know how to call it. But it didn’t take very long, about a year or two, when they made sidewalks and we got electricity too. And while I was young, my mother came. We didn’t know what to do. She brought a little money. No matter how much you brought you know it was half here. My brother said the best thing is to make a grocery [shop], make some business, because we had a business at home, in the Old Country. Mary Kevalko  When we came from the Ukraine we took a house, me and my mother and my younger brother, and I had an older sister from me, not married yet, and we stayed together. We took a grocery shop—we were helping. My sister was working. Then she got married.And after she got married, at that time, you know, young married women didn’t work—no matter whether it was good or not—but they didn’t work. It would have been much better, but they didn’t work So we made a grocery and my mother was green, a newcomer. She didn’t know the language and I was too young. I helped her as much as I can. You come from Europe, you are thirteen years old, you are not a baby no more. Thirteen years is a big girl. So I helped her for a few years and then she got sick. It wasn’t for her that kind of business.We had bigger business at home. She got sick and she couldn’t do it any more and we gave it up. I tried to do something, to work, you see. I helped her and at night I went to night school to take up a little English. So that means that I didn’t have much education to work in an office or places like that. So I tried to go to a factory. My relatives’ friends took me up. So I got four dollars a week. Four dollars a week at that time! None of our relatives or friends were tailors . They didn’t know anything about that. But here you come to America— you call it Canada—you can do whatever you want to make a living. And so I was a button sewer. You’ll be surprised. Lots of people work in it.You have to know how to do it. It’s not just you sew a button on.You have to know how … well, in the summertime you work on big coats, winter coats. In the summer you work on the winter goods to prepare for winter. And in winter you work on the summer clothes. So I became a button sewer and I worked a few years. I work myself up. And before I came here, there were all kinds of people working here, at that time, in 1912. People...