I Have a Story to Tell You

Max Yellen

247 Max Yellen was born in 1899 in Russia, and came to Montreal before the First World War. He was thirteen years old, straight out of a yeshiva, a Hebrew school. Max spent his formative years involved in the start of the unionization of the garment industry.While others his age were getting a formal education, he was getting an education of a different sort. He subsequently spent his life in the needle trades. I interviewed Max in Montreal in 1974, when he was eighty-five. I ARRIVED HERE IN MONTREAL in 1912 from Russia—at that time it was Russia—before the First World War, and I was thirteen years old then. I got to be an orphan: no father, no mother at that time, and I was raised by my grandfather and grandmother. They died off, and so a cousin of mine took me over to Canada. I came here from the yeshiva—they call it at that time, Hebrew school— and at that time the only jobs for the immigrants was the tailoring trade. Nothing else. Either you became a peddler—I was too young for this—or you went into tailoring. I came into such a place at the age of thirteen and I was working there a month, I think, without anything, without pay. At the end of the month, I got $2.50 to three dollars a week … something like that.And there was no union shop at that time. It was starting to form, the United Garment Workers’ Union. So we were, some of us, starting to form. And there were right and left [politically] too at that time. A strike broke out in Montreal.We were working at that time, if I’m not mistaken, fifty-two to fifty-three hours a week. The majority of the shops from the tailoring manufacturers then was in Jewish hands, with the exception of a few Gentiles. So our week consisted of from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. each Max Yellen  day except Saturdays, when it was closed. Saturday we worked after Shabbes (the Sabbath) at night. That was in the winter. In the summer, Shabbes did not finish till 9 p.m. But in the winter days we had to go back to work after the Sabbath and I think we worked two and half to three hours, and on Sunday half a day. That was the way at that time. So, naturally, that was the time when the strike broke out. We had a strike, I think, in 1913 for nine weeks. Majority of these people were elderly people. That’s the way we were working for three, four, seven dollars. Ten dollars was the highest pay at that time. At the time I was living with my cousin in a house.You would like to know how many lived in that house? [Max breaks out laughing.] That’s a good question and I’d like to tell you. I think we were: the cousin of mine who was single (his wife was in the Old Country), his two brothers, and me, and the family itself was a couple [whose house they all lived in] with three children. Nine of us. The house consisted of two bedrooms and a kitchen and a living room. All of us stayed there. The rent at the time, I think, was ten dollars a month for the house. I paid two dollars a week and that included food. I stayed in the needle trades practically all of my life. At the very beginning , I was working there as an operator until 1929. There were big factories at that time, and I am not talking about contractors—those were others who contracted work out to people in their homes—I am talking about factories . The big shops consisted of one hundred and fifty to three hundred people. Oh yes! I wasn’t in the contracting at all. I stayed in this place until 1916. Then I got into the International Garment Workers, in the cloakmakers’trade, and I was working in raincoats at that time. That was a big industry here in Montreal , which it is still at the present.And it was better pay at that time. I used to make about thirty-eight dollars a week, which was a very big pay until the end of 1917—until the war ended in 1918. During the war it was prosperity, you know. Every war it...