I Have a Story to Tell You

Dave Ship

Dave Ship  Dave Ship was born in 1915 in the White Russian Republic, not far from Minsk, during the First World War. He lived through pogroms, the Russian Revolution, and received his basic education in a White Russian school. Dave Ship arrived in Montreal in the middle of June 1930. He spent most of his life in the garment industry except for the four years he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War. He was still working in the trade when I interviewed him in Montreal in the summer of 1974. Dave Ship is married to Ena Ship, whose story appears earlier in the volume. I WAS FIFTEEN YEARS OLD when I came to Canada from Russia—the White Russian Republic, not far from the capital city of Minsk. Life in my early years was very interesting. The times were of great importance to Russia because those were the formative years of the new republic. I was born actually during the First World War, and then followed the revolution. There were counter-revolutionary attempts; there were White Guards and pogroms by various bandit groups. They tried to take advantage of the weakness of the Communist government [the Soviet Union],and they robbed and pillaged the population. In the small shtetl, the town where I lived, there went through a pogrom where eighteen or nineteen people were actually murdered. That was about 1919 or so. I remember it very distinctly. I was carried on my father’s shoulders to run away, you know. It is vividly imprinted in my memory . I will never forget that occasion. Then there were periods of stabilization of the government: setting up schools, opening avenues of education to most of the people who wanted to take advantage of it. My parents did take advantage of it by sending me and 251 252 i have a story to tell you my brothers to school and I actually finished there seven grades. This was a Russian school, a White Russian school, and I had every opportunity to pursue my education and continue it further to university level. I am sure I would have done that had I remained in the country. But my parents (and I was the youngest in the family) decided to come to Canada. My mother was the oldest in her family and she had to be a mother to her younger brothers, who eventually immigrated to the United States and established themselves there, and became quite well-to-do. They were in the dress-manufacturing business and they regarded my mother as their mother, not as a sister. My uncles wanted to bring the family over to the States, but immigration was closed by that time and so they brought us over to Canada. My mother did say to them in letters that her youngest son (that was me) would have a good opportunity to go to university in America. They replied that there are plenty of universities in Canada! My mother’s brothers were here to meet us. They established a home for us and then they went back to New York and continued to live there. However, life did not turn out to be exactly so.We came in 1930, in the middle of June. That was during the Depression period and those were hard years, naturally, for most of the people here, especially the immigrants. It wasn’t that difficult for us since we had support and assistance from my mother’s brothers who were sending us money. I went to school for four years. I went through high school and during the summer months I used to work as a delivery boy in a grocery store. My older brothers went to work in dress factories as cutters. As it so happened, during that period, there was a good deal of discrimination against immigrants and Jewish immigrants. It was difficult to get into the professions and not so much in the professions but just to get a job in other industries.About the only place you could get a job was in the needle trades. So, naturally, through some recommendations of acquaintances, most of the youngsters ended up in the needle trades. I started out when I finished school, beginning at the end of 1934. I went to work in 1935 as an apprentice cutter in the coat and suit industry.A friend of my brother’s got me into the cutting room. It wasn’t...