At the outset of World War I, Hyman Leibovitch was an eighteen-year-old cabinetmaker with “golden hands” and an ambitious plan to take his talent to America (“Canada, New York, is the same, it’s combined – it’s called America”). After three months of training with the Romanian army, in 1914 Leibovitch was released from duty and crossed Romania’s northern border into present-day Chernivtsi, Ukraine. With just his army uniform – no papers, no money, no passport – Leibovitch embarked on what can only be described as an epic journey through Germany, France and Belgium, before finally settling in Montreal. Working his way through Europe, he narrowly avoided an unwanted engagement to his boss’s daughter in Germany and had a chance encounter with a long-lost aunt in Ukraine. Upon arriving in Montreal, one of his first jobs was delivering advertisements door-to-door in the dead of winter, work he found with the help of boys he befriended at Midway Photo Play, a theatre on St-Laurent near Ste-Catherine. Though he never worked in the garment industry, as many of his contemporaries did, Leibovitch’s struggle to find work in his field – or any work at all – was common among Jewish immigrant labourers.
These excerpts of his oral history appear in Seemah C. Berson’s I Have a Story to Tell You (WLU Press, 2010).
I went to look for a job … : a month, two months, four months. I couldn’t get not job. You know how boys are! So I went to a show— in St. Catherines? St. Lawrence? The Midway, I think they are calling it. It used to cost fifteen cents to go to see a show and I went in there and I meet some boys—and we made a friendship. And one boy, he said, I’m looking for a job. He’s looking for a job. And I am also looking for a job … Where could we find some jobs? They are looking for young boys to carry advertisements around to the houses. I said, I’ll go down. We could lose nothing. We went down there and we took the jobs and we didn’t ask no price and they didn’t tell us what they gonna pay. We were working out two weeks carrying around the advertisements—steps up, steps down—and I don’t have no coat, no jacket, just a uniform jacket, and there it was cold, wintertime, freezing. I had a big handkerchief, a red handkerchief, and I cover my mouth, my face. The hat I pull down. I have nothing else. I just had a hat. So I’ll just pull it down over my ears and we went down to carry the advertisements and we finished two weeks. I’m waiting for he two weeks to finish already so we should get some money out. I come to the end of the two weeks. They give $1.30. I look them over and I said, What is that? Charity? I worked two weeks! That’s the price. You like it, keep it. If not, go. I take the $1.30 and I throw them right back in the face. I was not scared. (199)
So what I used to do? I used to get up in the morning, six o’clock in the morning, and go looking around for a job. I see I can’t get no job [as a cabinetmaker]. So I find a job in St. Dominique and corner of St. Viateur [sic] – a piano factory. I come in there, in the piano factory, and I ask for a job. I couldn’t speak no English. So they had a foreman, an Italian foremen, and the Italian foreman was working in Romania, in Bucharest, and he was speaking Romanian. So they called down the foreman that he should talk to me. He asked me what I am, what kind of work I could do. I said I’m a cabinetmaker, I could do any kind of work. I’m a responsible man and I want work. He said, Here in Canada there is only one thing. You do one kind of work. We’ll give you a job to make only the doors for the pianos. I said I could do the whole thing. I can’t work on only one piece. I’ll get sick and tired of it. He said, Well that’s the law around here. That’s what everybody works on, one piece: one makes drawers, one makes the top, one makes something else, one glues them together. Everybody does his own work – special. Anyways, I said, I’ll take it. Better than nothing. Better than walking around in the streets. I took the job and I was working a week, so the second week the foreman told me, You’re not getting paid. One week is going to always stay. I said all right. I was working up two weeks. The second week he brings me in an envelope, the pay. I open the envelope. I see five dollars. I start to scratch my head. I said to myself, What is going around in here? They told me in Canada that you sew me up a button and you make five dollars! I’m a cabinetmaker with golden hands. I can’t make no living around here. What am I doing around here? (200)
Compiled by Sarah Woolf and Seemah C. Berson.
Berson, Seemah C. (ed.) I Have a Story to Tell You. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010.
*Images courtesy of the Leibovitch Family descendants and McCord Museum.
This project is funded in part by the Government of Canada.
Ce projet est financé en partie par le gouvernement du Canada.
Ce projet est financé en partie par le gouvernement du Canada.
This project is funded in part by the Government of Canada.
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