Harry had come to Canada from Poland at the age of eight. The family was sent to a Jewish farming village in Manitoba. His father had been a merchant in the old country, but he was allowed into Canada on condition that he took up agriculture. In the village, they lived in a small wooden house.
When he was sixteen Harry moved to Winnipeg to work for his cousin Albert in the fur business. He was paid fifteen dollars a week for sixty or seventy hours of work. This arrangement continued for two years, and then Harry asked for a raise or a reduction in working time. His cousin said no; that was when Harry began his own family fur business. After his parents sold their farm and moved into the city, he operated out of their North Winnipeg basement.
I was introduced to Harry through a friend of mine, a local city planner. Harry now owned properties in the exchange district, so named because it was where the grain and fur exchanges started. My friend had been encouraging Harry to renovate these buildings. The city was trying to save its architectural past. Much remained that would have been torn down in other Canadian cities.
The three of us walked to a restaurant called Bottles. Looking at the menu, Harry said he didn’t want anything rich. He had had problems with his stomach since he was eighteen. “Poor eating,” he explained. There had not been enough money for decent food.
“I don’t know what’s happened to Winnipeg,” Harry said. “Thirty years ago Portage Avenue was full of life. Now in the evening the whole downtown is dead.”
Harry had bought his first raw pelts in 1952. There had been a thousand people employed in the fur trade when he began. Now he thought there might be a hundred. The fur manufactures in Montreal and Toronto, many of them Greek immigrants, had taken over the business. “We used to work like dogs. One of my parents’ neighbours reported us – we weren’t supposed to work out of a house – so we had to rent space downtown. People said we’d be broke very soon. But slowly we expanded.”
Harry was among the inter-war immigrants who had given Winnipeg’s north end its special character. Then North Winnipeg had been a seat of political ferment and of Jewish immigrant culture. Its history had acquired a patina because so many talented people had escaped its poverty and gone into business or the arts professions. But Harry was one of the last. Many of the old Jewish families had moved across the river into more expensive neighbourhoods. There was a new underclass made up of Filipinos, Vietnamese, and Canadian Indians. |