Ann helped out when she could, and stood guard at the cellar door to watch for military police while her mother made bootleg liquor in the basement and then hid it in the wall to later sell to the goyim. This, along with some sewing work, allowed Esther to provide for the children and her bedridden mother, as all the money Joel sent home from Ontario was confiscated by the Russian authorities.
At least three times their escape plan seemed set, their passage guaranteed, only to have it unravel at the last minute when the Russians refused to let them leave. Finally, in 1921, with exit visas in hand, Ann and Esther boarded a train in Kiev destined for Hamburg. Thin and sickly, Ann tried to keep her strength up so she could pass the immigration examinations. At one station stop, Esther got off the train and went to find a pharmacy to get her daughter some medicine. On her way back along the platform, the train started to move. Ann, watching from the small train window, began to scream as she saw her mother break into a run. As she tried desperately to catch up to the train, her mother’s long hair, held up with bone hairpins, started to fall. Just then, two men reached out and pulled her onto the train. Ann was in tears. She had nearly gone to Hamburg without her mother.
While switching trains in Germany, an elegant woman approached Ann and Esther on the platform. “You have too much luggage to carry by yourself. Let me help you,” she said with a smile. A moment later they turned back to find she had disappeared, along with the two small bags containing all of Esther’s valuables, purchased or bartered for through years of sewing and bootlegging. All that was left was their large wicker travelling trunk.
“My mother sat down and cried her heart out,” Ann later remembered. “She wanted to show her husband she wasn’t exactly a pauper, that she earned monies herself.”
At Hamburg, they boarded the ship that would take them to Montreal. Three weeks of travel across the roiling Atlantic Ocean followed, as the pair was packed in steerage with hundreds of retching passengers and nothing to eat but herring, sour cream, and onions. The entire boat was crawling with lice, and upon their arrival in Montreal the immigration officials doused them in kerosene and roughly sheared their hair.
Then came the medical examinations.
“I remember vividly about a dozen people were put on the small boat to go back to the big ship and be taken back to Europe, because they had different diseases. We were fortunate. They let us through,” said Ann.
Free to leave, they were swallowed up in the push of bodies leaving the immigration hut; struggling with their wicker luggage, they merged into the river of other passengers streaming onto the train station platform.
A man, eyes searching behind circular-framed glasses, stood tall and immutable amidst the jumble of bodies, derby hat clutched in his hand. “This is your father,” Esther said to Ann in Yiddish as they approached him.
Husband and daughter stood staring at each other. Joel wore a double-breasted topcoat, all buttons, and underneath, a vest and high-necked shirt. A tie was just visible, held down with a tiny sparkling pin. His face was smooth and inscrutable, though this moment marked the culmination of days that had run into weeks and months and years. Time had blended together in an endless ream of rolled-up rugs and sacks of dried goods hefted door to door. It was nights measured by the clink of his fork as he ended the day at Wong’s Garden, the old Chinese restaurant on Richmond Street. It was the creak of springs as he fell into bed at the boarding house where, he would later confess to his son Saul in a rare moment of intimacy, the woman who ran it once tried to lure him into a “compromising situation.” And here, now, on the train station platform was his child — a virtual stranger.
Joel’s arrival in London, Ontario, in 1913 had been swiftly followed by news of the war, which clouded out all else except the grinding years of waiting and working. Cent by cent the original fifty-dollar loan he had taken out was repaid, and dollar by dollar he trudged unwaveringly toward the goal of freeing his family. At first, he peddled goods on a bicycle; then, he moved to a horse and buggy until he scraped together enough money to purchase a panel truck.
By the time he led his wife and remaining child out of the train station, it was to the open door of a convertible Essex automobile, in which they drove to a trim little house on Rectory Street, which was furnished and complete with a wiggling bulldog puppy for Ann. Her old doll, fashioned from a linen kitchen towel, was replaced that day with a new one.
Ann remained an only child for two years until her brother Morris was born in 1923. Two years after that, her mother came home from the Salvation Army hospital across the street with a new baby they called Israel — and who later went by his middle name, Saul. The family soon moved from Rectory Street into a large apartment above the ladies’ ready-to-wear shop they owned, where both parents toiled for thirteen hours a day. Ann was left to raise the boys, who were both still in diapers. Serving as nursemaid and housekeeper, cooking, making formula from scratch, and washing diapers, thirteen-year-old Ann often resented the lack of choice in her position as second mother. She juggled this role alongside the adjustment to life in a new country, where her family members were dismissed as “greenhorns,” and in which she was so ashamed of her inability to speak English that she often didn’t speak at all.
Saul was a boisterous six-year-old when his sister, Ann, was first courted by Sam Paikin, a man from Hamilton who would later become her husband. Adored and admired in equal measure, Sam captivated Saul. When Sam came to visit, it was the high point of Saul’s day, and the two soon developed a game in which Saul wheedled nickels and dimes from him. It always took a different form, but when Sam arrived, Saul would race out to meet him as he emerged from his car.
“Look, Sam! I found a billfold, and there was a nickel in it,” Saul would call to him.
“Only a nickel, Saul? What’ll that buy you?”
The way the game unfolded, Saul would typically end up triumphantly clutching two quarters. Throughout his life he viewed Sam as a mentor, though Saul struggled with insecurities that were exacerbated both by his father’s constant belittling and Sam’s impatience and criticism. Even when pushed away, Saul continued to watch Sam from the corners, taking note of his style and flair, his dominant personality and ability to turn a room to his favour with magic tricks and jokes. The way Sam jostled and traded barbs with his own siblings was curious to Saul. It stood in stark contrast to the pressurized, reserved atmosphere in his own home. Proper inhibition was the tenor of their household, and physical affection was in short supply. At times, Saul would become tongue-tied around his brother-in-law — Sam would tell a joke, and Saul wouldn’t get the point. If Saul tried to be a smartass, Sam could cut him up and down with just a few words. Like a shamed dog, Saul would put his tail between his legs and run off. Over time, though, Saul went from feeling intimidated by Sam to wanting to emulate him.
By the beginning of the 1930s, Saul’s parents were struggling to make ends meet at the dress shop. It was as though Joel and Esther were sliding into a pit, and no matter how hard they squirmed to get out, it only seemed to make them sink faster.4
Aware of this, six-year-old Saul conspired with his brother Morris, and the two boys took to the streets. They slipped into the backyard of one of the nearby houses, raided their pear tree, and then went out and sold the fruit along Dundas Street. One of their customers turned out to be the very owner of the pear tree whence they had obtained their wares, a man who had a ladies’ wear store nearby.
The two boys became adept at shoplifting from the variety store and the Loblaws supermarket down the road from their house, and would regulary load up their windbreakers with jelly beans and licorice and chocolate maple buds. This continued until Morris brazenly bounced a huge beach ball away from the front of the store and was caught.