I got the idea for moving to Canada from a most unexpected direction. \u00a0Draft dodgers, as the Vietnam War draft evaders were often called, got emigration counseling from various anti-war groups, to facilitate their safe removal to Canada. And that helped me plan my move to the same country.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t come to Canada directly from South Africa, the country where I was born and in which I grew up, where I went to school and worked for a few years. \u00a0I came here via stop-overs in London, Los Angeles and then New York. I had followed a man to this last U.S. stop. And then I followed him again, when he wanted to leave New York to return home to Canada, to Toronto, to a quieter and less aggressive society. New York in the late 60s was not a happy place, it was broke and grubby and in the midst of the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n
I planned my move carefully, using the Vietnam War draft evaders\u2019 information. I completed a copy of the questionnaire that I would be asked on arrival, and made sure I had the requisite number of qualifying points. I chose a quiet time to arrive, mid-week, mid-afternoon. And I arrived by plane, a lot more respectable than getting off a Greyhound Bus.<\/p>\n
At the airport arrival counter, I said \u201cPlease, Sir, I want to immigrate.\u201d It was still quite easy to immigrate at the border in those days. I was taken off to an office, and taken through the questionnaire. The official gave me more points for personal impression than I had awarded myself, and I was in!<\/p>\n
We moved into the apartment we had found on a previous recce. A lovely apartment and Toronto so much more reasonable than Manhattan. The weather didn\u2019t help the move, this was Canada in winter, the week before Christmas.<\/p>\n
One of the first experiences of that very first Canadian week was going to Honest Ed\u2019s to shop for Christmas gifts. Honest Ed\u2019s has long been a Toronto landmark, a huge discount store visited by generations of immigrants to purchase goods for their first home in the city. When I arrived, they would have been Portuguese or Italian, previously probably Hungarian or Czech. Today mostly Asian, but Honest Ed\u2019s is about to disappear and no new waves of immigrants will pass through its doors and read its humorous signs like \u201cOnly the floor is crooked.\u201d Throughout my life in Toronto, I have shopped at Honest Ed\u2019s, mainly for household goods, like English pudding bowls, or woks. I still have jeans and a denim shirt from Honest Ed\u2019s that are probably 20 years old. I live near Honest Ed\u2019s today, and if I feel I need a cultural experience, off I go for a stroll through the store. I will miss that now that it has been sold and will be demolished to be replaced by a large retail and apartment complex.<\/p>\n
Perhaps it was winter, but I found Toronto desolate in my first weeks there, the streets barren and bleak, the city dreary. It took a while before I learned my way around a lovely, manageable city with its tree-lined streets, distinct ethnic neighborhoods, its ravine parks. It has become a sophisticated shopping city, but in the early seventies the clothes were dull, epitomized by Eaton\u2019s, the iconic department store, a Canadian symbol!\u00a0 There was Simpson\u2019s too, but that morphed a long time ago. \u00a0I went to Montreal to shop for clothes.<\/p>\n
In the Toronto of over 40 years ago, like today, liquor had to be bought from the Ontario Liquor Control Board. But in those days, bottles were not on display, one chose from a catalogue and went up to the counter to make a purchase. I think ID was required. Booze was not allowed in parks or on balconies. No restaurant patios existed. It was still Toronto the good.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t remember my first Toronto Christmas. I do know that a friend and neighbor had an annual New Year\u2019s Eve party. I am not sure I went that first year, but I remember going one time wearing a thrift shop wedding dress that fluoresced under the strobe lights, and a tiara saying Happy New Year<\/em> in rhinestones. Our host would dance with a woman, throw her to the floor and bite her big toe! The hangovers were horrific.<\/p>\n As we settled into Toronto we hosted an annual Boxing Day brunch, inviting almost everyone we knew, with bullshots to drink, a whole boiled ham, Egyptian Eggs, trays of perogies bought from a Hungarian food store. Toronto\u2019s ethnic diversity lent itself to our entertaining. I always ended doing the cleaning up. Our Boxing Day brunches stopped when we moved, but friends later had theirs, serving Macedonian sausage, again utilizing Toronto\u2019s plethora of food choices. A sausage stall in the St Lawrence Market was the source. \u00a0On Saturdays farmers came in to the market and it has been quite the thing to go very early in the morning to buy fresh vegetables, fruit, eggs and flowers.<\/p>\n Kensington Market was the main location for ethnic produce, but for one specific group at a time. When we arrived it was known as the Jewish Market, with Jewish egg sellers, etc. Since then it has evolved through several ethnicities. Right now it\u2019s become Latino, selling tacos and burritos, and the older ladies in house dresses who used to shop for European sausages have been replaced by young people. It\u2019s becoming trendy with more up-market providers selling organic goods, like the excellent butcher and fishmonger and bakeries, and a coffee shop where the young line up for their lattes or whatever.<\/p>\n There were more Hungarian eateries then, on College and Bloor Streets. They were defined by the white boots with cut out heels and toes worn by the waitresses.<\/p>\n In New York City, we would go to Chinatown most Sundays for brunch. I was amazed at how four-year-olds could manipulate chop sticks, while I was still struggling. Toronto\u2019s Chinese restaurants in the seventies were Hong Kong style, chop suey and egg rolls. There was only one that served spicy Northern dishes, a restaurant supposedly owned as a co-op by the waiters. We relied on their suggestions, and the place was a mainstay for quite a while. Now Chinatowns have emerged all over the city, and every regional cuisine can be found, and going for dim sum has become a popular lunch destination.<\/p>\n Korean and Thai and Vietnamese restaurants started appearing, as those populations grew in Toronto, but that has been over a long period of time. There were just one or two Japanese. Now they have proliferated, and in the couple of blocks near where I live, there must be more than half-a-dozen sushi joints, filled with kids who previously would have grown up on hot dogs and hamburgers.<\/p>\n Our cleaning lady when I first came to Toronto was Japanese. In New York I never had any help, coming from apartheid South Africa, it seemed exploitative and made me feel guilty, but in Toronto it seemed different somehow, and the woman who came every two weeks was not a servant, and we enjoyed the Japanese dishes she sometimes brought us, and our incredibly tidy closets, things arranged by color and size. She eventually left to work in the post office. There were several successors of different backgrounds, and then for 25 years Pearl from Trinidad, who eventually came to work by Wheeltrans. I had found it hard leaving New York, feeling that I was selling myself short by giving up my career in television – a green young South African who was making it in the big apple, strange for someone who hadn\u2019t seen tv until London in the early 60\u2019s, the South Africa government for so many years not wanting the black underclass to view the good white life.<\/p>\n Educational television was about to be launched here and I was able to secure work in Toronto based on my New York experience, a huge plus in those days. The job was not very clearly defined, and making television programs was what I ended up doing for a while. I \u201cproduced\u201d a multicultural cooking series called \u201cThe World in Your Kitchen,\u201d an appreciation of Toronto\u2019s wide range of culinary experiences. Because of the \u2018educational\u2019 mandate of the broadcaster, we were called educational supervisors, not producers, and debates ensued as to whether televising Shakespearean plays or dramatized classic novels was indeed educational!<\/p>\n We went ice-skating on Sundays. I bought boots at Canadian Tire, like Eaton\u2019s, another iconic Canadian retailer. I would join friends at the neighborhood rink, clinging to its wire barrier. I never ever let go, and so I ended up finally making hot chocolate for apres <\/em>skating. Wine making was an activity shared by a half-a-dozen or so neighbours. We bought huge containers of grape juice from a supplier, put the juice through various stages and ended up with a whole lot of wine. Everyone\u2019s wine tasted the same, and the supply never seemed to diminish. I had some for years after, even after we had moved from our rental to a home we bought four years after arriving in Toronto.<\/p>\n It was possible to buy a house, something that we could never have achieved in New York City. Gentrification was beginning in older downtown neighborhoods, we were about the first \u201cwhite painters\u201d in ours, among the first to take down walls to make it fashionably open-plan. The locals came to stare through the windows. I remember some ex-pat South Africans coming down from the newer northern suburbs and ringing our doorbell to show friends \u201chow people lived downtown\u201d, and the fact we had window blinds, not drapes, was another talking point.<\/p>\n The South Africans who came to Toronto in the 60s and 70s were largely academics and professionals who were unable to tolerate the apartheid system. One day I looked up from squeezing the tomatoes in the St Lawrence Market and in front of me was one of my English teachers from the University of the Witwatersrand! The architect Jack Diamond was already here, and one of the accents heard quite often on CBC radio was that of psychiatrist Dr. Vivian Rakoff, a popular lecturer. Cousins of mine dribbled in, but the large ex-pat South African population took a while to establish itself, as political and economic factors increasingly drove them to make the move. They settled in north Toronto enclaves, in what we now call 905. South Africans came with their worldly goods, no need to visit Honest Ed\u2019s! I know of only one friend from my youth who ended up here. She and her family were apparently helped by an \u201cunderground railroad\u201d set up to assist South African Jewish families immigrate.<\/p>\n My parents came to visit shortly after I settled here. My father wanted to go to a synagogue on Rosh Ha Shana, the Jewish New Year. I wasn\u2019t familiar with Jewish Toronto, but took advice and got him a seat at Holy Blossom Temple. He wouldn\u2019t go, thought it sounded Catholic or something. In South Africa synagogues were simply called by town or street names. I tried a few more synagogues, until he ended up happily at one in the Kensington Market. He was looking for roots. Our next task, using the Yellow Pages, was to find him a bridge club. No internet then. Every afternoon for the three weeks of his visit I drove him to Bathurst and Wilson to play, while I did touristy things with my mother.<\/p>\n The big issues of my early Toronto years were: fighting development in Ramsden Park; fighting the Spadina Expressway which threatened to destroy residential areas including the Annex, parks, and the University campus; and Henry Morganthaler\u2019s abortion clinics.<\/p>\n It felt easier to try to fight the system, or change things, in Toronto than it had been in New York. Civil liberty seemed a given.<\/p>\n Almost five years to the day I arrived in Canada, I went to apply for citizenship. I felt privileged to be a Canadian. I still believe it\u2019s one of the best countries in the world. I had even started to learn French, believing also in bilingualism. Because South Africa was no longer in the Commonwealth at that time, the Canadian immigration authorities had a problem about how to handle South Africans, so they chose to consider us British. I had imagined I would have to go away to study the premiers of the provinces, and other Canadian facts, pass a test, and then arrive at a ceremony, complete with white gloves, to be awarded my citizenship. But no, I was taken into an office, asked a few details, told I was now a Canadian citizen, and asked to swear allegiance, if I was uncomfortable with the bible, on a cookbook. I was in.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Coming to Canada\u2026Toronto Actually! <\/b>
\n
\nThe city\u2019s ethnic diversity was reflected in an annual event known as Caravan which began in 1969. Multiculturalism was the buzz word of the times. Canada, unlike the US, was not a melting pot, we were a mosaic! Caravan was a week-long party during which various ethnic communities showcased their foods and culture. Each ethnic group had its own pavilion, in a church basement, or community centre. We went around with a $2 \u201cpassport\u201d trying to sample each one.\u00a0 Caravan eventually vanished, perhaps because almost every national cuisine is now readily available in the city, perhaps because though we love our diversity, the concept of multiculturalism doesn\u2019t carry the same weight, perhaps because various ethnic groups spread from the city centre to the suburbs.<\/p>\n
\nI got the idea for moving to Canada from a most unexpected direction. Draft dodgers, as the Vietnam War draft evaders were often called, got emigration counseling from various anti-war groups, to facilitate their safe removal to Canada. And that helped me plan my move to the same country. I didn\u2019t come to Canada directly from\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":266,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creative-non-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":708,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions\/708"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}