‘Stories were how we shared time’

about how the owner of the Acme Hat Company, Mr. Levine, took my grandfather under his wing when my grandfather was 10 and working in the Acme factory. I knew how when my grandfather was 25, the new, young union president, he returned to Acme to inform Mr. Levine, in the nicest possible way, that his shop was organizing and it was only fair.

By the time I was 10, I knew what a scab was. I knew there was something called the Workmen’s Circle, Der arbiter ring, which I imagined as men in coveralls doing some kind of maypole dance. I knew that in my grandfather’s time, there were people identified as socialists and others called communists and they did not always get along. I knew that when the hatters’ union needed some muscle, they brought in the seafarers’ union. I have more than once wished I could have seen one of those picket lines: The giant, squareshouldered sailors, interspersed with the cutters and sewers of rather more Diasporic proportions.

I knew that sometimes, when I ate at the Snowdon Deli with my parents, the man behind the counter would give us some pastry on the house. One day I asked my father why. “That’s because he’s one of the people your grandfather brought over,” my father said.

These people were a special class. My grandfather called them souls. The souls that came over from the camps. I didn’t understand everything about them yet, but I knew that sometimes, holding my mother or my father’s hand on an outing, we could run into one — maybe in a drug store, maybe sitting in a restaurant. I remember one man rising out of a concert orchestra and coming to us. They would hear the last name Silcoff, and kiss both my cheeks.

Zaidy never put it in his stories, but even then I knew he was a hero. A child can sense when they are in the presence of truth, compassion, goodness. And even though my grandfather believed everyone had within them the kernel of decency — sometimes it just needed to be coaxed to surface — he still seemed sprung from this earth a little sweeter, finer, more ethical, more morally complete than the rest of us.

And humble, of course. When I was about 12 I asked him why, on the top shelf in his office, there was a large sculpture of his head — a bust with a golden plaque like you would normally only see in a museum. He said a committee thought he needed a better place to hang his hat.

The storyteller can’t dwell, and so Zaidy didn’t. His modus operandi was something along the sane lines of: you just keep going. When he was orphaned as a tiny boy, with no choice but to become a child labourer, he just kept going. When he lost his wife and broke his hips in the same week in his midnineties, he just kept going. He never returned to the home he shared with his beloved Beatrice. He just had a bag packed and moved right into his new home, at the Manoir Montefiore, where he spent his last eight years.

And what did he do there? He told stories, now writing them, making great use of his love of what us writers sometimes call “ten dollar words.” He called these stories his vignettes. Here is one of my favourites. He wrote it when he was 99:

It is Saturday afternoon at a home for the elderly. A gutten shaboos! And while most men are wearing skullcaps in the dining room, I, as usual, am not.

I am waiting for the moment when some more religious man will ask me, “Why are you not wearing a yamulkeh?”

I will respond by telling him that when I was the head of the capmaker’s union, such items were often manufactured by non-union bedroom operations with low wage standards. Or they were imported from the far east, where standards were horrifically lower.

“I am dining with my bare head in labour protest,” would be my summation. My true answer, having more to do with religious disinclination, would likely be more insulting. Some things are better left unsaid!

In his very last years, when Zaidy was dimming a bit, sometimes I would tell him the stories about his life that I by then knew so well:

Zaidy, do you remember about the time you had that botched protest in front of the Ontario Federation of Labour?

Zaidy, do you remember how you called the violinist you brought over an experienced sewer, and he couldn’t even thread a needle?

And he would look at me, this man of 102, 103, 104, with complete delight in his eyes, and ask me how in the world I knew about those things. And I would say: It’s because you told me, Zaidy, and I remember. And Zaidy, I still do. And I will make sure others do, too. Because some stories are so good they are worth retelling — because they are themselves made of goodness, and they have the power to create more goodness, like a blessing to anyone so lucky to hear them.