{"id":42844,"date":"2023-12-01T01:55:41","date_gmt":"2023-12-01T09:55:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=42844"},"modified":"2023-12-04T09:41:25","modified_gmt":"2023-12-04T17:41:25","slug":"a-1930s-immigration-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2023\/12\/01\/a-1930s-immigration-story\/","title":{"rendered":"A 1930s immigration story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Author Norman Ravvin\u2019s grandparents, Yehuda Yoseph and Chaya Dina Eisenstein, around the time of their engagement, in 1928. <\/i>(photo from Who Gets In: An Immigration Story)<\/i><\/p>\n

Relentless perseverance, continual pressure on select politicians and some key allies are what helped Norman Ravvin\u2019s maternal grandfather, Yehuda Yoseph Eisenstein, finally bring his wife and two children to Canada from Poland in 1935, five years after he immigrated here. In a decade generalized as a time of \u201cnone is too many\u201d with regards to Canada\u2019s immigration policy towards Jews, Ravvin\u2019s grandfather managed to get his family into the country.<\/p>\n

In his new book, Who Gets In: An Immigration Story<\/i> (University of Regina Press), Ravvin combines his novel-writing skills with his academic expertise to create an engaging memoir about his grandfather\u2019s first years in Canada, one that is firmly situated in the larger context of what was happening at the national level at the time. An extensively researched book \u2013 with 10-and-a-half pages of sources \u2013 Ravvin\u2019s style will make readers feel like they\u2019ve come to know him a bit, as he allows his personality to be seen in the telling, though what is documented fact and what is conjecture or opinion is clear.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy approach is to make nothing up. The story rides its own hard-to-believe rails,\u201d says Ravvin on his webpage. \u201cI present its narrative creatively, so readers relate to it on a personal level. Events and personalities from nearly a century ago remain fresh, telling and relevant to contemporary North American life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ravvin does allow his imagination some space. He doesn\u2019t know, for example, the exact reasons his grandfather left Poland, but he can surmise that rising antisemitism was one of them. Whether it was because his grandfather objected physically and publicly to a slur and became a marked man, or whether a rock was thrown into the family\u2019s sukkah, Yehuda Yoseph Eisenstein\u2019s response, writes Ravvin, \u201cwas to say \u2018I can\u2019t live with these people anymore.\u2019 Or, as he would have said in Yiddish, \u2018Ich ken mit zei mer nisht lebn<\/i>.\u2019 It\u2019s good to hear some of these things in the language in which they took place. In this incident, the spoken words evoke the moment of decision with clarity and purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eisenstein had three siblings who had already left Poland, with his younger brother Israel (Izzy) having settled in Vancouver. It was this brother who offered Eisenstein sponsorship and, while Canada was a much less welcoming place by 1930, \u201ca single man could obtain a visa with a brother\u2019s sponsorship.\u201d The problem was Eisenstein had been married in 1928, without a civil licence, as he was already planning on leaving and knew that he would need to appear single to get into Canada. The illegality of the marriage and the misrepresentation of his marital status on his immigration application would cause Eisenstein much tsuris<\/i> (distress) in getting his wife, Chaya Dina, and their children, Berel and Henna, to Canada as well.<\/p>\n

\"image<\/a>Who Gets In<\/i> is divided into two parts. The first is about Eisenstein finding his place in the country; the second is about his efforts to bring his family over. Ravvin wants to \u201cpaint a detailed picture of the time and place, with careful attention to Western Canada,\u201d where his grandfather went, and he does this by talking about such things as the content of school history books in the 1920s, Canada\u2019s immigration numbers and the country\u2019s changing\u00a0<\/span>demographics, the implications of government forms that asked immigrants to declare their \u201cNationality\u201d and \u201cRace or People,\u201d how census data were being interpreted and used, the popularity of eugenics in Canada and beyond, the impacts of the Depression, and so much more.<\/p>\n

Ravvin uses history not only to provide context for his grandfather\u2019s experiences but also brings it into the present. Assimilability was a key consideration in assessing immigrants\u2019 suitability in Eisenstein\u2019s day and continues to be \u2013 current NDP leader Jagmeet Singh \u201cwas approached while campaigning and told that he should remove his turban to look more Canadian,\u201d notes Ravvin.<\/p>\n

Ravvin spends quite a lot of ink discussing various perceptions of what a Canadian should like and contemplating how his grandfather would have been considered. The cover of Who Gets In<\/i> features a photo that was part of a newspaper article in 1910. The three men \u201cappear as cutouts in a group of twelve \u2018Types\u2019 of \u2018New-Comers\u2019 from \u2018Photographs Taken at Quebec and Halifax.\u2019\u201d From left to right, they are described as \u201cPure Russian, Jew, German.\u201d As the landing form stripped Ravvin\u2019s grandfather of his nationality \u2013 someone crossed out the typed letters \u201cPO\u201d and wrote in by hand \u201cHebrew\u201d \u2013 so too is the Jew in this photograph stripped of his, observes Ravvin.<\/p>\n

In setting the scene for Part 2 of the book \u2013 the bureaucratic fight his grandfather must undertake \u2013 Ravvin discusses the Indigenous peoples that inhabited the Prairies where his grandfather ended up. Eisenstein first went to Vancouver, where he hoped to stay and work as a shoichet <\/i>(kosher butcher), but he was apparently seen as competition by Rev. N.M. Pastinsky, \u201cwho happened to be on the board of the Pacific Division of the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society (JIAS) and thus someone with whom one might not want to tangle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eisenstein backtracked to Saskatchewan, living first in the farming town of Dysart and then in Hirsch.\u00a0Ravvin talks about what Jewish life in rural Canada was like and some of the impacts that European settlement had on the Cree, Saulteaux and Assiniboine.<\/p>\n

Ravvin starts the book with the story of the Komagata Maru \u2013 the chartered ship from India, full of immigrant hopefuls, mostly Sikhs, that was not allowed to land on the coast of British Columbia in 1914 and was instead forced to return to India, with disastrous results. He returns to the incident at the end of Part 1 to point out that one of the central (negative) figures in his grandfather\u2019s life was A.L. Jolliffe, \u201cwho began his civil career in 1913 as an immigration agent in Vancouver,\u201d playing a role in the handling of the Komagata Maru.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy the 1930s,\u201d writes Ravvin, \u201cJolliffe had ascended to the position of commissioner for the Department of Immigration in Ottawa. He is the closest thing to a b\u00eate noire in my grandfather\u2019s story. If the much better-known doorkeeper, F.C. Blair, played any role in my grandfather\u2019s struggle, he left no trace in any of the documents beyond a shared penchant for the use of pompous and hectoring language that appears in letters in my grandfather\u2019s file.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jolliffe denies more than once Eisenstein\u2019s applications for permission to bring his wife and children to Canada \u2013 in one instance, while expressly not recommending deportation, Jolliffe suggests that, if Eisenstein wants to be reunited with his family, he should return to Poland. Ultimately, Eisenstein is successful only because he has allies such as A.J. Paull, executive director of the JIAS, and Lillian Freiman who, married to influential merchant A.J. Freiman, had \u201cremarkable access to the leaders of early-twentieth-century Canada.\u201d She also did many amazing good works, including managing \u201cOttawa\u2019s response to the flu epidemic in 1918 almost single-handedly.\u201d Ravvin also positively differentiates the federal government, as led by R.B. Bennett, prime minister from 1930 to 1935, from that which succeeded it, the \u201cnone is too many\u201d government led by William Lyon Mackenzie King as prime minister.<\/p>\n

Eisenstein finally achieves his goal through an order-in-council \u2013 a decision made by the Privy Council, the prime minister\u2019s cabinet \u2013 that \u201casserted its right to \u2018waive\u2019 determinations of an earlier order in which strict immigration regulations were brought into effect. This reflected an ability \u2013 understood to exist by those in the know \u2013 of the minister to \u2018issue a permit in writing to authorize a person to enter Canada without being subject to the provisions\u2019 of the Immigration Act, without interfering with the status of those provisions.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Eisenstein family was one of the lucky ones.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Author Norman Ravvin\u2019s grandparents, Yehuda Yoseph and Chaya Dina Eisenstein, around the time of their engagement, in 1928. (photo from Who Gets In: An Immigration Story) Relentless perseverance, continual pressure on select politicians and some key allies are what helped Norman Ravvin\u2019s maternal grandfather, Yehuda Yoseph Eisenstein, finally bring his wife and two children to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42846,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[3157,22788,4242,5154,22787],"class_list":["post-42844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-canada","tag-eisenstein","tag-history","tag-norman-ravvin","tag-who-gets-in"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42844\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}