Roumanian Immigrant.
I don’t usually eat red meat, but last night I had a piece of my husband’s steak. Juicy, almost blue, and smothered in delicious Montreal Steak Spice.
It is almost certain that an original form of this ubiquitous seasoning was brought to Montreal in the 1910 era by a Mr. Schwartz, a Roumanian Jew. Apparently there exists a book about him, by Bill Brownstein, Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen, the Story, 2008.
Anyway, I’ve been reading an earlier document about Romanians, and Jews, and Hindoos, and other immigrants: Strangers Without our Gates by J.S. Woodsworth, published in 1908, the beginning of “The Tighsolas Era.”
It was an influential book, I recently learned by reading Mariana Valverde’s Light, Soap and Water.
Here are some excerpts.
From the Preface:
“What does the ordinary Canadian know about immigrants? He classifies all men as white men and foreigners. The foreigners he thinks of as the men who dig the sewers and get into trouble at the police court. They are all supposed to dress in outlandish garb, to speak a barbarian tongue, and to smell abominably. This little book is to attempt to introduce the motley crowd of immigrants to our Canadian people and to bring before our young people some of the problems of population with which we may deal in the near future.”
From the Introduction:
“Perhaps the largest and most important problem that theNorth American continent has before it to-day for solution is to show how the incoming tides of immigrants of various nationalities and different degrees of civilization may be assimilated and made worthy citizens of the Great Commonwealth. The United States have been grappling with this question for decades, and have not found a solution. Canada is now facing the problem but in an aggravated form.”
And from within:
“English and Russians, French and Germans, Austrians and Italians, Japanese and Hindus, a mixed mulitude, they are being dumped into Canada by a kind of endless chain. They sort themselves out after a fashion, and each seeks to find a corner somewhere. But how shall we weld this heterogenerous mass into one people? That is our problem.”
The book goes on to dissect each ethnic group. Negroes and Indians, the author writes, are not essentially immigrants, but as they are so strange in their ways, they are lumped in as such. (You see, Negroes were Americans, a group not lumped -here anyway- as immigrant.)
Swedes and Finns came to Canada is fairly large numbers, the stats page in the book shows, but they seem to come in under the radar. I saw an article about an effort to bring in young Swedish girls as domestics.
Winnipeg, apparently, is the city with the biggest immigrant problem. (According to Woodsworth.) Funny, Herbert Nicholson writes from that city and describes the people there, but his tone is merely one of amazement when discussing the many nationalities who made up that city. As a Quebecker, he feels as much an immigrant as the “Irish who speak so broad you cannot understand them.” He writes about how the Westerners he meets can’t understand how he can be from Quebec and speak English!
The same thing happens to Anglo Quebeckers who travel in the rest of Canada today. English Quebec doesn’t exist in the minds of most Canadians. We are off the map.
