Who knew that in Toronto, a big city in a big new country, my mother and her family would find themselves living and working in Kensington Market, a neighbourhood so reminiscent of Krasnobrod, their shtetl hometown in Poland?

The family’s immigration to Toronto had the contours of fairy tale with the fairy godfather played by Ben Ber, the brother of my grandfather Avram. Ben had immigrated to Toronto in the ’20s and had become the successful and proud owner of the Chicken Palace restaurant at 404 Yonge St. Avram had lost his brother’s address during the Second World War and didn’t know how to reach him with the news that, after the hometown was burnt to the ground by the German army at the beginning of the war, his whole family had survived and was in Pocking, a displaced persons camp in Germany.

All the same, whenever the boys in the camp asked my mother Dora out on a date, the first thing she would tell them was that she couldn’t get serious because she was moving to Canada, even though that seemed the wildest of dreams. When she was introduced to a boy from Berlin on a blind date, he excitedly told her, they are looking for your family in Berlin. There are advertisements on the radio and even a poster of a man and a woman standing in front of a restaurant surrounded by waiters and cooks, asking for information about the Ber family of seven. Since my mother was the best English speaker in the family, my grandparents sent her to the Canadian consulate in Berlin. And then eventually the family was whisked away to Toronto (a long whisk though, it took two years) arriving October 1949, part of the next wave of Jewish immigrants, Eastern European Holocaust survivors, settling in Toronto.

Their new home — bought and furnished by Ben — was on Major Street in the Kensington Market neighbourhood. To my mother’s delight Kensington Market combined the best of two worlds — the ambience of her shtetl hometown and the city conveniences of Warsaw, which she had always dreamed of visiting, but never had.

The neighbourhood — bounded by College Street to the north, Dundas Street to the south, Bathurst Street to the west, and Spadina Avenue to the east — had been nicknamed the Jewish Market since the early 1900s when it became the home and workplace for Russian and Ukrainian Jewish immigrants fleeing czarist pogroms. On the wide sidewalks of Augusta Avenue and Nassau Street, peddlers in street carts hawked their goods. On Baldwin Street and Bellevue Avenue, others sold fruits and vegetables from makeshift stalls in front of their homes, and others converted their living rooms into shops.

The food merchants evolved naturally to meet the Kosher requirements of Jewish dietary laws. Since it was difficult to import Kosher foods, just as it was in the shtetls and towns of Russia and Eastern Europe, the shopkeepers produced their food from local ingredients according to Kashrut laws. Soon there were butcher and poultry shops, creameries, bakeries, dry goods and fruit and vegetables stalls selling Kosher products and delicacies from the old country. And an added plus, for those still uneasy with their English-speaking skills, you could bargain and buy in the mame-loshn, Yiddish.

By the time my mother’s family arrived, 80 per cent of Toronto’s Jewish population lived in the neighbourhood which blended the characteristics of a shtetl, town and city in a few downtown blocks. It had the bustling open market atmosphere of a shtetl’s central square; enough synagogues (30 at its peak, like the stately Kiever Shul on Bellevue Avenue and Anshei Minsk on St. Andrew Street) to meet the varied religious needs and cultural backgrounds of its small town Jewish population, and the abundant entertainment and dining choices of a city. Restaurants and coffee shops lined College Street, along with movie theatres every few blocks (The Playhouse, 344 College St., Bellevue, 350 College St., Python, 606 College St., and there was even a movie house showing Yiddish movies, the Kino, at College and Manning.)

Right away it felt like home peopled by landsmen, and yet wonderfully sophisticated.

Once happily settled, everyone in the family started looking for work so they could repay Ben’s generosity. My soft-spoken grandfather was a shoemaker in Krasnobrod and he and my steely grandmother Bella had sold handmade shoes in its market square. On Augusta Avenue, they began by selling and repairing shoes from a stall, and eventually rented one of converted houses and opened a shoe store. My mother got a job in a children’s clothing factory on Spadina Avenue, within walking distance of her home.

Two evenings a week she attended night school at the nearby Harbord Collegiate to perfect her English. And the weekends, after Sabbath services at shul, she and her girlfriends headed for the College Street strip bordering the market. There all the single women and men spent Saturday and Sunday afternoons, as my father Irving recalled (he had arrived in Toronto in December 1949), walking and talking, and going for tea and coffee. On one of those College Street walks with his boyfriends, my father saw my mother, and it was love at his first sight — though it would be months until they actually met.

Saturday evenings were spent at one of the movie theatres and Sunday afternoons and evenings at the Jewish YMHA on Brunswick Avenue, where there were social gatherings and dances.

My father finally got the nerve to introduce himself to my mother in the summer of 1950. She was with her four brothers on Centre Island and he asked to borrow their soccer ball.

When I was school age, my mother began taking me with her when she went shopping at Kensington Market, and I was eager to go along. Shopping there was so much more interesting than going to Dominion supermarket where my mother shopped for such boring household staples as Comet, Windex and toilet paper.

Outdoor open markets were the main place to shop during my parents’ childhoods, and both were more at ease shopping there than anywhere else. Our first stop was always my grandparent’s shoe store on Augusta Avenue, then the shopping began. Unlike the tidy and organized aisles of Dominion, Kensington was a spellbinding mess — a giant sidewalk sale every day with all kinds of foods displayed outside on wooden tables covered with bins and baskets of all sizes sided by four-foot barrels. Most of the selling, and buying, took place outdoors on the sidewalks.

As we went from stall to storefront, my mother studied everything as though she was holding a jeweller’s eyepiece. Fruits, vegetables, nuts, pumpkins seeds and sour pickles in barrels were bought at a produce store wrapping around the corner of Nassau. My mother meticulously examined the produce for bruising and discoloration, then touched for firmness. This was followed by the taste test. No one bought anything without test tasting — taking samples of everything you could take samples from before buying — from poppy seeds and walnuts, and sour pickles in barrels — to the grapes, cherries, and blueberries crammed into baskets on the tables.

Next, we went to buy cheese at one of the creameries — Mandel’s or Daiter’s. There, I would read out loud the cheeses and dairy products available and their prices written on the windows — in English on one window and Yiddish on the other. Inside, my mother would buy a slab of cottage cheese by the pound and various hard cheeses sliced to her preferred thickness, and of course, my favourite treat — marbled halvah.

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Challah, rye bread and bagels were purchased at Health Bread Bakery on College Street — out of loyalty to my father’s brother Jack, who worked there. The last stop was my mother’s preferred butcher and poultry shop. As we headed there, we passed poultry shops fronted by live chickens in cages. Thankfully, as much as my mother and father revered freshness in food, choosing a chicken in a cage to be handed to the butcher and killed by a shochet (a man trained to kill animals according to Jewish law), in one of the laneways adjoining the shops, was too fresh and upsetting.

I always regarded the chickens with pity, hoping to avoid seeing one being chosen by a customer and taken squawking and feathers flying to its death. Often as we passed the laneways where the shochets operated, you could spot the trail of chicken feathers and hear the distressing sounds of the chicken’s last moments.

Reaching my mother’s butcher, before entering here again I would read out loud the specials listed on the windows, and my mother would make her choices. We were greeted by the mashgiach (who supervised the kashrut — dietary laws — status of the shop) seated in a chair at the front, then went over to the glass-fronted refrigerated case displaying meat, poultry and fish. No wonder the butcher had no hair, I thought as I watched him serve my mother. I would have ripped my hair out if all my customers were like my mother (probably many were, I guessed). I squirmed as she made him hold up every brisket, chicken and smoked cisco fish and pirouette them as though they were beauty pageant contestants as she carefully scrutinized them.

Eventually my mother stopped shopping at Kensington Market regularly after we moved to North York — as did some of the stores, including Daiter’s, Health Bread and the butcher. As well, the old-world way of shopping lost its allure for my mother in favour of the one-stop shopping convenience of large supermarkets.

The last time I spent any length of time in Kensington Market was as a teenager in the mid-70s helping out in my grandparents’ store. On my lunch breaks, I wandered through the market, so different from before. Now instead of Yiddish and English on storefront windows, it was Portuguese and Chinese — most of the Jewish merchants were long gone.

There were new scents in the air and new foods to be tasted.