Gerald Ziedenberg was born in Toronto on October 22, 1939. He had a serious arm defect called Erb’s palsy. His immigrant parents provided a foundation for his life, but school and upper-level education were not encouraged. Despite his weight and arm defect, Gerald Ziedenberg struggled and managed to get through pharmacy school. He went on to have a highly successful career with Shoppers Drug Mart, where he eventually simultaneously had three very profitable downtown drug stores. He efficiently managed these three stores with twelve full-time pharmacists, two hundred employees, and sales in excess of 35 million dollars annually. Gerald completed several marathons and frequently bicycled more than 100 miles a day. As he approached retirement, he was struck down by extremely severe osteoarthritis, and this completely curtailed all his physical activities. His arm defect compounded his problems. After six major surgeries, he was finally approaching a complete cure. During these nine long years of pain and frustration, Gerald returned to the University of Toronto, where he graduated with high distinction in 2003, with a BA in modern history. This was upgraded to an Honors BA in modern history in 2005 (also with high distinction). Gerald won a scholarship for being the "best part-time graduate history student" in 2008. Gerald is now approaching the finalization of his master’s degree in modern history at the University of Toronto. In addition, Gerald has made himself into a public speaker and consultant. He frequently speaks and organizes programs at Beth Tikvah Synagogue. He has appeared on nine different cruises, lecturing on historical people and events of interest as well as destination ports. Gerald also spent large amounts of time lecturing and consulting to Superpharm, a large Israeli drugstore chain and sister company to Shoppers Drug Mart. In the face of severe pain and lack of mobility, Gerald still has made significant contributions to the Jewish community of Toronto and his synagogue. In spite of all the pain, which was excruciating at times, Jerry managed to travel to almost all the places he dreamt of as a child. After a long and successful career as an entrepreneurial pharmacist, Gerald truly managed inspiration through the adversity of his senior years, when he virtually lost a decade of his life.

Inspiration through Adversity

By Gerald Ziedenberg

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2010 Gerald Ziedenberg
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4520-3129-3

Contents

The Introduction.......................................................xiChapter 1: Sam and Sophie..............................................1Chapter 2: Jerry the Child.............................................15Chapter 3: School......................................................26Chapter 4: The Marriage................................................35Chapter 5: University 1960.............................................45Chapter 6: Pharmacy....................................................58Chapter 7: Shoppers Drug Mart..........................................70Chapter 8: Success Continues at Shoppers Drug Mart.....................81Chapter 9: The Children................................................99Chapter 10: Born to Run................................................115Chapter 11: Travels....................................................127Chapter 12: Return to University 1997..................................143Chapter 13: The Accidents..............................................156Chapter 14: The Start of Adversity.....................................169Chapter 15: Operations.................................................179Chapter 16: Operations Continued.......................................192Chapter 17: Coping.....................................................209Chapter 18: Nachas.....................................................224Appendix...............................................................233Master's Thesis........................................................238

Chapter One

Sam and Sophie

On September 30, 1930, a bewildered Polish-Jewish immigrant, Symcha J. Zjaidenberg came ashore at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Symcha was tightly clutching his $5.00 Canadian and a scrap of paper that contained the address of his sister at 166 Robert Street, Toronto. To this day, I still ponder how Sam made it ashore and somehow arrived in Toronto, despite his lack of English and the culture shock of being in Canada.

Sam sailed from Copenhagen on the Prince William VIII, an immigrant transport ship, on September 20. The manifest shows that Sam was grouped with a number of other Polish Jews who were also going to Toronto. Perhaps there was some sort of group dynamic that guided these bewildered men. There did not seem to be any women on the manifest.

Sam left his family-four sisters, two brothers, his parents, uncles, aunts and a warm, close-knit family-behind in Warsaw, Poland. Zjaidenberg (which became Ziedenberg in the New World) was a fairly common Jewish name in Poland. He had left behind him a Poland that was becoming increasingly anti-Semitic and a Poland that was in the deepest throes of the Great Depression. It was also a Poland that had been governed by a wise dictator, Marshall Pilsudski. As Pilsudski's health slipped, Poland sought to accommodate herself more and more with Germany. Symcha was lucky to have left when he did.

When he arrived finally at 166 Robert Street, he did not find his sister as documented on the manifest and his scrap of paper. Instead, he found his sweetheart Sophie, who had emigrated from Warsaw two years before, in 1928. Sophie-who shared a similar last name to Sam's-was able to deceive Canadian immigration officials into thinking Symcha was her brother. When Sam met Sophie, he was overwhelmed; the culture shock and all the excitement were simply too much. Sam, in a state of panic, immediately fled to the upstairs attic and locked himself in.

Nevertheless, people living at 166 Robert Street decided that Sam had to go through with the arranged marriage. A rabbi was summoned to the attic to perform a marriage. On examining the papers, he declared vehemently that he could not endorse such an incestuous relationship. Finally, after a great deal of persuasion, Sam and Sophie were married.

Sam was always a hard-working man who never seemed to stop. Coming to Canada at age thirty, he never quite managed the language. This was exacerbated by the surroundings of the mostly Yiddish-speaking tailors that he worked with. Sam was a great craftsman, but he never really managed the speed necessary for real success. Nevertheless, he always provided food, accommodations, and all the basic necessities for his family.

Sophie, in contrast, was not slow-moving, but she was overly impulsive and hard working at the same time. Compared to Sam's easygoing demeanor, she seemed to antagonize people.

The Ziedenberg/Zeidenbergs (both spelled the name differently) underwent three heavy blows through the 1930s as they integrated into Canadian life. In 1934, they had a daughter named Carol; by the pictures and accounts, she was beautiful both as a baby and young girl. Unfortunately, at age four, she died of a form of spinal meningitis which is easily treatable today by antibiotics. Then, on October, 22, 1939, I was born. Somehow, my mother received erroneously the advice to lie in bed and eat chocolates. That was her tale. As a result, both she and the baby gained an enormous amount of weight. It was a difficult birth, and the physician pulled me by the right arm. This delivery method caused me to develop a condition called Erb's palsy. I never had full use of my right, naturally dominant arm. For the most part, this was a lifelong affliction that I managed to overcome, but it was always there, hindering me. I always have had difficulty getting dressed and it even hinders my walking and balance.

At age seven or eight, in grade two, I was asked to write some letters; frustrated, I wrote the letters, each one about the size of a page. Disturbed by my seeming disobedience, the teacher gave me the strap, but on my left hand.

Years later, as I became a historian, I read that Kaiser Wilhelm II, the leader of Germany during World War I, had a similar affliction. His withered right arm, also caused by a birth injury, became the subject of many historical dissertations. They even claim the kaiser's overcompensating personality may have contributed to World War I. I can claim no such contribution to world events.

Years later, I found it very interesting that many doctors immediately recognized who had delivered me. Apparently, I was not his only victim. This defect was perhaps the second blow to the Ziedenberg family.

My parents made their way through the cultural Yiddish milieu of Spadina Avenue, the tailoring mecca for Canada. Sophie worked at Caps hats and Sam worked as a cutter at various enterprises. Sophie took English lessons at night, which helped with her integration to Canada. Sam stayed with his mostly Yiddish-speaking fellow workers and never developed a great facility with English.

Two family stories seem to resonate down through the ages. Sophie, always adventurous and impulsive, decided that they should have a picnic at Niagara Falls. She dutifully made her signature dish of roast duck and filled a picnic hamper. They took the bus to Niagara Falls and made their way across the Rainbow Bridge. With no passport or papers, they made their way to the American immigration checkpoint. Even in those pre-9/11 days, this was a mistake; irate American immigration officials almost had them incarcerated.

When Sam came to Canada in 1930, work was hard to find. The first winter of the Great Depression was particularly difficult. One cold winter night in January of 1931, Symcha found himself outside the Ladowski's United Bakers on Spadina Avenue near Dundas. The windows were frosted over; Sam wiped a small viewing hole to the inside. As he peered in at the mounds of steaming food, he was noticed. Immediately, Symcha was ushered in and given a bowl of hot barley soup and a cup of coffee. Coffee was virtually unknown in interwar Poland, where tea prevailed. One of Sam's great delights always was a good cup of coffee.

The third blow that the Ziedenberg family received was the Holocaust. Sam had evidently come from a closely knit family of seven siblings. He had four sisters, two brothers, and his parents. Apparently, he was the oldest child. Jacob, the father (whom I was named after as Yacov) was cross-eyed. There seemed to be no picture of Sam's mother. There were various pictures of his four sisters and other pictures of his brothers. Despite the pleas of poverty, all seemed to be reasonably dressed. The middle brother, Garshon, wore a nice overcoat with a fur collar. People of the era who looked at the pictures of my family concluded that although they were certainly not wealthy or even middle class, they were not destitute. My grandfather Jacob was a tailor, like my father, and Chaim, the youngest, was a tinsmith, a reasonable profession for a Jew in Warsaw at that time. Garshon was shown in one picture pushing a large pram with his son and wife on fashionable Marshakovsky Street in Warsaw.

Many of the pictures bore inscriptions on the back in Polish; tearful entries and notes to my father who was so far away. Indeed, there were reports that postcards with German stamps had arrived after the German invasion. I never remember seeing those.

Poland was invaded on September 1, 1939. Some of the first targets bombed in Warsaw were Jewish in nature. Indeed, German troop trains bore banners that said, "We are going to kill the Jews." The German conquest of Poland lasted about six weeks. The city of Warsaw, home to the extended Ziedenberg family, actually held out in a siege for several weeks longer.

Because of the German occupation, after the initial few postcards with German stamps, nothing was ever heard from these people again. My father and mother spent many hours filling out documents, all to no avail. In the late '40s and early '50s, I even remember helping my father send Red Cross forms to Arlosen, Germany, the central tracing facility. I don't think that I could fully appreciate his loss until I was an older person. He had come from a tight, close-knit family with six siblings. There was never any confirmative conclusion.

Unfortunately, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto were not enumerated in any way. It is almost impossible to understand what happened to individual people. Jewish Warsaw, pre-war, was the largest Jewish community in the world next to New York City. It was the cultural and religious center of world Jewry. Two great movements competed for Jewish power and attention. My father belonged to the Bund, a socialist organization partially founded by Stephen Lewis's grandfather. Sam was an active participant and brought his socialist pro-labor views to Canada. When we think of the Holocaust (or the Shoah), we quite rightly commemorate the death of 6 million of our own people, including 1.5 million children. But we often overlook the destruction of the Yiddish language and culture, and Yiddish organizations like the Bund.

The tailors in Toronto were paid not by the hour, but by the materials produced. Sam was a diligent craftsman, but as he was slow; he suffered financially. I remember once mixing up his tiny tags with which the accounting for the piece work was done. He was furious.

In 1975 or 1976, I journeyed to Israel and filled out numerous documentations on Sam's lost family testimonials. These were stored at Yad Vashem. I always had some hope that someone survived, perhaps the little boy walking with my uncle Garshon, my cousin. Perhaps, one of my dad's four sisters ... somebody, anybody. In both 1993 and 2008, I journeyed to Warsaw to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of April 1943. I camped out in the Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw. At my sister Marilyn's wise suggestion, I examined the Warsaw phone book from 1939. Sure enough, there was a Tosia Zjadenberg listed. My father had a sister who was apparently a professional dancer. Could she have been the same Tosia? We will never know. A death certificate early in the war when there was still documentation being produced listed a Jacob Zjaidenberg. Was it my grandfather whose age and dates matched? Again, we will never know.

Despite all my research and heavy involvement with the Holocaust, I had nothing to show. Then, one day, Yad Vashem digitalized all their files; I waited patiently for a day, fearing an overload. They even had a device on the Web site that translated the names to the Polish Jewish equivalents. So I dutifully typed in Ziedenberg; it came up Zjaidenberg. I found my father's middle brother, Garshon. It appeared to have new information. Anxiously, I scrolled through the list. Could it be that someone else, another Ziedenberg, had added new facts? Near tears, I scrolled to the bottom and read an update: "Information submitted by nephew Gerald Ziedenberg, thirty years before." This was the information that I had forgotten. There was no new contact. The Ziedenberg family of Warsaw, like so many others, simply disappeared into the vast conflagration that was the Holocaust. There was no trace and no closure.

Chapter Two

Jerry the Child

One of my earliest childhood memories was my mother's toughness. We were living on Montrose Avenue near Dundas. My mother had sold our house on Lauder Avenue and Rogers Road in the Dufferin area because a black family had moved in next door. It was also too far for Sam to go to Spadina, the tailoring mecca of Toronto. On Montrose Avenue, children went to Grace Street Public School. I was terribly frustrated because of my right arm and also because of my inability to sing. When the children were singing, I was asked to stand in a corner and cut out papers.

It became apparent I wasn't a good student and might fail. The teacher, Mrs. McCormick, sent home a note and Gerald threw it in the sewer. This went on for several days until I was accompanied home by a classmate named Ruth Borenstein. Ruth approached my mother and said, "Mrs. Ziedenberg, aren't you getting Mrs. McCormick's notes?" My mother was aghast. I was pulled by my rather large ears down to the Grace Street Public School, and Mrs. McCormick and Sophie engaged in a very heated discussion. Sophie then determined for Grace Street Public School, Gerald Ziedenberg, and Mrs. McCormick, that Gerald would advance to grade one.

A similar situation occurred several years later at Shareii Shomayim Cheder. We had just moved to 45 Atlas Avenue, just north of St. Clair. The principal for the cheder lived next door. During class, Burke referred to my father in Hebrew as a tailor. Again, Sophie marched me by my large ears down to the Sharei Shomayim. She demanded to know why Sam had to be referred to as a tailor. This was the time of a lot of discrimination between the various Jewish classes. Indeed, the newly arrived Holocaust survivors were called Greenies. The Greenies called the established Jews the Yellows. My mother was furious at this apparent slight. She certainly was a proud woman.

My parents had moved from Lauder to a rental flat on Montrose Avenue and then finally bought a home at 45 Atlas. This was to be our home for next ten years. My sister Marilyn was born in 1949. After initial difficulties because of the age gap of ten years and the difference in gender, we grew much closer.

My father brought me two presents that stood out in my mind. The first was my initial bicycle, an Etonia Glider from Eatons. It only took me a few hours to scratch it up. The second was a very good radio, a Stromberg Carlsen. Years later, in a lecture on Harry Truman, I quoted the initial broadcasts that I had heard on my Stromberg Carlsen radio about the surprise North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950. Much later in life, my sister, who frequents antique shops, bought me another Stromberg Carlsen radio.

I went to Humewood Public School, and unlike today, I walked by myself. The walk went from 45 Atlas to Normana, up Normana to Arlingon, across to Maplewood and then up Maplewood, to the intersection of Maplewood and Humewood. A feature of the walks was damming up the leaves and snow with your feet so that the sewers were blocked. Somehow, everything seems so much bigger. Humewood Public School loomed in my mind as a vast edifice. It had a huge library and a very large basement where they sometimes showed movies. In the library, I found a large picture travel book titled Haliburton. I gazed in awe at the pictures. There were pictures of Petra in today's Jordan, pictures of the Great Wall in China, the Forbidden City in Beijing, China. All the exotic travel locations were featured including Timbuktu in Africa. As a little boy of perhaps eight, I vowed that I would travel and go to see all these places. I have been to most of them. So far, Timbuktu, Africa has eluded me.

From an early age, I loved to read. Books were a treasure for me. My father Sam liked to read, but again, due to his poor English, he was ponderously slow. A childhood image that still resonates for me is my father sitting on my bed with me reading to him. He was fascinated by current events, socialism (the dirty word in the United States today), Communism, and the history of the Second World War. Nothing yet had been written about the Holocaust; it did not become a topic until after the Eichmann Trial in 1960. Since then, there has been an explosion of Holocaust literature covering every conceivable aspect of that tragedy.

My reading also took me to Wychwood Library on Bathurst, just south of Sinclair. It seemed again like an enormous place. Years later, I went back and saw the newly renovated version. It also looked tiny, but it still has two floors. As an eight- to ten-year-old, I walked by myself down the three to four blocks from 45 Atlas to St. Clair, then across Bathurst and down Bathurst. It was a long walk, especially carrying two to three heavy books. I worked with the librarians and chose the books carefully. Occasionally, Mrs. Montgomery (Toronto and Canada were mostly all Anglo-Saxon then) told me that Pilgrim's Progress, a Christian story, was not for me. Nevertheless, I developed a passion for reading. Books have consumed me for more than sixty years. Now, I have an iPod and have listened to more than 150 downloaded audiobooks, other lectures, and podcasts. Whatever little music I have on the iPod has been downloaded by my oldest son, Mark. I am not sure for what purpose.

Humewood Public School was an integral part of my life. In the beginning, I was a poor student, but I slowly progressed. There were many other first-generation Jewish students and other first-generation immigrants. There were a few non-Jews. The great wave of Italian and other European immigration had not come yet. From my childish viewpoint, it seemed that there were gentile teachers and mostly Jewish students. The wooden desks were hard to get into and they all had inkwells that were never used. The front of the classroom was covered by a large map that showed the world. The map was sponsored by the William Neilson Candy Company. In each of the four corners, there was a chocolate bar.

(Continues...)

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