After completing my studies in London in 1980, I was looking for my next port of call. Since 1968, I had lived in Prague, in Tel Aviv and in London, which I enjoyed enormously. However, my UK student visa was about to expire and the stern, greasy haired chap at the Home Office angrily slammed a stamp in my passport “leave to remain in the United Kingdom extended for 30 days, till September 1, 1980”. I had a month to pack up and get ready for my move to Toronto, Canada, where I had been hired part-time as a T.A. (teaching assistant) at the University of Toronto The position was contingent on getting accepted as a post-graduate student at the Slavic Languages faculty. Luckily, I did get accepted but the part-time position only brought in $400 a month. I was able to secure a small grant and on August 21, the 12th anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, my wife and I boarded our first ever trans-Atlantic flight. We flew to New York’s Kennedy airport, with a connection to Toronto out of La Guardia the following day.
London’s Heathrow Airport was a well organized, airy structure with a brisk, cosmopolitan feel. Arriving at Kennedy, felt like landing in Calcutta. It was dark and smelly. Custom clearance, performed by armed agent wearing mirror shades felt like something out of the 1920’s - no green lane/red lane system like in Europe. The agents were loud and rude. The terminal had no currency exchange kiosk, or a bank, only two or three pay phones, each with a long line-up. There was no information desk and everyone was scurrying around at breakneck speed. Once in our hotel, we had to fight the reception to honor our reservation. The custom inspection had delayed us for an hour and apparently the hotel had decided we weren’t coming. I understood that I was not in Old Blighty anymore, where things get arranged with quiet voices and polite smiles. I banged the desk and yelled for a minute or two and voila, the manger came out and remembered that, yes, she had actually kept a room for us.
The room was awful. The view consisted of endless rows of warehouses and dimly lit, empty streets. The colors on the TV were so garish you almost needed sunglasses. Out of the set we heard the grating screeches of guests on “The Price Is Right”. I was in tears. All my life I had dreamed of America. I had visions of a super modern, super efficient place with wide, well lit boulevards, futuristic airports and total efficiency. Instead, the whole experience from landing till bedtime was a nightmare that might as well have been taking place in some outer province of China. Jet lag got the better of me and I fell asleep, exhausted and mentally crushed. America, it seemed, was a giant, dirty, rude, inefficient slum.
The next morning, my mood improved considerably when we went downstairs for breakfast. Unlike the London bed and breakfast places that served lukewarm tea and beans on toast, the hotel’s large, brightly lit, icily air-conditioned dining room featured a full buffet breakfast, with scrambled eggs, mountains of bacon and sausages, toast, pancakes, maple syrup and - by far the best of all - bottomless cups of coffee. Waitresses were hovering around, refilling your orange juice and your coffee to your heart’s content. “Ah!” I thought to myself. “Now THIS is America.” After breakfast we took a cab to La Guardia. The busy freeways were lined with trees and the scene was altogether more pleasant than the previous evening, especially with three cups of coffee sloshing in my belly.
The impression of Toronto was quite favorable. Customs clearance was speedy, the airport airy, though sterile and with the interior design reminiscent of the 1960’s communist style. The drive out of the airport offered a similar picture. The streets, the buildings, the over-ground subway line were all clean and tidy but created an impression of a vast concrete labyrinth with few redeeming features. The suburbs, on the other hand, were leafy and pretty, as was the lovely park surrounding the University campus and the Ontario Legislature.
This was my first foray into the New World and I had to come to terms quickly with its brisk utilitarianism and sober pragmatism. The level of service was vastly better than what I had known in Europe, as was the endless variety of food from all over the world. I remember my first days at the Faculty of Slavic Languages on Sussex Avenue, on the university campus. I was given an office, supposedly shared with three other T.A.’s but I never saw them once. I sat behind my desk (it had a telephone! And when the Dean’s secretary called occasionally, she’d say “How are you Mr. Grosman? Settling in?”) Made me feel like some real “macher”. One of my first days there I inquired about a good place for lunch and the secretary directed me to a little tuck shop, one block down, at the corner of Huron and Glenn Morris Streets. I ordered a ham sandwich: “What bread?” the elderly Ukrainian clerk asked. I had no idea there were choices. “You want white, whole wheat, rye, seeded rye, a hoagie or a kaiser?” My eyes bulged out: “What’s a kaiser?” He showed me, shaking his head…[another idiot foreign student] “That looks great!” “OK, what do you want on it?” Once again, I was stumped. “Ah…well…ham!” “Mayo, butter, mustard, Swiss, American, mozzarella?” I was beginning to get it. This was not a tuck shop. This was some kind of sandwich emporium. “Butter and a touch of mustard. No mayo. No cheese” He proceeded to make the sandwich. “What else do you want?” At this point he sounded tired. “Tomato, cucumber, lettuce, pickle, onion, olives, hot peppers?” “Just a tomato and maybe a pickle” He handed me the sandwich. I was holding the large bun overfilled with goodies and felt a wave of reverence. Anyone who’d eaten British cuisine and British Rail sandwiches for three years will know what I’m talking about. Incidentally, there were three thick slices of ham, at least a quarter pound, (British Rail serves one see-through slice) two layers of tomatoes with a couple of kosher pickles on top. It would have made three nice sandwiches in the Old Country. “Any drink?” “I’ll have a Coke” “Just help yourself, it’s in that cooler over there!” He put my sandwich in a paper bag. The Coke was ice cold. “That’ll be $2.75, please” OMG! For that amount of food, that was pennies, even back in 1980. Suddenly, Toronto seemed like a cool place. I went down to Vladimir’s shop daily and soon became an expert in ordering sandwiches.
My career at the U of T was of short duration. I got into a bit of a tiff with the Dean over the topic of my PhD thesis and I left academia for good. I was offered another T.A. position in Dallas, one that would have included more hours and where I’d likely would have been able to complete my PhD but my wife and I had a baby girl now and more moves across international borders were simply not on the cards.
Let me finally get to the meat and potatoes of what this piece was intended to be about - before I launched into my architectural and culinary segues. I was never able to secure a full time job in all my time in Canada. For the first nine years, I cobbled together music teaching gigs and some translation gigs, while my wife got a good programming position with the Union Bank of Switzerland. We bought a townhouse in the suburbs and I took care of our girls, cooking and shopping, writing music in my spare time, playing the occasional gig and teaching. We lived in a green, calm subdivision about 20 miles west of the city. During my nine years there I never learned the names of any of my neighbors, save for one family who helped us with the girls. We were on friendly terms with them. They were sweet people but when we invited them over for a coffee, conversation stalled. This was my first confrontation with Canadian social norms (I must emphasize that every time I use the word “Canadian” in this context, I mean “Ontarian”. Just like the US, Canada is geographically vast and varied and people are different everywhere) Throughout my nine years in Mississauga suburbia, my exchanges with neighbors were limited to “Hey, how ya doin’?” and “Nice mornin’, eh?” or, frequently “Cold enough for ya?” We were not invited into their homes or they to ours. Our kids tobogganed together in the winter and went swimming in the summer but the parents never socialized. Having spent nine years in Israel, this behavior seemed almost pathological. In Israel you can’t keep the neighbors away from your door. God forbid should you get a flat tire. A group of people would form around you instantly, each of them a tire changing expert. They’d stand around smoking cigarettes and telling you how to do the job. In Canada a motorist will slow down, lean out of the window with a curt “You ‘aright?” and step on the gas.
As time went on and the girls grew and became more independent, I found more gigs and started taking my music career more seriously. After my divorce, I moved to a condo building in Toronto and vowed to make a full time career out of playing, recording and teaching. It took many years but I was successful. Again, just like in Mississauga, the Toronto neighbors would limit themselves to a nod and a quick “How ya doin’?” - only this time I’d have to spend a few awkward minutes with them, staring at our shoes in the elevator. The same mores, the same general demeanor dominated the music circles as well. I met and worked with some excellent musicians and am eternally grateful for the help of those few who secured gigs for me that I otherwise would not have had access to. My name became relatively well known in the Toronto jazz community. But after the between-set gossip, and maybe a beer after the gig, everyone went home. Everybody was polite to a fault, the only tackles I had were with unscrupulous bar owners. Otherwise Canadians prefer to settle disputes quietly, with insincere smiles because “We are not like the Americans”. You could not pass one day without either hearing or reading that sentence in the papers. “We are not like the Americans. Our healthcare is better. Our welfare system is better. We are not gun toting cowboys”
This didn’t sit well with me. You see, as a child of Communism, I adored America and the Americans. Not every President, not every policy, of course! But I adored the American culture, American jazz, American hipness, American slang. I thought Canada, instead of trying to be a more polite, more reserved version of the United States, would have done better to dispense with their champagne socialism and revert to their lumberjacking, beaver trapping, river portaging roots. But from the mid-60’s on, most Canadian Prime Ministers insisted on making Canada less American and more European - a policy that has now lead to a total disaster post Covid.
I did make close friends but they were all American ex-pats and Czech exiles. It was fine: professionally, I did well for myself entertaining Czech exile groups across Canada (our tours of Winnipeg, Manitoba were particularly gratifying) But it did nothing towards my feeling of alienation from my Toronto colleagues. I was outspoken, hot under the collar, I held libertarian views that contrasted sharply with the cherished Social Democratic views of all the jazz musicians I knew. But politics was secondary. What was jarring to me was the realization that I was simply not capable of making friends in Toronto. Real friends: folks you share your secrets with, your best and worst ideas with. As a Russian friend of mine put it: Toronto was the perfect city for accountants and dentists. I could write many more paragraphs and still not capture exactly what I felt. Perhaps the best definition is: Ontarians lack spark. And perhaps the reason they lack spark is because they’re unsure of who they are. All the know and all they will say is “We are not Americans”. Well, that’s not enough. Sharing a 5 thousand mile border and inundated with cross-border culture makes it hard to hold on to your identity but it’s not impossible. Nova Scotians have done it as have the people in the Prairie provinces. Ontario just cannot shake its inferiority complex, which ends up sounding like the empty bragging of a younger brother.
It is not my intention to be harsh. Making friends requires two parties, obviously. But my background, my Jewish humor, my emotional openness were simply not suited to Toronto - a city I still love for its fabulous food and incredibly dynamic, varied population. How Canada has dealt with Covid is a topic for a separate article.
I was able to move to the US in 2011. I had hired a lawyer, started the process in late 2010 and was granted an 0-1 visa after a year of filling out forms, interviews and bureaucratic reversals. Here is the USCIS definition of the visa: “The O-1 nonimmigrant visa is for the individual who possesses extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics, or who has a demonstrated record of extraordinary achievement in the motion picture or television industry and has been recognized nationally or internationally for those achievements” Yes, I’m humble bragging…or just bragging. It was a difficult journey to get the visa and in November of 2011, I was given final approval. I had an agent in the US, through whom I secured gigs: mostly in Florida but a few outside of the state as well. My (second) wife and I had bought a little condo in Orlando in 2009, so naturally, that city was our destination. It’s hard to describe how happy I was living in the US, despite having only skeletal health insurance which scared the crap out of me. But I fell in love with Florida on Day 1. I couldn’t understand why people were booking vacations in the Bahamas. Orlando and Florida were my Bahamas! Where the hell else would I need to go? We had palm trees, we had the Gulf and the Atlantic, it would be foolish going anywhere else. Orlando did not have the cool coffee shops and varied cuisine of Toronto but it made up for it in spades in too many different aspects to count: the openness of the people, the ability to make friends quickly, the easy self-assurance of Americans in general and Southerners in particular. People know who they are. And that makes them secure, less envious, less needy. The politics agreed with me better too. I found plenty of musicians who shared my libertarian views, though, it must be admitted, America has not been spared the socialist virus and many musicians actually look to Canada and the Canadian healthcare system as something to emulate. Be that as it may, I felt at home in a week, where in Toronto I felt perhaps 50% at home after 30 years.
I married my third and by far the best wife, Diane, in 2014 and got my Green Card a year later. I am in the process of applying for US citizenship. I’ve had amazing jobs down here - more great jobs in a few years than in my whole Canadian career. I have worked for Disney, for Full Sail University, I have played great jazz festivals and befriended one of my teenage idols, the late great guitarist Larry Coryell. The best thing of all? No shoveling snow :)
One eventually finds a home. Most people are born to it and never change it. Some move to another country, another state and find it there. I had to move to six different countries before I found mine ten years ago, at age 58. Better late than never. MUCH better!
(playing the Toronto Jazz Festival in 2017 with Mark Dunn on bass and Chris Lamont on drums)
I’m glad you found Florida as your home as well!!! Very enjoyable read!