My mother, Nellie Brodovsky, was born in 1902 in Mezerich a hamlet in western Ukraine about 25 miles from Rovno. Her parents were Basia and Shimon Smoler which became anglicized to Smalley. She was one of nine children, but only four survived infancies. An older sister died of perhaps scarlet fever at about the age of eight. The family, then composed of James, my mother, and a younger sister Gertrude, emigrated to Winnipeg in 1907. They lived in a rented house on Jarvis but by 1916 they had bought a home on Magnus near McGregor where my grandparents lived until 1944.
My mother graduated from St. Johns Technical High School and then went to normal school for one year. This was common for teachers at that time. She initially taught in the town of Elma located 75 kilometres east of Winnipeg. She told me that she accepted Elma because it was on the CNR main line, and the schedule allowed her to come to Winnipeg on late Friday afternoon and return Monday morning. Her salary was $600 annually.
She taught at Elma for a few years but then accepted a position at Faraday School in north Winnipeg where she taught until she married our father Bill Brodovsky in 1928. Her favourite pupil at Faraday was apparently Ann Nozick (nee Rossen). Years later I met Mrs. Nozick, and I was told that the affection was mutual.
At that time married women could not teach so she retired. She had three children, my sister Eileen, my brother Harvey, and I who was the youngest. Our father died suddenly from a brain abscess in 1933. She was left a widow with three children, the eldest being three and a half, amid the Great Depression.
The family moved into the Smalley home on Magnus Avenue, where we lived until about 1936 when my mother rented a home on Matheson Avenue near St. Cross with her bachelor brother Jim.
In 1939 Esther Swartz encouraged her to start a nursery school in our home. She enrolled her daughter Jimmy (later Jimmy Silden) and canvassed her friends and arranged a cohort of about eight pre-schoolers. My mother was always very grateful to Esther for organizing her first class.
In the spring of 1941, my mother bought a house on Matheson just east of Main Street. The summer kitchen was converted to a larger heated room which was able to accommodate about twenty children in her nursery school. She ran both morning and afternoon classes. As I recall, classes finished at 11:30 a.m. and my siblings and I came home for lunch about 12:15 before returning to school for classes at 1:30. The lunch was almost always a hot lunch, but I am still amazed how she managed that.
My mother ran a very efficient school and was in high demand because she had a reputation of being able to deal with children with behavioural and learning disabilities. She had an excellent memory and remembered children’s birthdays and favourite songs for years. Most of the children came from within an area of about ten blocks and most were Jewish although several were not. Neither I nor my siblings ever saw her in one of her classes because we were at school. However, over the years many of her students recalled to me how much they enjoyed her classes.
The school in our home continued until 1952 when she was recruited by the Rosh Pina synagogue, which had just been built, to run the school there. She enjoyed her time there, especially her relationship with Rabbi Arthur Chiel. However, I think she missed her independence.
In 1957 my mother started teaching again in the Winnipeg public schools at the kindergarten in John M King school in the west end. She taught there until the spring of 1970 when she was hospitalized with complicated gallbladder disease. She had always been a very hard worker and was critical of some teachers in the school system who seemed to view sick leave as a chance to have a little holiday. While she had thought about retiring at the end of the school year in 1970, her illness decided for her. However, she had accumulated about forty weeks of sick leave, so she was able justify using it for most of the following year. In her last year of teaching, she earned $7,200 which was better than her salary in 1921.
She stayed in her home on Matheson until the early 1960s, when she sold it and moved into an apartment in River Heights where she could be closer to me and my family. After her retirement from teaching, she enjoyed having some of her grandchildren come for lunch occasionally and told them that they liked the same soup I did. She had a social life in her building and even learned to play mahjong.
As I mentioned, she was of necessity very independent and was a feminist before I had ever heard of the word. She did her own bookkeeping for her kindergartens, did her own tax returns well into her eighties and was aware of tenants’ rights when her apartment building was converted to a condo. She was frugal and could always calculate whether it was cheaper to buy two 1 litre bottles of milk or one 2 litre bottle. She concluded it was cheaper to buy two 1 litres. However, she was very generous to charities and probably contributed beyond her means. Somehow, after her death she left bequests to all her grandchildren and great grandchildren totalling well over six figures.
She was very supportive of education to her children and to their friends. Adele Wiseman, the author, was a close friend of my sister’s and my mother encouraged her in her writing. Years later when Adele received an honorary doctorate from the University of Manitoba, she picked my mother up to take her to the convocation. My mother beamed and couldn’t have been prouder if it had been my sister.
In her latter years she had many fractures which markedly reduced her mobility. In 1997, while still very alert cognitively, she decided she wanted to be admitted to the Sharon Home on Magnus. She said that she didn’t want to waste her life waiting for home care to show up for her bath or to not show up. She stayed there until 2001 when it moved to the current location as the Simkin Centre. In her last few months, she declined mentally. In July of 2001 my brother, who was visiting in Winnipeg, and I went to see her. She was very alert and mentioned that that particular day was the birthday of Paul Shuckett who had been her student fifty years earlier. She died peacefully in her sleep a month later just two months shy of her 99th birthday.
After her death I received five or six notes of condolence from her students in the 1950’s most of whom I knew by name but had never met. They had responded because they had remembered my mother so fondly.
