Lipshitz, Manya

• Kantorowicz, Manya

Manya Kantorowicz was born in Bialystok, Poland in December 1906. The youngest daughter of nine children; her mother was a baker, and her parents were secular Jews in the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) tradition. She developed an early interest in Communist politics. At age 13, she left Bialystok, Poland and joined the Twelfth Children’s Work Commune in Vitesbsk, Russia; and entered the Teachers’ Seminary there in 1923. In 1926 she immigrated to Montreal where her brothers had earlier settled. She joined the Young Communist League in Montreal immediately following her arrival. She married Sam Lipshitz on 20 January 1930. They moved to Brunswick Street in Toronto, and she began a 25-year career teaching Yiddish and Jewish History at the Morris Winchevsky School, operated by the United Jewish People’s Order (UJPO). In 1977, Manya published a memoir of her recollections of Jewish life in Russia and immigrating to Canada, titled Bletlekh fun a shturmisher tsayt. It was published in translation as Time Remembered: A Jewish Children’s Commune in the Soviet Union in the 1920s (Toronto: Lugus Publications, 1991).

C. Long, 2021.