Margaret Kamin-Zysman will be 100 years old on May 16. At an interview in her apartment, where she lives alone, the sprightly centenarian said, “I am 100 years old. Isn’t that ridiculous? I don’t feel it. And I don’t look it.”
Centenarian Margaret Kamin-Zysman is seen at a Na’amat Canada tribute dinner in September 2008. [Mollie Rothman photo]
There’s no doubt that she could be taken for a person in her 80s, both mentally and physically. She has some hearing loss, but her memory is exceptional.
Born in Poland, she had a long career in the theatre business in Toronto and was active in fundraising .
Her memoirs were published in 1996.
Before Memoirs of Margaret Kamin-Zysman was published, she had been making notes about her life to give to her children and grandchildren, but she discovered that the cost of getting a book published was high.
In the mid-1990s, she saw an item in The CJN by June Callwood asking people to submit their biographies for possible publication.
“I went for an interview with June Callwood, and I sent her a few pages from my book,” Kamin-Zysman said.
“I was thrilled when she told me that the book had literary value and that she would publish the book for me for $300.”
In the foreword of her book, which is dedicated to her two sons, Arthur and Jules Kamin, Kamin-Zysman acknowledges Callwood. “My deep gratitude to June Callwood without whose help these memoirs would never have seen the light,” she wrote.
Born Miriam Fingerhut in Bolechow, Poland, a shtetl near Lvov, Kamin-Zysman came to Canada at age 17 with her parents and two younger sisters. Her grandfather had arrived in Toronto in 1890.
Although she is fluent in six languages – English, Polish, German, Ukrainian, Yiddish and Hebrew – her first job was in a millinery factory.
“The Depression made the work sporadic,” she said. “So I looked for more permanent employment.”
Her mother’s stepbrother, Samuel Fine, was in the theatre business. He arranged for her to work as a cashier in a theatre box office. From the 1930s to 1985, when she retired, she worked in several movie theatres, including the Towne Cinema, which used to be at Yonge and Bloor streets.
She jokes that she became known as “Margaret,” because that’s what her “colleagues, lovers and boyfriends” would call her.
In 1939, she married Mack Kamin. Along with raising her boys, working, singing in the Beth Tzedec Congregation and the choirs of Farband, a Yiddish-speaking labour Zionist organization, she joined Pioneer Women (now Na’amat Canada) and became an ardent fundraiser. She was a delegate at a Na’amat conference in Israel in 1965.
Her husband died in 1976, and she remarried Arthur Zysman in 1983. Although they were married for only four years, she said she was fortunate to have had two good marriages.
When asked about her independence, positive outlook in life and how she copes with problems, she said, “Throughout my life, in times of need and uncertainty, I think of my mother and ask what would she do.”
Kamin-Zysman plans to lead a family sing-song at her birthday celebration.
