David was born and raised in Canada—in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in what he describes as “the coldest city in the world,” though he is quick to note that he is referring to the temperature and not to the social or cultural environment.
His parents had made their way to Canada from Ukraine: his father from Odessa, his mother from Kiev. His father, Benjamin (Ben), emigrated at about 18 years old at the turn of the 20th century, traveling with his two cousins. Seeking to escape conscription in—and mistreatment by—the Tsar’s army in pre-revolution Russia, which had been responsible for incalculable violence against Jewish soldiers and communities, they crossed Europe and boarded a ship to Canada. His mother, Lillian (Luba), fled Ukraine in 1914 with her mother, father, brothers and sisters, because of anti-Jewish pogroms there and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Both families entered Canada in Halifax, a port on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia, crossed yet another continent and eventually settled in Winnipeg.
Nestled in a patch of land at the confluence of the Red River and the Assiniboine River, Winnipeg was the capital of the province of Manitoba and the “Gateway to the West” during a period of westward expansion in Canada. It was also home to the largest concentration of Ukrainian immigrants in the country. After the Canadian Pacific Railway reached Winnipeg in 1885, the Department of Interior launched a campaign to encourage prospective homesteaders to settle the western prairies. Posters started appearing across Europe touting the Canadian west as the “New Eldorado” and offering “free farms for the million[s].”
The campaign attracted Eastern Europeans especially, and while many used Winnipeg as a jumping-off point for a broader expansion into the West, many others settled in the city itself. By 1914, when David’s mother and her family arrived in the city, the permanent Slavic population in Winnipeg, including Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and elsewhere, was growing rapidly.
David’s parents and their families built new lives there. Ben drove a taxi and worked for a local meat company, hauling carcasses on his back. Luba’s father became a peddler (“he knew horses,” David says) eventually opening his own grocery store. Ben and Luba met in Winnipeg and fell in love, but Luba said she wouldn’t marry him unless he became “respectable.” So Ben learned a trade: building tufted furniture, particularly sofas. After some early success, they wed in 1920. Their marriage certificate lists his occupation as “upholsterer.”
The young couple eventually made a home for themselves, mostly at 353 Aberdeen Ave., in “a Slavic part of Winnipeg,” David says. In fact, the North End of Winnipeg, which included Aberdeen Ave., encompassed one of the largest and most significant Slavic enclaves in the city, extending from the Canadian Pacific railyards to Inkster Blvd. in the northern reaches of the city. Before long, Ben and Luba started a family. They welcomed a daughter, Miriam, in 1924. Three years later, David arrived.
Ben joined the labor movement in Winnipeg, and his involvement deepened as time marched on. The movement was affiliated with the Workmen’s Circle in New York, a mutual aid society established in the 1890s to support the millions of Eastern European Jews fleeing pogroms and immigrating to the U.S. The society offered social assistance programs including health care and unemployment relief, organized dances and other social events, and more; it was “home, family, doctor, friend, insurer, provider of husbands and wives and everything,’’ as Dr. Barnett Zumhoff, then-president of the organization would explain in a 1985 interview with the New York Times.
The Winnipeg arm of the Workmen’s Circle was a Socialist labor group associated with the I.L. Peretz School, named for the Jewish-Polish writer Isaac Leib Peretz, a social critic and a promoter of Jewish non-conformism. Founded in 1914, the school was a secular, Yiddish-speaking school in the heart of the Jewish community in Winnipeg’s North End. In the 1930s, it was the largest Jewish day school in North America. It has always retained its reputation as one of the most progressive and most innovative institutions of Jewish learning on the continent.
Ben was one of the founders of the Peretz School and, in 1922, was involved in moving the facility and its ever-growing student body to a new location at 418 Aberdeen Ave., only a block away from the Cohen’s home. David remembers it being a hub of activity when he was a child. “My life centered around the Peretz School,” he says. Not only with respect to the education provided and the social events it sponsored, but also in terms of the secular, socialist ideals it promoted. For example, because the Jewish religion itself was not favored, neither David nor many of his friends in the school had a bar mitzvah. On the other hand, he recalls singing “The Internationale” and other revolutionary songs with his classmates.
Less than two miles east of the school was David’s grandfather’s store at 719 Alfred Ave. The building that housed the store also served as a home for most of his extended family, with as many as seven people, including uncles and aunts as well as his grandparents, sharing the space behind the shop. So it’s no surprise that many of David’s earliest memories also revolve around this location. “When it snowed, my mother pulled me on a sled back and forth between home and the store,” he says. “And in the summer, my grandfather took me on his horse and wagon as he peddled his stuff.”
The Streets of Winnipeg
As often happens in first-generation immigrant families, not least because of the dramatically different experiences between parents and children, David developed a worldview largely incompatible with the one his parents espoused. “My culture was the streets of Winnipeg,” he says, “and their culture was Workmen’s Circle Jewish.” Almost inevitably, the two cultures clashed. When they did, David found solace and a sense of belonging among the neighborhood kids. “All the guys up and down the street were not close with their parents; we were close with each other.”
“My friends saved my life,” he says. “I had a group to hang on to.”
David’s bond with his friends was based on a shared “us against the world” mentality, a group identity forged not only in conflict with their parents but also in earlier scraps and scuffles with kids from neighboring streets. “In an immigrant city like Winnipeg,” he says, “clubs were based on ethnicity. There were Italian clubs, Polish clubs. We were a Jewish club with 18 kids, and we all stuck together because we had been chased down the street so often when we were young, before high school.”
He describes the group as his “gang,” and paints a picture of his early life not entirely unlike a Bowery Boys film, with a group of street urchins living a life of petty crime. “We got into trouble,” he says. “We ran down the street and got into fights and things like that. And when we were very young, I think we stole things.” Like all good gangs, they came up with a name—‘the Canucks’—and even had sweaters with the name specially printed on them.
But the full story of David’s adventures with his North End pals is so much richer than this cursory reading would suggest. They loved sports and played hockey and rugby on the streets. As they got older, they developed shared interests in chess, music and—notably—science and technology. “We matured together,” David says. “We went from a gang of kids being chased down the street to an ongoing sports club, to a rather intellectual group of guys who read books and built radios, telescopes and model airplanes.”
Uncle Louie’s Gift
David’s primary field of inquiry in those days was radios, particularly the “crystal set” radios of the day, which worked by converting the energy in the electromagnetic radio waves to something you could hear on headphones.
His love of the technology—and his fascination with the principles of electromagnetism— was initially sparked and endlessly encouraged by his Uncle Louie (Louis), his mother’s brother, who had emigrated from Ukraine with her and the rest of their family. By now, David’s grandfather had opened his grocery store. Louie, a self-taught electrician who earned a living wiring some of the earliest homes in the region to have access to electrical power, lived behind the store with his parents and siblings and maintained a workshop of his own in the basement. When David and his family came to visit, he would let him explore the workshop and tinker with what he found there.
“He had a lot of electrical gadgets, and he liked to teach me things,” David says. “He got me interested in crystal sets when I was six or seven years old. I knew then what I wanted to do with my life; I loved electromagnetic things from the word go.”
Louie eventually became a dentist; Ben lent him the money to go to dentistry school. In 1939, when David was about 12 years old, Louie was drafted into the Canadian army, where he served as a dentist during World War II. By the time he returned to Winnipeg, in 1945, David was in college. They saw little of each other in later years, but the early lessons David learned from Louie, and the passion for science Louie instilled in him, never left him. Today, David describes his uncle as “the biggest influence in my life.”
As for “the Canucks,” David’s boyhood gang, they partly stuck together through their college years and well beyond, never losing sight of their shared intellectual interests. In the late 1970s, they held a reunion in Winnipeg, where they reminisced about their younger days and caught up on what everyone had been doing since they were last all together. Most of the group were now doctors, professors or scientists. David, too—by then, he was an MIT researcher and the inventor of an intriguing new biomedical imaging technology. In one way or another, everyone in his gang had achieved a degree of professional success.8
Of course, it wasn’t always a smooth road getting there, not least for David. Indeed, before he could become the father of MEG and biomagnetism, or even begin his graduate studies in physics—the foundation of his later work with biomagnetism—he had still-more challenges to face at home in Winnipeg.
