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Harry Mayerovitch was born in Montreal in 1910, the first son of Samuel and Clara Mayerovitch, two Bessarabian Jewish immigrants. He was a Canadian Jewish architect, artist, illustrator, author and cartoonist.
The Mayerovitch family war poor, and moved to Rockland, Ontario in 1912, where he grew up. In the small town, his family was the only anglophone Jewish one, in a majority catholic and french-speaking environment. Moving back to Montreal at fifteen, he enrolled at McGill, where he discovered his passion for architecture, obtaining his degree in 1933. He then went on to obtain a McLennan grant, offering him the opportunity to travel to Europe. During these years, he developed a sympathy for socialist ideas and for the Communist Party. After a sojourn in Mexico in 1939, he became acquainted with the work of Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente, which had a profound impact on him and his vision of art.
During the Second World War, he was selected by the National Film Board of Canada founder John Grierson to become artistic director of the NFB's Wartime Information Board's Graphic Arts Division. During his stay at the NFB, he produced some of the most famous propaganda posters of the war, using the pseudonym "Mayo". As an architect, he designed after the war the old building of the Jewish Public Library, worked in urban planning, and taught architecture at Laval University and at McGill. He wrote several books during his life, and his last published work, Way to Go, a collection of cartoons, appeared in 2004. He passed away that same year.