Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil by Rebecca Margolis

She was invited to join an “active writer’s union,” which connected the community of local writers as well as inviting Yiddish authors from abroad, which is how she met such stars as “Opatoshu, Bialostocki, Itzik Manger, Israel Joshua singer, and his brother Bashevis.” Interestingly, in her essay, Rosenfarb discusses not only the intense community among writers in Montreal, but also makes an effort to define Canadian Yiddish literature more generally. Arriving after the golden age of Montreal Yiddish literature that Margolis described, Rosenfarb remembers that when she arrived in 1950, she “found a bustling Yiddish social life,” including Yiddish literary periodicals through which she might stay connected to both local and global Yiddish cultural life. Much of what she describes matches Margolis’ careful research.

In a rare work of nonfiction, the poet Chava Rosenfarb took the time to describe the Yiddish literary life of Montreal in her essay on Canadian Yiddish Writers. Photo of young Chava Rosenfarb from the frontispiece of her first published collection of poetry This “high point in Montreal Yiddish literary activity” allowed writers to explore new genres, organize literary groups, and interact with the wide variety of Yiddish cultural institutions in Montreal. Although she admits that this “minor Yiddish center… lagged behind the United States and Europe in its development of Yiddish literature,” she focuses on the fact that by the 1930s there existed in Montreal a “diverse group of writers and a network of literary activity” that allowed for a Yiddish literary culture there. Because many of the Yiddish speaking Jews in Canada were those who had experienced the “literacy movements that had emerged among nineteenth century modernizers in Tsarist Russia,” Margolis argues that they brought with them and then adapted “Eastern European literacy patterns,” which would later influence Yiddish literary culture through emphasis on education, especially self-sought opportunities for that education. The prolific scholar Rebecca Margolis at the University of Ottawa is among those who have explored Montreal’s Yiddish literary culture in depth, and in her book Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil she describes the life of this literary community. Montreal could easily be considered a Canadian Yiddish hub, however on the global scale it is considered by many scholars to be peripheral at best.

Yiddish Literary Culture and Community in Montreal

Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil by Rebecca Margolis