Negotiating Jewish Canadian Identity Montreal Yiddish Literary ...

48 ♦ Rebecca MargolisYiddish communities worldwide shifted from creative expansion to culturalsurvival.In the years after World War II, Montreal’s network of Yiddish institutionsand influx of Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors curtailed Yiddish attritionin comparison with other Jewish centers. However, the focus of Yiddish culturalactivity, in particular in the literary realm, changed markedly. Rather thanproduce journals proclaiming a given ideological orientation, Yiddish writersworked collectively to produce lasting monuments that could capture a vanishedworld, in particular through the publication of books. With the steadyanglicization of Canadian Jewry, the Yiddish language ceased to serve as theprimary mechanism by which to explore issues of identity. It is all too easy toforget that for a brief period between 1920 and 1940, the struggle to negotiatewhat it meant to be a Jewish Canadian was largely played out in the Yiddishperiodic press, which functioned as a platform for Canadian expressions ofwider literary and cultural trends. While the local popular press reached morereaders, newspapers displayed a moderateness that kept them away from thecutting edge. The journals experimented with new ideas and provided a forumfor the Yiddish community—poets, writers, critics, activists—to wrestle withtheir identities as Yiddish Canadians. Although the journals do not offer anyunified conclusions, they reflect the vibrancy of a Yiddish world that has sincefaded into history.Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies