Negotiating Jewish Canadian Identity Montreal Yiddish Literary ...

26 ♦ Rebecca MargolisSoon after World War I, a great hope began to blossom across the Yiddish worldand all of Yiddish literature. Large centers were in communication with otherlarge centers—Warsaw with New York with Moscow and Kiev—while smallercenters were doing the same, including Montreal with Vienna. At that time, theMontreal Nyuansn [journal] reached the Kritik [journal, Vienna] and with it,the first poems of A. Sh. Shkolnikov. 5In Montreal, these journals provided a context for emerging writers to negotiatetheir evolving identities as Canadian Jews closely connected to the majorYiddish centers in Europe and nearby New York City, but also as a distinctminor center. They were tied to the wider Yiddish world and its diverse expressionsof ideology and culture while also relating to their new home.This study will present Montreal’s interwar Yiddish literary journals assites of identity formation for Jewish immigrant writers in Canada. As thecountry’s major center of Jewish publishing, Montreal was at the forefront ofYiddish journal production, both quantitatively and qualitatively: of the hostof journals dedicated to Yiddish literature or with a core literary componentthat were published in Canada between 1920 and 1940, twelve appeared inMontreal, four in Toronto, and one English-Yiddish edition in Vancouver.These journals acted as a venue for Yiddish writers across the country to publishinnovative works and enter into the international fray of letters and ideasfrom a distinctly Canadian vantage point. Moreover, these publications indicatethat although they emerged out of a secondary Yiddish center, their editorsand contributors did not understand themselves as peripheral, but as fullparticipants in the creation of a global Yiddish culture. The journals reflect thepaths of self-identification and self-determination forged by the Yiddish communityin Canada during its formative years.Montreal, the primary destination for Jewish settlement in Canada untilthe 1940s, was a dynamic hub of Yiddish cultural activity in the first halfof the twentieth century. The watershed migration from Eastern Europe atthe turn of the twentieth century boosted the Jewish population of the provinceof Quebec from under 8,000 in 1901 to some 60,000 thirty years later,out of a total Canadian Jewish population of some 157,000. During this period,Yiddish was the vernacular of continuous waves of immigrants. WhileQuebec’s Jews underwent steady linguistic acculturation to English, in 193199% of Quebec Jews (96% in Canada) declared Yiddish as mother tongue,with Yiddish forming the third most-spoken language in Quebec after French5Melekh Ravitch, “A. sh. shkolnikov, z”l,” Keneder Adler (19 February 1962).Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies