Negotiating Jewish Canadian Identity Montreal Yiddish Literary ...

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