Keynote Lecture

Régine Robin, professeure émérite

Université du Québec à Montréal

 

Sidney Sarkin : un destin juif canadien

 

Sidney Sarkin est né en 1903 en Lituanie, d’une famille juive dans un shtetl : Wilkomir où la majorité de la population parle yiddish. Il arrive au Canada en 1921 où sa famille est installée à Saint-Jean au Nouveau-Brunswick. Puis il arrive à Montréal . Un de ses oncles est un riche homme d’affaires de Westmount. Rompant avec sa famille, Sarkin s’installera dans le quartier des juifs immigrants du Boulevard Saint-Laurent, la Main. Travaillant dans les Sweatshops,  il va très vite créer des syndicats du textile et en prendre la direction. Se mêlant à la riche vie culturelle yiddish des années Trente, il sera le témoin privilégié du bouillonnement  culturel et  politique de ces années tumultueuses. Il tentera de créer des ponts avec les ouvriers canadiens français, ce qui s’avérera très difficile.

Enfermé dans un camp dans le cadre de l’anticommunisme paranoïaque du Canada durant la guerre, il sortira malade et s’installera à Vancouver où il mourra en août 1991. . C’est en 1973 qu’il fait paraître ses Mémoires en yiddish, Mémoires que j’ai traduites en français (encore inédites). Il me plairait de présenter l’itinéraire de ce militant aujourd’hui bien oublié.

 

Keynote Lecture

Prof. Goldie Morgentaler

University of Lethbridge

 

Chava Rosenfarb's Tree of Life: Recreating Jewish Poland on Canadian Soil

 

Chava Rosenfarb (1923-2011) was one of the major Yiddish authors of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Poland in 1923, she survived the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen before settling in Montreal and commencing a prolific six-decade literary career, strongly influenced by her Holocaust experiences. Rosenfarb’s award-winning novel, The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto has been called one of the seminal works of Holocaust literature. Her three other novels —Bociany, Of Lodz and Love, and Letters to Abrasha — all, like The Tree of Life, written in Canada but set in Poland, represent the author’s attempt to recreate the lost Jewish communities of her youth. Rosenfarb’s novels were all written and published in Yiddish, although three of them have now been translated into English. Her decision to write in Yiddish was intended as a memorial to her lost community of Polish Jews who had lived their lives in Yiddish; but it also contributed to the obscurity of her work, which was dependent on translation in order to reach a wider audience. This paper will provide an overview of Rosenfarb’s work, focusing primarily on the way in which Poland figures in her fiction. It will also focus on the implications of trying to recreate the lost world of Polish Jewry while living in what Rosenfarb once called “the Canadian reality,” a reality that also included the slowly disappearing world of Montreal’s once-vibrant Yiddish-language community. It will thus address the difficulties of trying to recapture the past when that past has left so little of itself behind, and when the writer is living in a present that is not only removed in time and in language, but is also located a continent away.

 

Keynote Lecture

Prof. Norman Ravvin

Concordia University

 

Leonard Cohen, The Beats and Salinger’s Cigarettes: Decoding a Novel and its Cultural Moment

 

Certain cultural productions seem suis generis – to be unlike anything else.  Often the singleness of a thing depends on our not knowing enough about the context of such works. On the Canadian literary scene, Leonard Cohen’s 1966 novel Beautiful Losers is a prime candidate for such consideration.  We read it with a variety of nearnesses – whether to its mid-sixties Canadian moment, to Cohen’s wide-ranging career, to the literary experimentalism – some would say excesses – of the North American 1950s and sixties.  Stylistically it presents itself oddly in ways too many to list, with its somehow unpicturable narrator; its expansive interest in the French colonial and Catholic past; the shifting mode of presentation, whether in straightforward prose, paragraphs of full cap incatatory truisms, cut outs from language guides, word for word descriptions of comic book materials.  There is too, the curiosity of its nearly total exlusion of the Jewish motifs and themes in play in Cohen's other work.  Beautiful Losers, if dug out of a time capsule by visitors from outer space, would seem to be a singular Canadian artifact of its time and place, or, better, a singular Montreal artifact of its time and place with no artistic confreres.  I hope, in this talk, to make my way for you into the book, in part to uncover some of its stranger and secret parts, but also to link these with sources, influences and imaginative work to which the novel  has not been linked.   To quote J.D. Salinger, one of my guides in this pursuit, this talk will provide a “prose home movie” of Canada , circa 1965, with certain digressive side trips to places and routes unknown.

 

Keynote Lecture

Prof. Sherry Simon

Concordia University

 

Writers of Czernowitz / Les écrivains de Czernowitz: Rosa Auslander, Aharon Appelfeld

 

Located on the most eastern frontier of the empire, Czernowitz was the site of a rich literary culture, a culture of the border. Czernowitz was a provincial capital, a city which developed a German-language identity despite its distance from Vienna. It was a city which saw intense literary activity,  a very bookish city,  whose literatures were in many ways translational—that is developed against the backdrop of language contact. German was the language of prestige, but Czernowitz also saw the birth of Yiddish, Ukrainian and Romanian modernist writing.  This talk will be about two Jewish writers who are a product of Czernowitz-- both survivors of the Holocaust-- whose work was nurtured in very different ways by the language divisions of the city.

 

Guest Lecture

Prof. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Museum of the History of Polish Jews

 

A Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust Remembered in Words and Images

 

Mayer Kirshenblatt, born in Opatów (Apt) in 1916 left a remarkable record--in both words and images--of Jewish life in a Polish town before World War II as seen through the eyes of an inquisitive boy. He left Poland for Canada in 1934 and taught himself to paint at age 73. Since then, he made it his mission to remember the world of his childhood in living color, "lest future generations know more about how Jews died than how they lived."

His daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, will present his lively paintings woven together with his stories, based on interviews that she recorded with him for more than forty years, Together, father and daughter recover a lost world--as Mayer roams the remembered streets and courtyards of the town of Apt, recalling details of daily life, and introducing those who lived and worked there: the pregnant hunchback, who stood under the wedding canopy just hours before giving birth; the khayder teacher caught in bed with the drummer's wife; the cobbler's son, who was dressed in white pajamas all his life to fool the angel of death; the corpse that was shaved; and the couple who held a "black wedding" in the cemetery during a cholera epidemic.

This moving collaboration--a unique blend of memoir, oral history, and artistic interpretation--is at once a labor of love, a tribute to a distinctive imagination, and a brilliant portrait of life in one Jewish home town. 

 

The presentation will include a documentary film made by Sławomir Grunberg and presentation by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. 

 

Dr Ewelina Bujnowska

Université de Silésie

 

L’Amérique hantée par le passé juif. Le ciel de Bay City de Catherine Mavrikakis

 

Dans notre communication nous proposons d’examiner le 4^e roman de Catherine Mavrikakis, écrivaine américaine née des parents d’origine européenne et travaillant au Québec, Le ciel de Bay City, publié en 2008. Dans son texte, la romancière interroge la capacité d’un peuple à oublier son histoire et touche le problème de la négation de ses origines juives dans une famille de Bay City, village sombre du Michigan.

Amy Duchesnay, protagoniste du roman, jeune fille ordinaire du Michigan, une Américaine type, née un 4 juillet, jour de la fête nationale américaine, incarne la rédemption et la confiance en l’avenir. Enfant d’une Juive polonaise venue au Nouveau Monde afin de fuir les horreurs de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, Amy grandit dans le déni du génocide des Juifs. Mais, la nuit, la fille est hantée par le passé tragique de sa famille et les grands-parents tués à Auschwitz. L’histoire qu’elle porte en elle s’avère être une maladie héréditaire et lui empêche de se délivrer du poids du passé européen.  

Catherine Mavrikakis nous plonge dans les méandres d’une mémoire américaine construite sur les cendres européennes et par son roman, l’écrivaine semble contester l’existence de cette société « sans mémoire » qu’est la société américaine. Il nous semble donc pertinent d’étudier la réflexion sur cet enchevêtrement des identités et des cultures dans le contexte nord-américain qui se poursuit chez cette auteure.

 

Dr Dagmara Drewniak

Adam Mickiewicz University

 

Addicted to the Holocaust – Bernice Eisenstein’s ways of coping with troublesome memories in I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors

 

In her I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors published in Canada in 2006, Bernice Eistenstein undertakes an attempt to cope with the inherited memories of the Holocaust. As a child of the Holocaust survivors, she tries to deal with the trauma her parents kept experiencing years after the WWII had finished. Eisenstein became infected with the suffering and felt it inescapable. Reminiscing on her father’s origins, she comes back in a figurative voyage to Miechow in Poland and traces the way her father went from this small town through the 1940-established Miechow ghetto, a concentration camp in Plaszow near Cracow, and Auschwitz, to Canada which offered peace and a safe place to live, but no consolation and forgetting.

Eisenstein’s powerful book, probably the first Jewish-Canadian graphic memoir, appears as an extremely strong voice of the children of the Holocaust survivors not only owing to the text but also due to the drawings the author created and incorporated into the text. Moreover, the story is rich in allusions to Jewish and Yiddish cultural heritage ranging from the Yiddish language, through films, to the philosophers such as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, to name just a few. Therefore, the text becomes a combination of a memoir, a family story, a philosophical treatise and a comic strip, which all prove unique and enrich the discussion on the Holocaust in literature.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the ways Eisenstein deals with her postmemory, to use Marianne Hirsch’s term (1997 [2002]), and the addiction to the Holocaust memories as she becomes obsessed with the Holocaust and is unable to free herself from the compulsive thoughts about her parents’ ordeal. This postmemory is both unwanted and desired at the same time and constitutes Bernice Eisenstein’s identity as the eponymous child of the Holocaust survivors.

 

Mgr Marta Duńko

Independent Researcher

 

Duddy Kravitz's Canadian Dream

 

Polish and Canadian landscapes visibly entwine in Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. The novel’s protagonist “could have been born in Lodz” if only his grandfather had not had to flee from Poland because of anti-Jewish pogroms. However, Duddy – a third-generation immigrant – does still bear the burden of his family’s painful history. In fact, the protagonist embodies both his ancestors’ burden of the exile and the young man’s belief in the endless possibilities of achieving success. Thus, the path of fulfilling Duddy’s Canadian Dream is not simply to repeat the rags to riches trope. The course of his Canadian apprenticeship is determined by his family’s history – namely, by his grandfather’s statement “A man without land is nobody.” Duddy’s desire to provide land for his Jewish family is, of course, symbolic for all the Jews.

The aim of this article is to depict how Richler – by putting Duddy’s pursuit of land in such a perspective – shatters both Jewish and Canadian myths.

 

Vivian Felsen

visual artist and translator

 

Preserving Canada's Yiddish Culture: The Remarkable Legacy of Chaim Leib Fuks

 

The most vibrant period of Jewish literary activity in Canada took place in the first half of the 20^th century with the arrival of tens of thousands of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewish immigrants.   By the eve of World War II, Montreal had become an important centre of Yiddish culture.  Poland, by granting its Jewish inhabitants political and cultural autonomy that kept them separate and apart for centuries from their Polish neighbours, had provided the conditions for the Yiddish language and culture to develop and flourish.  Similarly, Yiddish culture continued to thrive in Canada when immigrant Jews lived in communities isolated from the dominant English and French cultures, but strongly connected to Yiddish-speaking communities worldwide.  The scope and diversity of the literature they produced was vividly captured by the Lodz native, poet and lexicographer Chaim Leib Fuks in his lexicon entitled One hundred Years of Yiddish and Hebrew Literature in Canada.  This astonishing work included the biographies and bibliographies of 429 writers who lived and published in Canada.  Paradoxically, by the time the Fuks lexicon was published in 1980, it had few readers.  Canadian-born Jews had distanced themselves from Yiddish.  The Jewish community in Canada had become largely English-speaking.  Recent attempts to preserve Yiddish culture through translation into English, and the increasing availability of university Yiddish language courses, has made it possible for non-Jewish French Canadian scholars to translate Canadian Yiddish writing into French and, in the process, discover aspects of their own history from an entirely different cultural perspective.   I believe that the availability of an English translation of Fuks, which I embarked upon a few years ago, could reinvigorate contemporary Canadian Jewish culture by providing considerably greater access to an era marked by intense literary activity, idealism, innovation, and commitment.

 

Justyna Fruzinska, Ph.D.

Monika Kocot, M.A.

University of Lodz

 

Approaching the “backward G O D”: Thomas King’s dialogues with the Hebrew Bible.

 

Thomas King, a writer of Cherokee, Greek and German descent, is a First Nations master storyteller. He writes at the interface of oral and written narrative traditions. In his trickster narrative, Green Grass, Running Water, King questions the status of creation of literary narratives and attempts to establish a new pattern of looking at the western literary canon and history through the eyes of an Indian. We are interested in the way Coyote and other trickster figures appear (and disappear) in these stories, teasing Native American and Jewish myths and mainstream history. According to Laguna Pueblo critic, Paula Gunn Allen, the distinguishing characteristic of tribal thought is the constant sense of fluidity, the fragility and plasticity of the creative universe in which people live. Thomas King’s Green Grass maintains such epistemological and spiritual flexibility and, by pursuing a dialogical renegotiation of the Jewish biblical stories, he initiates intertextual struggle over meaning and the signs of God. Interestingly, in his version of the creation of the world, King chooses to draw upon two episodes from Genesis: the Garden of Eden and the Flood. In his collage the creation and the destruction of the world become part of the same chaotic/formative event, an expression of the same life energies. What is more, both the Garden of Eden and the Flood sections of the Hebrew Bible exist in two variations. Thus, King’s play with the source texts adds one more version to the existing biblical voices.

 

Mika Goodfriend, MFA student
Concordia University

 

Refuge

 

In the Fall of 2012, I explored a vacation retreat for ultra-orthodox Jews in St-Adolphe d’Howard, Québec. I became interested in the rituals and gestures that were performed in these spaces, in the country—ones that I as a secular nonpracticing Jew had never performed before.

I chose to immerse myself in that world, at a time when the colony was inactive and prepared for winter. I performed these rituals to the best of my abilities as a way to try to connect with and experience a culture and lifestyle that was foreign to me, a lifestyle that only a few generations back, was practiced by my family in Poland. I lit my great–grandmother’s Shabbat candelabras, beautiful artifacts from an era that exists solely in my imagination. I stood at the Bimah in the synagogue wearing my grandfather’s prayer shawl, shaved my head in a special room where the orthodox women shaved their heads and adjusted their wigs, and performed a mikveh purification ritual in the lake at dawn on a crisp November morning.

In many ways, Refuge is an attempt at trying on identities. Each home I explored, each bed I lay down on, I found myself imagining their lives—meals around the family table, the sounds of children playing outside, the calm from feeling anchored. More than anything else, I connected with this reality and it left a feeling of loneliness stemming from the absence of that reality in my everyday life.

Regarding the concept of ‘rootedness’, Refuge deals with issues of cultural identity, belonging, the boundary between the self and the other, and a connectedness to ones heritage. Though I was born and raised in Montreal, I continually feel as an outsider regarding my own Jewish culture, and of the greater Québécois identity. This detachment towards my people—of Jewish religion and culture, coupled with the longing for a family of my own, were the sources of inspiration for this project.

 

Prof. Kathleen Gyssels

Universiteit Antwerpen

 

Convexe et concave : L’écriture-niche de Schwarz Bart et de Robin

 

Dans « Le sujet de l’écriture », Régine Robin exprima son désir de surtout ne pas répéter ses prédécesseurs en la matière :

 

Ne refaire ni Schwarz-Bart, ni Elie Wiesel, ni Marek Halter. Ce serait pire. Tout le monde n’est pas Celan. Nous nous contenterons de peu. Méditer sur l’arbre généalogique, trouver le moyen de redonner une place à ces cinquante et une ombres qu’elle (Rivka) n’a pas connues[1]

 

Dans ma communication, je démontrerai par trois séquences du Prix Goncourt 1959 que contrairement à cette assertion, Le Dernier des Justes, roman familial et saga sur trois générations compte de nombreux passages méta-fictifs. De surcroît, ceux-ci ont bien pu inspirer les auteurs d’origine juive de l’après-Shoah dans leur besoin de réinventer radicalement l’art narratif et la pratique romanesque. A vrai dire, André Schwarz-Bart me semble avoir pu marquer ceux qui sont les tenants d’une littérature crypto-juive, voire oulipienne, sans qu’en retour ces auteurs se soient réclamés du « Juif de nulle part », devenu un « écrivain par accident » (Pierre Assouline).

S’inspirant de Celan et de Kafka, Schwarz-Bart a sans doute mis le pouce à l’oreille à Perec, mais pourquoi pas, aussi à Robin ? Hypothèse intertextuelle que nous aimerions proposer en présence même de l’auteure de L’Immense fatigue des pierres et de La Québécoite. Car tous deux ont su élever la page du texte au rang de stèle funéraire pour les disparus et ont tissé dans le textyle du texte des alvéoles où loger la mémoire des 51 membres de la famille, des «six millions d’Ernie Levy », respectivement.

 

---

[1] Régine Robin, « Le sujet de l’écriture », « Fins d’analyse » in Trans, 1995, p 103.

 

Dr Renata Jarzębowska-Sadkowska

Université Nicolas Copernic de Toruń

 

Lekhaim ! de Malka Zipora : étude sociolinguistique de l’habitus juif adapté, traduit et expliqué dans le paratexte

 

Lekhaim ! Chroniques de la vie hassidique à Montréal de Malka Zipora, paru en 2006, réunit 22 textes qui proposent une entrée dans la culture à travers les mots les plus importants reflétant la vie quotidienne de la communauté juive montréalaise. Dans notre comunication, nous observerons comment l’auteure, le traducteur et les adaptateurs du texte transmettent une vision de la culture hassidique – le hasidishkayt - destinée aux lecteurs francophones non-juifs. La traduction de l’anglais effectuée par Pierre Anctil ainsi que l’adaptation littéraire de Marie-Christine Lévesque et de Pierre Quenneville ont permis de garder l’objectif principal de l’auteure, celui d’entrouvrir « les rideaux de [sa] maison » aux voisins étrangers. Tout en respectant la spécificité du texte traduit et adapté de Zipora, nous en proposerons une étude sociolinguistique à travers l’habitus translitéré et glosé (au sens que confère à ce terme P. Bourdieu). Après avoir dégagé les axes thématiques du quotidien profane et sacré, nous nous pencherons sur l’appareil paratextuel. Les expressions yiddish et hébraïques des glossaires terminant chaque nouvelle seront examinés à travers le prisme de leur fonction d’accomodation sociolinguistique. Traduits et explicités, ces culturèmes offrent au lecteur l’accès au sens des termes-clés du judaïsme de manière différente de celle adoptée par Naïm Kattan dans A.M. Klein La réconciliation des races et des religions ou Myriam Beaudoin dans Hadassa. La comparaison des modes d’adaptation et de présentation de l’habitus juif chez Zipora, Kattan et Beaudoin facilitera de démontrer la fonction socio-éducative de leurs textes qui neutralise en partie les effets d’une minoration sociale spécifique concernant les diasporas juives.

 

 

Dr. Karolina Krasuska

University of Warsaw

 

The World of our Grandfathers?: New Yiddishists and New Immigrants in Recent North American Jewish Writing

 

The newest 2010 edition of the influential New Yorker’s list singling out 20 most promising authors under 40 includes three authors whose work addresses Jewishness: the Canadian David Bezmozgis, and the US –American  literati couple, Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer. Bezmozgis and Krauss/Foer may be read as standing for two most pronounced tendencies in recent Jewish-American fiction: new immigrant and new yiddishist respectively. Contrary to their literary predecessors, New Yiddishists write in English , but  their fiction champions the elements of Yiddish culture, point to Yiddish wirters and themes, setting their work in Eastern Europe or in locations that are not the part of the (Jewish-)American mainstream. As a result, when compared to the generation of the classics such as Roth, Bellow, or Ozick, who focused on the ambiguities of assimilation, they demonstrate „reverse assimilation” and are „unapologetically Jewish.” On the other hand, the new immigrants, as I term them – writers from the former Soviet Union – are far from romanticizing Eastern Europe and, often raised in atheism, approach Jewishness almost as a sociological  factor of ethnicity. This paper looks at two short stories, Bezmozgis’s “Natasha” and Krauss’s “Last Words on Earth,” to examine and juxtapose these two literary trends, and consider what they mean for North-American Jewishness and Jewish-American Literature.

 

Prof. Józef Kwaterko

Université de Varsovie

 

Orthodoxie et sexualité dans La célébration de Naïm Kattan

 

Parmi les écrivains juifs francophones du Québec, Naïm Kattan occupe une place particulière. Juif de culture arabe, française, québécoise, canadienne et anglo-américaine, contraint à l’exil, mais l’assumant pour le dépasser et portant un regard neuf sur son pays d’adoption, il est un « écrivain migrant »  à part entière, participant d’une culture juive en perpétuelle réinvention.  La célébration (1997) est exemplaire de cette dynamique qui interroge, au cœur de Montréal, la culture juive traditionnelle. Notre communication se propose d’examiner cette culture non pas comme une marginalité exotique, mais comme un défi identitaire problématisé par la fiction − là où la préservation de la religion, de la mémoire et des valeurs morales et la quête de l’amour charnel comme expérience individuelle ( « narcissique », « urbaine » et « moderne »), sont appelés à être confrontées.

 

Prof. Petr Kyloušek

Université Masaryk de Brno

 

Aaron d’Yves Thériault et Son of a Smaller Hero de Mordecai Richler – deux images identitaires de la recherche de soi

 

La parution d’Aaron d’Yves Thériault est considérée comme un grand événement en ce qui concerne la thématique juive dans la littérature canadienne-française. L’année de la parution (1954) est symptomatique de la conjoncture de plusieurs facteurs, historiques, sociologiques et littéraires, qui concernent non seulement le versant français de la littérature canadienne, mais également sa composante anglophone, et à travers celle-ci, les romans issus des milieux juifs montréalais, tels The Second Scroll (1951) d’Abraham Moses Klein, Son of a Smaller Hero (1955) et The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) de Mordecai Richler ou The Favourite Game (1963) de Leonard Cohen. Notre contribution propose la comparaison de deux romans Aaron et Son of a Smaller Hero, à la fois complémentaires et opposés, en appliquant la méthode de la modélisation identitaire, dérivée de la modélisation sociologique de Gérard Bouchard et de la conception Anthropos–Cosmos–Logos de l’École de Liège.

 

Dr Krzysztof Majer

University of Lodz

 

From Painter to Schlockmeister: the Evolution of the ‘Doubtful Artist’ in Mordecai Richler’s Fiction

 

A strong influence on Mordecai Richler’s sensibility, perhaps equal to that of his religious upbringing, was his fascination with the modernist aesthetic and the resulting artistic ethos. Arguably, modernist literature, with its rootless and solitary artist figures confronting a chaotic, godless world, offered Richler an inherited sense of loss, more pleasurable than terrifying in that it was a convenient exit strategy from what he saw as his doubly parochial (Canadian-Jewish) status. This inevitably resulted in flawed and affected early novels – The Acrobats, Son of a Smaller Hero and A Choice of Enemies, all published in the 50s – which dutifully addressed the artist’s role in an entirely serious manner. However, concurrently with finding his own ironic voice (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz), Richler began to question not only the artistic pretensions of his characters, but the relevance of ‘high art’ in general. Between the 60s and the 90s, what I choose to call the ‘doubtful artist’ – i.e. both troubled by self-doubt and inciting serious suspicion in the reader – became a recurrent figure in Richler’s novels; he was variously disguised as a historian (Solomon Gursky Was Here), journalist (Joshua Then and Now) or television producer (Barney’s Version), but was always plagued by, and increasingly surrendered to fears of mediocrity and insignificance following early artistic promise. Taken as a whole, Richler’s novels constitute an anti-künstlerroman of sorts, mapping a journey from proud and auspicious beginnings to undistinguished and resigned ends. The evolution of the Richlerian artist figure – from André Bennett, the exiled painter in Spain in The Acrobats, to Barney Panofsky, the “ageing purveyor of TV dreck” (Richler 1997: 158) in Barney’s Version – reads like a playful invitation to consider dismissing Richler’s own output as trivial.

 

Isa Milman

Writer and Artist, Victoria, British Columbia

 

Telling History in Poetry: The Story of Prairie Kaddish

 

Prairie Kaddish tells the story of Jewish immigration from Poland to farm colonies on the Canadian Prairies in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. It’s a book of history told in poetic form. As a daughter of Holocaust survivors who grew up in Boston, and immigrated to Canada as a young woman, I knew nothing of this history, and believed that I had no connection to it. But from a chance suggestion to visit the Lipton Hebrew Cemetery, not far from Regina, Saskatchewan, I began a journey that led me back to the Pale of Settlement, through written and oral memory, particularly my mother’s stories of her life in Poland between the two world wars. What’s more, my quest awakened my love of Yiddish, which appears in original form in my book. Canadian aboriginal history, the building of Canada’s west, and Jewish-Christian relations all resonate through the poems and prose pieces, as well as through fragments of journals, maps, pamphlets and letters.  The making of Prairie Kaddish brought me to understand my place in this history, and as a Jew in Canada.

 

This presentation will be illustrated with my photographs of the original Jewish colony sites and cemeteries in Saskatchewan, as well as with a few poems from the collection. 

 

Dr. Annie Ousset-Krief

Université Paris3-Sorbonne Nouvelle

 

De Po-lin à Outremont. Les Hassidim, Passeurs d’identité

 

Montréal est la deuxième ville juive du Canada, après Toronto. Avec environ 90 000 personnes, elle offre un visage diversifié, multiple : le nombre de congrégations reflète les différences religieuses et culturelles, héritées des vagues successives d’immigration. Pendant longtemps, la culture dominante était ashkénaze, yiddishophone. Mais aujourd’hui, que reste-t-il de cette emprise ? Car la troisième génération, née au Canada, a totalement abandonné le yiddish que parlaient encore leurs parents, au profit de l’anglais. Même si le yiddish est encore enseigné, c’est de manière exceptionnelle, et il n’est plus la langue de communication, sauf pour les Hassidim. De plus, l’arrivée dans les années 1960 d’un grand nombre de Juifs sépharades marocains a modifié la communauté juive montréalaise.

Il semblerait donc que la survivance des liens avec le passé d’Europe de l’Est soit le privilège des communautés hassidiques. Ce sont les Hassidim, installés à Montréal après la Shoah, qui sont le vecteur de transmission d’une identité juive particulière. Si la yiddishkeit a encore un sens, c’est dans les rues d’Outremont qu’elle s’incarne.

Comment s’est effectuée cette transplantation dans le Nouveau Monde ? Comment les liens entre l’alte heime et Montréal se conjuguent-ils aujourd’hui ? Telles sont les questions que nous pouvons poser pour aborder les perspectives de ces communautés et l’évolution générale de la judaïcité de Montréal.

Les Hassidim, héritiers des shtetls de Pologne – Po-lin, « ici tu te reposeras » – sont aujourd’hui des passeurs d’identité dans un pays qui s’est en effet avérée être, pour le judaïsme européen martyrisé, une Goldene Medine.

 

Dr. Alex Ramon

University of Reading

 

Mordecai and Him - Canadian-Jewish Identity and the “Really  Unauthorised Biography:”  Joel Yanofsky’s Mordecai & Me: An Appreciation of a Kind  (2003)

 

The decade since Mordecai Richler’s death has witnessed the appearance of numerous biographical portraits of one of the most divisive and controversial figures in Canadian literature. The most self-reflexive and idiosyncratic of these publications has been Joel Yanofsky’s Mordecai & Me: An Appreciation of a Kind (Red Deer Press, 2003), a self-described “really unauthorised biography” and meta-memoir in which Yanofsky assesses his relationship to Richler across several decades of reading and awkward interview encounters.   Drawing upon post-structuralist theories of life-writing (which Yanofsky’s text at once endorses and critiques) and placing Mordecai & Me within the context of other comparable works such as Nicholson Baker’s U and I: A True Story (as well as other Richler biographies), this paper examines Yanofsky’s construction of Richler as an “ambivalent” Canadian-Jewish writer who serves as both inspiration and hate-figure to his self-described “literary stalker.” Mordecai & Me, I argue,  offers a subversive interrogation of kinship, cultural identity and life-writing practices within the Canadian-Jewish context.      

 

Jessica Roda, Ph.D

Canada Research Chair on Urban Heritage

 

The Representation of Jewish Identities in Montreal Public Space

 

In Canada, since the 2000s, official cultural policies have emphasized the promotion of cultural diversity by developing subsidy programs, which encourage the visibility of cultural communities’ heritage. In this context, several “ethnic” groups have implemented strategies, such as the creation of festivals, in order to be part of these programs and gain visibility in the public sphere. The Montreal Jewish Music Festival and the Festival Sefarad, both related to Jewish community in Montreal, are excellent examples of this new phenomenon. Even though both festivals are related to Jewish identity, what kind of discourse concerning Jewishness does each festival reveal and how do they manage their visibility on the public space?

 

In this paper, I will analyse the discourse of cultural protagonists who are in charge of each festival. By doing so, I will investigate the way they manage the discourse of cultural diversity with the specificity of Jewishness and their visibilities on Montreal public space. This analysis, based on an ethnographic study with a focus on the media-based materials, the performances and the discourses of the organizers and investors, will give us keys to understanding the dialectic among actors of the Montreal Jewish community. More broadly, the paper will illuminate issues surrounding Canadian cultural policies and their impacts on public performative culture.

 

Dr hab. Piotr Sadkowski

Université Nicolas Copernic de Toruń

 

A. M. Klein au Québec français : échos critiques et intertextuels

 

La reconnaissance des œuvres des auteurs montréalais anglophones comme une partie intégrante de la littérature québécoise (cf. Michel Biron, François Dumont, Élisabeth Nardout-Lafarge, Histoire de la littérature québécoise, Boréal, Montréal, 2007) et la réapparition fréquente de la thématique juive au cours des dernières années sont deux facteurs qui invitent à revoir la place de l’écriture de A. M. Klein au Québec français, dans le contexte de sa réception et de ses traces intertextuelles perceptibles chez des écrivains francophones. Nous nous proposons alors de procéder, dans le premier volet de la communication, à un bilan concernant la traduction et les approches critiques (Robert  Melançon, Sherry Simon, Pierre Anctil) de l’œuvre de Klein. Dans la deuxième partie, nous nous concentrerons sur sa présence, sur le mode intertextuel, chez Naïm Kattan et Régine Robin. Nous examinerons, plus particulièrement, la biographie romancée, destinée aux jeunes lecteurs québécois, A. M. Klein. La réconciliation des races et des religions, publiée par Naïm Kattan en 1994 ainsi que le fonctionnement, sous l’angle comparatif, des thèmes kleiniens, tels la rencontre de la judéité et de la québécité, la thématisation de la langue, les déambulations urbaines (p.ex. dans La fortune du passager, Adieu, Babylone et Le long retour de Kattan et La Québécoite de Robin).

 

Dr Eugenia Sojka

University of Silesia

 

Exploring the idea of  “Indigenous Shtetl” in Canada:  Aboriginal-Jewish writers and artists embracing their complex histories,  identities and cultures in the 21^st century.

 

The paper touches first on the complex history of Aboriginal and Jewish relations in Canada  and discusses several Aboriginal Jewish initiatives including the most recent  program “Tawiskam Mifgash”  (Cree and Hebrew words for Encounter)  which  aims  at “teaching tolerance through the dual themes of the Holocaust education and Jewish/Aboriginal  relations”.   It proceeds  then to the discussion of selected writers and artists and their various ways of negotiating their Aboriginal-Jewish identities:

• Monique Mojica ,  Toronto playwright,  artist-scholar,  artistic director of Chocolate woman Collective,  stage and film actress, social activist,  of Guna , Rappahannock and Jewish ancestry.

• Tamara Podemski,  Jennifer Podemski , Sarah Podemski -  multi-disciplinary artists, actresses,  film directors, screen writers,  born and raised in Toronto to an Ojibway/ Saulteaux mother  (Bear/Thunderbird Clan, from Muscowpetung First Nation in Saskatchewan); fluent in Hebrew, and Ojibwa/Saulteaux.

• Gregory Scofield,   poet, playwright, teacher, social worker; a  Métis of Cree, Scottish, and Jewish descent

• Nathan Adler and Howard Adler,  Jewish and Indigenous (Anishinaabe)   writers and multi-disciplinary artists;   members of Lac Des Mille Lacs First Nation.

 

Dr Weronika Suchacka

University of Szczecin

 

“To come to terms, to find not answers, but acceptance”: Canada as a place for the Jewish-Ukrainian dialogue?

 

Canadians of Jewish and Ukrainian descent share the particularly troubled and deeply traumatic pasts of their ancestors in Europe. Memories of such pasts may still be too painful for some to engage in a dialogue with each other, but literature has become a necessary means to create a ground on which a dialogue could take place. Janice Kulyk Keefer is one of the Ukrainian-Canadian writers for whom the necessity of establishing open communication between the members of the two groups in Canada has always been of utmost importance, as she has managed to emphasise not only in her novel The Green Library (1998), but also in her numerous essays. Referring to Kulyk Keefer’s works, the paper will ask for the conditions and potentials of this dialogue, the core of which is deeply connected with complex issues of identity. Consequently, the paper will have to address the following question, as asked by the Jewish-Ukrainian-Canadian author, Martha Blum in her novel The Walnut Tree (1999) : is Canada a place where one can try “[t]o come to terms, to find not answers, but acceptance” (304) of oneself, of the Other, and of each other’s traumatic yet shared hi-/stories? While Kulyk Keefer’s The Green Library (1998) focuses on the Jewish-Ukrainian issue, Blum's novel explores the stories of its Jewish protagonists during WWII and in the post-war period. The main aim of the paper will be to show that the two works entail messages that speak to each other and that constitute vital voices in the Jewish-Ukrainian literary dialogue.

 

Evelyn Tauben

Independent Curator, Producer & Writer

 

Born in Montreal, I Come From Lodz: Rediscovering Connection Through Creative Expression

 

Like so many Canadian-born Jewish young adults, producer, curator and writer Evelyn Tauben descends from Polish Jews. In fact, her grandmother was born in Lodz in 1916. Recent trips to Poland have spurred Tauben to reconsider the relationship between Canadian Jews of her generation and their roots in Poland, and question the nature of the intersection between memory, personal and collective identity, the Holocaust, and the primacy of place. There is a nascent impetus among young people in both Canada and Poland to re-interpret the stories they have inherited and reclaim aspects of their identities that were previously inaccessible. In her presentation, Tauben will explore the possibilities for her generation of shaping a new narrative that includes historical accuracy and present-day realities—a narrative that is not solely defined by family lore and communal trauma. To this end, Tauben will use examples from a performance piece and a multi-media exhibition that she is producing as well as other contemporary artistic projects that respond to and signal this new moment in Diasporic consciousness. Tauben will reflect on her attempts using creative expression to push past the numbness that persists in her generation with respect to anything remotely connected to the Holocaust; and to challenge stereotypes of Poland and Jewish identity, while encouraging the collective conversation to move beyond the empty exhortation to remember not to forget.

 

Dr Ewa Urbaniak-Rybicka

State Professional school of Higher Education, Konin, Poland

 

From Dora to the moon – inter/national politics, personal histories and the Jewish Other in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s novel The Way the Crow Flies

 

A Canadian playwright, novelist and actor, Ann-Marie MacDonald in her 2003 novel The Way the Crow Flies revises Canadian history from the Cold War period. The novel explores the interconnection of private and public histories as it bares the mechanisms of the Cold War competition between the West and The Soviet Union in the space race during the Canadian 1960s prosperity era. Set in Ontario, in 1962, The Way the Crow Flies presents the tensions of the Cold War and their effects on the life of the McCarthy family who are residents of an aircraft base Centralia. As the personal and the national intertwine, Jack, Mimi, Mike and Madeleine become indirectly involved in Paperclip Project aimed at smuggling Nazi scientists to NASA laboratories which made Canada an asylum for war criminals (Matas and Chaledndoff 17- 22, 57). As a peculiar commentary on the construction of racial and ethnic/national difference in Canada, The Way the Crow Flies reveals inglorious aspects of Canada’s immigration policy which in the times of the Cold War preferred Nazi war criminals to their Jewish victims from concentration camps. In the name of global peace, Canadian authorities justified injustice as well as repression of certain ethnic minorities. The novel’s othered protagonists with hybrid identities such the eccentric Froelich family of Jewish-German Canadians are perceived as the threatening Other when Canada’s ignoble involvement in smuggling war criminals is to be discovered and endanger the national security. Thus, the novel exposes the falsity of Canadian myths of tolerance and utopian multiculturalism (Helms 3-9) but offers also a hope of recognising and accepting difference due to facing uncomfortable counter narratives.

 

Dr. Eva Voldřichová Beránková

Université Charles de Prague

 

Symbiose ou « solitude à trois » ? Le théâtre yiddish à Montréal face aux communautés francophone et anglophone

 

Presque 120 ans après les premières manifestations du théâtre yiddish dans la métropole du Québec, la présente contribution se propose de résumer ses rapports avec les deux grandes communautés montréalaises, la francophone et l’anglophone. Cette longue histoire inclut de nombreux exemples de soutien économique ou moral (acteurs professionnels d’expression française dirigeant des « séances » d’amateurs  juifs dès 1897 ; présence quasi simultanée de troupes francophones et yiddish sur la scène du Monument-National durant la première moitié du XX^e siècle, locations d’autres théâtres et coopération avec leurs troupes ; projet d’une compagnie « mixte », jouant en quatre langues, que Chaim Avron a proposé; symbiose actuelle au sein du Centre Saidye Bronfman), tout comme certains affrontements (concurrence des salles anglaises de la ville, spécialisées dans les variety shows ; proportion grandissante de jeunes juifs bilingues voir trilingues ; chute de la pratique de la langue yiddish au profit des deux langues « majoritaires »). C’est avant tout les parallèlisme d’esthétiques qui nous intéresseront ici : Les Yiddish Players et les Compagnons de la Petite Scène qui expérimentent, au même moment, le constructivisme et l’expressonnisme ; les rapports du Dibbouk de la Vilna avec les principes d’Antonin Artaud ; les échanges entre Maurice Schwartz et Gratien Gélinas, Menasha Skulnick et Olivier Guimond fils ; les adaptations yiddish des Belles soeurs de Michel Tremblay présentées par Dora Wasserman, etc.

 

Dr. Yvonne Völkl

Université de Graz

 

Le Canada et la Pologne dans l’œuvre de Tecia Werbowski

 

Tecia Werbowski est née le 23 février 1939 à Lwov. À cette époque, Lwov était une ville polonaise, mais les conséquences de la Seconde Guerre mondiale ont amené cette ville à faire aujourd’hui partie de l’Ukraine. D’origine juive, Tecia Werbowski a survécu à l’Holocauste en se cachant près de Cracovie. Après la guerre, sa mère l’a emmenée à Prague où elle a continué sa formation jusqu’en 1962. De 1962 à 1968, elle a enseigné l’anglais à l’Institut d’économie et de statistiques de Varsovie. En 1968, alors âgée de 29 ans, elle s’est installée au Canada, plus précisément à Montréal où elle a étudié les sciences sociales à l’Université McGill et a obtenu sa maîtrise en 1971. Par la suite, elle a travaillé comme assistante sociale pour l’état canadien jusqu’en 1991. Après sa retraite, elle a commencé à consacrer son temps à l’écriture. Depuis, elle a publié une douzaine d’œuvres en polonais et anglais, pour la plupart traduites en français.

Dans la communication, nous analyserons le parcours littéraire des œuvres françaises de Mme Werbowski dès son début avec Le mur entre nous (1995) jusqu’à son plus récent roman Franz Schubert express (2013). Il serait également question du rôle que joue son pays d’adoption et son pays d’origine dans son œuvre et du rapport entre le Canada et la Pologne, pays entre lesquels Mme Werbowski partage son temps.

 

Dr Joanna Warmuzińska-Rogóż

Université de Silésie

 

France, Québec, Pologne et histoire juive. Identités multiples face à la traduction : Régine Robin en polonais

 

Le phénomène des « écritures migrantes » constitue un défi particulier pour le traducteur puisque les textes appartenant à ce courant se caractérisent par un entrecroisement hors pair des identités et accents multiples propres à l’auteur et à son appartenance complexe aussi bien à sa culture natale qu’à la culture de son pays adoptif. De plus, le texte traduit acquiert une nouvelle dimension dans la culture d’arrivée, ce qui fait que plus que dans tout autre type de traduction se réalise ici parfaitement l’idée de traduction multiculturelle. Pour illustrer ce phénomène, nous proposons de recourir aux textes littéraires de Régine Robin traduits vers le polonais. Dans notre analyse, nous tenterons de démontrer les difficultés et les défis auquels fait face le traducteur confronté à un texte impregné des cultures et identités multiples : en commençant par les cadres culturels français qui façonnaient d’une certaine manière Régine Robin, par son nouveau pays adoptif qu’est le Canada, jusqu’aux racines juives de l’auteure, liées intrinséquement à la Pologne, soit le pays de ses ancêtres. Les textes robiniens en traduction polonaise font un trajet particulier en revenant – grâce à la version polonaise – à la culture qui constitue en même temps un des éléments fondamentaux de la culture de départ du texte original.

 

Dr Dominic Williams

Independent Researcher

 

‘Let’s change one letter only in Palimpstine’: Writing Israel-Palestine in Adeena Karasick’s Dyssemia Sleaze and Rachel Zolf’s Neighbour Procedure

 

This paper will discuss how two contemporary Canadian-Jewish poets engage with Israel-Palestine through a practice of linguistic collage. In Dyssemia Sleaze (2000) Adeena Karasick reads the Western Wall as ‘a collage of verbal ghosts and letters to God, love letters to the letters of the alef beit’ (Damon, 2010: 394). In writing of the politics of occupation in Neighbour Procedure (2010), Rachel Zolf used ‘the collage method to engender a deliberate distancing effect’ (Zolf, n.d.). The paper will consider how collage is not only an aesthetic strategy, but also a political mode, as in Divya Victor’s suggestion to Zolf that ‘collage as the drift of subjects toward contact’ (Victor, 2011). Collage also provides a way for continental philosophy to exist as one discourse among others that has no necessary priority over the other parts of the text. For Adeena Karasick, deconstruction operates in the same mode as Lurianic Kabbalah. At the same time she draws upon both to assert her lack of a fixed identity. Rachel Zolf has suggested that there is a particularly close relationship between ‘Canadian avant-gardists’ and ‘Continental philosophies’ (Eichhorn and Milne, 2009: 190). ‘Theory’ therefore provides ways to be both Jewish and Canadian without occupying straightforward identity positions.