Third Solitude Series

We’re crowdsourcing our museum at reCOLLECTION, a photo...

Fri, 10 May 2013 19:51:53 -0400

We’re crowdsourcing our museum at reCOLLECTION, a photo scavenger hunt of Montreal’s Jewish history this coming Sunday.

Take photos, win prizes and save history!

The Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal is co-presenting this event with the Jewish Public Library Archives, which provided the rare photos for these memes. Discover WAY more on Sunday!

I was on CJAD yesterday for an interview with Dan Laxer about...

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 15:45:00 -0500

I was on CJAD yesterday for an interview with Dan Laxer about the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal.

We spoke about…

The heder where Dan’s uncle went to school.
The Aberdeen School Strike (100th anniversary walking tour coming in February!)
Bernard Wexler AKA Alex Bernard
Israel Rabinovitch and French Canadian folk music
How to use our website
Aaron Lansky and the National Yiddish Book Center
Crying with people we interview
Yiddish store signs
Our walking tour on hazzanut
Collecting oral histories and building a community
Montreal vs NY Jewish life

Enjoy listening and happy 2013!

Zev

—

Visit the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal: http://www.imjm.ca

On Time Capsules (Part 4)

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 10:11:00 -0500

(Click for Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3)

Montreal: Centre of Hazzanut

From the 1950s until around 2000, dozens of Montreal synagogues had full-time cantors who performed weekly and on holidays. Montreal was also home to thousands of fans, aficionados and connoisseurs of hazzanut and Jewish religious music. They knew and expected certain melodies at different services during the year. The Selichot service, which took place late at night on the Saturday before Rosh Hashana was a major attraction, mainly to hear the cantor and choir unveil the tunes of the High Holiday season.

(Cantorial concert in 2000s at Shaar Hashomayim, courtesy of cantorsmontreal.com)

Montreal Jews bought their cantors’ albums and attended concerts with full orchestras that would often sell one or two thousand tickets. In fact, cantorial concerts in Montreal were quite popular well into the 1990s and even attract sizable numbers today.

Meanwhile across North America, the market for cantorial music was drying up by the 1960s and 70s. In an attempt to retain their members, synagogues experimented with more popular tunes, often influenced by Broadway or folk music. The Hasidic and folk-inflected tunes of Shlomo Carlebach are ubiquitous in synagogues today. But this rarely occurred in Montreal, where these musical influences weren’t mainstream until recently.

(Shlomo Carlebach)

As Stephanie and I prepared what we thought would be a fairly straightforward walking tour, we realized we had stumbled upon something far more complex. Montreal has been one of the final bulwarks protecting the traditions of hazzanut, its intricate institutional knowledge, its sometimes-arcane and even funny culture and its ability to channel the spirits and emotions of Jews.

What initially made Montreal’s Jewish community appear outdated, is actually what makes it more relevant than ever. It became clear that this part of the time capsule is fast disappearing and that we have been meeting with some of the last preservers of this fragile art form.

It is difficult for someone from my generation, with our penchant for innovation and experimentation, to rally around something that seems so stuck in the past. And yet, I can’t help but feel passionate about making sure others are aware of this complex tradition that has slowly come into being over 2,000 years. Perhaps hazzanut is worth preserving because it has changed so slowly. I am inundated every day with information and knowledge that is piecemeal, trivial and ultimately disposable. Very little of it forms the building blocks required for further expertise. But if there is such a thing as “slow knowledge” (like slow food), hazzanut is a great example of it.

Hazzanut is worth preserving, yet it is hard to see how we will preserve it, at least in Montreal. Outside of a few wealthier synagogues, changing community demographics will make it increasingly difficult to pay for cantors’ salaries. Changing musical tastes are also beginning to shift what synagogue audiences demand. Younger Jews are not as interested in attending synagogue and if they return later in life, few will have the knowledge needed to appreciate the many layers that make hazzanut and synagogue music fascinating and beautiful.

In Montreal, it will ultimately be contingent upon younger Jews and perhaps even non-Jews to take it upon themselves to learn about the many layers of hazzanut, both as a way of preserving a Jewish tradition as well as a way of preserving a Montreal tradition. The forgotten songs of the Plateau and Mile End were once uniquely tied to their neighbourhoods, influencing their development and the daily lives of tens of thousands of their inhabitants. Now it’s time for us to take a peek back into history, connect with it and bring it new life.

—

Zev Moses

Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal

Visit IMJM’s new walking tour: Between These Walls: Hidden Sounds of Hazzanut in Montreal

On Time Capsules (Part 3)

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 10:47:31 -0500

(Click for Part 1 or Part 2)

Inside B’nai Jacob on Fairmount Ave., “Montreal’s Carnegie Hall for cantors,” ca. 1945. Courtesy of CJCCCNA.

The Accidental Preservers

In 1997, Cantor Subar and the Cantorial Council produced an album of collected recordings of Montreal cantors. It included rare lost tracks from decades earlier. One such track is of Cantor Joshua Dlin, who had presided in the 1940s and 50s at the Beth David on St-Joseph. It is a recording of blessings sung during Subar’s wedding ceremony. The recording of Cantor Joshua Rosenzweig, originally cantor at B’nai Jacob on Fairmount Ave. (and “Montreal’s Carnegie Hall for cantors”), is essentially a bootleg tape made by a young Sidney Dworkin. He would become the cantor of the prestigious Shaar Hashomayim Congregation in the 1990s and 2000s. These recordings and others are featured on our walking tour.

Dworkin now runs a home for children with special needs and on his spare time also hosts a radio show about hazzanut. Dworkin never meant to have a radio show. He was once asked by Radio Shalom to create an episode on the topic of hazzanut and, at first, he didn’t believe he could speak for an hour about the topic. The show recently marked its 250th episode. It often focuses on the voices and stories of Montreal hazzanim, but garners an international audience. In fact, Dworkin mentioned that a Hasidic station in Israel is pirating his show! It doesn’t matter to him, as long as more people find out about hazzanut.

“No One Would Know That We Were Here”

It was the 1997 album that brought us back to visit Cantor Subar this past October. He gave us permission to use it as well as photos from his book for our walking tour. We also sat in his kitchen and recorded him as he entertained us with stories about different Montreal hazzanim in the 60s, 70s and until today. He explained why he decided to publish Hazzanut in Montreal in 1971, “In synagogues, you have pictures of the rabbis, but the cantors – you don’t even see them. So people won’t know…who was hazzan before me. No one would know that we were here.”

The book was published by the Council of Hazzanim of Greater Montreal and is idiosyncratic to say the least. It is bound in white leather and embossed with gold lettering. It can be read from left to right and right to left, with information in English on the left side of the book and other material in Hebrew on the right. The book follows its own order, acting more as a tribute and scrapbook rather than formal history. It includes short biographies, sheet music and long since missing photos of cantors and choirs, as well as some of the only known photographs of the city’s synagogues taken in the 1960s. Perhaps most interestingly, Hazzanut in Montreal also includes some of Cantor Subar’s poetry in Hebrew, written as acrostics, a form most commonly seen in Medieval synagogue liturgy, where the first letter of each line forms a part of a word or person’s name.

An acrostic poem by Cantor Arie Subar in his 1971 book, Hazzanut in Montreal. The first letter of each word spells out “Moetzet Ha’Hazzanim” (Council of Cantors).

The Choirmaster

Our interviews also brought us into contact with Lou Burko. I have known Lou Burko since I moved to Montreal. He was the towering figure whose silhouette I would see in the loft above the ark in my synagogue, conducting a choir in what seemed to be the dark. Burko is Musical Director Emeritus of the Shaare Zion Congregation, after having served there for over 40 years.

What is most remarkable about Lou Burko is that his career in synagogue music spans more than 70 years. It began when he was a child in 1939. At that time, Burko lived “Downtown”, in what is now the Plateau. Many synagogues had choirs that featured boys who sang soprano parts. He would sing in the Beth Yehuda, Adath Yeshurun, Beth David and Shaar Hashomayim choirs, before becoming a choir director himself at the age of 17. The Beth Yehuda on Duluth hired him for the high holidays and soon after he took over as full-time choir director at the Adath Yeshurun on St-Urbain.

The Beth Yehuda choir, where Lou Burko began singing at 8 or 9 years old. The synagogue was located at Duluth and Hôtel-de-Ville.

By the early 1950s, Lou Burko had moved on to the Sheveth Achim Congregation on Côte-des-Neiges. His career was growing and branching out beyond the Jewish community to prestigious roles in the CBC radio orchestra. He also had created a business arranging High Holiday and concert choirs for different synagogues that could not afford them year-round. When he finally settled down at the Shaare Zion in 1963 to work with Cantor Solomon Gisser, he had already had a role in the music of nearly every synagogue in the city.

An interview with Lou Burko is a bit like opening an encyclopedia. His knowledge of the musical history of different synagogues in Montreal is vast. Of the 30 or so synagogues he spoke about, he could name most of the cantors during the past 50-60 years and could also share his views about their voices and abilities as cantors.

What became apparent to us as we spoke to him and others was that during the 2^nd half of the 20^th century, just when traditional hazzanut was fading in many other parts of the world, it was thriving in Montreal.

(To be continued…)

—

Zev Moses

Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal

Visit IMJM’s new walking tour: Between These Walls: Hidden Sounds of Hazzanut in Montreal

On Time Capsules (Part 2)

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 13:36:00 -0500

(Click for Part 1)

Hazzan Moses Master and his choir at Adath Yeshurun ca. 1930s. Young members of synagogue choirs learned from older choir members, choir masters and cantors. They in turn transmitted their knowledge to future generations.

The Last Teachers

Almost two years ago I met with Arie Subar, who is the cantor at the Beth Ora Congregation in Ville St-Laurent. He is one of the remaining hazzanim (cantors) from a golden era of hazzanut and synagogue music in Montreal that began in the 1920s and probably came to an end by 2000, although many might say it was fading earlier. Subar arrived here in 1961 from Israel and began his career at the newly amalgamated Shomrim Laboker, Beth Yehuda and Shaare Tfillah on Westbury Avenue in Snowdon. Just a few years earlier the three synagogues had operated independently in different buildings around the Lower Plateau.

Subar is a preserver of hazzanut (cantorial music). In 1971, he published a book about the hazzanim of Montreal, which included biographies and photos of the many cantors in the city at the time, as well as whatever information he could collect about the city’s former cantors from as early as the 1920s. He became a leader of the Council of Hazzanim of Greater Montreal, and is now perhaps the last teacher for new hazzanim in the city who are searching for extra training.

Courtesy of Arie Subar (www.cantorariesubar.com)

Subar was born in Israel and comes from a line of cantors. His father, his grandfather and great-grandfather were cantors in British Palestine (and Ottoman Palestine before that). He learned the nusach (modes for different prayer services) from his grandfather who presumably learned it from his father. His current students, among the shrinking number of hazzanim in Montreal, will hopefully pass on to future generations the knowledge that Subar gained from his ancestors and from Montreal’s mid-century greats.

2,000 Years of Tradition

If that sounds like a long tradition, consider that hazzanut itself has 2,000 years of history, with roots that go back as far as the 2^nd Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. Though we will never know how prayer services sounded back then, we do know that some of the words and prayers still said today come from that era, and some scholars claim that the nusach derives from the Temple services.

Think of hazzanut as a series of building blocks that are constantly added to or rearranged as Jews moved from one place to another around the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. New components were added as Jews came into contact with different musical traditions, new prayers were added to the liturgy over the years by different rabbis and poets, and cantors and choirs developed new styles, which reflected the mood of the people in times of peace, success, violence or danger.

Selections from Hazzan Moses Master’s sheet music collection show the variety of influences he brought over from Europe in the 1920s. Courtesy of CJCCCNA.

By the time cantorial music arrived at the banks of the St. Lawrence River around the turn of the 20^th century, it was deeply affected by Classical music, formal music education, the reforms and counter-reforms of 19^th century Judaism, and increasingly large choirs and complex arrangements. Those cantors arriving from Eastern Europe brought in their song a certain amount of mourning and sadness from centuries of hardship, as well as rich traditions of ornamentation and improvisation.

Cantors needed to know the words of the service almost by heart, the specific nusach that pertained to the given service of the week (there were dozens), have the ability to read music, understand the text so they could interpret its meaning through improvisation, and know the various melodies that different congregations sang for different songs.

From Hazzanut to Jazzland to French Canadian Folk Music

For Eastern European Jews, arriving in Montreal between the 1880s and 1920s, this music was what Subar calls “the bread and butter of the people.” Even the many Jewish immigrants who were non-observant or irreligious found comfort in this music or saw it in romantic terms – as a type of Jewish folk music. The editor of the Keneder Adler, Montreal’s Yiddish daily, was also a musicologist. Israel Rabinovitch, a secular Labour Zionist, would devote some of the space of the paper, which did not have a particularly religious outlook, to discussing hazzanut and Jewish music.

Israel Rabinovitch speaking, ca. 1950s. To his left sit Samuel Bronfman and MP Leon Crestohl. Courtesy of CJCCCNA.

An article in the Keneder Adler by Israel Rabinovitch on different tunes for Shir Hashirim (King Soloman’s Song of Songs) with musical notation, April 17, 1935. Courtesy of CJCCCNA.

Rabinovitch also published a book on the same topic in 1940, called Musik by Yidn (translated as On Jewish Music.) The renowned Canadian author A. M. Klein, worked down the hall from Rabinovitch in the Keneder Adler building at 4075 St-Laurent, and translated it in 1952. We learned about the close ties between these two individuals when we interviewed Jack Wolofsky, whose grandfather Hirsch Wolofsky was owner and publisher of the Keneder Adler. Jack Wolofsky worked at the newspaper every evening as a teenager in the 1940s.

Jack Wolofsky in his office. Above him hangs the eagle from his grandfather’s Yiddish daily, the Keneder Adler (Canadian Eagle).

Wolofsky told me a bit about this rare book when I met him at his office in Côte-des-Neiges in October. He mentioned that there was an entire chapter dedicated to Jewish influences on jazz. I found this fascinating but quickly forgot about that detail.

Musik by Yidn (Israel Rabinovitch)

A few weeks later, my parents were on a trip to New York to help clean out my grandparents’ apartment. My mother let me know that she had brought back a copy of Rabinovitch’s book. (This isn’t entirely accidental. My grandmother lived in Montreal until 1948 and her parents were Labour Zionists who ran in the same circle as Rabinovitch.) I can barely read Yiddish, but just a quick perusing of the book’s table of contents revealed that there in fact was a chapter titled “Unzer Haimische Klezmer in Jazz-Land.”

The book also includes sections about cantorial nusach and interestingly, a couple of chapters dedicated to the similarities between French Canadian folk music and traditional Jewish music. Rabinovitch wrote during an era of great misunderstanding and tension between Jews and French Canadians that had been punctuated by clear moments of antisemitism. But like A. M. Klein would do in The Rocking Chair a few years later, Rabinovitch looked beyond the borders of his community and sought to find commonalities with Canada’s other minority.

Chapter in Rabinovitch’s Musik by Yidn comparing traditional Jewish music with French Canadian folk music.

A meeting of Le Cercle Juif, a pioneering group that promoted Franco-Catholic and Jewish relations, ca. 1950s. Israel Rabinovitch sits at the far left. Courtesy of CJCCCNA.

(To be continued…)

—

Zev Moses

Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal

Visit IMJM’s new walking tour: Between These Walls: Hidden Sounds of Hazzanut in Montreal

On Time Capsules

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 16:20:00 -0500

Upon First View:

Shortly after I first arrived in Montreal from California in 1995, at the age of 11, I went to synagogue with my family at the Shaare Zion, a prominent congregation in the West End, where my father had taken a position as rabbi.

The sanctuary was huge, perhaps the length of a football field, with 30 rows of wooden pews and a balcony above. The services seemed formal and highly scripted, and the atmosphere was austere. The men wore suits and ties under their prayer shawls. Some of those officiating the service wore robes that I had until then associated with church clergy. There was a general hush in the building.

Perhaps most impressive, yet also foreign to me, was the music. The cantor, in his 70s, was Solomon Gisser, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor, with a deep baritone voice that reverberated with the emotions of a lost world. Fifteen or twenty voices mysteriously accompanied him, singing choruses, or humming as he improvised upon a melody during a segment of the Saturday morning service. You could not see the choir. They stood behind a screen, in a loft twenty feet above the ark. Many of the tunes were unrecognizable to me, written in the 19^th century and based on much older modes. The pacing of the service, which featured many solos by the cantor or members of the choir, seemed entirely foreign. It was like a concert.

For a Montreal Jew, this type of service may not sound foreign at all. It’s probably what you grew up with. But I had grown up in California, attending services that were highly participatory, filled with folk tunes (along with some older synagogue compositions), and a more unruly atmosphere where children ran around and often found themselves leading parts of the service! I had entered a time capsule.

On Time Capsules:

It is often said that Montreal’s Jewish community is “30 years behind” its counterparts throughout the rest of North America. It is said to be more traditional, more formal, more conservative, more top-down, more insular and perhaps less innovative than other communities. But it also features higher rates of affiliation, Jewish education and identification, lower rates of intermarriage, and a miraculous ability to preserve certain cultural traditions and the Yiddish language that have all but disappeared in other places.

I don’t know if this generalization remains as true anymore as it did just five or ten years ago. It seems that trends in the Jewish world that skipped Montreal or came late, have begun to trickle in over the past few years and this community is poised to quickly catch up with the rest of North America, for better and for worse.

That said, visitors to our community have often remarked to me that Montreal is like a time capsule to a Jewish world from decades ago. “There is something in the air here” that feels Jewish to them and, I suppose, to me as well.

On Preserving the Time Capsule:

This fall, the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal developed a new walking tour feature for our website. The tours feature a curated experience that links numerous exhibits together to tell a story relating to a specific theme. They will soon be available on mobile devices.

When Stephanie Schwartz, our research director, and I tried to choose a topic for our first walking tour, we had a variety of possibilities. Since April, we had been uploading material on the dozens of former synagogues of the Plateau and Mile End, given to us by Sara Tauben, who recently published Traces of the Past (Véhicule Press, 2011). Her work often includes transcripts from interviews she made with former members of the synagogues, as well as memorabilia and ephemera found in archives that give us a peek into what life was like between the walls of those buildings fifty, sixty or even one hundred years ago.

But we knew that this exploration could become even more powerful, if we could actually bring the synagogues to life, even for just a few minutes. What would it be like if we could transport ourselves into the aisles and pews of the long-since shuttered, retrofitted or demolished synagogues that were teeming with life until the 1950s and 60s? An unexpected gift to the museum helped us answer this question.

(To be continued…)

—

Zev Moses

Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal

Visit IMJM’s new walking tour: “Between These Walls: Hidden Sounds of Hazzanut in Montreal”

Bagel Exports

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 12:10:00 -0500

I am not a food blogger and may never blog about food again. But I have a public duty as a Montrealer to give my opinion on Montreal bagels whenever I am faced with a bagel that calls itself “Montreal style”.

Two weeks ago I was in Philadelphia for the weekend. I went to grad school there and love returning to all of my old haunts around town as well as to check out the new additions to Philly’s wonderful and eclectic food scene. My friend insisted on taking me to Spread Bagelry, a new bagel and brunch place near Rittenhouse Square.

Spread Bagelry is part of a micro trend of restaurants creeping up around the U.S. that have Montreal inspirations. I should note that this is quite gratifying and flattering for Montrealers. We are very proud of our culinary creations, and when we hear about poutine on menus in Chicago, smoked meat in New York, or Montreal bagels in Philadelphia and Oakland, it feels a bit like an honour. We’ve seen Montreal bagels creep up in places like Ottawa and Toronto, but never before have they spread across the border.

So how do Spread bagels compare to actual Montreal bagels?

Wood burning oven? Check.

Black and white seeds are called sesame and poppy? Whaaaat? There are other types of bagels besides black and white seed? Ok, we’ll let that slide. Fairmount has been doing it for years.

These bagels seem to be about 15-20% larger than Montreal bagels. They also don’t have as many imperfections as Montreal bagels do. I personally love how no Montreal bagel ever has the same shape.

Now for the taste test…

The outer crunch is correct. Flavours are more or less the same too – it’s kind of sweet, but not too much. So far so good. But something is different about the dough inside. Montreal bagels are best in the first 12 hours out of the oven (after that you might as well freeze them and toast them – also great!). These are seemingly very fresh but not as chewy on the inside. They are slightly denser even though they are still quite light.

Conclusion: while it’s a good bagel and it definitely pays homage to Montreal bagels, I can’t quite call it a Montreal bagel. I guess “Montreal Style” sounds about right. But even if it’s not exactly the same, it’s nice to see that the U.S. is getting an alternative to the extra doughy New York bagel and other factory-made varieties (Lender’s). Thanks to Spread Bagelry for helping spread the love.

P.S. the Spread bagel melt is pretty good too!

—

Zev Moses

Visit the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal: http://www.imjm.ca

First We Take Le Mood

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 16:55:00 -0400

In the spirit of Leonard Cohen…

IMJM will be co-presenting 8 sessions at the 2nd Annual Le Mood Festival.

10am: Unearthing Jewish Mile End Walking Tour - http://on.fb.me/SXthdL

11am: David Rome, Dialogue and Me - http://on.fb.me/Tmn6Ki

12pm: Searching for Rabbi Glazer - http://on.fb.me/RirESf

2pm: 20 Ans Après - http://on.fb.me/RmqghN

3pm: Little Fists For Social Justice - http://on.fb.me/SVgTog

4pm: A Broken Hallelujah: The Life and Faith of Leonard Cohen - http://on.fb.me/SVgXEn

7:15pm: Logging Off: Hasidim and the Internet - http://on.fb.me/QWju54

7:15pm: Remixing Layton: An Evening of Poetry, Music and Storytelling - http://on.fb.me/SVhc2e

So get in le mood with us and see you on Sunday!

Tickets and more details at http://www.lemood.ca

—

Visit the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal: http://www.imjm.ca

Kaddish, Kerouac and Krishna at the Montreal Hillel House

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 11:31:00 -0400

On October 31, 1969, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg visited Montreal for a series of performances and readings. Besides a reading/concert at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia), Ginsberg made a curious stop at the Hillel House, Montreal’s Jewish student centre.

Hillel and the McGill Debating Union, sponsored the appearance. (Interestingly, Leonard Cohen had been an active member of both in the mid-1950s.) As the introductory remarks suggest, the students recognize the slight “incongruence” of Ginsberg’s appearance at the Hillel House, considering “the fact that he’s probably not much of a debater, and perhaps even less of a Jew.”

But Ginsberg decided to read from his most Jewish (and 2^nd most famous) text, the powerful poem Kaddish, which had been published ten years earlier. The poem, whose title refers to the Jewish mourning prayer, is a dirge for his mother, Naomi, who suffered from psychological illness and spent many years in and out of mental hospitals. Ginsberg’s poem is filled with references to her illness, to his childhood in New Jersey, and to his distance from his religion.

The poem had been written partially in response to Naomi’s funeral in 1956. Ginsberg had brought some of his friends to his mother’s funeral, including Jack Kerouac, but there was no minyan (a gathering of at least 10 Jewish males according to Orthodox tradition) and the mourning prayer was not recited.

Why did Ginsberg choose to recite this poem ten years after it was published? Normally an author performs and promotes recent work at a reading and Ginsberg had recently published Ankor Wat, which concerned his explorations of Buddhism while in Cambodia. Ginsberg gives us a hint when he dedicates the poem to both his mother, and to Jack Kerouac, who had died ten days earlier. This sense of loss for his friend lends added emotion to the reading. (In part two of the recording, Ginsberg also reads poems from Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues. He then reads his own works from the past week or so, written in response to Kerouac’s death and funeral.)

The recording is immediately striking because it begins with a minute or so of Hare Krishna chants (Ginsberg was well into his Krishnaism phase at this time and seems to begin other performances this way). Around 57 minutes into the recording, Buddhist mantras are also chanted. Hillel, which was part of B’nai Brith at the time, was normally not a sponsor to such counter-cultural programs.

Usually I like to give context to such events and how they fit into Montreal’s Jewish experience, but I am sadly ill equipped to discuss this one. There is definitely more research for us to uncover about Jewish students and their involvement in Montreal’s counter-cultural life during the 1960s and 70s. And we have read hints of this in some books and newspaper articles. Harold Troper also covers this period in his recent book, The Defining Decade, but much of his focus is on the increasing importance of Israel on college campuses.

For now though, we invite you to listen to a deeply emotional and beautiful reading and performance, during a second period of mourning in Allen Ginsberg’s life:

Listen to Part 1

Listen to Part 2

*The recording is courtesy of two sources: The Jewish Public Library, which owns the recording, and the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, which has gone about digitizing the mostly Yiddish recordings from the JPL. The preamble states that this event took place at the JPL. It did not. Most likely it occurred at Hillel House, or perhaps in another McGill building.

**Photo source here.

-Zev Moses

Visit the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal: http://www.imjm.ca

Hearts and Horseshoes: The Jewish Cemetery in Ste-Sophie

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 12:08:00 -0400

On a recent tour of Ste-Sophie, Quebec I snapped a couple of photos of the tombstones in the community’s fascinating Jewish cemeteries (there are two). Howard Gontovnick, our guide and one of the organizers of the Ste-Sophie/New Glasgow Centennial planning committee, and Barbara Weiser, an expert in Canadian Jewish religious art illuminated some of the mysteries and intricacies of these sites. Why were men and women buried in separate sections? Why were the tombstones facing different ways? What was the significance of the heart on a child’s tombstone or the horseshoe left at a grave? Why two separate Jewish cemeteries? Why was there a third section in the orthodox cemetery?

In 1905 the first Jews arrived from Russia to establish a Jewish agricultural community in Ste-Sophie. It became one of the few successful Jewish agricultural colonies in Canada. Though the Jewish community has diminished today, the town is still home base to businesses including the popular Putter’s Pickles, which is purportedly the supplier of Schwartz’s pickles. Ste-Sophie lies just east of St-Jerome, an hour north of Montreal on the edge of the Laurentians.

To learn more about the history of Ste-Sophie check out these two articles in Canadian Jewish Studies:

Howard Gontovnick’s From Colony to Community: Ste-Sophie, Quebec

and

Roderick MacLeod and Mary Anne Poutanen’s Upstairs for Hebrew, Downstairs for English: The Jewish Community of Ste-Sophie, Quebec and Strategies for Public Education, 1914-1952

The Jews of Ste-Sophie and New Glasgow are preparing to celebrate 100+ years at an event that will take place June 30 and July 1, 2013. Photos, histories, memorabilia - and volunteers, are needed for this to be an outstanding event. You can contact the planning committee and learn more on their website at http://www.jewishfarmers.ca/

-Stephanie Schwartz

Visit the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal: http://www.imjm.ca

Photos by Stephanie Schwartz for IMJM.

Hershbain: A Gritty Jewish Relic in a Cathedral of Cool

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 18:15:00 -0400

Hidden inside the industrial district of St. Viateur East is a gorgeous café called Le Falco. Japanese cuisine is on the menu, coffee is syphoned through a glass apparatus, and designer types hold meetings around a large rectangular table perched on high wooden drafting stools. There is a deep leather couch in the window and I sink into it one freezing April day to bask in the sunlight.

Sipping on coffee, rejuvenating in the warmth I take in my surroundings: tall concrete ceilings overhead, a swinging chair hangs adjacent, a child plays inside it. To my right I see this:

Emanating from the stoic beauty of this sewing table, illuminated by a ray of sunlight, holding up the trendy Spacing Magazine,the name Hershbain Bros. Regd and the address 1462 St. Lawrence Blvd are a sobering blast from the past. Hershbain! There is some sweet irony in finding this gritty Jewish relic in the contemporary Japanese/Franco-Quebecois cathedral of cool.

Over a year later, after learning the ins and outs of Lovell’s Street Directory I can tell you that until 1926 the company name was listed as Hershbain Bros bicycles and machine at 444 S Lawrence Blvd. Did the owners of the Le Falco know this? There is a large black bicycle in the store with a box for carting goods positioned before the front wheel – for sale? After the big change in street addresses in 1927 Hershbain Bros. loses its bicycle manufacturing credits, now only listed as maker of sewing machines at the address written in fading red on the table before me.

In some bizarre euphoric buzz I have an intense feeling of irrational ownership over this space. Hershbain! My people. The Anglicized street name. The shamata business, the Jewish working class! (yet, Hershbain was an owner). Where do these feelings come from? Why the satisfaction of an (arbitrary?) claiming of space? Why don’t I get the same buzz from this?

Source: http://retaildesignblog.net/2011/07/22/allsaints-spitalfields-at-michigan-avenue-chicago/

But maybe I do. Naming, categorizing, marking territory as “ours” can be a powerful tool for carving out identity. But we have to be careful with this, conscious of what practices this way of identifying (literally fixing a single definition to) entails. Who and what does it exclude? These implications give a balancing weight to the euphoria of my discovery. It is a heavy responsibility to claim exclusive ownership over something based only a vaguely familiar family name.

-Stephanie Schwartz

Visit the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal: http://www.imjm.ca

"Wee Kiddies on Picket Duty" and the Aberdeen School Strike

Wed, 09 May 2012 12:24:00 -0400

(Children picketing in front of the Aberdeen School in Carré St. Louis. Courtesy of Jewish Public Library.)

On February 28, 1913, as many as 500 Jewish students at Aberdeen School walked out of their classrooms as part of a general strike in response to antisemitic remark made by one of the school’s teachers. What facilitated the quick response and organization of kids that were only 12 or 13 years of age? Mary Anne Poutanen and Rod Macleod, two scholars currently researching the Aberdeen school strike, were gracious enough to sit down with Third Solitude and share their detailed knowledge of the event.

TS: We’re here with Rod Macleod and Mary Anne Poutanen, who are the authors of the forthcoming works “We Kiddies on Picket Duty” and “Young Militant Children for Jewish Dignity,” that are both in Antisemitism and Resistance at Montreal’s Aberdeen School in 1913. Our focus today is the Aberdeen School Strike of 1913 during which as many as 500 Jewish students at the Aberdeen school walked out of their classrooms in protest of a comment that a teacher had made, a comment that the students believed was antisemitic. What precipitated this conflict and what where the events that followed it?

MP: A teacher we think in a Grade 6 classroom made an antisemitic comment about the Jewish kids at the Aberdeen School, and some of the children who heard the comment walked out of the school.

RM: I think they went to the principal. I was looking into this. I think they went to the principal – we have to reconstitute this story from local accounts, and they vary in their details a little bit. The principal was seasoned, he’d done the rounds, he’d been in a lot of tough schools. He saw these thirteen year-old boys coming along and whatever complaint they had, I think he just felt that “Oh, they’re complaining again.” And we’ve located some references to him receiving complaints from people in the community that the students were “rowdy,” that there was rowdiness, and it’s hard to know exactly what to make of that.

MP: We should point out that the Aberdeen School is right across from Carré St. Louis, which of course was an area for the bourgeoisie.

RM: Certainly at the time. It was a very comfortable area, for sure.

MP: And the children liked to go to the square to be kids! (Laughter)

RM: Yes, complaints about children’s behavior does not necessarily mean all that much. But he dismissed them, and they met, these five guys. And we should mention their names -

MP: Yes, they were Harry Singer, Frank Sherman, Joe Orenstein, Moses Skilbelsky, and Moses Margolis. There were either twelve or thirteen, and they varied in age.

RM: So they decided that they wanted an apology, and if necessary, they would strike. And the word spread through these networks – these kids all came from the area around the school. A lot of them came from the same streets, sometimes even the same buildings. Their families probably knew each other, I mean word spread very quickly and the next morning, this was the last day of February 1913, the kids all met at the gates of the school, a whole bunch of them, and the numbers built and grew and eventually they moved into the square across the street and set up a strike committee.

MP: They established a strike committee, they also established that they would not go back until the strike committee decided to do so, and that anyone that went back would be a scab! And they decided at that time that they would march – first to the Baron de Hirsch [Institute], and then they would also march to the offices of the Keneder Adler.

RM: I think the mass of kids stayed in the square, but one or two delegations marched away. They stayed in the square because the police did come –

MP: Even mounted police.

RM: Yeah, that’s right. Of course kids are very hard to control (laughter).

MP: Hard to round up!

RM: They would go after one group and they would skedaddle off to another corner of the square and everything. Of course, the police didn’t want to do anything too nasty. No one took it all that seriously, but at the same time, numbers were considerable – maybe 300, 500 kids, depending on the accounts – there are a lot of kids. This is still not the whole school; this is a school of around 1500 kids or more, but significant numbers. And they were standing their ground, and I think they felt it very profoundly. So the delegation certainly went off to the Baron de Hirsch Institute, and they were met with some ambivalence –

MP: Certainly. They were met with some ambivalence, I would say.

RM: Community leaders thinking that it was possibly –

MP: We should say the elites, because there are different groups of community leaders. One for leadership within the immigrant community, and then one that is a leadership that comes out of the established group that settled in Quebec and in Montreal following the [British] Conquest. So there are these two big groups that make up the Jewish community.

RM: And they don’t always see eye to eye.

MP: Exactly.

RM: Well we know that there were two leaders who took it upon themselves or were delegated – over the course of negotiations at the Baron de Hirsch Institute that afternoon – who undertook to negotiate on behalf of the students with the Protestant School system, with the principal to begin with. And these were Rabbi Abramowitz and Samuel Jacobs. Jacobs, who was a major lawyer at the time, who would go on to be a member of Parliament and I think was personally involved in the team that was fighting the Plamondon libel suit.

MP: Yes, he was involved in that.

RM: It was very much in the air at the time. And Rabbi Abramowitz was the rabbi of the Shaar Hashomayim Congregation, one of the major synagogues in Montreal at the time.

MP: But we should put this in context as well, and then we can go back to the consequences. The other thing that’s happening is, while we are talking about the end of February 1913, but in 1912 there is this huge tailors strike. And we are able to reconstitute a portion of the children who are attending Aberdeen school, and it shows that a significant number of the children came from families where the father was a tailor, and likely would have been involved in the strike of 1912. So these kids may have seen their fathers on the picket line, would have probably been witness to big parades in the community, would have been aware that for some the parades were forms of protest against repressive tactics, such as when picketers were beat up. These children would have been very much aware of how important labour politics, the union, striking, were in their lives and the lives of community members. They would have been educated about labour politics around the kitchen table, on the laps of their parents or other relatives, they would have talked about it in green spaces, across the fence, in playgrounds. Because these children lived in very densely populated neighborhoods, occupying the same buildings, and playing in the same streets. So we have that, but we also have the Plamondon Case that only a few months after the strike went to court.

RM: And everybody was talking about it that fall and winter.

MP: This was really very critical, because they were aware of the importance of the Plamondon case. So when this teacher makes this antisemitic comment, it was the convergence of a whole lot of things; the fact that these children were probably exposed to you know, antisemitic snides and treatment, sometimes maybe on a daily basis. But it was certainly a part of their lives, and the teacher was so clearly putting down Jewish students, calling them “dirty”, that they had finally reached the point where they weren’t going to take it anymore.

(Aberdeen School Strike agenda in the Keneder Adler, March 2, 1913. Courtesy of the Jewish Public Library.)

TS: Do you think this is generally understood as an isolated event, or has this chain of events been interpreted as precipitating from this very labour-focused culture? Would you say that the Aberdeen Strike was just another example of the protests of the Jewish underclass?

MP: In fact, when Eastern Europeans migrated to Montreal, a lot of them looked to the shmata trade for work. So even if they weren’t working as tailors, they could have been working as cloak makers or working in other areas of clothing manufacturing. So they would have had a relative, or a neighbour, or a friend involved in the movement.

RM: But about that question regarding the significance of it. You know, one of the interesting things, and also something that is very ironic, is that there is not that much material written on the Aberdeen School Strike. That’s why we were intrigued to write about it. Even at the time, it had a little flare-up in the press, was handled significantly in the Keneder Adler and a couple of others, but generally it is dismissed as an “incident.” It comes up here and there as an example of the consistently poor relations either within the school system or simply between Jewish and non-Jewish communities in Montreal, but it has not had a lot of resonance attached to it.

MP: Well in part we’re still looking at this because there is some question that the strike itself led to the creation of a citizens’ association made up of Jewish people living in Montreal, and that is something that we want to pursue further, but it may have had greater repercussions that we can see at the moment.

RM: We also see a rise in the number of parochial schools and the rise of independent Jewish schools in Montréal. Whether that is connected, I don’t know. The community was growing anyway so that may have happened.

MP: But we know that in the history that there is this conflict between the elites of the Jewish community who believed that Jewish children should go to public school – that this was a beneficial form of integration – and the immigrant group that believed that there children would be better served by parochial schools.

(News clipping. Courtesy of the Jewish Public Library.)

TS: You know, to me it seems so exceptional that thirteen year-olds would engage in strike activities, and I’m wondering if there has been anything in Montreal history since that has reflected this movement. Is the Aberdeen School Strike completely unique?

MP: Well, that’s a good question. And I can’t really answer it because we are still in the midst of working on this. Have we seen anything like this? No. Not in the sources that we’ve looked at.

RM: There are cases of other school strikes, here and there. Even in Canada. There’s a handful that take place at this time or at the early decades of the twentieth century. We’ve tried to link them in some way. What’s interesting about the Aberdeen School situation is this ethnic element. It’s not the only case of Jewish students striking, but it is the only case – part of this is because Quebec has had a history of having ethnic-based school systems, possibly a school system that seems to have been set up, in retrospect, for this type of conflict to come up – but we do see this case where the strike itself sparks all kinds of issues within the community and certainly conflicts within the school system which was operated by and for the Protestants of Quebec.

MP: When you look at these other strikes – in Victoria involving Asian students, in Toronto there is a conflict involving Jewish children, in New York City there is another strike – but what you see here is the language. The language of radicalism. It’s much different from the way in which other strikes are interpreted and described. So this is different. But what one of the things that we haven’t looked at, which we need to, other children like paper boys for example. There is some history of paper boys going on strike, and they are young. So we need to look at these elements as well.

TS: What are some other difficulties you’ve faced in researching this topic?

MP: Oh my goodness. You know, I had a “eureka moment” in the archives. Because until recently, we had no photographs of the children. And we searched and searched and searched for them. We thought maybe someone had a photograph in their, you know, in a box in the basement of someone’s home, but we couldn’t find any. And I’m looking in the archives at the Canadian Jewish Congress, and I’m looking in a box in the middle of researching something else. I see a folder for 1913, and I think, I know this is a long shot but the folder is there and I’m going to look in it. I looked in there and saw a photograph from a newspaper of some of the kids on the strike line, if you like, that nobody knew about and I just happened to come across it. So we would love to have more photographs, if anyone has any or knows about them!

RM: Anyone who had an Instamatic back in 1913! (laughter)

MP: There’s that but there is also the fact that there are no journals, no written record from the mouths of the children involved in the strike even when they got older. We would love that, or something like that. And ironically, I’ve done some research on Rabbi Simon Glazer, who in this period had kids at the Aberdeen School, and yet I couldn’t find anything coming from him, and this would be right up his alley. You know, he’s a little bit of a cantankerous guy who is going to fight for the little man, he was the Chief Rabbi for five synagogues, and yet, there’s nothing. And finally, the strike leaders – Harry Singer, Frank Sherman, Joe Orenstein, Moses Skilbelsky, Moses Margolis – we’re having difficulty finding out anything about them. What happens to them when they finish at the Aberdeen School? We’d love to know.

RM: What we have – which is definitely useful – is the register of the Aberdeen School which is at the English Montreal School Board. And we’ve gone through that, and we’ve created lists and lists and lists of names. And we’ve tried to figure out who they were, and it’s surprisingly difficult actually. With the hundreds of names that we have, we do have a good sampling that we work with, but trying to match them with the 1911 census, and all this good social science stuff that we do – you get a bunch of names, but it’s challenging. We’ve found four of the five, we couldn’t even find all five of the leaders convincingly on the census, so we’ve got a base of data that we’re sitting on, which is useful, but many of these things we’d like to know more about. When you have information from a particular year, you have a snapshot. It’s not a literal snapshot, unfortunately, that would be even greater! But what were they doing ten years later? As people have pointed out to us, some of these guys very likely went on to labour careers, even political careers.

MP: Or maybe careers as lawyers, I mean, who knows.

RM: Yeah, certainly. I’m sure that we’ll get more stuff, I’m sure that there are people out there related to them. I mean I found a blog recently where people were writing in about something and a whole bunch of them had said that they attended the Aberdeen School, but mostly in the 40s and 50s, so it wasn’t quite far back enough. So there’s information out there and we just have to tap into it. But it’s less of a challenge than dealing with people hundreds of years earlier! We both have experience researching much earlier communities, and it’s often very hard to get those peoples’ voices at all. So we’re holding out some hope that within human memory there will be something that will come forward.

MP: And I think that, when we talk about voice, you know the voices of these children are what we’re seeking. We’d like to give them their due, and we’d like to know if this strike had any profound meaning or consequences for them later in their lives.

RM: It must have had some consequences.

MP: It makes sense.

RM: Nobody has an experience, certainly not of this magnitude, and this was very dramatic for a group of twelve and thirteen year-olds, without it being at the very least the kind of thing you look back on and say “My life really changed that day,” or “I would never have been the type of person I am if it weren’t for that incident.” I mean sure, they were kind of steeped in that discourse and they knew what they were doing because their parents did it –

MP: It was normalized.

RM: It was normal up to a point. But the fact that they took that step – I can’t believe that such an event didn’t, for most of them anyway, have some kind of profound consequence that informed the rest of their lives, or at least informed their careers.

MP: But that’s the other point that I think is really important. This is why we say it’s so profound, is that the strike leaders and the children that participated in the strike were never disciplined. So in a certain way, the strike was legitimized. I would think at least in their eyes because they weren’t disciplined by school authorities.

RM: Some of them were pulled out apparently on the Monday morning when they went back. The principal had sort of implied that no harm would come to them, and he pulled them out and said that they were in some sort of trouble, but nothing came of it.

MP: What also came of it was this kind of sudden increase in the hiring of Jewish teachers. We can see that.

RM: Yeah, I think the school board was clearly embarrassed about this whole thing, and I think at some level they were embarrassed by the behaviour of the teacher, and at some level the behaviour of the principal who was not handling things very well.

MP: Not very well at all.

RM: I think that he very quickly got the message that he was going to leave it, he wasn’t going to, as they called it, “call the boys out.” He was not going to follow up on any of these punishments that he was bragging about. Of course the press went and asked him what he was planning to do, and he basically said that it was none of their business! Not really the way to win a cause. So I think that there was a compromise in there somewhere where the school board decided to just drop it. And they probably decided to do what they could to improve the school system from within. We don’t know for sure that they did this, but within weeks of the end of the strike the school board was talking about hiring Jewish teachers and we know that by the end of that year they hired one or two Jewish teachers for the following year, and they continued to hire more over the next few years. Clearly a nerve was struck and they were responding in some way. In a slightly, you know, cumbersome sort of way. But in the best way that they were capable of to this situation. So I think that the strike certainly had some consequences, but you could really argue that it had positive consequences for the school system, which began to gradually become more diverse. Gradually, slowly –

MP: A little bit more accommodating. It was still a fight.

RM: I mean these are incremental, very much incremental, but things for Jewish children in the school system got better, again very incrementally, and these problems didn’t go away.

MP: And definitely not without a fight. Especially for things like the recognition of Jewish holidays.

RM: Oh, absolutely. But you set a precedent. And obviously this was a negative precedent – the strike shouldn’t have had to happen. I mean for the authorities it was an absolute embarrassment.

MP: But I also think too within the Jewish community – I keep going back to Reuben Brainin, the editor of the Keneder Adler, this real intellectual who came from New York and eventually returned to New York. He wrote as extensively as anyone did about the Strike, and I am just going to read an excerpt from the last paragraph of a piece that appeared in March 4^th, 1913 in the Keneder Adler, because for him the strike was extremely significant. He said: “We need to think much about this first sprouting of a generation which is new in our exile history, a free generation which is discarding the chains of diaspora, which no longer bends its head, no longer begs for justice, but takes what is not accorded freely.” And I think that that represents another type of achievement, or it’s significant. It represents something important that Reuben Brainin gives voice to.

TS: In both of your opinions, what do you think that today’s student movement in Quebec can learn from the Aberdeen Strike, or what can people unfamiliar with this story take from it in regards to our current system of education in Quebec?

RM: You’re never too young to start! (laughter) What can they learn?

MP: Well I think one of the things that we haven’t talked about that is really significant is the solidarity and discipline that these youngsters showed through all of this, and I think that if the students want to succeed, they need to stick together, they need to show solidarity, and they need to disciplined. In the case of the Aberdeen School, the five leaders spoke for the movement. So I think maybe it’s about the techniques of keeping the movement going, keeping it together. I think what you said also Rod, that age doesn’t matter as long as you are convinced that you’re doing the right thing.

RM: Their problem was that they were young enough that adults felt they should intervene, even positively. Positive intervention is not always necessarily a helpful thing. So on top of that too, I would say that every movement of this sort has to be sovereign, has to understand its own objectives and sort of take charge in its own terms. It’s very hard to come in from the outside and start speaking for other people. But that’s also not a real danger, I don’t think, when you get to the level of university. But there are always kinds of ways where spontaneous movements can be divided, and I think as Mary Anne said, it’s always important to keep the solidarity and to understand why, because the movement has a common interest.

MP: And I marched on that Thursday with 200,000 people. And there were many wonderful things that happened that day. But what I really liked, going back to solidarity and discipline, well it really showed that. But also to speak to what Rod has been saying, there were parents there, there were potential parents there, parents of potential university students who were marching. The labour movements were there. Professors were there. I marched in solidarity with students at Concordia –

RM: But you didn’t try and take it over (laughter).

MP: No! (laughter) It’s their strike, it’s their march.

RM: Haha, yes I’m labouring that point.

MP: But I can show solidarity, and I think it’s important to build that. And I think that there are professors, parents, others in the community, certainly the labour organizations, that came out that day to show that. And it wasn’t so much spontaneous as it was, you know, people were making connections and drawing us to march that Thursday.

TS: Well thank you both so much for participating in this discussion and sharing your current research with Third Solitude. It’s been a real pleasure!

MA/RM: Thank you.

* * *

Mary Anne Poutanen and Rod Macleod are currently searching for individuals whose parents or family members may have been involved in the strike, or who were students at the time at Aberdeen or at a nearby Protestant school. To contact them with such information, please contact (514) 398-5058, or email them at mary-anne.poutanen@mcgill.ca and rodmacleod@videotron.ca - They would love to hear from you!

Visit the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal.

Bernard Wexler and the Making of Alex Bernard

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:56:00 -0400

During the 1930s, Alex Bernard led a French Canadian folk band that played on Montreal’s CKAC radio station every week. Every summer, he and his band would tour around Quebec, entertaining towns, villages and church audiences. Throughout those years, his band mates kept his real identity from public knowledge, because Alex Bernard was really Bernard Wexler, a classically trained violinist from Romania, and a Jew.

Listen to Jerry Wexler, Bernard’s son, tell his father’s story: http://vimeo.com/imjmontreal/alexbernard-bernardwexler

***Part of the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal’s Stories Project, which aims to collect, preserve and share the diverse stories of Montreal’s Jewish experience.

Created by Nicholas van Beek. Produced by Nicholas van Beek and Zev Moses. Interview with Jerry Wexler. Images courtesy of Jerry Wexler and the Canadian Jewish Congress Charities Committee Archives. Music by Bernard Wexler, courtesy of Jerry Wexler. Special thank you to the Concordia Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling.

Animation by Delphine Wibaux - www.delwibaux.com. Animation music by D’Harmo, “Smog et Mardi Gras”, written by Sam Caron. Animation images courtesy of the Jewish Public Library Archives, Canadian Jewish Congress Charities Committee Archives, les Archives de la ville de Montréal, and the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union Archives, Kheel Centre, Cornell University.

Visit the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal: http://www.imjm.ca

Already in the Ambulance: A Story of Interning in Translation

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 19:18:00 -0400

On January 20, 1950, my grandfather, Dr. Isaak Tischler, arrived in Montreal with his wife, Dr. Bluma Tischler and Dr. Stera Gorfinkel, his mother-in-law. It took 7 months and a lot of daring in order for my grandparents to find employment. Hospitals weren’t very open to hiring European physicians, so my grandfather took the train to Toronto, showed up at the office of the Registrar of Physicians and Surgeons without an appointment and asked the Registrar to write him and Bluma letters of recommendation. He agreed. It was probably this that secured my grandparents their internships at St Mary’s in Montreal. But they soon found that working in a language they didn’t yet know well presented its own challenges…

Our only impediment on the job was our English, especially when somebody spoke to us faster than we could absorb. At first, we translated everything we heard to Polish or German in our heads.

One night, while I was working in the Outpatient Department emergency, I received a telephone call. A hurried voice said, “Dr. Tischler, come immediately to the ambulance.” In my head, I translated the word “ambulance” into Polish literally, as “the Department of Ambulatory Care,” i.e. the O.P.D, where I already was. “I am in the ambulance,” I told the caller. Then, I hung up. In a few seconds, the phone rang again. It was the same man, with the same message, except this time he added, “It’s a police call,” as well as some swear words. My reply was the same. When the man called a third time, the charge nurse realized that something wasn’t right. She took the phone out of my hands and spoke to the caller. Then, she took me by the arm, saying, “Come with me. You are going with the ambulance driver to pick up some injured people, who were involved in a car accident on Decarie Boulevard.”

When I reached the ambulance, the driver – he was the man who had called me – continued with his swearing. I didn’t pay too much attention. I wanted him to think that I didn’t understand his profane language. He told me to sit near him. He realized I must be “one of those damned D.P. doctors from abroad.” He said, “You must be nervous. I can give you a sedative.” I told him that I didn’t need any of his pills, that I would manage any medical emergency I might be confronted with. Even so, I felt my tension rising, especially with the sirens on, the noise of the street traffic on both sides of us, and the fact that we were going through red lights. I didn’t understand the driver’s explanatory remarks exactly, but it seemed that there was some sort of emergency somewhere on the road. Soon, I noticed police cars and a large crowd. Even though it was my first experience with road accident injuries, I knew I had to deal with the situation professionally. As we approached the area, onlookers shouted: “There is the doctor!” These words gave me an ego transfusion. The onlookers let me pass, as if I were a big dignitary.

As soon as the driver noticed that I knew what I was doing, he became helpful and polite. Together, we fitted the injured with splints on their fractured extremities. On the drive back to the hospital, I stayed in the car with the injured. I told the driver to notify the charge nurse, so that she could be ready for us.

My grandfather was pleased with his performance. It seemed, in spite of his initial confusion, that he had proved himself. He and the ambulance driver became friendly. When my grandparents moved into an apartment together, the driver helped them move their belongings.

My grandparents spent four years in Montreal. During that time, they regained the faith in humanity that they’d lost during the war years. Eventually, their careers brought them to Vancouver. But, who knew that their granddaughter would end up back in Montreal several years later, in that city where everything started for them?

* * *

An excerpt of The Last Survivor, a memoir by Dr. Isaak Tischler, edited by Yael Tischler.

Visit the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal.

A Balcony Under Threat in Balconville

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 16:43:00 -0400

While walking down Avenue de l’Esplanade a few days ago, I passed by a building at the corner of Laurier freshly painted in black, with signs promoting a renovation and 9,000 square feet of commercial space. The sign features a rendering of a theoretical café with dozens of people seated outside on a terrace, enjoying the sun. Such posters would not normally catch my attention, as Montreal is currently in the midst of a real estate mini-boom. But the building that will be renovated is no ordinary building. Obscured by the very sign announcing the renovation stands an unassuming balcony that is absolutely unique to Montreal and Canada.

The balcony belonged to the headquarters of the United Jewish People’s Order (UJPO) from 1947 to 1950, and then the Farband Labour Zionist Centre from 1951 to 1968. Since 1962, the same building has also housed Glatt’s, a kosher butcher that has occupied this same intersection since 1933. Though there is now a significant Hasidic population just a couple of blocks away, Glatt’s is one of the few remaining Jewish businesses in the Plateau and Mile End that directly descends from the era of Jewish immigration.

(When 5101 Ave. de l’Esplanade was the Farband / Labour Zionist Centre, ca. 1950s. From 1947-1950, the building was called the Morris Winchevsky Cultural Centre and belonged to the United Jewish People’s Order. Courtesy of the Jewish Public Library Archives).

Businesses come and go and communities move from place to place. But some landmarks are worth keeping. The balcony at 5101 de l’Esplanade is one of them, as it played a significant role in Canadian and Jewish history. A bit of background:

In the first decades of the 20^th century, the East European Jews that settled in Montreal were often impoverished and politically Leftist or radical. Thousands of Jews in Montreal began their lives in the New World toiling in clothing factories, or perhaps as peddlers or petty merchants. They organized themselves politically either according to affiliations already established in their home countries or in new organizations in Canada. Such political organizations were extremely active in the “downtown” Jewish community of Montreal, and were certainly not monolithic; the Jewish Left was composed of a variety of political groups and break-aways representing hotly contested opinions concerning the preferred form of socialism (or sometimes anarchism), the Jewish national language (Yiddish vs. Hebrew), and the preferred Jewish homeland (if there was to be one at all).

On the “right wing” of the Jewish Left, stood Labour Zionists, who were tied to what would become the Labour Party, Israel’s ruling party for three decades. Their followers took over the building on Esplanade in 1951 and led the Canadian Labour Zionist movement, which included the Habonim youth group, a Pioneer Women’s Organization and the Unzer Camp offices. Interestingly, Habonim members at one point became involved in David Lewis’ 1949 campaign as a CCF candidate for Parliament.

But Labour Zionists would not have even inhabited this building if it had not been for a historic raid on January 27, 1950 by the Quebec Provincial Police’s “anti-subversive” squad. In 1937, Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis had enacted the infamous Padlock Law, which allowed the government to raid and close politically undesirable organizations for up to 12 months without formally laying charges. The law, also known as “la loi protégeant la province contre la propagande communiste,” also allowed the police to confiscate materials and possessions within the building. The law is historically considered to be one of Canada’s most repressive and most subject to abuse. It was rarely used after World War II, but the UJPO was nevertheless targeted in 1950, during the height of the Cold War. The closing of UJPO headquarters is one of the most notorious instances in which the Padlock Law was enforced.

If the Labour Zionists were on the “right wing” of the Jewish Left, UJPO stood at the left of the Left. It roots were as a Canadian breakaway from the socialist, Yiddish cultural organization, the Arbeiter Ring (aka Workmen’s Circle), which met in present-day La Sala Rossa. In the 1940s and early 50s, the membership of the UJPO may have constituted the largest Jewish fraternal organization in Canada. Closely tied to the Communist Party of Canada, many UJPO members supported Fred Rose, who won a seat in the House of Commons and became Canada’s sole Communist MP in 1943. Even after Rose’s conviction for espionage in 1946, Jewish communists would stay active in promoting their cause.

The UJPO headquarters at 5101 de l’Esplanade was also called the Morris Winchevsky Cultural Centre. UJPO also ran the Morris Winchevsky Yiddish School at 30 Villeneuve Ouest, which no longer stands. UJPO sponsored lectures, concerts, folk choirs, and even summer camps, creating an immersive cultural milieu for its members. One such camp, Nitgedeiget(meaning “Don’t Worry”) welcomed non-Jewish French Canadian children, a rare example of cultural exchange and inclusion in the period.

The UJPO did not support the Zionist cause, instead seeking a solution for the Jewish national question within the framework of the Soviet Union. It supported the creation of Birobidjan – a small Jewish autonomous region in Siberia and promoted Soviet Jewish life through articles in the Vochenblat, an UJPO-associated Yiddish newspaper. Only in 1948, with the creation of the State of Israel and increasing anti-Jewish repression in the Soviet Union, would UJPO tentatively begin to support Israel. By the mid-1950s, following reports of further Soviet purges, UJPO withdrew its support of the Soviet Union.

The January 1950 raid by Quebec Provincial Police coincided with the beginning of the UJPOs slow decline from relevance. As the Soviet Union was increasingly being discredited amongst the Left in the West, the children of UJPO members were also less interested in speaking Yiddish (English was the language of choice) or in radical politics (as they were able to ascend to the middle class). Radical groups were under incredible pressure from legal authorities, including the RCMP, which kept close tabs on the UJPO’s activities. Even Jewish organizations felt a need to distance themselves from the UJPO. The Canadian Jewish Congress, led by Samuel Bronfman, which had representatives of Jewish groups from across the political spectrum, succeeded in pushing out UJPO in 1951.

But the UJPO never disappeared. It still maintains a presence in Toronto today, where it runs a summer camp and the Morris Winchevsky School and Centre, which promotes socialist values and secular Judaism. There is also a smaller presence in Winnipeg and Vancouver. If there are remaining activities in Montreal, I am unaware of them.

Such information is a long preamble to our discussion of the balcony at 5101 de l’Esplanade. But it’s necessary context for understanding why the balcony even exists. Eiran Harris, the archivist emeritus at the Jewish Public Library, and himself a former Habonim member who frequented the building in the 1950s, explained to me the uniqueness and importance of this balcony. When UJPO constructed the modernist building in 1947, they created an auditorium space on the first floor and office space on the second floor. The building features only one balcony with an unusually tall five-foot high wall. Most balcony walls, however, are scarcely higher than 3 feet. So why was the wall so high?

The explanation lies in the politics of the building itself. The UJPO hoped to use the balcony as a space for leaders to give political speeches to crowds below, emulating Soviet and other political leaders of the time who would speak to their followers from similarly elevated balconies. Harris sees similarities in the balcony wall’s uncommon height to that of balconies used for speeches in Red Square at May Day parades. The implication is that a higher wall will protect the speaker (somewhat) from assassination attempts. This explanation may be true, although the high wall may also have just been an architectural device, meant to line up with the lintels atop the first floor windows.

Whatever the reason for the design of the balcony at 5101 de l’Esplanade, its very existence was emblematic of the outlook of the United Jewish People’s Order, and shows a “Jewish” building whose form followed function. In the coming months, Glatt’s butcher will move to a new venue and the building’s renovation will likely mean the disappearance of all physical signs of this unique story.

When I think about the preservation of this building, I am immediately faced with some questions: When does the need for preservation trump the fostering of street life? Should we preserve buildings that are unattractive? And what if a place only maintains meaning for a small number of people?

Even though the present version of the building is arguably ugly, and the alternative proposed by the developer will most likely effect an improvement to Laurier’s street life, it seems imperative to me that the UJPO balcony (at the very least) should be preserved.

Some would say that this defense of a mere balcony is just another example of misplaced nostalgia for groups and movements that are no longer relevant. Groups like the UJPO and the Farband, however,were very important in their own time and represent a piece of the complex pantheon of Montreal’s Jewish life in the first half of the 20^th century. To ignore these movements, their stories, and, yes, their physical imprint on our urban fabric, is to simplify Jewish, Canadian and Quebec history as well as the diversity of Montreal. In this case, a balcony is not just a balcony.

- Zev Moses

Visit the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal.

A Centenary Cette Semaine

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 19:39:00 -0400

Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen. Photo by Harry Rasky.

This week I’ve been thinking of Irving Layton, one of Canada’s first modernist poets who was born 100 years ago this week and died six years ago. My copy of his witty memoir, Waiting for the Messiah, is packed away among many other life stories in wine boxes in a garage. In my favourite passage Layton recalls his involvement with First Statement, the modernist literary magazine he and John Sutherland stapled together in the early 1940s. Out of a tight Stanley Street office Irving and John worked one of Montreal’s very few small presses. They prided themselves on being apart from the conservative and Britishist Preview magazine, a minor rivalry which didn’t prevent them from publishing the same poets and soon merging together.

Image from Gregory Betts in ‘The Rise
of the Small Press Movement in Canada.’

In this passage John and Irving receive a visitor to their office in the form of an old man, shrivelled like a tasty prune and I imagine bent over himself at a right angle supported by his weathered cane. He came to the ‘First Statement Press’ bureau on official business. He wanted John and Irving to print his grand-son’s bar mitzvah party invitations and he was going to pay for it. Layton describes tears dripping from his eyes.

Bar mitzvah cards. This did not resemble the literary material John and Irving envisioned their small First Statement press to publish between runs of Ezra Pound and Louis Dudek. To this unenlightened man’s crass proposition, Layton let it be known, albeit ever so subtly, that the First Statement press was a delicate virgin whose chastity was not up for grabs by anything to do with bar mitzvah celebratory events. The gumption! Good day, Sir.

Layton was a teacher for the better part of his life. Here he is with his Herzliah High School class in the early 1950s, where he taught History, English and Political Science.

- Elizabeth Moorhouse-Stein

Reposted from Tansky’s Phone Booth.

Visit the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal’s exhibit on Irving Layton.

Is It Too Soon?

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 22:05:00 -0500

Every community’s history is filled with memories that instill pride as well as some less auspicious moments. Montreal’s 250 year-old Jewish community is no stranger to controversy. Many divisive events that have occurred involve parties who are long since deceased or whose children or children’s children are no longer alive. As a result, any sensitivity usually has diminished or disappeared. Sometimes the contentiousness of a given event is one of its most interesting aspects. For me, some of the most fascinating periods of Montreal’s Jewish history were at one time the most divisive.

A group picture of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the Chief Rabbi of Palestine (bottom centre), with Rabbis Epstein and Shapira, and local dignitaries including Lyon Cohen (top right), the mayor of Montreal (top, 2nd to left) and Rabbi Hirsch Cohen (lower left corner). Picture dated 1924. Despite Rav Kook’s stature and attempts at mediation, the rupture caused by the Kosher Meat War would continue. (Courtesy of CJCCCNA)

I think back to the 1920s, when Montreal’s community was often divided socially, economically, politically and religiously. In the midst of labour battles in which Jews played leading roles on both sides of the picket lines, the Jewish community was also embroiled in a very public debate about its place in the Protestant school system. The community found itself further divided and exposed when battles broke out in 1923-25 over control of the kosher meat industry, a period that Ira Robinson has called the “Kosher Meat War.” We will be uploading an exhibit about this to our website soon, so I will spare you most details, but suffice to say that the period involved lawsuits, sabotage, violence, accusations of being traif (non-kosher) in newspapers, and even death threats! Very sensational!

Nothing since has equaled the bitterness and divisiveness of the intra-community battles of the 1920s. And yet, during the past year and a half, many of our researchers have come to understand that some memories still remain raw or painful for some of the people we interview. We are sometimes gently recommended to stay away from certain topics.

What parts of Montreal’s Jewish history are we not yet comfortable to discuss?

There are obviously quite a few. But I can point to one particular period that remains sensitive for Montreal’s Jewish community and may remain so for at least another generation. It was a formative period that saw the community at its zenith in the late 60s and early 70s, followed by a rapid exodus and decline between 1976-early 1980s. But that is only a view of some English-speaking, Ashkenazi community members. This period also encompassed growth and institution building for Montreal’s Sephardic community, a source of pride for many. But even the Sephardic community witnessed certain disagreements amongst their own members, some divisions which are extant today. The period also saw misunderstandings and tension between the more established Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardic Jews, that latter of which were more recent immigrants.

For members (or former members) of Montreal’s Jewish community above the age of 45 or 50, this period elicits very different meanings and memories, some proud, some filled with grievances, some confusing, and some still traumatic. This is but one example of a challenging time period to address. Others exist and future controversies are inevitable in a community as vibrant and changing as the Jewish community of Montreal.

So how does a community museum broach such a difficult subject or time period? Do we simply ignore these times, issues and events? Do we self-censor? Do we wait until an entire generation is gone? Moreover, how do we weigh truth versus community engagement?

Without truth, we are forgetful at best, and irresponsible at worst.

Without community buy-in, we cannot fulfill our mission of telling the story of the entire community and its diverse constituent communities.

There is a particular sensitivity amongst Jews regarding intra-communal division. Since at least the Middle Ages, Jews have preferred to deal with their issues by themselves and to try to keep them hidden from the rest of the world (although this ideal has not always been practiced). The thinking goes that if many groups have historically hated Jews, then Jews cannot afford to be divided. Rather, they must struggle to show a face of unity to the rest of the world.

There are some reasons that I will cautiously disagree with this viewpoint:

1.) Lessons of the past are important to explore. More documentation and discussion (if polite and sensitively-led), with a wider group of individuals, will provide a better historical record for future generations to absorb and use to their benefit.

2.) If explored responsibly, a community can come together and resolve long-standing grievances.

3.) Revealing our glitches humanizes us – it shows that Jews are not a monolithic group of people, that we have our passions, our concerns and our divisions just like anyone else. In a society where many ethnic groups are insular, the ability to let others peek in and witness our humanity is generally a healthy one.

So where does this leave us?

It means that the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal will gradually explore some of the slightly controversial events of the more recent past and that we will not avoid the truth. But at the same time, we will do so diplomatically, without focusing on blame, and with a view that all opinions and experiences matter. This comes with the understanding that often time heals as well. Our patience will be an important asset in the coming years.

- Zev Moses

Visit the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal: http://www.imjm.ca

A new blog editor!

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:25:00 -0500

Ricky Kreitner, our close friend and co-founder of this blog, is stepping aside to travel and begin an amazing career in journalism. He came to the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal when we were beginning the project back in June 2010, offering to help us on his spare time. Ricky went on to become a researcher during the past year and a half, touching upon nearly every activity we have done. This blog was an experiment for us to find an outlet for more informal thoughts about Montreal’s Jewish heritage as well as to explain how the museum works. So far so good! We will miss Ricky and his passion for discovering bits of Montreal’s Jewish history hiding in libraries and alleyways around the city.

Luckily we have found a wonderful replacement to Ricky. I want to introduce you to Ian Becker, our new blog editor. Ian is finishing up his Bachelors in English and Jewish Studies at McGill University. He is excited to come aboard.

During the upcoming few months we plan to expand our blog to include writers on diverse subjects relating to the Montreal Jewish experience. We hope you will continue to enjoy our posts and share them with your friends.

You can continue to follow us here, as well as on Facebook and Twitter.

And if you would like to contribute to our blog, feel free to contact Ian at iandavidbecker@gmail.com. No prior expertise is needed. Stories, anecdotes, photos, interviews and personal narratives are welcome.

We look forward to hearing from you!

-Zev Moses, Curator

Visit the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal: http://www.imjm.ca

Saul Bellow on Napoleon

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 14:00:06 -0500

This post by Elizabeth Moorhouse-Stein first appeared on Tansky’s Phone Booth, her blog about Montreal Jewish culture and history.

The Jewish Museum in New York has in its art collection this painting of a wonky Napoleon Street in Montreal. It’s an aptly named road. Napoleon is but five short blocks when it disappears, defeated by wide thoroughfares then continues for another two metres. Abraham Manievich depicted its like in 1930 when perhaps on a stop from Russia to his new home in New York. Napoleon remains as off-kilter as Abraham portrayed it, although to my puzzlement I see the city has since filled these bathtub potholes.

Napoleon Street, Montreal. Abraham Manievich 1930.
Image from The Jewish Museum, New York.

This painting and Napoleon Street make me think of Saul Bellow. More than the Emperor and more than his wife Josephine whose name I appropriated for over two years, it is this author who comes to mind. To Bellow’s great credit, I associate this street to him and his characters more so than even a couple nearby Portuguese chicken restaurants, for which I thank God of Rotisserie that it put poultry and Portuguese people in the same place at the same time.

Bellow’s famous character, Moses Herzog, lived on Napoleon as a young boy with his family, crowded among many and supported erratically by his bootlegging father.

Here was a wider range of human feelings than Herzog had ever been able to find….Napoleon Street, rotten, toylike, crazy and filthy, riddled, flogged with harsh weather—the bootlegger’s boys reciting ancient prayers. To this Moses’ heart was attached with great power. All he ever wanted was there.

Bellow with his son Adam in Chicago.
Photo by Michael Mauney for Life Magazine.

Bellow’s own childhood beat before he moved to Chicago was the nearby Saint-Dominique, a past home he shared with the thoughtful, loner narrator Joseph in his book Dangling Man. Joe describes it in his journal.

I have never found another street that resembles St. Dominique. It was a slum between a market and a hospital…Little since then worked upon me with much force as, say, the sight of a driver trying to raise his fallen horse, of a funeral passing through the snow, or of a cripple who taunted his brother. And the pungency and staleness of its stores and cellars, the dogs, the boys, the French and immigrant women….the very breezes in the narrow course of that street, have remained so clear to me that I sometimes think it is the one place where I was ever allowed to encounter reality.

Rue Saint-Dominique, Montreal. Sam Borenstein 1942.
Image from the National Gallery of Canada.

This cold painting of Bellow’s Saint-Dominique is the cover image on a 2002 edition of The Street by Mordecai Richler, whose literary world borne from his childhood Saint-Urbain Street likens to Bellow’s own grounding in his past neighbourhood. In a scene out of the biographical This Year in Jerusalem, Mordecai is dining with an old classmate in a popular steakhouse. He charitably enlightens his waiter on their shared cultural geography, showing a condescension common throughout his work.

“Remember Sid Horowitz?” said the waiter.

“I don’t think so.”

“Sure you do,” said the man at the next table. It was Marty Hoffman, Baron Byng class of ‘48. Now sole proprietor of Pantalon Picasso - Picasso Jeans. Made by prisoners in China. No strikes, no late deliveries.

“He was with the Y basketball team the year they won everything.”

…The waiter was back with more names recalled from the good old days. Charna Rosen, Moish Barcovitch, who was doing time. Dr. Phil Gold, a credit to us…and William Shatner, Captain Kirk of Star Trek.

Foolishly, I tried to trump that one. “Do you know who used to live right around the corner from here on Napoleon Street?”

“Sure. The Krushners. They were in footwear. Retail.”

“Saul Bellow,” I said, “right around the corner. When he was a boy.”

“Bellow?” The waiter asked, puzzled. “Now you’ve got me. What was his father in?”

Napoleon Street, as photographed for the cover of The Apprenticeship
of Duddy Kravitz on McLellan & Stewart’s 1974 edition.

I suppose two possibilities. Either Mordecai confused Bellow’s childhood address with his famous character Herzog’s, or he showed a susceptibility to distraction by Portuguese chicken prophets, and the proximity of one particularly holy shrine sent his mental faculties into temporary suspension. I recognize the symptom of discombobulation because I know it well.

If you’re interested to know Bellow’s thoughts on the consciousness and identity-building of Jewish writers in America, this and this are what you should read. Bellow gave this talk in 1988 and The New York Review of Books recently published it for the folk absent.

- Elizabeth Moorhouse-Stein

Kosher Bread and Social Protest: An Interview With Eve Lerner

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:00:00 -0500

(A deal stuck in 1925 between the Hebrew Consumers’ League and the Montreal Jewish bakers. Courtesy of Eve Lerner.)

In the course of our preliminary research for the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal, we were directed to a Master’s thesis written in 2002 by Eve Lerner, then a graduate student at Concordia University. In “Making and Breaking Bread in Jewish Montreal: 1920-1940,” Lerner wrote about Kosher bread industry in Montreal and the Consumers’ League, which fought against high prices and unfair trade practices. Lerner spoke with us recently about the general milieu of the Jewish baking industry in Montreal and what relevance is still has today.

Can you tell me a little about yourself? Are you from Montreal? What first interested in you in the Jewish bakeries of Montreal?

I am from Montreal, two or three generations back on each side. When I first started looking at this I was in my second university career, and I really wanted to do a project that involved Jewish labour history, just because I thought that was a really important thing to do. That’s what I identified with and so on. I was active in Jewish social issues and social justice issues before I had my academic career. I ended up by chance working on the bread issue just because my adviser told me to look out there, to see what the sources are. My original idea was to do something on the clothing unions, because they had the most impact.

But I happened on this anniversary album of the bakers’ union and it led to all sorts of other things. The more I got into it the more I realized my own personal history was connected with it: my grandfather was Ukrainian Jewish and grew up in a bakery, and he baked when we were kids. His family was in the lumber industry before their sources got cut off because of shifting borders in the First World War. He had lots of stories to tell. Plus, in an earlier career I was a baker as well, so it had a lot of resonance for me. It was the perfect project.

What were some of the distinctive features of the Montreal Jewish bakers’ union?

It had kind of an Old World flavor that the other unions didn’t have. One thing was they had this kind of market-sharing scheme. It was just so incredibly egalitarian. They shared all the available work, which meant that you might be a baker in the 1930s and you only have two or three days of work per week, but everybody had the same amount of work. The other thing that was distinct was that it was such a Yiddish environment, even more than the clothing unions, which tended to be very mixed ethnically—there were French Canadians, Italians, and so on. But the baking industry, partly because you could get into it so easily, since food is often the industry that immigrants gravitate to—so immigrants who didn’t have any English or French could get into it easily. So it was more of a Yiddish Old World environment. And they shared the workplace with the same people they shared it with in the Old World—Russians, Ukrainians, Poles. It was also tiny—the clothing unions were very big, comparatively.

Was it uniformly radical, politically?

I would say so, definitely. The other thing that distinguished it from the clothing industry was that you could link trade union activism and consumer activism. It meant that, for instance, in 1925 when there was a consumer strike against bread, you could have all the bakers walking with all the consumers who were striking against the price of bread. The way it was conceived was that workers and consumers and housewives all had the same ideas of fair prices and fair wages, and basically mutually supported each other in being politically active in order to have fair prices and fair wages and working conditions and so on.

Is there anything to be learned about this milieu that we can apply to today’s world?

Well, yes, I’m very interested in all these boycott movements, and to what extent boycott of a product that’s unethical—like, let’s say, chocolate that’s picked by child labour, or clothing that’s made by sweatshops and so on—to what extent you can organize boycotts that affect market conditions. And to what extent people can be active in setting ethical standards for any industry. That’s basically what was going on in the ‘20s and ‘30s in the bread industry, consumers were being very active in deciding, through strikes and boycotts through the most part, what’s the standard for labour conditions, wages, and so on.

What does it mean, as you wrote in your thesis, that you’re going to study history along the contours of “space and culture”?

Well, for one thing, you can’t separate them from one another. They’re intimately related. Let’s look at culture. It’s a way of acknowledging that it’s not just supply and demand, for instance, that determines what happens in any given industry or market. It’s also the shared ideas about what that market is, about what’s an attractive product, and what people are buying when they’re buying a product—they’re not just buying a thing, they’re also buying an idea. They were buying bread that helped sustain Jewish families, and they thought of themselves as sharing certain values. And they were willing to act to protect those values. That’s the cultural aspect.

Space is a fascinating thing. Depending on what kind of space people share, that also changes the way people are active, the way they think of politics, the way they think of themselves as consumers and producers.

What’s the importance of looking at issues related to food when you want to study a particular culture, and Montreal Jewish culture specifically?

Food is one of the things everyone takes for granted. It’s not military history, it’s not purely political, but it’s the stuff of everyday life. It’s also something that shapes political movements. If you look at something like coffee, cocoa, those are such political products. We don’t usually think of them that way, because we don’t think of things we ingest as being political. It’s also a women’s issue.

There are no bounds to the kinds of issues that food touches on. It touches on every single aspect of life. I was looking at things like the nitty-gritty of what a loaf would look like and taste like, and the role it had in everyday life. People told me stories that during the Depression they would buy day-old bread and get half-loaves delivered to their houses. That was something that people had really strong memories of. There are also a lot of legal implications, involving activism, those you have to look at as well.

What are you working on now?

The only thing I’m working on now doesn’t have anything to do with Jewish history. I’m doing some research on local history in the Eastern Townships, where I’ve spent most of my life. It does have a lot of food in it, it’s an article about everyday life in the Townships in the 1850s.

There’s a couple projects I’d like to do. I’d like to look at the hat industry, and I think it would really balance very well with food. Food is really a basic issue of sustenance, and the hat industry is very interesting because it’s the other side of the coin: it’s about status. And it’s pure idea and dressing-up. So it’s like the inside and the outside, appearance and sustenance.

- Ricky Kreitner

Visit the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal: http://www.imjm.ca