The Montreal Shtetl: Making Home After the Holocaust

By Zelda Abramson and John Lynch

As the Holocaust is memorialized worldwide through education programs and commemoration days, the common perception is that after survivors arrived and settled in their new homes they continued on a successful journey from rags to riches. While this story is comforting, a closer look at the experience of Holocaust survivors in North America shows it to be untrue. The arrival of tens of thousands of Jewish refugees was palpable in the streets of Montreal and their impact on the existing Jewish community is well-recognized. But what do we really know about how survivors’ experienced their new community? Drawing on more than 60 interviews with survivors, hundreds of case files from Jewish Immigrant Aid Services, and other archival documents, The Montreal Shtetl presents a portrait of the daily struggles of Holocaust survivors who settled in Montreal, where they encountered difficulties with work, language, culture, health care, and a Jewish community that was not always welcoming to survivors.

By reflecting on how institutional supports, gender, and community relationships shaped the survivors’ settlement experiences, Abramson and Lynch show the relevance of these stories to current state policies on refugee immigration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Release date: Jul 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781771134057

Zelda Abramson

Zelda Abramson is an associate professor of sociology at Acadia University. Her areas of teaching and research include methodology, health, and family. As a public sociologist, she strives to combine academic research with social activism. Zelda grew up in Montreal as a child of Holocaust survivors.

Book preview

Cover design for The Montreal Shtetl: Making home after the Holocaust by Zelda Abramson and John Lynch. A sepia-toned photograph above the title features a bustling group of young men and women waving as they disembark from a large ship. The sepia-toned photograph below the title features three light-skinned young women grinning and leaning over a metal railing. One of them is balancing a toddler in the crook of her arm.

PRAISE FOR

THE

Montreal Shtetl

"A moving and long-needed contribution to

Canadian-Jewish immigrant history."

—Fraidie Martz, author of Open Your Hearts:

The Story of the Jewish War Orphans in Canada

"The Montreal Shtetl is researched and written with great care and attention to detail. Filling a void in Holocaust survivor literature, it delivers a strikingly personal yet analytical account. Each sentence is heavy with emotion and understanding—a feeling that comes only from the sensitivity gained through lived experience, whether first hand or inherited. Truly a work of unique caliber."

—Jessica Zimmerman, Director of Archives,

Jewish Public Library, Montreal

Books relating the saga of Holocaust survivors number in the thousands. In almost all of them, the story ends abruptly with the survivors’ arrival in their new home. The way the survivors made their way in their new surroundings and their relationship with the Jews of the local community who did not experience what they had experienced has remained a tale mostly untold. Through a judicious combination of archival research and personal interviews, Abramson and Lynch shed considerable light on the experiences of Holocaust survivors in Montreal. The findings they present constitute an important contribution to the history of the Jewish community of Montreal and of Jewish life in postwar North America.

—Ira Robinson, Chair in Quebec and Canadian

Jewish Studies, Concordia University

The

Montreal Shtetl

Making Home after the Holocaust

Zelda Abramson & John Lynch

Between the Lines

Toronto

The Montreal Shtetl

© 2019 Zelda Abramson & John Lynch

First published in 2019 by

Between the Lines

401 Richmond Street West, Studio 281

Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8 Canada

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Between the Lines, or (for photocopying in Canada only) Access Copyright, 56 Wellesley Street West, Suite 320, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2S3.

Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. Between the Lines would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Abramson, Zelda, 1951-, author

The Montreal shtetl : making home after the Holocaust / Zelda Abramson & John Lynch.

Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77113-404-0 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-77113-405-7 (EPUB).—

ISBN 978-1-77113-406-4 (PDF)

1. Holocaust survivors—Québec (Province)—Montréal—Social conditions—20th century. 2. Holocaust survivors—Québec (Province)—Montréal—Economic

conditions—20th century. 3. Holocaust survivors—Québec (Province)—Montréal—Biography. I. Lynch, John (John Francis), 1950-, author II. Title.

Cover and text design by John van der Woude, JVDW Designs

Printed in Canada

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing activities: the Government of Canada; the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council, the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and Ontario Creates.

Logo: Canada Council for the Arts. Logo: Conseil des Arts du Canada. Logo: Government of Canada. Logo: Ontario Arts Council, an Ontario government agency. Logo: Conseil des Arts de L’Ontario, un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario. Logo: Ontario Creates. Logo: Ontario Créatif.

In memory of

Chaim Abramson ל״ז and Rywka

Abramson (Wajchman)

ל״ז.

We dedicate this book to Madelyn and Penny,

our grandchildren, with the hope they grow

up in a more tolerant and kinder world.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. The Research

2. The Context

Part I: Uprooting

3. No Way Home

4. The Narratives I

Simka: Buttonholes

Sidney: A Pack of Player’s

Paul: The שייגעץ—Sheygetz

Henia: Coffee Beans

Renata ל״ז: North Star

Theresa: International Women’s Day

Miriam B.: Border Crossings

Olga: Me and My Two Boys

Hank: Red Banner in the Sky

Aba ל״ז: Disillusioned

Paula: Third Class

Part II: Unpacking

5. Montreal and Jewish Immigrants

6. The Narratives II

Paul: Two Left Hands

Esther: Intake

Greta: Coffee, Biscuits, and Clothing

Simka: The Jewish Seminary

Paula: Baggage

Myra H. ל״ז: I Speak Yiddish but I Do Not Understand It…

Gabor: Friday Night Peddling

Henia: The Domestic

Renata ל״ז: The Queen’s English

Esther: Overwhelmed

Olga: Making Do

Miriam B.: Allez chez les protestants

Sonja: The Strike

Myra G.: Motherwork

Aba ל״ז: The Bankbook

Esther: Compassion

Harry: Going Out of Business

Part III: Making Home

7. The Great Divides

8. The Narratives III

Paul: Tongue-tied

Sidney: Dance to the End of Time

Gabor and Miriam A.: The Outsider

Paula: School Books

Myra G.: Second Generation

Estelle and Irving: Restricted!

Theresa: À la mode

Hank: Becoming Hank

Rita and Hank: Theatre of Survival

Harry and Sonja: Hierarchies

Miriam B.: The Montreal Shtetl

Tom: Matryoshka Dolls

Aba ל״ז: Revolutionary

Conclusion

9. Loose Threads

Acknowledgements

Interviewees

Notes

Preface

My partner and I arrived in Montreal in September 2012 and rented a flat in Mile End, the same neighbourhood where the Jewish refugees settled after World War ii. We are amused now that it took us three weeks to settle into our Montreal life and dive into the research on the experiences of Holocaust survivors who lived there. The refugees who arrived almost sixty-five years earlier had, after one day, begun their job search; after two days, many had started working.

Part of our daily regimen in Montreal was to take long morning walks starting at our flat on l’Esplanade and Bernard, and walk partway up Mount Royal. We would descend the mountain along its east flank, behind the Sir George-Étienne Cartier monument, close to where we had entered an hour before. Crossing Avenue du Parc to get to what was then referred to as Fletcher’s Field, now renamed Parc Jeanne-Mance, we would be reminded of our readings the day before at the Canadian Jewish Congress Archives, and the photographs that vividly portrayed the refugees who in 1948 had recently arrived from Poland, France, Hungary, Lithuania, displaced persons zones in Germany, and many other places. We read that Sunday morning assemblies became a ritual at Fletcher’s Field for the new settlers.

Angling north along the field, Avenue de l’Esplanade borders the east side of the park. The Jewish Immigrant Aid Services (JIAS) office was located on this street in a building facing the park. It was open seven days a week. Farther along was the Jewish Public Library. On the north side of Mount Royal Avenue was the YMHA (Young Men’s Hebrew Association), known as the Y. These institutions are now elsewhere, following the Jewish communities that resettled westward.

Leaving Parc Jeanne-Mance, we would head north through the residential streets of Mile End towards our flat. The housing stock is much the same as it was sixty-five years ago, and probably similar to what it was ninety-five years ago: two- and three-storey walk-up flats, known as the plexes—duplexes and triplexes. The house numbers—4633 Jeanne-Mance, 4723 St. Urbain, 213 Villeneuve O.—match the flat rental assignments in the case files we perused in the archives. As the refugees walked the same sidewalks we were walking, they might have been looking ahead to see someone they previously knew, someone who had also survived the atrocities.

Reproduction of a 1940s city map showing the St Urbain Ghetto in Montreal. The ghetto’s boundaries are Van Horne and the CPR Rail Line to the north, De Gaspe Ave and Hotel de Ville to the east, Fletchers Field and Mount Royal Park to the south, and Hutchinson to the west. Outremont is located southwest of the ghetto.

Map of St. Urbain Ghetto (late 1940s)

Drawn by John Lynch, Montreal, 2017, based on Lloyds map of the city of Montreal (document cartographique), by Frank P. Lloyd (193–?), BAnQ Numérique Patrimoine québécois, numerique.banq.qc.ca.

My parents were Holocaust survivors who emigrated to Montreal from Israel in 1952. My father was a skilled tailor, and he had a small tailor shop that he operated with the help of my mother, who was a trained seamstress. Although they worked all the time, the early years were financially challenging. Not long before my mother died in 2005, she told me a story. After living in Canada for about three years, she applied for a program sponsored by a Jewish community service that would pay the expenses for mothers and their children to spend a week in the country, namely the Laurentians north of Montreal. Across the street from my father’s tailor shop was a typical 1950s soda fountain shop. One day an individual entered the soda fountain shop asking questions, pointing to my father’s store. Does he work? Is he busy? The owner of the soda fountain shop answered, Oh yes! He works very hard, and there are always customers coming and going. It turned out that my mother’s application was not successful, as she evidently failed the means test. Almost fifty years later, my mother shared this story with frustration, shaking her head in dismay. She added two comments: Busy does not mean money, and This was the only time I ever asked for help from any agency, and I swore I would never ask for any other help again. When I asked why, my mother answered, No one really cared.

In March 2008, the New York Times featured a story based on records of social agencies that served the postwar Jewish immigrants living in New York City.¹ Challenging the popular belief that the survivors were treated in awe, the author claimed that many of these refugees walked a gantlet of resistance and distrust: disapproval of their lack of English and need for health care, threats of deportation, and agency rules shaped by a suspicion of freeloading. That same article reported that the unimaginable traumas that survivors experienced were unacknowledged: Nobody is thinking, ‘Oh, amazing, survivors.…’ At worst they are human debris; at best they are unfortunate victims who have to be resocialized. There have been similar findings in Canada. Franklin Bialystok’s research on survivors who settled in Winnipeg and Toronto found that the established Jewish community sought to distance themselves from their European background and consequently offered little support to the survivors.²

Today, the story of the Holocaust is memorialized worldwide through education programs and commemoration days such as Holocaust Memorial Day (in January) and Yom HaShoah—Holocaust Remembrance Day (in April or May). In most major world centres, there are museums documenting the lives of the six million Jews murdered. The New York Times article and my mother’s story stand in contrast to the common perception that the Jewish community, locally and globally, rallied around the Holocaust survivors. The prevailing assumption is that [Holocaust survivors’] arrival in America is considered a happy ending.³ Such an assumption, according to social historian Beth B. Cohen, trivialized, minimized, [and] obscured the immediate postwar period and, as such, has been reinvented into a story that is comforting but untrue.⁴

Bialystok’s research focuses on the reaction of the established Jewish community to survivors in Toronto and Winnipeg, but it does not address their settlement experiences from the survivors’ standpoint. Overall, there are few studies on Holocaust survivors who came to Canada post–World War ii. There is a master’s thesis on the survivors who settled in Vancouver; however, at most, five hundred settled there.⁵ More recently, Adara Goldberg’s doctoral dissertation, rewritten as a book, examines the postwar immigration and resettlement experiences of survivors who settled both in metropolitan centres and in small communities throughout Canada.⁶ The only study of survivors in Montreal focuses on self-help groups, notably לאַנדסמאַנשאַַפטן—landsmanshaftn, societies or mutual aid organizations.⁷ But there is no in-depth ethnographic study that specifically looks at lived experiences of survivors who made Montreal home, although there is some recognition in scholarly articles of a need for such research.⁸ This void in scholarship is curious, as the majority (56 per cent) of Holocaust survivors resettled in Montreal, even though Ontario was the preferred place of settlement for other ethnic groups after World War II.⁹

With the influx of refugees, the size of the Montreal Jewish community grew from 63,888 in 1941 to 80,788 in 1951, and to approximately 100,000 in 1958. The impact of their arrival was palpable in the streets of Montreal, and, according to Canadian Jewish scholar Ira Robinson, they greatly contributed to the growth of the Jewish community demographically, economically and culturally.¹⁰ Underpinning this statement is the notion that the survivors’ integration into Canadian society was a success. If I draw on all the benchmarks that signify success—the middle-class home in Côte-Saint-Luc (a neighbourhood in west-end Montreal mostly inhabited by Jews), children going to university, careers in the professions, southern winter vacations—it would go without saying that the survivors’ integration into the Jewish community and into Canadian life was a success. I can reflect on my parents’ lives and check off each of the above benchmarks. However, in so doing, I have erased more than a decade of their personal history that precedes this so-called success story. I asked myself: What do we know about the strategies survivors used to facilitate their integration into Canadian society? What structural factors were in play that enabled integration? And, to return to my mother’s story and the New York Times article, how and when did the attitudes of world Jewry towards the Holocaust change?

To answer these questions, my partner, John, and I left for Montreal to spend three months in 2012–13 doing research. Our plan was to do in-depth interviews with survivors as well as archival research at the Canadian Jewish Congress Charities Committee National Archives’ Collections (now renamed the Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives / Archives juives canadiennes Alex Dworkin) and the Jewish Public Library Archives. John joined me in every aspect of the research and in the writing of this book.

Zelda Abramson

Introduction

1

The Research

There were three waves of Jewish immigration to Canada post–World War II. The first wave took place between 1947 and 1950, and most of the refugees were admitted into Canada through the labour schemes organized by the Canadian Overseas Garment Commission and the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC). Immigrants who arrived in Canada in the second wave, 1951–54, were sponsored by Canadian Jews as well as by refugees who came in the first wave. Before emigrating to Canada, the second wavers had resettled in European countries such as Sweden, France, and Belgium, and many had resettled in Israel. The third wave, beginning in 1956, for the most part were refugees from Hungary and Poland. Although our original research spanned all three waves of immigration post–World War ii, this book focuses on the first two waves from 1947 to 1954, during the immediate postwar period.¹

Archives

In the Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives and the Jewish Public Library Archives, we examined an array of documents from the Jewish Immigrant Aid Services, Canadian Jewish Congress, Federation of Jewish Agencies, Canadian Jewish Appeal, Jewish Labour Committee of Canada, and other Jewish community groups such as the Workmen’s Circle.² Among the Canadian Jewish Congress documents were the Inter-Office Information (IOI) memoranda, written by the executive director of the Canadian Jewish Congress. Between 1947 and 1949, there were daily IOI entries, recording the ships arriving; number of Jews entering Canada by trade, family compositions, and destination; and news related to the Jewish communities, such as lobbying activities with the Canadian government or, more locally, with the school boards.

The Jewish Immigrant Aid Services documents include policy papers such as its constitution, JIAS Social Service Manual, letters, JIAS newsletters, reports, photos, ledgers, and thousands of social work case files. JIAS was responsible for providing support services as needed to the newcomers for their first six months in Montreal. A case file was opened for individuals seeking any type of assistance, such as a clothing requisition, housing, work, loans, or medical referrals. We had access to these individual social work case files, which not only provided insight into the daily challenges the refugees confronted and the availability of support systems to facilitate their integration, but also gave clues to the impressions and expectations of the social workers as well as the attitudes the Canadian Jewish community held towards the refugees.

Research Sample

Finding survivors to interview proved initially challenging. I moved away from Montreal in 1971 and my family left years later, as did many of their friends. In 2012, I knew few people living in Montreal and was resistant to interviewing friends of my parents or parents of my friends, so as not to methodologically compromise the research. Although this research was motivated by my family’s personal history, I did not want the research to be about my family. But, with few options at first, I contacted four Holocaust survivors I knew, and they agreed to be interviewed. I also contacted the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre and other Montreal Jewish agencies such as the drop-in centre for Holocaust survivors at the Cummings Centre.³ They gave me names of potential interviewees, and from there the sample snowballed.

By the time we left Montreal at the end of November 2012, thirtythree interviews had been completed. However, the pool of interviewees had expanded. Since we had run out of time to talk to them all, and more archival research was needed, we decided to return to Montreal the following spring for a two-month stay. During the second visit, we were coincidently introduced to a freelance writer who took an interest in the research. She asked if she could pitch our research as an article in the Montreal Gazette, and a feature article appeared on June 7, 2013.⁴ Subsequently, we were contacted by survivors and their children and grandchildren living in Canada, the United States, and Europe. More than seventy survivors, child survivors, and children of survivors were willing to be interviewed. We booked three more visits to Montreal for interviews and archival research.

In the end, we completed sixty-seven interviews: sixty with men, women, child survivors (there were nineteen), and children of survivors (commonly referred to as second generation; there were eight). A distinction is made between adult and child Holocaust survivors because the children’s stories revealed settlement experiences markedly different from those of their parents. The intent in interviewing children of survivors was to understand, from a child’s perspective, their impressions of immigrant life, including their integration into the public-school system and social network. We interviewed a number of couples: some together, others separately. The survivors’ ages at the time of the interviews ranged from seventy-two to ninety-nine years. Approximately 60 per cent of the survivors interviewed were women. In addition to these interviews, there were six interviews with Jewish Canadians who were not survivors: three who lived in Mile End, the same neighbourhood as the survivors; one who worked at the Jewish General Hospital in the 1950s and had daily contact with survivors; one who was the daughter of the woman who ran the JIAS clothing room; and, finally, a Montreal woman who was hired when she was twenty-one years old and a recent graduate to work as a Jewish Vocational Services (JVS) caseworker in the late 1940s.

The original sample captures the unique and diverse nature of this group of immigrants. Much of the sample (44 per cent) came from Poland, 25 per cent were from Hungary, and the others were from France, Holland, Germany, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union.⁵ They were not a homogeneous group: they varied by social class and education; some were deeply religious, others were atheists; some came from cities, others from rural areas, better known as the לטעטש—shtetl; and even their coping strategies, post-genocide, differed from person to person. However, they shared two common characteristics—they had survived the war, and they had settled in Montreal.

Interview Process

When we arrived at the homes of the survivors, we were greeted warmly and enthusiastically. The adult survivors we interviewed were approaching or in their nineties. Many had limited mobility and welcomed an afternoon with company. While preparing for the interviews—I was getting the consent forms signed, and John was setting up the filming—an interesting dynamic occurred. John noticed in many instances that the interviewees only spoke to me in Yiddish. However, when the interview began, they switched to English. Perhaps they were testing whether I was indeed an insider, whether they could trust me or whether they would be heard. According to oral historian and psychologist Henry Greenspan, what survivors say, how they say it, whether they say it all, will depend, in part, on their perceptions of those listeners, as well as on the way the listeners have made their own hopes, fears and expectations known.⁶

The interviews lasted three hours on average, the shortest being one and a half hours and the longest six. Some interviews took place over a number of visits or subsequent phone interviews. The interviews were organized into four parts. In order to contextualize the survivors’ lives post–World War ii, the first part of the interview focused on their years prior to the war. The second part followed the ways in which they survived the war. Then the interview shifted to their lives postwar, their emigration to and arrival in Canada. The crux of the interview probed their story of settling into Montreal and Canadian life. With the New York Times article in mind, specific questions were also asked about how they viewed their relationship to the Canadian Jewish community and how that relationship evolved over time.

Focusing on the pre-war years was not easy. There was some hesitancy, and notable stiffening of body language. When this occurs, oral and public historian Steven High explains:

our interviewees are transported back into another time, or another place, their body language sometimes changes to what it would have been in that cultural and historical context. Their gestural repertoire, or bodily knowledge, is thus revealed in the art of remembering. People’s relationships to their own stories—where they linger and what they skip over—helps us understand the logic of what we are hearing. The telling of a story is a dialogical process, that is charged, contingent and reflexive.⁷

The interviewees would tell us where and when they were born and who the members of the family were, and then they would skip to 1939—the beginning of the war. We asked if we could stay in the pre-war ground, reminding them that they should not feel pressured to answer any questions. Some remarked it was too difficult to speak about the family they lost; most, however, said that even though it was trying, it was good to revisit this period of time. Specific questions were asked on education or their family’s aspirations for education, the type of work their parents did, home culture, and religion. A snapshot of their life as a child or young adult emerged. For many, the pre-war years were very happy ones, albeit remembered with an undercurrent of deep sadness.

Recounting their lives during the war years brought a different energy to the interview. Although we had not intended to probe the circumstances of their survival, they wanted or needed to tell in detail all that they had witnessed and experienced. There was a fluidity in their reflection of the war experiences. We presume many had shared their war years numerous times before, either as part of the Spielberg project on living testimonies of Holocaust survivors, as volunteers of the Holocaust Memorial Centre, as guest visitors or docents in schools, or in telling their story to their grandchildren.⁸

When scheduling an interview, we underscored that the interview would largely address the postwar years: why and how they came to Canada, and their experiences of settling in Montreal during the first few years. Yet, after they had recounted their Holocaust stories, the survivors assumed the interview was over. When asked to speak about the ways in which they came to Canada and their early years in Montreal, the responses were similar: There is nothing much to tell. We came, it was hard, and we made a living. Their story of resettlement was one they rarely thought of and had yet to be told. Specific questions were then asked, chronologically starting with their arrival in Canada: Who greeted you when you arrived in Montreal? How did you find housing? What was your housing like? Questions shifted to the dailiness of their lives: working (paid and unpaid), mothering, schooling for children, language, financial support. Then to the nonmaterial conditions of settling: friendships, assimilation, cultural adaptation, integration, citizenship. Next were questions such as: Are you an immigrant? How do you self-define? Who is a Holocaust survivor? At this point, many of the interviewees asked me the very same questions, and the interview dynamics transformed, as Greenspan would say, into partners in a conversation.⁹

As we reflect now on the interviews, we find remarkable the detail in which questions were answered.

Where was your first flat?

4640 Esplanade.

Then where did you move to?

4261 St. Urbain. It’s the first door to the left when you face Baron Byng.

What were your wages at your first job?

Nothing. It was fifteen dollars a week.

How much was the rent?

Fifty-five dollars a month. That was a lot of money then.

At times, a silly question was asked. For example, Do you remember your first breakfast in Montreal? Without a pause, and with gusto, as if the meal were being served in this moment, the breakfast items were listed. Many talked about their introduction to food in Canada, which often was on the train between Halifax and Montreal. Although not a fond memory, it was vividly and humorously recalled.

The telling of the Narratives

This research is informed by a methodology of standpoint theory. Feminist standpoint theorists such as Sandra Harding and Dorothy Smith challenge mainstream science and argue that science must be contextualized in actual experience, which is the vantage point from which every individual sees the world.¹⁰ Doing so, says Smith, preserves the presence of subjects as knowers and as actors, and each individual occupies a social and historical position or a standpoint that produces many varying perspectives.¹¹ The in-depth interview or oral history method thus becomes a way to make history more inclusive by capturing the voices of those who have been excluded from history: the marginalized and oppressed.¹² Further, standpoint theory is rooted in a knowledge/ power framework and emphasizes the social conditions that shape individual experiences.¹³

Within the discipline of sociology, the common method of organizing interview data is through coding the interviews and identifying key themes. That was our starting place in writing this book. Each interview was transcribed, closely read, and analyzed. Codes and categories were identified and then organized into broader themes or concepts, as is commonly done in qualitative research.¹⁴ Three prevalent analytic concepts emerged from the research data: 1) dailiness, which included themes of settlement, housing, financial contributions (through budgeting, unpaid work, or paid work), education, and language; 2) motherwork, themes of organizing and maintaining the home and family life, taking care of the physical and emotional needs of children, feeding the family, supporting husbands, making do, using resourcefulness and creativity (individual agency);¹⁵ and 3) integration and acculturation, from the perspective of the refugee as well as the role played by various arms of the state (i.e., education, social work practice, the immigration bureaucracy, and medical services and religious institutions) in reaching out towards and supporting survivor families.

When we started writing, we quickly found that the interviews to which we were very connected were slowly being fragmented, and the power that each individual interview held was fading. Under the guise of seeking objectivity, we were depersonalizing, as writer and cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar would say, our connection to the field, to treat ethnographic work…as that which is ‘other’ to the ‘self’ and to accumulate masses of data that can be compared, contrasted, charted, and serve as a basis for policy recommendations, or at least as a critique of existing practices.¹⁶ Through the data mining process, we worried that the unique and powerful voices of the interviewees and the complexities of their narratives would be lost. We were compartmentalizing their lived experiences in a way that felt messy. Canadian historian Joy Parr argues that when doing ethnographic or oral history research, we are seeking not objectivity but a highly disciplined subjectivity. The obligation of the interviewer is to proceed deliberately, prudently, and with all due care not to leave the memoryscape littered carelessly.¹⁷

Greenspan is critical of the imbalanced ways in which research is done with Holocaust survivors: Survivors provide testimony about the Holocaust, we provide testimonial—or observation—about survivors. What has been missed is sustained knowing together. Whereas experts cook raw data, he argues that cooking and interpreting need to occur "within the conversation" of the interview.¹⁸ Under this conception, our challenge in telling the story of survivors’ resettlement experiences in Montreal became: How do we translate their stories without assimilating their voices into those of the expert? Mariolga Reyes Cruz, whose research focuses on Latin Americans in the United States and who self-identifies as a critical ethnographer, struggles with this same question. She writes:

I’m not talking about collecting the other’s stories, amplifying their voices, analyzing their comings and goings, supporting our theories with the observations we make about their lives. What I’m talking about is grounding our theories, anchoring them, on the reflections nonacademics make about social life as they live it, elaborating theory with them instead of about them. [emphasis in original]¹⁹

What distinguishes this book from other texts that draw on oral histories is our decision to move away from the usual way of organizing qualitative research, and instead to narrate this book through the voices of the men and women we interviewed. The conversations that took place with the survivors are the ones we share. It is their voices that prevail.

This book is written as a series of narratives constructed from the interview transcripts, and they serve as primary data. From the original sample of sixty-seven interviews, we identified twenty-three oral histories to be told (see Interviewees). These narrations represent the dominant themes that were present in

Reviews for The Montreal Shtetl

[jetangen4571 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

post-WW2, Canada, immigrants, survivor's guilt, survivors, Jewish, holocaust, adaptation, social-issues, socioeconomics, cultural-assimilation, cultural-exploration, culture-of-fear, culture-shock, refugees, family, family-dynamics, friendship, pride, prejudice, interviews, intolerance*****They thought it would be better than the devastation and homelessness they left behind. But there was no close family to help with the adjustments and the aid agencies just didn't understand that this wave of European Jews were very different from those who came earlier. Then there was the negative/hostile attitude from Canadian Jews in reference to the newcomers, the way that the school system was not based on religion so that even if a youngster was fluent in French, the Catholics wouldn't have them and they were then assigned to the Protestant/English speaking schools. Most were fortunate to have the binding thread of Yiddish among themselves because there were so many languages and feelings about their own religion among them. Learning about the shifting borders of their former home countries (especially Poland) was absolutely astounding. I could go on forever (but I promise not to) about what I learned from this intricately researched and presented history of people who struggled to find a place to thrive and to belong.Voice actress Margot Dionne is superb at defining each person's narrative.I requested and received a free temporary audio copy from Between the Lines via NetGalley. Thank you!