Third Solitude Series

Jewish Montreal Painters of the Interwar Period

What Muhlstock Found in Empty Spaces

Jewish Montreal painter Louis Muhlstock (1904-2001) explored deserted apartments in the Jewish ghetto – places declared unfit for human habitation – and made them subjects of his paintings. “When I painted these empty rooms,” he said, “I painted silence and decay. I was very moved and disturbed that people were allowed to live in such surroundings and I think I expressed it through my colour. Although the people were never introduced in these paintings, there were traces of their having been here.”[1]

Basement with Tailor’s Dummy is part of a series of empty rooms captured by Muhlstock mainly during his visits in the Centre-Sud borough of Montreal. In her book Peintres juifs de Montréal Témoins de leur époque 1930-1948, Esther Trépanier notes that “these paintings appear as examples of an approach that conjugates a process of formal exploration with a particular socio-historical dimension.”[2] The female bust is reminiscent of the visual tradition of the woman subject by the window, for example in Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, all the while making a social commentary on the socio-economical situation of the Jewish community at the time.

It is a work that communicates with sensitivity the social and economical situation of the Jewish community at the time.[3] Because of low-income jobs, Jews in Montreal could often not afford to buy homes. They were not only forced to live in these slums, but were often forced out either by the intolerable living conditions or because of economic difficulties.[4] In an interview with Charles Hill from the National Gallery, Muhlstock explains the emotional magnetism between himself and the barren spaces he painted:.

“The atmosphere, we were—we lived around there, so I knew that. I didn’t know a Westmount mansion and I had no feeling for that kind. For me there was much more character in that; or I’ll show you a few things. In the door or doorway or a closed shutter or a brick wall neglected. A derelict tree that you’ll see on the wall. I had the same sort of feeling for that, and the approach was almost the same as two men sleeping in the field. It was a form. It was something I had known and experienced and seen, and so it was the thing I wanted to express.”[5]

The bust in the work most likely references the involvement of the tenants in the textile and clothing, or shmatta, industry. During and after the First World War, the rag trade was exponentially growing, producing inexpensive ready-to-wear clothing, as well as some of the worst labour conditions in the history of the country.[6] The shmatta industry employed a large number of Jewish immigrants and most of these employees lived and worked in dire conditions. By 1931, three quarter of Jews in Montreal were employed in the garment and textile industry, as manufacturers, contractors and mostly as workers.[7] The environment was thus a familiar one.

In the empty rooms series, the viewer encounters peeling wallpaper, dirty walls and desolate spaces. The rooms are immersive in pathos and emptiness, confronting the viewer to the absence of human presence all the while hinting at a faint trace of the passage of people. The social importance in this series is matched with interesting formalistic elements; the viewer is positioned as an outsider to the situation, as though peaking through a window. As for the world outside these slums, it is often reduced to a few spots of light or colour on the ground of the abandoned space. Time seems frozen, dust hangs in the air and light faintly shines through windows, cutting the space into perfect geometrical shapes.

The subjects that leave these spaces vacant are the people that Muhlstock honours in most of his oeuvre.[8] The void left by them in this series is far from neglectful; it is an homage to the people of Montreal: the workers, the beggars, the sick, the poor, the immigrants.

Blog post by Antonia Mappin-Kasirer, Research Fellow at the Museum of Jewish Montreal

Endnotes:

[1] Louis Muhlstock, interview with Monique Nadeau-Saumier recorded in his studio on St. Famille street, February 16^th 1985, in Monique Nadeau-Saumier, “Sous-sol au mannequin de tailleur: un tableau témoin d’un quartier et d’une époque de Louis Muhlstock”, Journal of Canadian Art History, Vol XXXIII:1, 128.

[2] Translated from French, Esther Trépanier, Peintres juifs de Montréal: témoins de leur époque, (Éditions de l’Homme: Québec), 68.

[3] Monique Nadeau-Saumier, “Sous-sol au mannequin de tailleur: un tableau témoin d’un quartier et d’une époque de Louis Muhlstock”, Journal of Canadian Art History, Vol XXXIII:1,

[4] Terry Copp, Classe ouvrière et pauvreté : Les conditions de vie des travailleurs montréalais, (Éditions Boréales Express : Québec), 77.

[5] Louis Muhlstock, interview by Charles Hill, Canadian Painting in the Thirties, National Gallery of Canada, September 15^th 1978, http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/servlet/imageserver?src=DO914-1000&ext=x.pdf, p. 25 .

[6] Gerald Tulchinsky, Branching Out : The Transformation of the Canadian Jewish Community, (Stoddart : North York, Ontario), 86.

[7] Alexandra Szacka, « Bases économiques et structure sociale 1931-1971 » in Anctil et Caldwell, Juifs et réalité juives au Québec, 126.

[8] See blog post Social Consciousness on the Canvas.

Jewish Montreal Painters of the Interwar Period

Struggles on and off the battlefield

Jewish Montreal painters of the interwar period grew up in the era of radical ideologies, war and unions. In their oeuvre, the hardships of the era are transposed to the canvas. In some, themes of battle are central, and in others, it is the socio-economical context of the war that prevails in representation.

Moe Reinblatt worked in his father’s embroidery business until the war, when he joined the Royal Canadian Airforce in 1942. Two years later he became a war artist, commissioned by the Canadian government “to record the history of Canada’s role in the present war” [trans.] [1].  Upon his return to Montreal from England, he studied art under Arthur Lismer at the Art Association of Montreal’s School of Art and Design.

Although Reinblatt was the only Jewish painter in Montreal in that time period that was officially a war artist, many of his peers engaged with themes of the war in their world. Harry Mayerovitch’s work Home Front (1940) presents a comprehensive critical overview of Canada’s situation during the Second World War. Different times and places collide: soldiers die at the European front while the portly bourgeois devours his steak, the concerned businessman observes the stock exchange fluctuations and a poet reads his work to friends at teatime. Simultaneously, Mayerovitch questions the role of the artist in this time of crisis. He depicts a man happily painting a glamorous nude woman, while a drooping-faced victim gazes back at the scene.

In 1940, Mayerovitch was hired by the Wartime Information Board to create posters that had the goal of encouraging the support of Canadians in the war effort. [2]

As one dives deeper into Montreal’s situation in the first half of the 20^th century, it is impossible to neglect the impact of the Jewish community on the industrial front. Louis Muhlstock, Ghitta Caiserman and other artists bear witness to this. In the interwar period, Jews were largely involved in manufacturing and were thus active in labour organizing and unionizing.

The dire working conditions contextualize the works of Alfred Pinsky and Ghitta Caiserman on the themes of strikes and unions. They speak of fraternity and resilience. Ghitta Caiserman inherited a socialist lookout on life from her parents. Her mother, Sarah Wittal, was active in the Labour Zionist Farband union. Her father, H. M. Caiserman, was a founder of the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society, an active member of the Labour Zionist movement as well as being a union leader for the Garment Workers of America. [3] Ghitta Caiserman herself worked in a cartridge factory and was involved in socialist organizations, and these values transposed to her canvases. [4] In Strike (1947), the workers are gathered at the right of the tightly cropped canvas and all glare in the same direction, understandably to the figure of power. The unequal composition paired with the bright and inorganic colours create tension and dynamism in the painting.

Alfred Pinsky, Ghitta Caiserman’s first husband, was born in Montreal but relocated to Halifax as a member of the Royal Canadian Airforce. Pinsky was active in Nova Scotia labour and union movements. [5] In Strike Room (1946) members of the United Textile Workers of America are involved in the Dominion Textile conflict in 1946.

The models and muses of Jewish Montreal painters in their depictions of the working class illustrate the struggles of the community as well as its strength. While Pinsky and Caiserman present focused and determined strikers, Louis Muhlstock paints the people in all their vulnerability. Muhlstock was one of the artists sent to document the impact of workers in munitions factories during the Second World War, alongside Fritz Brandtner and Fred Taylor. [6] He represents actions in manufacturing without erasing the people behind them. In W. Frédette, 16587 the viewer meets the fallen gaze of a tired, thin man whose welder’s mask and serial number identify him as a worker. However, Muhlstock humanizes the man behind the lifted mask by including his first name and creating a connection between the viewer and the subject’s emotionality that overpowers his role as a labourer.

Muhlstock explains his commitment to the people surrounding him as subjects: “[…] during the war, I spent several months in the shipyards drawing people at work. Riveters and chippers and crockers (sp?) and reamers, but it was people again. The effort, the atmosphere in a place like that; it was different.” [7] For Muhlstock, a different context for his subjects led to a new formalistic approach to painting. “One day, I understood that to paint them, I needed a completely different technique – also in my drawings and paintings of that period, the stroke is more abrupt, the light less delicate, the object more approximate and the colour, heavier and denser.“ [8]

Both Louis Muhlstock and Ghitta Caiserman commented on the diversity of people involved in factories and working for their country. Young Chinese Welder (1943) and Ouvrière de dos (1943) by Louis Muhlstock, as well as Effort de Guerre (1944) by Ghitta Caiserman, honour the involvement of immigrants and women in the war effort. [9] In Le départ (Mère envoyant son fils à la guerre) (1944), Caiserman illustrates a second kind of sacrifice made by Canadians in a time of war.

Jewish Painters in Montreal immortalized the commitment of the people on and off the battlefield. Sensitivity harvested in their hardships as immigrants or children of the latter translate to their canvases in engaged and engaging depictions of the struggle and determination of the working class. Harry Mayerovitch, Ghitta Caiserman, Alfred Pinsky and Louis Muhlstock honour all kinds of battles, in the spotlight or in the shadows.  

Blog post by Antonia Mappin-Kasirer, Research Fellow at the Museum of Jewish Montreal

Endnotes:

[1] Hélène Sicotte, Moe Reinblatt: The artist and his Work 1939-1979, (Université du Québec à Montréal), 35.

[2] Esther Trépanier, Peintres juifs de Montréal: témoins de leur époque, (Éditions de l’Homme: Québec), 136.

[3] “Ghitta Caiserman.” Museum of Jewish Montreal. http://imjm.ca/location/1396 (accessed August 2016).

[4] Esther Trépanier, Peintres juifs de Montréal: témoins de leur époque, (Éditions de l’Homme: Québec), 140.

[5] Sandra Paikowsky in Esther Trépanier, Peintres juifs de Montréal: témoins de leur époque, (Éditions de l’Homme: Québec), 266.

[6] Esther Trépanier, Peintres juifs de Montréal: témoins de leur époque, (Éditions de l’Homme: Québec), 136.

[7] Louis Muhlstock, interview by Charles Hill, Canadian Painting in the Thirties, National Gallery of Canada, September 15^th 1978, http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/servlet/imageserver?src=DO914-1000&ext=x.pdf, p. 24.

[8] Monique Nadeau-Saumier, Muhlstock : La matière d’une vie, (Musée du Québec, 1995), 30, 31.

[9] Esther Trépanier, Peintres juifs de Montréal: témoins de leur époque, (Éditions de l’Homme: Québec), 136-140.

Jewish Montreal Painters of the Interwar Period

Social consciousness on the canvas

In a time where French Canadian art was centered on religion and the countryside, and the Group of Seven and their followers concentrated on the depiction of the wilderness, Canadian Jewish painters were addressing topics of their own reality as working class immigrants.

Jewish Montreal painters of the interwar period played a vital role in directing Quebec art towards contemporary subjects and modernity through their humanism and sensibility, furthering themselves from values of the terroir. [1] Their subjects were part of their own environment – factory workers, the unemployed, the sick and fellow immigrants – showcasing on their canvases a sense of social consciousness of the dire living and working conditions in Montreal in the first half of the twentieth century.

Artist Louis Muhlstock was born in 1904 in Narajow, Galicia, and moved to Montreal with his family in 1911. Muhlstock worked as a bookkeeper at a fruits and vegetable vendor and acquired an artistic education by taking art classes at night. He eventually put enough savings aside to leave for Paris to study under Louis-François Biloul in 1929. Two years later, he returned to his sick mother only to find himself in a Montreal in economic crisis. There, he found his models for his sensitive and engaged depiction of the human condition of the time and place. [2] He reacquainted himself with his new home of Montreal by playing with colours and shapes of his everyday life, with the familiar backdrop of misery. Mulhstock drew Paranka, a young emaciated patient of a Montreal hospital, painted Evelyn Pleasant, a young black Canadian neighbour, Jos Lavallée and William O’Brian, beggars. He illustrated people emblematic of the difficult socio-economic situation all the while honoring their individuality. The figures, often bitter or sad, are never portrayed without Muhlstock’s tenderness, compassion and deep humanity.  

If for some artists representing the poverty of their adoptive neighborhoods was a political act, for Muhlstock it was more of an emotional response to his environment. In a 1973 interview with Charles Hill from the National Gallery he explained:

“It was only my feeling for people because I used to go down to spend time in the clinics and hospitals. Just sit around and look at people and sort of steal a few notes while they’re not aware of being looked at.”[3]

Socialist periodicals reproduced Muhlstock’s drawings regularly. As art historian Esther Trépanier eloquently writes, the artist “sacralise[d], so to speak, the misery of soup lines and shelters for the homeless”[4] in Last Supper at Refuge for Unemployed, a reference to Leonardo Da Vinci’s depiction of the final meal Jesus shared with his apostles before his crucifixion. By commenting on the condition of the city and its inhabitants during the interwar period, Montreal Jewish artists “st[ood] for the humanistic viewpoint that the artist is the conscience of mankind,” in the words of the artist Harry Mayerovitch on Ersnt Newmann.[5]

The artist Ernst Neumann was born in Budapest of Austrian parents in 1907. In 1912 the family left Europe and settled in Montreal, where Neumann studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Royal Canadian Academy.[6] He is known in particular for transposing the victims of the Depression from the streets to the canvas. Immortalizing the misery of his companions with compassion and solidarity, his work had a focus on the urban landscape of Montreal and street life. Neumann was also briefly a court reporter, which translated into the subject of some of his prints.

Works of Ersnt Newmann’s Unemployed series of lithographs were reproduced in the Montreal Star, the New Frontier, a communist periodical, as well as on the cover of a government publication on the issue of homelessness.

Montreal Jewish painters were often no strangers to the situation they were depicting. In these years of depression, most of them were not only compassionate towards their subjects, but were united by the same living conditions. Muhlstock remembers:

“I couldn’t afford canvas nor paint. I’ll show you drawings […] on paper that we used to get for free, the kraft wrapping paper. We used to draw on that paper.[7] […] I would pick up people in the street and get them to sit for me, and didn’t have to pay very much at the time. They were happy to have a room to come into and sit and be warm, and then often we’d prepare a bowl of soup.”[8]

Artists before and after Muhlstock and Neumann often shared these social preoccupations and engagement. With the advent of the Second World War, Jewish Montreal artists continued to express their engagement with the current events through their art. Harry Mayerovitch was at the head of the artistic section for the War Time Information Board in 1940, producing many war posters. In 1941 he participated in the Kingston conference, where Canadian artists met to discuss the role of the artist in society, this question being ultimately pressing in the time of war. In his work Home Front, inspired by Mexican muralists with whom the artist studied in Mexico, he denounces at once the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie and the horrors of the war, all the while questioning the place of the artist in a context of worldwide crisis.

The artist Moe Reinblatt, whose parents had emigrated from Russia, was part of the group of Jewish Montreal artists born in Canada. He worked in his father’s embroidery business until the war, when he joined the Royal Canadian Airforce in 1942. Two years later he became a war artist, commissioned by the Canadian government “to record the history of Canada’s role in the present war” [trans.].[9]  Upon his return to Montreal from England, he studied art under Arthur Lismer at the Art Association of Montreal’s School of Art and Design.

Moe Reinblatt wrote: “if the art truly expresses a value which is common to the community, I think it can be said to be social, because it […] expresses for that group a truth in their lives.”[10] Though his earlier engravings are not explicitly political, he does incorporate an element of awareness in his depiction of beggars, the sick and marginalized people.

The commonality uniting these artists goes further than their shared religion or background. Unlike their counterparts, Montreal Jewish painters, newly Canadian, were not bound to the tradition of Canadian nationalism in art, and were rather united by turning towards modern life as the subject of their work. With this, they became bearers of modernity in art, depicting their city and modern life in their work, and reflecting consciously on the human condition.

Blog post by Antonia Mappin-Kasirer, Research Fellow at the Museum of Jewish Montreal

Endnotes:

[1] Trépanier

[2] Monique Nadeau-Saumier, Muhlstock : La matière d’une vie, (Musée du Québec, 1995), 10.

[3] Louis Muhlstock, interview by Charles Hill, Canadian Painting in the Thirties, National Gallery of Canada, September 15^th 1978, http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/servlet/imageserver?src=DO914-1000&ext=x.pdf, p. 24 .

[4] Esther Trépanier, Peintres juifs de Montréal: témoins de leur époque, (Éditions de l’Homme: Québec),46.

[5] Esther Trépanier, Peintres juifs et modernité, (Saidye Bronfman centre : Montréal), 49.

[6] “Ernst Neumann”, Library and Archives Canada, accessed July 21^st 2016, http://collectionscanada.gc.ca/pam_archives/index.php?fuseaction=genitem.displayItem&lang=eng&rec_nbr=101893&rec_nbr_list=3028626,101893,2935528,1805654,2996882,3028622,3636190,3636191,3636189,3636188.

[7] Louis Muhlstock, interview by Charles Hill, Canadian Painting in the Thirties, National Gallery of Canada, September 15^th 1978, http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/servlet/imageserver?src=DO914-1000&ext=x.pdf, p. 10.

[8] Louis Muhlstock, interview by Charles Hill, Canadian Painting in the Thirties, National Gallery of Canada, September 15^th 1978, http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/servlet/imageserver?src=DO914-1000&ext=x.pdf, p. 19 .

[9] Annual Report of the National Gallery of Canada 1944-1945 cited in Hélène Sicotte, Moe Reinblatt, (Université du Québec à Montréal), 16.

[10] Handwritten text, undated, unpublished, personal archives of Lilian Reinblatt in Hélène Sicotte, Moe Reinblatt, (Université du Québec à Montréal), 35.

Bibliography:

Esther Trépanier, Peintres juifs de Montréal: témoins de leur époque, (Éditions de l’Homme: Québec), 44, 46.

Monique Nadeau-Saumier, Muhlstock : La matière d’une vie, (Musée du Québec, 1995), 10.

 Louis Muhlstock, interview by Charles Hill, Canadian Painting in the Thirties, National Gallery of Canada, September 15^th 1978, http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/servlet/imageserver?src=DO914-1000&ext=x.pdf, p. 24.

 Esther Trépanier, Peintres juifs et modernité, (Saidye Bronfman centre : Montréal), 49.

 “Ernst Neumann”, Library and Archives Canada, accessed July 21^st 2016, http://collectionscanada.gc.ca/pam_archives/index.php?fuseaction=genitem.displayItem&lang=eng&rec_nbr=101893&rec_nbr_list=3028626,101893,2935528,1805654,2996882,3028622,3636190,3636191,3636189,3636188.

 Louis Muhlstock, interview by Charles Hill, Canadian Painting in the Thirties, National Gallery of Canada, September 15^th 1978, http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/servlet/imageserver?src=DO914-1000&ext=x.pdf, p. 10, 19.

Handwritten text, undated, unpublished, personal archives of Lilian Reinblatt in Hélène Sicotte, Moe Reinblatt, (Université du Québec à Montréal), 35.

Jewish Montreal Painters of the Interwar Period

Introduction to the Blog Post Series

From the turn of the century through the 1940s, Canadian art expressed different strands of nationalism within the country’s cultural life. The modernism of the Group of Seven and their followers offered a post-impressionistic interpretation of the Canadian landscape and wilderness, often depicted as an idealized version of nature at the core of the young country’s untamed national ethos. On the other hand, a traditionalist view of French Canadian rural life dominated art of the period in Quebec, where many artists painted small town and religious scenes that idealized French Canada’s national ethos. Standing somewhat outside these two strands was an emergent urban art associated closely with working class life in Montreal.  There, a handful of Jewish artists played a decisive role in defining a distinct approach to Canadian painting. Often first or second generation immigrants from Eastern Europe themselves, these “new Canadian” painters helped define modern art in Montreal by straying from the two dominant strands of cultural nationalism and devoting themselves instead to painting the urban landscape and the conditions faced by immigrants in a new and foreign country.

This series of blog posts will explore the works of Jewish Montreal painters between the 1930s and 1950s and their depiction of the working class – a world in which they themselves were often immersed.

“These subjects were all in Montreal… They included people and the streets and lanes of Montreal, the slum parts of the city, around the harbour and then Mount-Royal, these were the areas that I frequented.” -Louis Muhlstock

Blog post by Antonia Mappin-Kasirer, Research Fellow at the Museum of Jewish Montreal

Segmentation versus Sedimentation: Grappling with Cultural Intersections in Literature, Media, and Personal and Community Fabrics

For the fourth part of the Museum of Jewish Montreal Blog Series, Sedimentation vs. Segmentation, I had the opportunity to interview Tracey Deer and Cynthia Knight, the executive producers of Mohawk Girls, which is airing its third season on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. Mohawk Girls was first introduced to me through an article in The Canadian Jewish News, referring to an intercultural relationship in the show between a Mohawk woman and a Jewish man in Montreal. I was immediately intrigued, and ended up binge watching the series, which is something like a Native Sex in the City. In addition to being extremely funny and relatable (the trials of love and belonging in Montreal anyone?), it also introduced me in an authentic way to Mohawk culture. Tracey was raised Mohawk while Cynthia was raised Jewish, and both women bring their respective heritage and passion for interculturalism to the show, enabling it to express so much of Mohawk cultural life while also underscoring the commonality between minorities in a multicultural society. 

MJM: I love Mohawk Girls for its drama and the cultural themes explored. For people who have never watched the show, can you tell me a little about the premise and your roles in its production?

Cynthia Knight: We are both Executive Producers, and Tracey is the sole Director, and I’m the Head Writer. The premise is a show about four young aboriginal women who are trying to figure out who they are, where they belong, how much they need to stay true to their culture, and how they can forge their own paths.

MJM: How did you both get involved in TV production? How did your collaboration with Mohawk Girls come about?

Tracey Deer: I wanted to be a filmmaker since I was twelve years old, and have been looking at the world through a camera lens since. I was in documentary for twelve years, and my last documentary, Club Native deals with all the topics that are found in Mohawk Girls. After I finished this documentary, I hit a wall in terms of coming up with another nonfiction film, and I was quite obsessed back then too, because these were real people I was telling the story of, and I wanted to do them justice. I had started reading my jot-notes that I wrote as a twenty-something Mohawk girl of all the crazy stuff that happened to my cousins, friends and myself and thought, ‘oh my God, this is a TV show’. So I went back to these notes and wrote, produced and directed my first fiction film, Escape Hatch, and this was the initial seed of Mohawk Girls. I showed that film to Resolution Pictures, and they loved it, and went to the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. APTN agreed, and asked for a pilot, and that is when I called up my dear collaborator, genius, goddess and friend Cynthia Knight, and this is how Mohawk Girls began.

Cynthia Knight: My aunt was a part of the NFB and she would cast me in movies when I was little, so I had an early love for filmmaking. I acted and worked for fifteen years in production, but eventually I wanted to tell stories. I went to the Canadian Film Centre TV Writing Program and when I finished, I worked in development for Fuse, a Montreal production company. During this time, I heard about Tracey through an editor friend of ours and I also read in an article in Playback about her, one of those “Top Ten to Watch”. In that article there was a blurb about how she was developing a fiction project that was like Sex in the City on a Reserve, and I immediately pictured the comedy and the drama. It seemed like the kind of story that I would like to tell, things that are bittersweet and resonate. As a non-Native, being Jewish, I felt that I could definitely relate to some of these issues. All in all, it was a couple years that we heard about each other before we finally met and clicked. We ended up working on a short film together for the NFB and so that was sort of the genesis for this all. Anything in our field is a super long process; it takes years for things to develop, years to forge relationships, we were colleagues first and then friendship came.

MJM: You’ve both mentioned your heritages a little bit. Can you tell me how much you bring from your heritage, either Mohawk or Jewish, to Mohawk Girls and other projects that you’ve worked on? 

Tracey Deer: I always introduce myself and define myself as a Mohawk filmmaker, and my whole career until this time has been focused all on Aboriginal issues. However, even if I were to do projects that had nothing to do with Aboriginal people, I think that I became a filmmaker because of my culture. So I define myself as a Mohawk filmmaker, because it does inform who I am as a person and who I am as a director. In this project in particular, as it is about Mohawk girls, and I’m Mohawk, my heritage plays a huge role. Many scenes in the show are from real things that have happened in my community, pulled from stories I’ve witnessed or that people have told me. It’s very authentic and stems from real life.

Cynthia Knight: Tracey and I come from very different backgrounds, but one of the things we immediately realized is how many themes are universal, and one of the things we try to do with the show is portray all that is relatable, both as a woman and as a minority. So I think we make it as world-specific as possible yet also as universal as possible. Deciding to stay within your own to keep up the bloodline or falling in love with someone of another culture, these are themes that so many people can relate to. We want everything that we produce to be true to a Native audience but also resonate with non-Native audiences grappling with similar things. And I think even for non-minorities, the pressure in your twenties of trying to navigate your dreams within the pressures of your parents or society is very relatable. So the show speaks to women of all colours.

MJM: Going off of the idea of the pressures one might feel as a minority to stay within your ethnicity or choose to extend beyond it, how much is Mohawk Girls about intercultural relationships or intercultural conflicts?

 Cynthia Knight: We definitely explore intercultural interactions a lot on the show. Our character Bailey for example went on a bit of a spree of dating non-Native men, an Indian guy and a Jewish guy which was very fun to write [laughs]. So we got to explore in a light way the different levels of predispositions Native people and non-Native people have towards each other. In a sense we want to show the absurdity of us all in being racist against each other. There is also the pressure within the community of blood purity, and this is definitely one of those questions that Tracey and I have grappled with in our own lives as belonging to small minorities. How do you meet that great guy who fulfills you and is also part of your heritage? Should you date someone who isn’t part of your heritage? So we explore this theme a lot in the show.

MJM: It’s amazing to see you both exploring these intercultural themes in a really personal way through the relationships on the show. Moving back to the title of the show, what type of image are you crafting for a “Mohawk Girl”? How might she transgress the stereotypes of Native women and Native life? 

Tracey Deer: I hope that the vision we are putting out for a Mohawk girl is that she is complex and multilayered, and just like any other girl. I think this is a big deal because what I grew up with is a portrayal of Aboriginal people that is very one-dimensional and very negative. Its because of the limited exposure of Aboriginal people, so for me, the hope is that people watch this show and realize how similar we are all.

Cynthia Knight: I think we have so often seen Native people depicted in very heavy and dire stories. I don’t think I’ve ever really seen a three-dimensional portrayal of a Native woman, and certainly not in an upbeat way. Something I’ve learned over these years through Tracey, which I find in my own culture, is the incredible sense of humour of her people. I think this comes through dealing with hardships. The main thing is definitely what Tracey said: they are an incredible and vibrant people, and they are just like us.

MJM: Well it’s really awesome that you can convey some of this humour within the community in your show. To wrap up, where do you think that Indigenous-themed television is going? Do you think that there is an effort to portray a particularly Aboriginal narrative or move towards hybridity and interculturalism?

Tracey Deer: I think it’s both of those things, based on the work that my Aboriginal colleagues have been putting out in recent years. I have people ask me “what is Indigenous storytelling about”, and I reply that it is constantly evolving. [Indigenous media] is like twenty years old right now, so our growth as an industry and as storytellers is exponential. The fusion of all of these influences- Native people coming from a reserve and the voices of Native people growing up in a city- is huge and inspiring. When I was a young girl, we weren’t represented anywhere really, and now we are represented everywhere. I’m really proud to be a part of that, and for our young people to turn on the radio or the TV and have the opportunity to see and hear themselves. I’m so happy for this, and that the country has shifted in this way.

Cynthia Knight: As a burgeoning field, it is so inspiring to see the incredible growth. We celebrate a lot of that in Mohawk Girls.

Interview has been edited and condensed.

Blog post by Keah Hansen, Research Fellow at the Museum of Jewish Montreal

Segmentation versus Sedimentation: Grappling with Cultural Intersections in Literature, Media, and Personal and Community Fabrics

Throwing Punches in Fletcher’s Field High: Mordecai Richler and his Intercultural Brand of Humour

When I think of a “Canadian” brand of writing, I immediately recall the Confederation poets whom I studied in a Canadian literature course in university. This group of poets shied both thematically and figuratively from the exuberance of the British Romantics, and from the originality of the American Transcendentalists. They instead harnessed the beauty of the Canadian landscape in a subdued and reflective tone; distinctly (and perhaps defensively) Canadian in its quiet dignity. In contrast, the Canadian author we are exploring in this week’s segment of “Sedimentation vs. Segmentation” shot a penetrating gaze over the peopled and political landscape of Canada and his hometown of Montreal, and chose instead to reach outside himself and pepper everyone else – French-Canadians, Anglos, and Jews alike – with taunts and tricks, like some indiscriminating bully in the schoolyard of Fletchers’ Field High. This “bully” is Mordecai Richler, and today, we will consider the ways in which his satire might in fact be intercultural and hybrid, remedying any sort of superiority complex by leaving no egos un-bruised. In this way, Richler manages to use levity as some sort of mediating force to deflate equally the self-aggrandizing tendencies of the various ethnicities of Montreal, Quebec, and Canada at large.

Ulrike Erichsen, in his essay “Smiling in the Face of Adversity” in Cheeky Fictions: How to Use Humour to Defuse Cultural Conflict, synthesizes and presents theories on the employment of humour in a postcolonial setting. Humour is attained either in a comic situation 1) when someone feels superior to someone else and is laughing at their expense, 2) when the recipient of the comic stimulus in turn uses comedy to gain some sort of psychological release and regain balance, or 3) by focusing on the structural principle of the comic situation and using comedy to understand the incongruity between these self-consistent but dissimilar frames of reference (Erichsen, 28). I would argue that Mordecai, in his omniscient-attitude and pundit-status on the titillations of Montrealers, Quebecers and Canadians at large, embodies this latter form of humour. His nuanced and perhaps more cognitive comedy can allow for empathy, and have a productive function in remedying social conflict. As Erichsen writes:

“Many cultural conflicts stem from differences in cultural values and norms, or are related to superiority/inferiority problems, real or assumed. In such cases, humour can have a socially regulatory function, providing an outlet for criticism without aggravating the initial conflict. In addition, as far as the reader-text interaction is concerned, humour can be used to highlight a doubly-coded situation. It can function as a means to alert the reader to cultural barriers that need to be overcome in order to fully understand the text, and thus can encourage intercultural communication and understanding” (30).

Thus, humorous writing of this vein strives for cohesion by exposing the pluralities that co-exist within a setting, like jostled and vibrant gumballs in a gumball machine. All bear a saccharine coating of pride, washed over with colourful cultural dye and arbitrarily preferred by some child. Richler, in his enduring mischievousness, spends his entire allowance on these gumballs, blowing and popping endless bubbles to the hilarity of his comrades. The colour preference is still considered, but transgressed in the spectacle of it all, and there is a dubious faith held in Mordecai to maintain his subversive act.

Quantifying Richler’s works in terms of their cultural jabs would be challenging to even the most ardent scholar of his texts, but I think that a perfect microcosmic example- the ideal gumball- lies in chapter nine of his 1992 satirical book, Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!.  The book was extremely contentious in Quebec at its publication, incensing French Canadians in particular. Its narrative galumphs across Quebec’s regions and decades of the 20^th century, to critique the stiffening French-language laws in Quebec, the desire for sovereignty of certain Quebecers, and the general sense of insularity coursing so vitally in the lifeblood of Montrealers and Quebecers, regardless of heritage. Richler opens his novel by juxtaposing Quebecois belief within the larger framework of Canadian “mythology” as backwards, and writes that while Westmount was once considered the epicentre of Canada, French Canadians are disillusioned enough to continue in this belief. This initial scathing comment tints the following satirical landscape of Mordecai’s Montreal with the glint of gold-shaded sharpie. We see the gilded lettering but also read between the lines to critique Montreal’s self-absorption within an evolving Canada. Richler then offers anthropological commentary of the various subgroups of Montreal, taking jocular jabs at Anglophones, French Canadians and Jews alike, reducing each to primitive caricatures who submit ignorantly to their own impulses. By somewhat favouring his own, “when thousands of flag-waving nationalists march through the streets roaring ‘Le Québec aux Québécois!’ they do not have in mind anybody named Ginsburg. Or MacGregor, come to think of it” (77), Richler reveals his own desire to placate Quebec within Canada, and mediate perhaps the existence of Jews within Montreal. 

Richler also expands his literary horizons to consider the centres and peripheries within Canada, demoralizing settler societies while also satirizing the entire system to the effect of almost producing an allegory. Heinz Antor’s essay, “Postcolonial Laughter in Canada” in CheekyFictions, speaks explicitly of Richler’s postcolonial comedic themes in his 1963 novel The Incomparable Atuk, published almost a century after Confederation. Antor writes that “like many other books of the period, it is concerned with a Canadian self as well as with that self’s relations with others” (92). This tendency for social awareness contrasts with the unifying themes of the Confederation poets through either their outward focus on the Great Canadian Landscape, or on their inner, sentimental thoughts, thus ignoring the tribulations of Canadians standing beside them. Instead, Richler establishes the multicultural landscape of Canada by othering a major urban hub, Toronto, in the eyes of an indigenous man, Atuk. Atuk, though initially duped and taken economic advantage of by white men in Toronto, later adopts similar practices to exploit his Inuit family. Capitalism is thus shown to be the true antagonist and culprit in the process of altering one’s morality, or in the case of Atuk, one’s romanticized morality. This tactic allows the reader to critique the systemic racism toward indigenous people yet also offers comic release in exposing the gradations of evil within everyone.

Literary critics have also considered Richler’s attempts, comedic or not, to find similarities between cultures. Gerald Lynch, in his essay “Satiric Lament for a City: Mordecai Richler’s Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!, Bill 101 and Montreal”, writes that Mordecai makes a tenuous analogy in the final chapter of Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! when he compares an independent Quebec to Ireland:

“I have no doubt that a combination of Francophone ingenuity and imagination could make Quebec a viable little country. Its citizens would find it a decent place to live, provided they were French-speaking. But, without the rest of Canada acting as an increasingly bilingual buffer, it would become even more isolated from the North American mainstream, its standard of living diminished. Eventually, I suspect, it would revert to being a folkloric society. A place that people come from. Ireland without that country’s genius” (Mordecai, 243).

Lynch says that his analogy is suspect because “apparent similarities need to cover up for major differences”. I think that the concepts of extension and empathy necessary for a successful analogy relay back to Richler’s comedic craftsmanship. His humour is viable because it is daring enough to find common comedic ground between different Quebecois and Canadian cultures, and is pragmatic in this endeavour. Since his passing in 2001, Montreal’s abundant writers, scholars and visionaries have done unto Richler what he had done for Montreal and Quebec, by writing bibliographies and essays and leading walking tours through his childhood haunts. With this plurality of cultural offshoots, Richler’s dream for tolerance might be progressing towards realization in a very real way. Richler himself has become a myth, which through his audaciously expansive wit, offers numerous access points for reinterpretation today.

The final metaphor I can think of for the myth of the man is the dilapidated gazebo bearing Mordecai’s name, sitting at the base of Mont Royal, which can be seen as a begrudging acknowledgement for his accomplishments. Journalist Bill Brownstein has been chronicling its refurbishment and re-branding, calling it a “farcical saga”, and backhandedly praising Richler as “one of this country’s greatest writers, albeit one of its most irascible, thus explaining why a gazebo and not a street or park was chosen to honour him”. Despite the delays in construction however, I’ve noticed that the gazebo is finally on the mend, with the municipality and province reaching agreements on the heritage-related details. The gazebo and its absurd suspensions have come to represent a levity-infused point of convergence much like neighbouring Tam-Tams. And just like Mordecai’s works, I can only hope that his gazebo might come to act as a platform to pay and perform homage to Montreal’s endless narratives- sheltering a belief in multiculturalism, alongside graffiti and a few pigeons.

Blog post by Keah Hansen, Research Fellow at the Museum of Jewish Montreal

Works Cited

Antor, Heinz. “Postcolonial Laughter in Canada: Mordecai Richler’s The Incomparable Atuk. Cheeky Fictions. Amsterdam, NL: Rodopi, 2005. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 1 August 2016.

Brownstein, Bill. “Plan for Richler Gazebo keeps crumbling”. Montreal: Montreal Gazette, September. Web. 1 August 2016.

Erichsen, Ulrike. “Smiling in the Face of Adversity”. Cheeky Fictions. Amsterdam, NL: Rodopi, 2005. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 1 August 2016.

Lynch, Gerald. “Satiric Lament for a City: Mordecai Richler’s Oh Canada Oh Quebec, Bill 101 and Montreal”. British Journal of Canadian Studies (24:1) 2011, 49-67. 113.

Richler, Mordecai. Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!.Toronto: Penguin Books, 1992. Print.

Segmentation versus Sedimentation: Grappling with Cultural Intersections in Literature, Media, and Personal and Community Fabrics

For the second installment of our series “Segmentation versus Sedimentation: Grappling with Cultural Intersections in Literature, Media, and Personal and Community Fabrics”, we interviewed Sigal Samuel, author of the critically acclaimed novel The Mystics of the Mile End. Sigal’s debut novel ambitiously tackles themes of growing and shaping identity alongside and in opposition to heritage and environment, as recounted through the experiences of a dysfunctional Jewish family living in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood. In our discussion, Sigal and I chatted about developing selfhood, and the forms of hybridity that she and her characters experienced through growing up in Montreal.

MJM: Your novel is set in Montreal, and sets forth multiplicities of Jewishness that interact with each other, as well as with other Montreal cultural archetypes. How does this draw from your own experiences of being raised in Montreal?

Sigal Samuel: When I was very young, I didn’t have access to the multicultural Montreal; I was actually raised in the orthodox suburb of Cote St. Luc, which is so insularly Jewish that people nickname it “Cote St. Jew”. In my teenage years, I began hanging out in Mile End, which I was charmed by and drawn to, because it was just starting to have that mystique as the artist enclave. I loved walking the streets and listening to the languages that could be heard- Portuguese, Italian, Yiddish and French- and felt inspired by that hybridity and multiplicity.

MJM: Tell us a little about the cultures in your novel and how they interact on the street level and within the psyches of your characters. Do they tend to merge or stand apart?

Sigal Samuel: My novel takes place in the Mile End, and the main characters are part of the Meyer family: David the father, and his two children Samara and Lev. All the characters, especially this family, are very much on the margins [of their cultures]- neither insiders nor outsiders. For example, David, a secular and atheist professor at McGill University, just had a heart attack and is beginning to believe that his heart murmur is God speaking to him through his heart. He comes to be in a strange position where he once derided his Hasidic neighbours, but is now in a liminal space where he is thinking that there is something he missed all these years and starting to share a little bit of that faith with them. He also has a secret romantic relationship with his grad student, Valerie, who comes from a Quebecois Catholic background, and I very much wanted to have that, it would seem absurd to write a book set in Montreal and not have any Quebecois characters. So through this relation, I wanted to show one way in which David thinks that he is multicultural. Then there is Mr. Katz, who is part of the Hasidic community, although the Hasidic community also thinks of him as somewhat an outsider, as he is sort of crazy and is building a mystical Tree of Life on his front yard. So it’s a novel about characters that are neither here nor there, with a tendency of hybrid relationships being formed between people outside their pre-assigned social boundaries. The characters are trying to push the boundaries of their own neighbours, and figure themselves out through their identities, to good or bad effect.

MJM: Your novel focuses on a mystic faction of Judaism; Hasidism. What is your heritage, and why did you decide to focus on portraying Hasidism?

Sigal Samuel: My personal family background is not Hasidic. I grew up Orthodox but moved away from this as I got older. I also grew up with the Hasidic community all around me and my father was a professor of Jewish mysticism at Concordia, so he taught me Kabbalah at a very young age. There were a lot of these Kabbalistic ideas that get developed in the Hasidic movement, so even though I didn’t grow up in that community socially, I feel that I grew up in that community intellectually.

MJM: Is understanding heritage more important to some characters than others? If so, who, and why?

Sigal Samuel: I think that understanding heritage probably becomes most important to the two young people in the novel; Lev and Samara. We meet Lev when he is 11 years old. His mother died when he was very little, and he is at a loss to figure out the more mysterious things going on in his life. He knows that his mother used to be very religious but there was a falling out of religion between his parents. As he grows older with the influences of his Hasidic and Orthodox neighbours, he tries to become more religious, and is focused on heritage in that sense. For Samara as she grows older and attends McGill, she becomes obsessed with what her father is up to, and has an inkling that he is adopting a mystical Kabbalistic vein. So heritage for the characters is tied to their personal familial relationships.

MJM: Do you think there are any motifs or metaphors in the novel or your life that speak to the array of ethnicities in Montreal and how they interact with each other?

Sigal Samuel: That is a question that I think if I gave it a lot of thought, I would come up with a lot of things, but I’ll list two off the top of my head. First of all, Mile End in the novel functions almost as a metaphor. Choosing to base the novel in the Mile End does half the work of plot for me, because [the neighbourhood] is so inherently about being on the margins, almost functioning as the centre of a Venn diagram of multiple ethnicities overlapping in one space. Setting the book there forces the main characters to shape their own identities with the help of, or in contrast to the other identities around them. The other thing that comes to mind is the Mountain, and the Sunday ritual of Tam Tams that draws all sorts of people to the mountain. I write about this a few times in the novel for me it is so entirely Montreal, in drawing different people together while simultaneously being separate.

MJM: Did writing the novel illuminate anything about your own identity and the various labels you have assumed?

Sigal Samuel: One thing I really had to think through when writing this book, was that because I had chosen the setting of the Hasidic Mile End, it made sense for most of the Jewish characters to be Ashkenazi. My family is Mizrahi, we are from India, Iraq and Morocco, so I had to think through the question of writing Jewish characters who are in some ways like me, but also different. This felt very natural to me because I grew up in an Ashkenazi dominated environment, but I definitely went through a process of not wanting to write a novel that was too definitively Ashkenazi, to contradict a sentiment of minority members of the Jewish community who feel that they aren’t represented in literature. I actually purposely chose an ambiguous Jewish surname because I didn’t want to exclude any Jewish readers if I didn’t have to. I also think that when I was young, I didn’t really realize that I had been mapped as different in the Ashkenazi-dominated community I was raised in, in my family’s customs, and I think this is one way that I really relate to my characters, in being both an insider and an outsider.

MJM: Do you think that personal labels are consciously chosen or assigned? If chosen, do you think that any of your characters focus precociously in curating these labels?

Sigal Samuel: There is a lot of snobbishness in the book and in the characters. David, for example, is often mocking all the hipsters in the Mile End and defining himself against them. He also demarcates his students as either aspiring professors or aspiring saints [laughs]. In contrast, his daughter Samara defines herself both as feminist and as queer. She never explicitly says that, but I think it is because it is so obvious and innate to her identity. Then for Lev as he gets older and grows more religious, it is purposely ambiguous if he is following Hasidism or Orthodoxy, because his religious identity is fluid enough, and it is part of his character to float between worlds. So I think that [the relationship to] a personal label varies very much depending on the psychologies of the characters.

MJM: Overall, what are you hoping to convey in the cultural and spiritual wanderings of your characters? Do you think this is universal or specific to Montreal?

Sigal Samuel: I definitely think that it is universal. [My novel] is basically a universal story about what happens when we become obsessed with a religious idea. It is a theme that has been explored in other novels that are not Montreal nor Jewish based. It’s funny because I feel that in some senses, the book is so Montreal, and that Montreal and the Mile End almost becomes a character in the book. But to me this is not a contradiction, because I think that the only way to get at the universal is through the particular. If you try to set out to write a book that is universal, you aren’t going to get at something relatable or believable. [A writer] needs to have the guts to pick out the particulars and trust that human beings will relate to it because there are specific idiosyncrasies that cater to some idea of the universal.

MJM: You now reside in Brooklyn, New York. How does it compare to Montreal in its embodiment of cultures?

Sigal Samuel: I think that part of the reason I live in Brooklyn is because it is the closest thing I can find there to remind me of Montreal. In my neighbourhood I almost feel that I am in Montreal, the streets have similar charm, and I love that there are almost uncountable cultures. I am also surrounded by a parallel muddle of hipsters and Hasidic Jews that are encountered in the Mile End, particularly in Williamsburg. But I like to think that the Mile End is what Williamsburg was 10 years ago, and that so far, there is less obnoxious gentrification [laughs].

MJM: What are you working on now?

Sigal Samuel: So many things [laughs]. I’m currently working on a children’s book called Infinity Hotel that is about a kid who goes into a hotel that looks normal from the outside, has an infinite number of rooms and guests on the inside. I’m also toying with another idea for a novel, set in the Jewish community in Mumbai, which is where my family is from.

MJM: Lastly, New York or Montreal bagels? 

Sigal Samuel: Of course Montreal bagels, and if I may be so bold and risk making a few enemies, I’ll say St. Viateur [laughs].

Learn more about Sigal, and find out how to purchase The Mystics of the Mile End at http://sigalsamuel.com.

Blog post by Keah Hansen, Research Fellow at the Museum of Jewish Montreal

Segmentation vs. Sedimentation: Grappling with Cultural Intersections in Literature, Media, and Personal and Community Fabrics

Welcome to the Museum of Jewish Montreal’s new blog series, Segmentation vs. Sedimentation: Grappling with Intersections in Literature, Media, and Personal and Community Fabrics. This blog will seek to explore cultural intersections and grapple audaciously with the hybrid identity implicit in being part of the Jewish diaspora, honing in on the experiences of Jewish-Montrealers. As the blog and Museum sprouts upwards and outwards, I hope to explore inter-cultural media and literature, the merging of different diasporas, and personal ruminations and reflections on assuming a Jewish identity and relating this to other personal labels. I’m inviting you to join me in this broad and bold discussion on conceptualizing sedimentation and segmentation in Montreal. How does one transgress or expose ethnic rifts within oneself, one’s culture and amongst a multicultural community?

We are opening this series by considering the paradoxical literary legacy of Abraham Moses Klein, about whom it was said, “knows the Talmudic sages great and small as he knows the men and women on Saint Lawrence Street in Montreal, and into his English poetic style, even to the wild wit and sparkle of his rhymes, he has transfused their ardours, their dreams, their exquisite goodness, their storming of the very courts of God” (Ludwig Larson, Hath Not A Jew). Klein was one of the first Jewish-Montreal authors to diverge from writing in the Yiddish language to write instead in English, and likewise through his career wrestled with extending the experiences of the Jewish diaspora to other ethnic minorities in Montreal. Through his extensive literary career, he ruptured out of his hermetic Jewish cocoon (from the allusion-filled writings of Hath Not a Jew) to seek parallels within the French-Canadian and Jewish-Canadian communities in the post-war period (with Rocking Chair and Other Poems). We will contemplate his poetry as a nuanced foray into Klein’s personal understanding of his Jewish identity, and possibly glean insight into larger conversations of the period on the significance of being Jewish in Montreal.

Klein was born in the Ukraine in 1909, and throughout his career as a writer in Montreal he mused on the extent of his rootedness, as was common for those of the diaspora. His cultural wanderings commenced by graduating from academic institutions grounded in both official languages of Canada, that is, at McGill and then the Université de Montréal. In 1934, he became the national president of a Zionist organization, the Canadian Young Judea. Klein later moved to Rouyn, a small mining town in northern Quebec, to establish a law office, before returning to Montreal in 1938 to work as an editor for the Canadian Jewish Chronicle, and to publish his poetry.  

Klein’s writings reveal the near mania that Edward Said spoke of in his lecture “Representations of the Intellectual”, namely, that the impetus for comparison is a reflection of the experience of the diaspora, seeing oneself in a constant state of alterity, stated by Said as “a double perspective that never sees things in isolation” (Magid 202). Gabi Gabriel Sheffer discusses this sense of otherness in her essay “Is the Jewish Diaspora Unique” and states that “culturally, socially and instrumentally committed diasporans tend to minimize their entities’ similarities to other ethno-national diasporas residing in the same, or in other host countries” and then relates this to the Jewish ethnicity as self-labelled “chosen people” (Sheffer 3). She furthers that this sense of solidarity and uniqueness emerges from the history of shared trauma within the Jewish community (3), an idea that Klein fixated on in his collection Hath Not A Jew, as Leon Edel has observed “it is clear that the Hitlerian era of persecution has driven Klein far into the past” (Poetry, 1941, pg. 52), thus clotting universal themes in heady Jewish euphemisms. Nevertheless, this tendency for allusion-filled writing was exulted by Ludwig Larson in his critique of Hath Not a Jew, as he claimed, “Klein writes as an intense individual out of one of those clans of which the texture of humanity is composed”. This demarcates Klein as distinct from the perspective noted and scorned by writer Ezra Glinter from Forward that “‘Jews love what non-Jews love about Judaism’”, creating instead a vein of poetry completely imbued in Jewish heritage yet paradoxically written in the English tongue.

During the post-war period Klein’s poetry shifted in its themes, focusing more on the experiences of French-Canadians and daily life in Montreal. This mirrored the attempts of the Montreal-Jewish community to open itself to the city, exemplified in acts such as the establishment of the Jewish Public Library in 1951; its predecessor was the entirely Yiddish library, the Yidishes Folks Bibliotek. This transition was welcomed and deemed successful in his 1948 publication, The Rocking Chair and Other Poems, in which the reader can denote commonalities between the Jewish and Quebecois experiences, with the emphasis on family and heritage, as well as claiming Montreal as a physical and figurative space to communally experience both joyous and mundane aspects of life. Sheffer attributes globalization to the “adoption of new ideas by all diasporas […] to augment the legitimization of multiculturalism, the acceptance of ‘others’ and ‘otherness,’ and the explicit demands for self-organization […] the inclination toward autonomous decision-making and self-conduct of affairs in host countries” (10). The increased globalization, immigration and strengthening of Montreal’s Jewish population can be understood as an impetus for Klein’s redefinition of his Jewish diaspora identity to a Jewish-Canadian identity, one amongst other minorities within the multicultural fabric of Quebec. Scholar Pierre Anctil speaks to this theme in his book Tur Malka, saying that “Peut-etre Klein pressentit-il, en une sourde communion, que ces deux peuples avaient en commun une certain experience difficile de l’histore moderne, et que rien ne leur était acquis dans un monde où la force des armes et la puissance du nombre ne leur appartenaient pas” (109), thus emphasizing a mutual sense of displacement and disadvantage, and perhaps even romanticizing Quebec’s rural and urban landscapes as poetic homelands for these ethnic minorities.

Klein’s evolving writing career can thus be viewed in tandem with his evolving relationship to his own diasporic Jewish identity, mirroring the Jewish affiliations to the city as well. Shaul Magid in his text “In Search of a Critical Voice in the Jewish Diaspora” summarizes Edward Said in writing that an expatriate existence is a “wellspring for critical reflection” (204) and that “the expatriate builds worlds in and through that chosen homeless state, critical worlds carved by comparison out of a host culture they temporarily inhabit” (205). Embodying this sense of homelessness seems to have been Klein’s original stance regarding his Jewish identity, thus creating Hath Not a Jew, for a narrow Jewish audience in North America and abroad. This is dialectically opposed to his later text, The Rocking Chair and Other Poems, which extends the Jewish experience to other minorities in Montreal and in Quebec at large. Perhaps Klein was grasping at another idea of Magid, who asserts the reconstructive semantics of homelessness for the diaspora, as negating the negative connotations of being part of the diaspora, and instead rooting oneself in one’s new surroundings (204). Whatever pragmatic motivation, Klein’s poetry fluxes in that liminal space between immigrant and resident as well as between Jewish and Canadian, and undertakes this bold question in the humble modality of pen to paper

Blog post by Keah Hansen, Research Fellow at the Museum of Jewish Montreal

Works Cited:

Anctil, Pierre. Tur Malka. Quebec City, Septentrion, 1997. Print.

Edel, Leon. “Poetry and the Jewish Tradition.” Poetry 58.1 (1941): 51-53. Web.

Glinter, Ezra. “A Poem of One’s Own”. Forward. April 2012. Web. June 2016.

Klein, Abraham Moses. The Rocking Chair and Other Poems. Toronto: The Ryerson Press: 1948.

Klein, Abraham Moses. Hath Not a Jew. New York: Behrman’s Jewish Book House, 1940. Print.

Magid, Shaul. “In Search of a Critical Voice in the Jewish Diaspora: Homelessness and Home in Said and Shalom Noah Barzofsky’s Netivot Shalom”. Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 12, No. 3. Spring 2006: 193-227. Jstor. Web. June 2016.

Pollock, Zaillig. “A.M. Klein: Biography”. Canadian Poetry Online. University of Toronto Libraries: 2000. Web. June 2016.

Sheffer, Gabriel. “Is the Jewish Diaspora Unique? Reflections on the Diaspora’s Current Situation”. Israeli Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1. Spring 2005: 1-35. Jstor. Web. June 2016.

OFF THE RECORD WITH BRADY WINROB

Hi readers -

*Content Warning: This blog post features a story about mental illness and suicide.

Brady here: back for another week of Off the Record(ing). I would like to start off by commenting on how both fruitful and challenging it has been to pick apart meanings and intentions behind podcasts and oral histories while writing this blog. I have begun to think more critically about the stories I listen to, as well as watch them unfold through different lenses; in this case, Jewish. While this has eliminated the “easy listening” factor that I associated with radio in the past, it has allowed me to deepen my once one-dimensional relationship with storytelling. I used to think only about the story itself and how it made me feel, but now I am much more in tune with how the story makes the storyteller feel, and where it fits in the giant web of oral histories.

After my post about Alan Dein’s Sounds Jewish podcast last time, I decided to dig up some of Dein’s archived episodes. There was one title in particular that caught my eye: Encounters. The reason why I was so drawn to this title is because I find myself consistently being drawn to stories with random encounters with strangers and unexpected reunions with a lost old love or family member. One of my favourite episodes of This American Life is even called No Coincidence, No Story, which is sixty minutes chock full of stories about coincidences. Furthermore, I can recall, quite easily, the coincidences in all of my favourite podcast stories: a few of which I have previously posted on this blog. I know I am not alone in my obsession with coincidences and encounters, because everyone I share these kinds of stories with mirrors my own reaction. Even in my own life, I find myself constantly wondering things such as: “If we hadn’t been at that same band’s show, we never would have met” or “if I hadn’t left my house at the time I did, I wouldn’t have run into this friend or that peer.”

The fourth story in Encounters is about just that. It chronicles about a Jewish boy named Jonny Benjamin who begins to suffer from mental illness at age ten. He describes his illness as a voice in his head, which worsened as he entered into his teen years. He fell into a series of delusional episodes in which he believed everybody was watching him, similar to The Truman Show. Benjamin explains that he was ashamed of what he was going through, and was especially quiet about it within his Jewish community, because he felt that his lack of education about mental illness in school contributed to the reality that the Jewish community was not openly confronting mental illness at the time.

As a young adult, he began contemplating suicide, and those contemplations came into fruition in 2008 on the edge of London’s Waterloo Bridge. On that rainy afternoon, Benjamin was met and approached by a random passerby, Neil Laybourn, in which he was taken out of his world and into an interaction with a compassionate stranger. Laybourn did not attempt to convince Benjamin to step back, but offered words of encouragement and sympathy until he removed himself from the bridge. Six years later, they reunited. Laybourn recalled of the day in 2008, “Maybe it was fate, it was easy to make a connection.” If Laybourn hadn’t been walking over the bridge to work at that time, on that day, we can’t say for sure where Benjamin would be today.

At first glance, the story doesn’t seem Jewish at all, other than the fact that the main character himself is a Jew who was raised in a Jewish community in England. However, Dein’s introduction to the episode reads as follows: “At the very core of Jewish life is the act of meeting, whether in clubs, youth groups or in prayer. In fact, ‘synagogue’ in Hebrew is bet knesset – literally translated as ‘house of meeting’.” I was inspired by this, as it framed the act of meeting as something potentially Jewish. Not inherently Jewish, but potentially. It’s obvious that community is an integral part of Jewish life, but the simple act of Jews encountering one another can be a small celebration, especially when you have a friend in common or have a shared memory that unites you. This particular encounter, and the entire episode of encounters, frame the chance meetings of our day-to-day through a Jewish lens. It is not that Jewish people appreciate the act of meeting more than non-Jews, or that it happens to us more. Maybe we just make a bigger deal about it, who knows. But it’s importance is in that it is an extremely formative topic of podcast, talk radio and oral history - all influential Jewish spaces. The most thrilling lesson that I took from this episode, and writing this blog post, is my ability to see coincidence backed up by some of my own Jewish thought and questioning, instead of a random, unrelated experience, passed off as nothing but chance.

OFF THE RECORD WITH BRADY WINROB

Hi readers -

For this week’s Off the Record(ing), I am excited to share some thoughts and feelings about a question I often ask myself: “Why are all my favourite podcasters Jewish?”

I first came across this article published last year in the Jewish Daily Forward that validated all of my suspicions about Jewish podcasters: not just Ira Glass of This American Life and Terry Gross of Fresh Air, but Robert Krulwich of Radiolab, Sarah Koenig of Serial, Peter Sagal of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, and the list goes on. Not only that, but the article states that some of the earliest roundtable podcasts were created by Jews. The podcasts previously mentioned are especially significant because most of them don’t even regularly feature Jewish content, but are merely facilitated by MOTs. Though I don’t find the Forward’s article particularly informative, it does bring to light questions of Jewish over-representation in podcasts that I have been wondering about. I know there are many answers to this question, but I am choosing to explore the particulars of Jewish entertainment and what it has to do with oral history.

I came across a British podcast from the news outlet The Guardian called Sounds Jewish, hosted by a Jewish oral historian and BBC broadcaster named Alan Dein. Though the podcast is no longer up and running, The Guardian’s website has archived all the aired episodes from Sounds Jewish’s five years in existence. I stumbled across an episode called Laughter in Jewish Culture, in which Dein interviews a series of people about Jewish entertainment and its significance to Jewish identity as a whole.

The third story in the episode features an interview with a Chassidic badchen named Yisroel Stern. A badchen, something I had never heard of before listening to Stern’s interview, is described as a folkloric Jewish jester who performs at weddings and ceremonies all year ‘round. Stern describes badchen, literally, as someone who makes people laugh. But it is not about mockery, as well as not on the same level as a comedy sketch or a theatrical performance. He claims that the badchen’s strength is in finding parables, stories and thoughts that simultaneously make the audience laugh and touch them in meaningful ways. He adds in his interview that an old Chassidic legend says if a bride and groom laugh on the night of their wedding, they will be happy for “twenty years plus.” He ends off by describing himself as lucky to have a job that is both “holy” and “lofty.”

This story stood out for a few reasons. It was engaging for me to listen to a story about Chassidic entertainment, as that is a world of Judaism I am not familiar with. It wasn’t only surprising to hear about the existence of Chassidic comedy/entertainment, but to know that the sharing of oral stories, entertainment, and laughter are not just common amongst secular Jews. A part that caught my attention most significantly, though, was Stern’s reference to his occupation as “holy” and “lofty”, as I took it to mean that laughter and enjoyment is a kind of commandment, necessary for a fruitful life. He makes the badchen seem like a necessary presence at a celebrated Jewish event, there in order to leave the mark of laughter on love.

While I know that most of today’s radio hosts and broadcasters were not raised to be badchonim, as well as not raised in Chassidic communities, I can see a link between the badchen philosophy and Jewish entertainers and radio hosts today. I’d like to think that Ira Glass or Terry Gross would echo Yisroel Stern in that parables and references that induce laughter, deep thought and reflection are integral to the success of a podcast. Maybe the Jews in contemporary radio would agree with the badchen’s ideology that there is some kind of feeling of responsibility to provide meaningful histories and anecdotes as a means of educational entertainment. Whether they’ve met a badchen or not, I feel that storytellers’ passion and dedication towards the sharing of diverse narratives and the emphasis on laughter and enjoyment are rooted in similar philosophies.

As I mentioned before, I’m sure there are a plethora of reasons why Jews are prominent in radio today. But in this short post, I chose to relate the phenomenon with the meaningful intention behind sharing knowledge and creating community through storytelling; something we did in the synagogue on Purim, something we will do at our Pesach tables, something I do when interviewing someone for the Stories’ project, and something I do with my headphones on and my podcast app playing.

You can listen to the entire story here.