Nazi Germany, Canadian Responses: Confronting Antisemitism in the Shadow of War

Edited by L. Ruth Klein For more information on this book, click here. To pre-order this book, click here.

Exploring the nature of Canada's response to the plight of European Jews seeking refuge and to anti-Jewish discrimination in Canada.

It has been thirty years since the publication of Irving Abella and Harold Troper's seminal work None is Too Many, which documented the official barriers that kept Jewish immigrants and refugees out of Canada in the shadow of the Second World War. The book won critical acclaim, but a haunting question remained: Why did Canada act as it did in the 1930s and 1940s?

Answering this question requires a deeper understanding of the attitudes, ideas, and information that circulated in Canadian society during this period. How much did Canadians know at the time about the horrors unfolding against the Jews of Europe? Where did their information come from? And how did they respond, on both public and institutional levels, to the events that marked Hitler's march to power: the 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws, the 1936 Olympics, Kristallnacht, and the crisis of the MS St Louis? The contributors to this collection — scholars of international repute — turn to the wider public sphere for answers: to the media, the world of literature, the university campus, the realm of international sport, and networks of community activism. Their findings reveal that the persecutions and atrocities taking place in Nazi Germany inspired a range of responses from ordinary Canadians, from indifference to outrage to quiet acquiescence.

Contributors include: Doris Bergen, Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Chair in Holocaust Studies, University of Toronto, Richard Menkis, Department of History, University of British Columbia; Harold Troper, Department of Theory and Policy Studies in Education, OISE/University of Toronto; Amanda Grzyb, Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario; Rebecca Margolis, Centre for Canadian Jewish Studies, University of Ottawa; Michael Brown, Department of Languages, Literatures and Lingustics, York University; Norman Ravvin, Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies, Concordia University; and James Walker, Department of History, University of Waterloo.

Canadian Literature: Mordecai Richler (Winter 2010)

Edited by Norman Ravvin and Dr. Nathalie Cooke   For more information on this issue, click here.

Dr. Nathalie Cooke (McGill English Department) and Dr. Norman Ravvin co-edit the Winter 2011 issue of Canadian Literature. Following the appreciation for Mordecai Richler that has been on the rise since his death in 2001,  this issue is dedicated to a reconsideration of the man and author. The articles in this issue discuss Richler’s Canadian content, his literary and national influences, and Jewish identity.

After The Mountain: The A.M. Klein Reboot Project

Compiled and Edited by Jason Camlot Published by Synapse Press, 2011 http://synapsemontreal.wordpress.com/   Design and Layout by Deanna Fong Cover Art by Mohannad Al Katib

Contributing poets Brian Campbell, Stephen Morrissey and Abby Paige have written about the chapbook on their respective blogs. Read what they had to say here:

• Brian Campbell on After the Mountain: The A.M. Klein Reboot Project
  
  
• Stephen Morrissey on Cutting up A.M. Klein’s “The Mountain”
  
  
• Abby Paige on “After The Mountain”

The included poets are: Asa Boxer, Todd Swift, Abby Paige, Angela Carr, Gary Barwin, Stephen Cain, John McAuley, Hugh Thomas, Ilona Martonfi, Eleni Zisimatos, Seymour Mayne, Donald McGrath, Antony Di Nardo, Vincent Tinguely, Stephanie Bolster, Concetta Principe, Stephen Morrissey, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Jon Paul Fiorentino, David McGimpsey, Philip Moscovitch, Sandrine Renault, Maxianne Berger, Chantal Ringuet, Mary Di Michele, Brian Campbell, Michael Dennis, Katia Grusbic, Kate Eichhorn, Jeffrey Mackie, Sherry Simon, Amanda Earl, Faizal Deen, Erin Moure.

From the preface, written by Jason Camlot: “To celebrate the launch of their newly co-edited collection of essays, Failure’s Opposite: Listening to A.M. Kleein (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2011), Sherry Simon and Norm Ravvin asked me to organize ‘something literary’ for the Montreal launch of the book. Rather than simply stage a reading, I decided to send out a call, an invitation to Canadian poets, for reboots, remixes, rewrites and creative translations of A.M. Klein’s iconic poem, ‘The Mountain.’

The Reboot genre takes iconic text or serial narrative and restarts its operating system from the beginning, in order to create something completely new, yet still affiliated with the original text. The Remix most commonly refers to an alternate version of a recorded song, giving new sound, accent, tempo and meaning to the original version. Creative Translation refers to the translation of a text into new terms of reference and situations of meaning, as well as a different language.

The project I had in mind would apply these transformational activities to the rewriting of A.M. Klein’s poem of early love in an iconic Montreal location. I sent the call out on October 28th, 2011 and set a deadline of November 15th. That’s not a lot of time for poets to respond to a (non-paying) commission! But respond they did, and the result is what you now hold in your hands: a chapbook of poetic reboots, remixes and creative translations of Klein’s strange and beautiful poem that combines a modernist syntax and diction with a heavy dose of nostalgic sentiment in a powerful manner that was unique to him. And now the contributors to this chapbook have remade the poem in a manner unique to themselves.

I am most grateful to them for sharing their creative responses to Klein’s poem, and for daring to engage with it in the first place. I am grateful, too, to Sherry and Norm for inviting me to develop this project, Deanna Fong for her great work in designing and assembling the chapbook, and to artist Mohannad Al Khatib for his visual mash-up (reboot, remix, creative translation) of Thoreau MacDonald’s original illustrations form the Ryerson Press edition of Klein ’s The Rocking Chair and Other Poems.

Some of the poems included in this chapbook were read aloud at the November 23rd launch of Failure’s Opposite: Listening to A.M. Klein, held on the 11th floor of the EV Building (1515 St. Catherine West) at Concordia University.

As a final word, I should note that one of the most rewarding achievements of this project, apart from the poems themselves, is the fact that, for a couple of weeks in the autumn of 2011, some thirty poets were occupied with a poem by A.M. Klein, sounding it out, close-reading it, thinking about it, feeling it, living with it, and engaging with in on their own creative terms. That image of so many gifted poets deeply immersed in Klein all at the same time, well, that’s a gift to cherish for the ages—my own special, Kleinian heirloom.”

Failure's Opposite: Listening to A.M. Klein

Edited by Norman Ravvin and Sherry Simon ISBN 9780773538627 CAN $29.95 Download the advertisement (PDF)

A.M. Klein has remained an enduring but elusive presence in the Canadian literary consciousness since his death in 1972. Klein's legacy has been mixed, his literary achievement sometimes overshadowed by his reclusiveness and withdrawal
from the literary world.

Failure's Opposite presents a fresh perspective on Klein's reception and legacy, exploring why he has remained a compelling figure for critics and readers. His experimentalism drew upon strong traditions and fluency in several languages – English, French, Yiddish, and Hebrew – allowing him to develop a multilingual, modernist Jewish voice that is a touchstone for understanding Canada's multicultural identity. His struggle with the emotional and historical dimensions of diaspora is of considerable importance throughout his work and is investigated through the lenses of translation, voice, and his relationship to other Jewish writers. Contributors also re-evaluate Klein's connection to Montreal and the original ways in which he captured the atmosphere of his "jargoning city."

Failure's Opposite reflects the many ways A.M. Klein is being remade, refashioned, and reconstructed in the twenty-first century, both as a bridge to the past and a model for contemporary critical and creative work in Canadian literature.

Norman Ravvin, chair of the Concordia Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies, is a fiction and non-fiction writer and editor. His books include A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity, and Memory.

Sherry Simon is the author of numerous books, including Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City. She teaches in the French Studies Department at Concordia University in Montreal.

New Readings of Yiddish Montreal / Traduire le Montréal Yiddish

Pierre Anctil • Norman Ravvin • Sherry Simon ISBN   9782760306318 Price CND $38 + 6% GST

A University of Ottawa Press publication, based on the 2004 conference “Traduire le Montréal yiddish / New Readings of Yiddish Montreal” held at Concordia University. The texts collected in this volume unveil the practice and the methods of the translators and scholars who contributed to the re-emergence of Yiddish in contemporary Canada. Each of the personalities discussed enlarged the historical position and interpreted various aspects of the Yiddish language in Montreal that until recently remained obscure of inaccessible.

For Canadian and international orders:

Telephone : 1.800.565.9523; Fax : 1.800.221.9985; utpbooks@utpress.utoronto.ca

American orders: Telephone: 716.693.2768; Fax: 716.692.7479

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Rabbis and Their Community: Studies in the Eastern European Orthodox Rabbinate in Montreal, 1896-1930

ROBINSON, Ira (author)  ISBN 978-1-55238-186-1 $34.95 T (pb) Subject: Canadian history, religious studies Category: Non-fiction

In one of the few studies of the early immigrant Orthodox rabbinate in North America, author Ira Robinson has delved into the Jewish community in Montreal in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Rabbis and their Community introduces several rabbis who, in various ways, impacted their immediate congregations as well as the wider Montreal Jewish community.

Most studies of the early North American rabbinate focus on only one rabbi. Here, though, Robinson carefully examines the interrelationship among a number of rabbis sharing the same communal “turf.” He has diligently researched the unpublished source material these men, generally forgotten to history, left behind. Their writing offers a valuable glimpse at some of the struggles and challenges they faced in their own community, as well as those faced by Canadian Jewish society as a whole in the early twentieth century. Robinson introduces the reader to such leaders as Rabbi Hirsh Cohen, a fixture in the Jewish community of Montreal from 1901 through the late 1940s, Rabbi Simon Glazer, Cohen’s main rival for the chief rabbinate, and revolutionary thinker Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg. The issues they faced, such as the Kosher meat wars of the 1920s, and the institutions they created, most notably the Jewish Community Council of Montreal, were factors of fundamental importance for the development of the second-largest Jewish community in Canada.

Co-publication with the University of Calgary Press and the Concordia Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies

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