Canada's Jews: A People's Journey (review)

In an old review of the Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports (1955), Mordecai Richler pokes fun at the breadth of the encyclopedia, which purports to be "the first all-inclusive volume to tell the complete story of Jews in professional and amateur sports all over the world, from biblical times to Sandy Koufax's no-hitter in September (qtd. in Richler's Dispatches from the Sporting Life, 19). Including such statistics from the volume as "COHEN, HYMAN . . . Total games: 7. Pitching Record: 0-0" and "HERTZ, STEVE ALLAN . . . Batting average of .000," the book convinces Richler that the notion of a compendium of Jews, who, in and of themselves, are not necessarily remarkable, though potentially a valuable resource, might not make for the most interesting reading.

With the only real restriction of topic being a combination of national and ethnic identity, Gerald Tulchinsky's Canada's Jews: A People's Journey seems to fall into the very category that Richler disparages. A culmination of Tulchinsky's previous work, the book attempts to follow the lives of Canadians who struggled, persevered, and succeeded in their journeys to be who they are in the country they claimed for their own. As Tulchinsky traces the 240 years of Canadian Jewry, however, the very meticulousness that makes this book a researcher's treasure trove becomes his downfall. While readers interested in the early settlements of Canadian Jewry are surely curious about the occupations of Jews at that time (jewellery makers, tobacco traders, ready-made apparel), the list of individual Jews engaged in these pursuits, along with their biographies, credit reports, and monetary worth, seems better-suited to a history book covering the particular time-period or professions. The scope of this book suggests that we will be reading about all the Jews in Canadian history, and we begin to wonder if we will hear details about each Jew living in Canada into the twenty-first century—when numbers have grown to the hundreds of thousands.

Using a tremendous variety of sources — journals, archives, libraries, reports of Royal Commissions, to name but a few — Tulchinsky gathers a swell of evidence to show the integration of Jewish life into Canadian life, situating the ethnic identity within the greater umbrella of a complex national identity. The book is chronological and divided into four sections: "Beginnings, 1768-1890"; "Emergence of a National Community, 1890-1919"; "Between the Wars, 1919-1939"; and "The Second World War and Beyond, 1940-2008." The main text is followed by an appendix (Jewish population of major Canadian cities, 1891-2001), as well as almost 100 pages of endnotes and a select bibliography.

Tulchinsky's subtitle — "A People's Journey" — is not as generic as it might initially appear to be. The people of the book, he demonstrates, are the people of everyday Canadian life (as the encyclopedia might have argued that the Cohens and Hertzes were the typical Jewish sporting people). Of the well-known, successful Canadians, there is little. The only Bronfman Tulchinsky is interested in is Samuel — because of his presidency of the Canadian Jewish Congress. The Reichmanns are mentioned in two paragraphs; Izzy Asper, the Ghermezians, Frank Gehry — none. Rather, Tulchinsky dwells on the journeys of the ones who formed congregations out of handfuls of people, fought for Jewish education, created Yiddish newspapers, made up the majority of the shmata business and its attendant unions, dedicated themselves to Zionism, mobilized resources to bring survivors to Canada after the Holocaust, wrote poetry, urbanized, and lived and died and were forgotten.

Tulchinsky, for all his dry facts, writes with a deep sense of pathos when he describes the fate of the working class, and these discussions are the strongest in the book. In "Travails of Urbanization," he writes of the labourer who must survive the "Hobbesian, crushing system of undeclared economic war of 'all against all'" (97). Tulchinsky returns to the lives of the workers in the following chapter, "Corner of Pain and Anguish," and again...