Collected Writings: Poems, Stories and Essays on the Canadian Jewish Immigrant Experience 1919 by Joseph J. Goodman (review)

The Yiddish Book Center is more than an archive of out-of-print and discarded Yiddish texts. The center has grown to offer a physical and digital archive of ancestral memory. For instance, a single reference to a book written by Joseph J. Goodman in a Canadian Yiddish newspaper prompted Leah Jay Hammer to travel to Amherst, Massachusetts, where she encountered her grandfather’s Collected Writings for the first time. The descendants of Goodman, a Russian immigrant to the Canadian Prairies, had been unaware of the book’s existence. To aid the book’s recovery, the family hired Hannah Berliner Fischthal as a translator, and another of Goodman’s granddaughters, Harriet Goodman Hoffman, took over the role of editor. Collected Writings, originally published in 1919 in Yiddish by the Art and Literature Society of Winnipeg, Manitoba, is back in circulation through the self-publishing company Xlibris, now with extensive translations, appendices, and photographs. Hoffman’s research usefully contextualizes not only Goodman’s life, but also the lives of Jewish immigrants to North America. According to Sebastian Schulman, the Yiddish Book Center’s Translation Project Coordinator, Goodman’s book is perhaps the only volume to have been discovered, translated, and published after its discovery at the center.

Collected Writings is a compelling example of the types of projects that the Yiddish Book Center facilitates through its archives and educational programs, showing how discoveries that enrich familial knowledge of ancestry and history can cross with endeavors of scholarly significance. More than simply a family memento, the book is a valuable artefact from a lesser-known community—that of Ashkenazi Jews who settled the Canadian Prairies, often as farmers. Joseph J. Goodman was born Chaim Tschernov in 1863 in a Russian shtetl. He immigrated with his family to the United States in the late 1800s, where he married another Jewish immigrant and moved to Winnipeg. His work placed him in a unique position to analyze and represent the Jewish Prairie experience: he held a relatively high rank with the Canadian government as an immigration inspector for the Canadian Pacific Railroad. His work took him through the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta to visit many small, rural Jewish communities. Goodman also had a regular column in the Manitoba Free Press, sometimes publishing under the pseudonym “Professor Incognitow [sic].” Yet Goodman’s work was not without controversy: he was once accused of granting a certificate of naturalization to a Jewish man who had not yet fulfilled the residency requirement. Goodman’s arrest made him a cause célèbre of Winnipeg’s Jewish communities, and without enough evidence to prove his guilt, the charges were dropped.

Goodman’s life, like his writings, was tinged with his dual loves of Zionism and Canada; indeed, he named his son Wilfred Hertzl Goodman, after Wilfrid Laurier, the Canadian prime minister, and Theodore Hertzl. Collected Writings likewise focuses on Jewish experiences of Canada in sections divided between poems, translations, stories, and essays. Goodman’s poetry displays a range of literary influences, from John Keats to the Song of Songs. Many are about, or in honor of, other poets, including A. M. Mandelboym and Shimon Frug. Fischthal, in her “Translator’s Introduction,” distinguishes between Goodman’s poetry and the New York Yiddish sweatshop poetry of the same period, suggesting that Goodman’s writings were not aimed at the “utilitarian function” of “denouncing the evils of the workplace” (xxiii). Neither was he interested in nostalgic renderings of life in the old country. This analysis holds mostly true for the Collected Writings as a whole: Goodman is neither homesick nor explicitly political. His stories follow themes related to the Jewish immigrant experience, but without either decrying the new country or hearkening back to the old. For instance, in “Yankl Becomes a Canadian,” a Russian immigrant learns to identify himself with his adopted country through watching...