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Negotiating Jewish Canadian Identity: Montreal Yiddish Literary Journals in the Interwar Period
- Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
- Purdue University Press
- Volume 27, Number 4, Summer 2009
- pp. 24-48
- 10.1353/sho.0.0385
- Article
- Additional Information
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In the first decades of the twentieth century, Yiddish journals emerged worldwide in tandem with the periodical press as a vanguard of modern Jewish culture. Canada's Yiddish publishing capital of Montreal produced a dozen interwar journals dedicated to Yiddish literature. The journals published innovative works by writers across Canada while forging links with both international Yiddish culture and world literature. With a shared a roster of Canadian writers, the journals gave voice to ideological rifts in the Yiddish world: journals of the 1920s such as Nyuansn promoted an "art for art's sake" approach; the proletarian journals that dominated the Depression era such as Montreol and Heftn linked literature with the struggle of the working class. Together, the journals provided a forum for emerging writers in a minor Yiddish center, closely connected to the major centers in Europe and the United States, to negotiate their evolving identities as Canadian Jews.