Canadian Jews and Their Story: The Making of Canadian Jewish Literature

Proofiexts283 the BDB lexicon, are available. (The newest version, Accordance 3.0, contains Emanuel Tov's parallel MT-LXX in a searchable form.) It is possible to list or plot the occurrences ofvarious words or phrases, thus seeing if they typify a particular corpus. (This has been very useful as a research and teaching tool for exarnining if certain phrases characterize a particular body of material, are editorial, or late.) The documentation is generally clear (though I regret that the printed documentation is not fully up to date), and the user support, in the few times I have needed it, has been very helpful, fast, and easy to reach. In sum, I have hardly touched my printed concordances since beginning to use this program, which combines the best features of Mandelkern (comprehensiveness ) and Even-Shoshan (clarity, ability to look up phrases). But despite its name, it is much more than a concordance program—it contains a wide variety of additional texts in several languages, all of which may be searched, and it examines grammatical phenomena as well, providing information that previously could only be accessed with tremendous difficulty, if at all. These various features more than justify the price of Accordance. MARC Z. BRETTLER Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Brandeis University Canadian Jews and Their Story: The Making of Canadian Jewish Literature Jewish-Canadian writers [are] in a uniquely favourable cultural position to realize the possibilities of the Canadian situation. . . . The Jews are, in a sense, the most Canadian of Canadians. Tom Marshall To be a Jew and a Canadian is to emerge from the ghetto twice. Mordecai Richler Ira Robinson, Pierre Anctil, and Mervin Butovsky, eds. An Everyday Miracle: Yiddish Culture in Montreal. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1990, 169 pp. Zailig Pollock. A. M. Klein: The Story ofthe Poet. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1994, 324 pp. Irving Massey. Identity and Community: Reflections on English, Yiddish, and French Literature in Canada. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994, 205 pp. Ira Robinson and Mervin Butovsky, eds. Renewing Our Days: Montreal Jews in the Twentieth Century. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1995, 187 pp. Canada's ethnic-religious-cultural-linguistic fragmentation, aggravated by the forbidding climate and desolate landscape, led to communal segregation that engendered a particular national Weltanschauung. The combination of antagonistic 284REVIEWS inter-ethnic relationships and a hostile natural environment infused a persistent sense of insecurity and displacement. In a statement that has become the classic definition ofa disjointed Canadian world picture, Northrop Frye enlists Canadian Jewish literature as his model: "Small and isolated communities surrounded with a physical or psychological 'frontier' . . . develop what we may . . . call a garrison mentality. ... In the earliest maps of the country the only inhabited centers are forts. . . . Novelists of our day studying the impact of Montreal on Westmount write of a psychological one."1 In reaction to social and environmental estrangement, the garrison inhabitants reinforced further the protective boundaries of cultural and religious traditions . The prime example of a "psychological fort," Montreal is a city where the "three solitudes"—English Canadian, French Canadian, and Jewish—have cohabited in constant friction and unease.2 It is therefore not surprising that the centuries-long Jewish history of ghettoization, hostility, and exclusion in the "old world" of Europe allowed the Canadian critics to consider Canadian Jews, as the first epigraph to this essay tells us, "the most Canadian ofCanadians." Indeed, the notion thattheJewish condition ofdisplacement and alienation transplanted onto Canadian soil has produced a remarkable body of literary representations of the Canadian Zeitgeist has been widely acknowledged. Thus, the eminent Canadian critic George Woodcock affirms the contributions of Jewish writers to Canadian culture when he maintains that while "it might be a metaphorical exaggeration to describe Canada as a land of invisible ghettos . . . [it] certainly is ... a country of minorities that have never achieved assimilation." Canadian Jewish writers, the critic claims, "have a peculiar force and sensitivity to depict the tensions that are characteristic of Canadian life and particularly of Canadian urban life."3 The reading of Canadian Jewish literature through the lens of the "garrison mentality," a mentality that continues to shape the sociopolitical tension between Anglo and French Canadians, led both Woodcock and Frye...