Twelve Vignettes: Tracing the Contours of Jewish Refugee Memory in Canada

In 1985 Paula J. Draper, then historical consultant with the Toronto Holocaust Memorial and Education Centre, wrote about her interviews with Jewish refugees from Nazi-controlled Germany and Austria who had been held in prisoner-of-war camps for most of World War II. Many of these male “internees” would eventually come to Canada, and they settled particularly in Quebec (Abella 207, Draper 15). Draper recalls that, when asked whether it was “doubly-hard” for some to flee Quebec for Ontario due to fear of resurgent anti-Semitism, they responded that, “It was not difficult at all! Once a refugee, I was told, always a refugee. It was a lesson they had no need to learn twice. For forty years they had been mentally packed and ready” (15). While this expression of ongoing refugee subjectivity is not uniformly felt across Jewish refugee communities, it struck a chord with me, as I reflect on my own experience as a descendent of Ashkenazi Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe.

This article recounts my family’s stories and my own experience in order to understand and map various forms of refugee subjectivity.¹ The stories that follow reflect on several generations of Jewish displaced people in my family, most of whom came in contact with refugeeness even though they rarely referred to themselves as refugees. In grappling with the meaning of these stories, I ask: Are my family members refugees? Are they Holocaust survivors? Do they still occupy a refugee subjectivity after they have assimilated into Canadian society? What is my relation to their legacies as refugees? What does this consideration afford politically? What is the role of capitalism and race in shaping the experience of refugeeness? How do I understand my own embodiment of Jewish refugeeness in Canada?

My approach is influenced by the method of autoethnography, particularly the way in which this style of writing combines the use of “epiphanies”—remembered moments perceived to have significantly impacted the trajectory of a person’s life”—common to autobiography, with a desire to do “ethnography,” or to communicate something about a cultural or ethnic group (Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 4). Like autoethnography, my stories gloss and analyze my individual experience of belonging to a cultural group, in this case, a tenuous and unresolved relationship to Jewish refugeeness. I explore my relationship to that group by providing my own semi-testimonial accounts, stories, and memories, whilst at the same time juxtaposing them with fragments of the official discourses surrounding Jewish refugeeness.

Thus, in keeping with the conventions of autoethnography, my stories frequently make references to “relevant cultural artefacts” that I include as part of the stories (Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 4). Some examples of the documents I drew from to understand my own experience of refugeeness in the stories are “Canada: A History of Refuge,” a government website that traces the history of refugees in Canada, and the archive Kraków Ghetto Register, a 1940 Nazi-mandated register of all inhabitants, included in the Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database, where I found information about my grandmother and great-grandparents as well as photographs previously unseen by anyone in my family. I also draw extensively from my own reading of books and articles related to Jewish refugee history in Canada and the history and theory of displacement and violence more broadly, which contribute significantly to my own understanding of these issues and well as my sense of self and relation to refugeeness. These personal and collective discourses, brought together in my stories, create a form of narrative that I hope comments on the way in which familial memory and official histories come to form my own understanding and embodiment of Jewish refugeeness in Canada.

The various depictions of displacement in my stories demonstrate some of the problems with the appellation “refugee,” the shifting nature of what it might mean to inhabit “refugee subjectivity,” and the political potential of grounding a refugee subjectivity in this form of critique. To that end, my stories are influenced by the work of scholars in the field of critical refugee...