Coming of Age: A History of the Jewish People of Manitoba (review)

Coming of Age contains a vast collection of well-told stories, anecdotes, and contextual information. Chronologically ordered, it lacks a driving theme that unrolls, but this absence is no shortcoming for, opened anywhere, this book engages, informs, and entertains in effective, if not vigorous, prose. This latest effort by historian Allan Levine, author of ten books including some mystery novels, received the Book of the Year Award from the Manitoba Writers’ Guild. Directed at a popular, rather than specialized, academic audience, this is the best history of a Manitoba ethno-cultural community that this reviewer has come across.

Produced with editorial, archival, and financial assistance from the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada, the lavishly illustrated narrative features some imaginative curatorial and creative image research—mainly photographs of notable personalities and groups, but also of maps, documents, newspaper headlines, and advertisements. They convey a sense of place. Oversized and handsome, the book appears intended to adorn a coffee table, but it is much more than a showy visual volume.

The author escapes the charge of reverential hagiography for, in addition, to pointing to commendable group and individual accomplishments, he shines light on a fractured community’s cultural conflicts and religious divisions such as those between Orthodox traditionalists and socialist free thinkers. Levine catalogues the advances of the vibrant, enterprising, and perseverant Jewish community, but also identifies the foibles of some group members with shady, colourful pasts. Victims of culturally-sanctioned fears and prejudices—the poisonous Jew-hating sentiments of prominent Canadian thinker and Liberal leader Goldwin Smith will strike the reader—destitute Jewish pioneers and their cells of various intellectual movements united to combat the discrimination they faced. They sought acceptance and integration, but resisted assimilation; one group of schoolchildren at the turn of the twentieth century, for example, sang “God Save the Queen” in Hebrew. It is a comment on the evolution of Manitoba society and Canadian values that Levine teaches at St. John’s Ravenscourt, Winnipeg’s prestigious private university-preparatory school. Through most of its history, it would not have tolerated Jewish students or teachers.

The story of Manitoba’s Jewish community is one of numerical rise and decline, despite its accomplishments, contributions, and relative wealth. Levine speculates that the first Jew in Manitoba was the Hudson’s Bay Company factor, a fellow named Jacobs, at York Factory in 1761. The first few Jewish settlers were German and British, but Russian Jews, desperate to escape pogroms and grinding poverty in the 1880s, quickly constituted the community’s nucleus and accounted for its growth. The community has steadily shrunk since its demographic high-water mark in the 1930s when it accounted for almost three percent of the population. Between the 1970s and 1990s, it shrank by nearly 20%, and Vancouver overtook it as home of Canada’s third-largest Jewish community. In recent years, the largely European Ashkenazi community has welcomed Russian-Israelis and Argentinean Jews. A sign of the creeping secularization of the community is that the overwhelming majority of synagogues and schools have disappeared (some of their buildings now occupied by conservative Christian congregations) and few kosher butchers remain.

Surprisingly, Levine informs that Jews, despite their lack of an agricultural background because of discriminatory restrictions in Europe, were no less successful as farmers than the Hungarians and Icelanders, but the Jews had less success than the Mennonites of Manitoba or the Doukhobors and Mormons of the more westerly provinces. Those groups, steeped in farming experience, also exhibited more communal unity than the Jews did. Yiddish facilitated communication with Mennonite and German farmers. Many of Manitoba’s Jews hailed from Saskatchewan as Winnipeg, the prairie capital and its “North End Jerusalem,” offered families the opportunity to provide their children with a Jewish education and maintain their link to Judaism. An amusing vignette is of three Mennonite men mistakenly identified as Jews and invited into a synagogue to complete a minyan...