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May 23, 2008
Jewish history, life, culture
Education, music, politics and more featured in ACJS sessions.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
The Association for Canadian Jewish Studies (ACJS) will be holding its annual conference at the University of British Columbia this year. The event provides a platform for original scholarly research in Canadian Jewish history, life and culture from an array of disciplines and, this year, the entire Jewish community is invited to attend New Views on Canada's Jews: A Day of Discovery.
Among the speakers in the Sunday, June 1, program are Janice Rosen, national archives director at Canadian Jewish Congress in Montreal, the University of Ottawa's Pierre Anctil, who translates Montreal Yiddish writers into French, Eric Vernon of the Ottawa branch of Canadian Jewish Congress, Vancouver-based musician Moshe Denburg and Seymour Epstein, director of the board of Jewish education in Toronto. Topics include current Jewish affairs, music, the preservation of history, Yiddish in Canada (session conducted in Yiddish) and Jewish genealogy. There will also be special tours of the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia and, in the evening, there will be literary readings by Nancy Richler, Norman Ravvin and Joe Rosenblatt.
Epstein told the Independent that his talk will centre on two topics: capacity-building in Jewish education, through outreach to peripheral sectors of the Jewish population; and Quality Review and Enhancement (QRE), a new approach to evaluation, benchmarking and enhanced curriculum and instruction. According to the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto website, the QRE initiative is intended to enhance the learning experience of students in Jewish schools and is currently being piloted, with the hope that it will be expanded into schools affiliated with Mercaz (Centre for Enhancement of Jewish Education).
Denburg will be participating in the session on Canadian Jewish music. In it, he said, "I will be discussing my movement, over the past 10 years especially, into intercultural music. I will illustrate – with the help of live demonstrations and recorded materials – certain commonalities between my Jewish music and the intercultural music I have created.
"I will also speak about the import of intercultural music, both as an art form and as a sociological phenomenon, and share my thoughts on why I have been attracted to it over the years," he continued. "My view is that it is a very 'Jewish' thing to do, to reflect on the multiplicity of cultures and their possible blendings, especially in today's fractious world. We, who have been 'guests' in so many cultures, who have wandered for centuries, can say something important, via the medium of art, about the dignity of all culture and its ultimate ownership by all human beings."
The multicultural aspect of Canada raises interesting questions for minority communities. At the daylong public conference, Vernon said he plans "to touch on a few key issues on the national agenda of the Canadian Jewish community, including combating anti-Semitism in its contemporary manifestations; supporting Canada's anti-hate laws and examining human rights commissions in Canada; communal and national security issues; and some key international issues, such as Durban and Darfur." He said he will also "touch on the opportunities of dealing with a minority government in general and the Harper government in particular.
"These issues are important because the Jewish community must be politically aware and active to play an effective role in the Canadian polity," he said.
The difficulties of adapting and integrating into this polity, as well as the advantages offered by Canadian society to its citizens, are reflected in Yiddish literature, contends Anctil.
"I will speak about the first Yiddish book of poetry published in Montreal (in Canada in fact), Fun Mayn Velt (From my World), in 1918, by Jacob-Isaac Segal, which I have translated in French and will be published probably next year," said Anctil. "My talk is about the process of translating Yiddish poetry in Canada and the significance of these texts once they reach a new audience in one of Canada's official languages."
In addition to Anctil, there will be three other speakers in the session on Yiddish: Faith Jones, Rebecca Margolis and Seymour Levitan.
"We all come from quite different angles," said Anctil, "so I will concentrate mostly on why I come to this subject. I discovered Yiddish, and learned the language, while I was doing research in the archives of Canadian Jewish Congress in Montreal in the early eighties. It became clear for me from the start that there was more to Yiddish in Canada than correspondence, memoirs, journalism and reports of community organization, as a testimonial to the great east European migration of the early 20th century (in Montreal in 1931, 99 per cent of the Jewish population aged over 15 had Yiddish as a mother tongue and a daily paper was being published in the city since 1907 – as in Toronto and Winnipeg a little later).
"I soon found out that there were also history books on Canadian Jewry, scholarship, essays, translations from the Hebrew and other languages, and poetry," he continued. "In 1992, I published a short bilingual (Yiddish-French) book consisting of the poems of Jacob-Isaac Segal and then I translated the memoirs of Israel Medresh (1996 and 2001), Hirsch Wolofsky (2000), Simon Belkin (1999) and a fascinating biographical dictionary of Canadian Yiddish authors by Haim-Leib Fuks.... In this work, Fuks lists 429 Yiddish and Hebrew authors in Canada, about 200 in Montreal alone. Clearly, there had been a dynamic and creative Yiddish literature in Montreal between the two wars (and even later), alongside the better-known Francophone and Anglophone literatures. Thus, we were dealing not with two literary corpus but with three.
"This Yiddish literature is important because it contains the perceptions and emotions of an immigrant group coming into Canada as the country is becoming more and more diverse culturally and religiously. In a sense, it holds a testimonial as to the difficulties of adaptation and integration, from a Jewish point of view, but also depictions of the advantages offered by Canadian society, notably its liberalism and tolerance. Esthetically, this Yiddish poetry is also at least equal to its French- and English-language counterparts, very modernist and ... contains depictions of Canadian cities and environments that are quite poignant ... not to mention strictly Jewish themes such as the Holocaust, the will to survive as a distinct community and Zionism."
On the history front, Rosen will lead a Jewish archivists roundtable session. "We expect to discuss the current collecting priorities of the archivists presently, recent trends in the types of most-requested materials at our institutions and new ways of making our material available for viewing and for reproduction," she said.
The fact that we, as human beings, tend to collect so many things during our lives, raises the question as to what types of history are important for an archivist.
"Certainly not all aspects of history are important to everyone, but all aspects of history are important to someone," said Rosen. "What is important in the archives business is the ability to recognize and preserve what is likely to be important to more than one 'someone,' or more than that person's immediate family. Certain things end up being important to a lot of people, and they are not necessarily what one might expect. For example, in Montreal we are asked over and over for photos and records of St. Lawrence Boulevard, the heart of the old Jewish neighborhood, as it appeared in the early 1900s. Such photos and documents are extremely rare and are, therefore, in our eyes, valuable. But what will be valuable for the researchers of tomorrow?"
For community members wondering how best to preserve their own family history, Rosen said, "My primary advice is that you need to keep the documents, photographs and recordings that are valuable to you away from their greatest enemies: light, humidity and dust. And don't forget that other great enemy: the indifferent housemate who, in the course of trying too much to tidy up, ends up throwing them out!"
The ACJS local organizing committee is Richard Menkis, Jones, Betty Nitkin and Ronnie Tessler. The Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Vancouver provided a grant for the day, which is also supported by the Jewish Historical Society of British Columbia, the Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies at Concordia University, the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver (JCCGV) and the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. The cost for the full day of seminars, including lunch and the literary evening, is $40 ($20 for students); for the evening only, $10. All sessions will be held at the JCCGV. For more information, call 604-638-7287, e-mail [email protected] or visit www.jewishmuseum.ca/info/current_events/acjs-event.
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