Montreal’s Jewish lot

JONATHAN WISENTHAL

This is the continuation of a series coordinated by the Isaac Waldman library and the Independent, featuring community members reviewing books they’ve recently read.

In 2001, Joe King published From the Ghetto to the Main: The Story of the Jews of Montreal, with an epigraph from A.M. Klein’s 1943 poem “Autobiographical.” Now we have a shorter book on the same subject, entitled Fabled City: The Jews of Montreal, with the same epigraph, beginning “It is a fabled city that I seek,” and ending with “Thence do I hear, as heard by a Jewboy / The Hebrew violins / Delighting in the sobbed oriental note.”

This is an odd choice of epigraph for either book, in that King’s Jewish Montreal is not particularly a fabled city, especially in the context of Klein’s nostalgic poem, and, in the volume under review, there is really no sound of Hebrew violins, no “sobbed oriental note.” In this book, the Jews of Montreal are not significantly engaged in religious or cultural life; rather they are, for the most part, occupied by business, community organizations and philanthropy. It is true that Klein figures in Fabled City (beyond the epigraph), but it is not his poetry, fiction or his other writing that receives attention. Instead, it is the fact that he worked as Samuel Bronfman’s speechwriter, the man who was given the task of revising the history of Canada that Bronfman had commissioned from Stephen Leacock during the Second World War. This information comes in a chapter about Bronfman, and the Bronfman family is given considerable prominence in the book.

The impression conveyed in Fabled City is that Jewish achievements in Montreal have been accomplished in the face of a hostile political environment. We are told right at the beginning, in the preliminary pages, that, in 1627, Cardinal Richelieu decreed that only Roman Catholics could live in Quebec (New France), which meant that Jewish settlement in Montreal could only begin after England had defeated the French in 1759. King emphasizes hostility towards Jews on the part of both French and English, but it is francophone “Quebec nationalists” who recur throughout the book as primary obstacles to the Jewish community. Summing up the situation at the present time in his final chapter, King does say that, “Quebec nationalism, in the main, is not tinged with antisemitism.” But the rest of the paragraph that begins with this statement moves, with care and tact, in another direction, noting that “the nationalists ... are intent on being a French ‘nation,’ in every sense. And provincial administrations – Liberal Party or Parti Québécois – while showing respect for the Jewish community, nevertheless resist any effort aimed at making their people vulnerable to assimilation.”

In spite of antisemitism, there are all sorts of Jewish triumphs and achievements mentioned. The prelude chapter is about “Gen. James Wolfe’s Jewish Sailor,” Capt. Alexander Schomberg, who commanded the first wave of troops up to the Plains of Abraham. In the early days of Jewish settlement, we have “Aaron Hart, the patriarch of the Canadian Jewish community,” and then his widow, Dorothea, “Canada’s First Woman Millionaire,” who “entertained lavishly in her new three-storey stone dwelling on St. Gabriel Street in Old Montreal” – which stands to this day as the restaurant Auberge Le St. Gabriel. And there is David David, “one of Montreal’s most successful merchants and fur traders,” who became a member of the celebrated Beaver Club in 1807; and Jesse Joseph, who, in the second half of the 19th century, headed the Montreal Gas Co. and the Montreal Telegraph Co.; and Moses Judah Hayes, who became chief of police in Montreal in 1854. There are many other colorful and successful figures throughout the book, including “Two-Gun Cohen” himself, the only Jew in history to became a general in the Chinese army (in the 1920s). No one can say that Montreal Jews are a dull lot.

Fabled City does not pretend to be a history of the Jews of Montreal. “This book,” the author’s preface acknowledges, “chronicles only a tiny segment of the immense Jewish contribution to the growth of Montreal. It would take a thick encyclopedia to outline the entire story.” Instead, it is an agreeably personal, informal collection of snippets and snapshots, with plenty of boxes and sidebars. One of the best moments is a photograph that looks like something dreamt up by Michael Chabon. It is an 1898 advertisement from the classiest department store in Montreal, Ogilvy, and it’s in Yiddish.

Jonathan Wisenthal was born in Montreal and grew up there in the 1940s and 1950s. He is a retired member of the University of British Columbia English department.

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