The Yiddish wish for a long life is “biz a hundert un tsvantsig” [until 120]. Secular Yiddish culture now finds itself in its 121st year. Its native speakers and readers are rapidly passing from the scene and those few young people who acquire a taste for secular Yiddish tradition, in academic programs or otherwise, cannot begin to make up the losses. The Hasidim, for whom Yiddish remains a living language, dismiss secular Yiddish literature as a passing irrelevance (as the pioneers of secular Yiddishkeit dismissed the Hasidim in their heyday).
And yet the history of secular Yiddish culture in twentieth-century North America is both interesting and instructive. Like all Jews coming to North America at the turn of the twentieth century, secular Yiddishists faced the daunting task of “translating” the integral, holistic civilization of Eastern European yiddishkeit into the terms of North American cultural realities. Rebecca Margolis has deftly chronicled the attempt to create a North American Yiddish utopia in Montreal, Quebec, and in so doing sheds considerable light on the larger trajectory of secular Yiddish culture.
Montreal, as Margolis hastens to point out, was the center of Yiddish creativity in Canada. As a world-class center of secular Yiddish culture, however, it was in the second rank, eclipsed especially by nearby New York. Nonetheless there is much more than filiopietism that brings Margolis, a Montrealer educated in the secular Yiddish school system she describes, to her subject. It is often true, and it is certainly true in this case, that in carefully examining a secondary center of cultural creativity we see historical processes with greater clarity.
How, then, did secular Yiddish culture flourish in Montreal? How did a community largely made up of poor recent immigrants create poetry, fiction, theater, schools, libraries, and other institutions? Margolis takes us on a journey of discovery to understand the people who wrote the poems, taught in the schools, and founded the libraries. They were idealists and utopians and many were socialists who affiliated with Poalei Zion. They nonetheless managed to establish institutions with staying power beyond that of similar institutions created at the same time in the United States.
The linchpin of Yiddish culture in Montreal was the daily newspaper, the Keneder Adler, which has the virtue of being the most-studied North American Yiddish newspaper outside New York. Though the Adler had a few short-lived rivals, it was quite clear that the Yiddish market in Montreal was just big enough for one daily, and too small to support a second. The Adler, therefore, had to offer something for everyone, and it did. It catered to labor and management, to the religious and the secular. Most importantly, it offered employment to journalists, a market for writers, and a tribune for the Jewish community as a whole.
Another central institution was the Jewish Public Library, which offered books and learning for young and old, as well as access to important cultural programs that brought in Yiddish writers, starting with Sholem Aleichem, from across the world. A third institution of crucial importance was the secular Yiddish school. There were two of them—the Peretz Shule and the Jewish People's Shule—and they were among the earliest such schools in existence. Both were secular, socialist, and Zionist. Both taught in Yiddish and Hebrew, though they differed on the relative importance of Hebrew in the curriculum. They united and formed one school that carries a remnant Yiddish curriculum into the twenty-first century.
Yiddish theater in Montreal came into its own relatively late in the time period Margolis examines. In its beginnings, Yiddish theater in Montreal had the advantage of its proximity to New York and received numerous touring theatrical companies. The flip side was that Montreal-based Yiddish theater was relatively late in blooming. Nonetheless, once planted, Yiddish theater in Montreal grew strong and remains one of the few flourishing Yiddish theaters alive and well in the era of post-vernacular Yiddish culture.
However, secular Yiddish culture is a victim of the Holocaust and of other global factors far beyond the ability of Montreal's secular Yiddish activists to overcome. Nonetheless, as Margolis concludes, those working-class activists who, for a generation or two, dreamed of a Yiddish cultural renaissance on the banks of the St. Lawrence, did not dream entirely in vain. The cultural institutions they founded, with the exception of the Keneder Adler, remain in existence and exert an important influence—if only in translation—on the contemporary Montreal Jewish community and far beyond.
