Canadian Jewish Short Stories

Carolyn D. Redl is a sessional lecturer of English at the University of
Alberta.

While rightfully proclaiming that Canadian literature has “no single
tradition,” Miriam Waddington substantiates her belief, through this
collection, in the continuity of a Jewish-Canadian literary tradition.
Reflecting Jewish values manifest in religion, ethics, and a culture
that, Waddington notes, “includes two languages besides English and
French—namely Yiddish and Hebrew,” these 18 stories also emphasize
an awareness of the Jewish individual’s “belonging to a marginal
group and being part of that collective.” Themes range from the
experiences of Jewish immigrants who came to Canada both before and
after the world wars, and of second- and third-generation
Jewish-Canadians, to exile, the Holocaust, and the family in conflict or
in harmony.

Represented are familiar writers (such as A.M. Klein, Mordecai Richler,
Matt Cohen, and Henry Kreisel) and less-familiar and new writers (such
as Sharon Drache, J.J. Steinfeld, and Naomi Guttman). Significantly,
Naim Kattam’s “The Pack” and Monique Bosco’s “The Old
Woman’s Lamentations on Yom Kippur” are translations of works
published first in French. And Waddington has translated (from the
Yiddish) Rochl Korn’s touching story about family disharmony,
“Earth,” and Chava Rosenfarb’s “The Greenhorn.” These
translations make welcome additions, bringing perhaps otherwise unknown
works to the cannon of Jewish-Canadian writing.

Ordered as they are in chronological sequence, these texts provide a
historical overview of the changes occurring in Jewish writers’
representations of ethnicity, while at the same time demonstrating a
continued, insistent projection of ethnic differences.