Growing Up Jewish: Canadians Tell Their Own Stories

Norman Ravvin is an assistant professor of English at the University of
New Brunswick. He is the author of Café des Westens, Sex, Skyscrapers,
and Standard Yiddish, and A House of Words.

Growing Up Jewish is a good example of life-writing, the use of memoir
and recollection to preserve family and community stories. The editors
of this volume see their project as a record of the “mass migration of
Eastern European Jews ... [who] arrived in the cities, towns, and farms
of the New World.” In fact, the focus here is on early experiences in
the Jewish neighborhoods of Toronto, Montreal, and Winnipeg, with a few
stories of smaller communities such as Lethbridge and Woodstock,
Ontario. The fullest portrait, however, is drawn of the rich cultural
and economic centre of Jewish Canada that thrived in the College and
Spadina area of Toronto.

Some of the contributors are well known for their literary and
scholarly output (Morley Torgov, Irving Abella, Larry Zolf), while
others are better known as figures of financial and social influence
(Charles Bronfman, Arlene Perly Rae, Rosie Abella, Joseph Tanenbaum).
Their contributions are often portraits of their parents’ early
strivings in Canada, of the neighborhoods they grew up in, and of the
particular challenges of growing up Jewish in post-war society. In a few
cases—such as Fred Sharf’s “Beatrice Street and the Pit
Gangs”—we are given bits of social history by way of personal
experience.

This volume was created as a community project to raise funds for
Toronto’s Ashkenaz Festival, which is dedicated to “new Yiddish
culture.”