Renewing Our Days: Montreal Jews in the Twentieth Century

Norman Ravvin is the author of Café des Westens (which won the Alberta
Culture New Fiction Award) and Sex, Skyscrapers, and Standard Yiddish.

The title of this collection of essays on Jewish life in Montreal echos
a striking phrase from the Hebrew liturgy—“Renew our days as of
old.” This is the equation by which the rabbis expressed the need to
go backward in order to get to the future, and the phrase conjures
yearnings for a lost past of tradition, heroism, and right living. In
fact, these essays characterize the social, political, religious, and
literary developments that have transformed Jewish Montreal, without
drawing any heady conclusions about the necessity of recovery or
renewal.

One gets from the collection a sense of the diversity of Montreal
Jewish life as it encompasses Hasidic, Moroccan, and mainstream secular
influences—and the editors have chosen portraits of this diversity
from a range of disciplinary approaches. Ira Robinson considers the role
of Kashrut in 1920s’ Montreal from the historian’s point of view;
Jack Jedwab examines the interplay of Jewish, anglophone, and
francophone communities in sociological terms; Mervin Butovsky applies
questions of literary biography to the work of Irving Layton; and the
editors have supplied a useful overview of Montreal Jewish life in their
introduction. The latter piece follows the Jewish presence in Quebec
from its earliest stages (when Ezekiel Hart was elected to the
Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada, only to be denied his seat because
he was Jewish) through to the recent arrival of French-speaking
immigrants from Morocco. This new influx has in some ways made up for
the flight of English-speaking Jews in response to Quebec separatism. On
this subject, Joseph Levy and Yolande Cohen contribute “Moroccan Jews
and Their Adaptation to Montreal Life.” On the subject of where Jewish
Montreal is headed, the editors are noncommittal: “the Jewish
community of Montreal has been confronted with the question of the sort
of future it can look forward to. What that future will look like cannot
now be discerned with any accuracy.”