Parchment: Contemporary Canadian Jewish Writing, 1993-94

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

In this anthology of poems and short stories by contemporary Canadian
Jewish writers, the short stories are better than the poems. Not
unexpectedly, ethnicity is an important, indeed dominant, topic.
Holocaust memories play a significant part and are at the core of the
stories by Helen Weinzweig and Monique Bosco. Significantly, exclusion,
anti-Semitism, and related problems within the contemporary Canadian
context are not big issues.

Gender, though, emerges as an important concern. Several writers
explore the conflict between traditional expectations and the lives of
women in the modern world. The main character in “The Prayer” by
Nora Gold, “is one of only five people at her shul who can lead the
High Holyday services, and the only one out of these five prayers who is
a woman.” She is at the same time more “in” than most, because of
her religious vocation, yet also “out” because of gender. “La
Danseuse,” by Naпm Kattan, explores a similar idea of a woman’s
special talents combining to both include and exclude her from the group
at the same time. Here, the female protagonist’s defining difference
is her ability to do “old country” dances. She is a centre of
attention at weddings and other special occasions, but her husband seems
not entirely pleased that she has failed to westernize herself more
fully.

Realism is the dominant literary mode. The work is content-oriented;
reporting Jewish experience as it is lived today in Canada seems to be
the goal. An enjoyable book.