Source: ForeignAffairs4
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Regan Lipes, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and English, MacEwan University
As an assistant professor of comparative literature, when I ask undergraduate students how they define “Canadian literature,” I get half-hearted answers about it encompassing anything inherently Canadian. They don’t, however, specify which language, if any, they believe Canadian literature must be written in.
I specifically ask this question because — although I teach in an anglophone environment — just as Canadian identities are multilingual, so too is the literature that tells Canada’s stories.
Defining a national literary canon can be complex. But literature written in any language can be Canadian when the experiences it describes are grounded in the realities of life in Canada.
Yiddish literature, though often overlooked, is an example that offers essential Canadian stories that broaden the national canon.
Reflecting multilayered identities
In my literary trends and traditions class, I teach the short story collection Natasha And Other Stories by Canadian author David Bezmozgis. Bezmozgis’s six English-language stories about a young Soviet-born, Russian-speaking, Latvian-Jewish immigrant to Toronto chronicle the gradual cultivation of a Canadian identity.
Students have a much easier time seeing the work of Bezmozgis as Canadian literature, despite the diversity of multilayered cultural influences, because it was written in English. To them, it’s more accessible.
I follow my first question with another: can Canadian literature be written in Yiddish?
This is usually answered with noncommittal shrugs. Some students are unsure whether Yiddish is still a functioning language and are surprised to learn it is the mother tongue of daily life in many communities globally, with 41,000 speakers residing in Canada.
Yiddish, traditionally spoken by Eastern and Central European Jews before the Second World War, has also experienced a renaissance because of growing appreciation for its evocative flair among contemporary culture connoisseurs.
My students were skeptical when I tell them we are going to read Canadian literature that had been translated from Yiddish. I introduce them to Jewish-Canadian writer Chava Rosenfarb, who was recognized by the University of Lethbridge with an honorary doctorate in 2006 for her literary achievements.
Born in Łódź, Poland, in 1923, Rosenfarb has become a core literary figure for the city because of her three-volume novel Tree of Life chronicling the conditions of perpetual struggle in the Łódź Ghetto. In 2023, a street in Łódź, was named after Rosenfarb, underscoring her importance in the Polish literary sphere.
But outside of Yiddish circles in Canada, her poetry and prose were not widely associated with the country’s literary canon for a long time.
Yiddish literature is Canadian
Though Rosenfarb spent most of her adult life in Canada, raising a family in Montréal, it is only in recent years that she is being appreciated for her significant contribution to Canadian literature. Even though it may have limited her audience, she predominantly published her work in Yiddish because it remained the language in which she felt most artistically at home.
Although Rosenfarb’s individual stories have been previously published in Yiddish literary magazines and in separate translations, it was not until In the Land of The Postscript: The Complete Short Stories of Chava Rosenfarb came out in 2023 that we had the author’s short fiction in a single volume for the first time.
Chava Rosenfarb’s daughter, Dr. Goldie Morgentaler — professor emerita at the University of Lethbridge who was honoured with a Canadian Jewish Literary Award for her translation work from Yiddish to English — translated the collection unifying the text with an insightful and synthesizing forward. She finally brought her mother’s short fiction, about the lives of Holocaust survivors rebuilding lives in Montréal, to anglophone audiences.
Rosenfarb’s stories in the collection tackle the philosophical and existential quandaries of the universal human experience, but with a recognizably Canadian backdrop. Her characters grapple with the obstacles of immigration and ongoing displacement while simultaneously navigating the legacy of their Holocaust trauma. The resettlement of survivors contributed significantly to Canadian Jewish culture, and the impact is still present today.
As Morgentaler notes, it is the ever-visible silhouette of Mount Royal in Montréal that reminds Edgia, the title character of “Edgia’s Revenge,” that as a Jew, she is always under the watchful gaze of the dominant Christian power structure. When Lolek, Edgia’s husband, later dies, it is a set of spiral wooden stairs characteristic of Montréal architecture that are to blame for his fall.
These are distinctly local, Montréal-rooted elements of Rosenfarb’s storytelling, and are immediately familiar to readers. Despite being written in Yiddish, these are Canadian stories that depict the lived experiences of a generation of traumatized newcomers.
Translation supports Canadian narratives
A nation’s literature used to be tied to language, but this can no longer be the narrow criterion for defining a canon. Migration, both voluntary and resulting from forcible displacement, has diversified and enriched the chorus of voices that narrate the stories of Canada. And translation makes it possible to appreciate Canadian literature in its diversity of voices.
Despite having written her short fiction in Yiddish, Rosenfarb’s work tells Canadian stories that provide a valuable glimpse into a chapter of the national narrative seldom explored.
After exposing my students to Rosenfarb’s short fiction, I ask them again whether they consider literature written in languages other than those officially recognized by the Canadian government as belonging to the genre of Canadian literature. And without exception, they agree their perspective has changed.
This marks a point in literary studies where scholars are moving past the traditional paradigm of examining national literature through the lens of national languages.
And the growing literary canon is not only stronger for it, it better reflects the country’s cultural reality.
Regan Lipes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
– ref. What Yiddish literature reveals about Canada’s diverse canon and multilingual identity – https://theconversation.com/what-yiddish-literature-reveals-about-canadas-diverse-canon-and-multilingual-identity-267190