The Montreal Shtetl…Making Home After the Holocaust

The Montreal Shtetl…Making Home After the Holocaust,  a book about immigrants to Montreal in the mid-40s is launching. The readings will take approximately 1 hour. The authors have chosen the passages which give life to the people in the interviews they conducted.

Date: February 22 7:00 PM

Where: Ruth Anne Whicher’s home, Tannery Road, Lunenburg

For more information contact Merrill Heubach at 902 634 8033M

Below is short synopsis of the book:

What distinguishes this book from other texts that draw on oral histories is our decision to move away from the usual way of organizing qualitative research, and instead to narrate this book through the voices of the men and women we interviewed. The conversations that took place with the survivors are the ones we share. It is their voices that prevail. This book is written as a series of narratives constructed from the interview transcripts, and they serve as primary data. From the original sample of sixty-seven interviews, we identified twenty-three oral histories to be told (see Interviewees). These narrations represent the dominant themes that were present in many of the interviews and reflect the multiple standpoints of the differing generations of survivors—adult survivors, child survivors, and children of survivors—as well as voices from Canadians who were living in Montreal at that time. The book is organized into three parts: Uprooting, Unpacking, and Making Home. In each part of the book, there is a collection of personal narrations. Some of the interviewees’ narrations span all three parts of the book, while others are in only one or two. There is some overlap of themes among the three parts, as the narratives are not necessarily linear. In part i, Uprooting, the narratives focus on the survivors’ lives before, during, and after the war years, culminating in their arrival in Montreal. The narratives in part ii, Unpacking, reflect the dailiness of rebuilding lives. Also, in this section, we address the role of jias—which was responsible for providing a financial safety net for the refugees during their first six months in Montreal integrating the refugees into the Montreal Jewish communities.

nity. … Part iii, Making Home, is an exploration 

of the nonmaterial aspects of settling in the so-called Montreal shtetl and 

addresses questions of identity, integration, assimilation, regional poli-

tics, and belonging.