New Perspectives On Canada The Holocaust And Survivors

In the decade after the Second World War, 35,000 Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution and their dependants arrived in Canada. This was a watershed moment in Canadian Jewish history. The unprecedented scale of the relief effort required for the survivors, compounded by their unique social, psychological, and emotional needs challenged both the established Jewish community and resettlement agents alike. Adara Goldberg’s Holocaust Survivors in Canada highlights the immigration, resettlement, and integration experience from the perspective of Holocaust survivors and those charged with helping them. The book explores the relationships between the survivors, Jewish social service organizations, and local Jewish communities; it considers how those relationships—strained by disparities in experience, language, culture, and worldview—both facilitated and impeded the ability of survivors to adapt to a new country. Researched in basement archives and as well as at Holocaust survivors’ kitchen tables, Holocaust Survivors in Canada represents the first comprehensive analysis of the resettlement, integration, and acculturation experience of survivors in early postwar Canada. Goldberg reveals the challenges in responding to, and recovering from, genocide—not through the lens of lawmakers, but from the perspective of “new Canadians” themselves.

The Azrieli Foundation established the Sustaining Memories Project to help survivors write their stories. A unique partnership between survivors and volunteer writing partners who were trained to work with Holocaust survivors on recording and transcribing their stories, volunteers spent countless hours on these testimonies. The strength of the bonds that form when a volunteer and a survivor create a memoir, of the emotional challenges that a survivor faces in the telling and the understanding, and the insight that the listener experiences were all part of an incredible journey. Excerpts of these co-written memoirs, never before published, are produced in this anthology to give readers a wide range of understanding of the varieties of experiences of Holocaust survivors. Sustaining Memories gives voice to Canadian Jews who suffered through ghettos, camps, hiding, fighting in the underground, as refugees in foreign countries or passing as non-Jews in daily fear of betrayal. Following their liberation, survivors often had to congregate in displaced persons camps, where many married, had children and waited years for countries to offer them new homes. Some would end up in the detention camps of Cyprus on their way to pre-state Israel; others found themselves locked behind the Iron Curtain for decades. Between 1946 and the 1980s, they all built new lives in Canada.

In Delayed Impact Franklin Bialystok explores the evolution of the legacy of the Holocaust in the collective memory of the post-war Canadian Jewish community. He seeks to understand why the Holocaust's effect was relatively muted up to 1960, moved to the forefront with the rise of antisemitism in the 1960s, and became a prominent concern and marker for Jewish ethnic identity after 1973. Bialystok begins by examining the years immediately following World War II, showing that Canadian Jews were not psychologically equipped to comprehend the enormity of the Holocaust. Unable to grasp the extent of the atrocities that had occurred in a world that was not theirs, Canadian Jews were not prepared to empathize with the survivors and a chasm between the groups developed and widened in the next two decades. He shows how the efflorescence of marginal but vicious antisemitism in Canada in the 1960s, in combination with more potent antisemitic outrages internationally and the threat to Israel's existence, led to an interest in the Holocaust. He demonstrates that with the politicisation of the survivors and the maturation of the post-war generation of Canadian Jews in the 1980s, the memory of the Holocaust became a pillar of ethnic identity. Combining previously unexamined documents and interviews with leaders in the Jewish community in Canada, Bialystok shows how the collective memory of an epoch-making event changed in reaction to historical circumstances. His work enhances our understanding of immigrant adaptation and ethnic identification in a multi-cultural society in the context of the post-war economic and social changes in the Canadian landscape and sheds new light on the history of Canadian Jewry, opening a new perspective on the effects of the Holocaust on a community in transition. Franklin Bialystok is a part-time lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo. He has published numerous articles on the Holocaust in various journals and edited collections.

As the Holocaust is memorialized worldwide through education programs and commemoration days, the common perception is that after survivors arrived and settled in their new homes they continued on a successful journey from rags to riches. While this story is comforting, a closer look at the experience of Holocaust survivors in North America shows it to be untrue. The arrival of tens of thousands of Jewish refugees was palpable in the streets of Montreal and their impact on the existing Jewish community is well-recognized. But what do we really know about how survivors’ experienced their new community? Drawing on more than 60 interviews with survivors, hundreds of case files from Jewish Immigrant Aid Services, and other archival documents, The Montreal Shtetl presents a portrait of the daily struggles of Holocaust survivors who settled in Montreal, where they encountered difficulties with work, language, culture, health care, and a Jewish community that was not always welcoming to survivors. By reflecting on how institutional supports, gender, and community relationships shaped the survivors’ settlement experiences, Abramson and Lynch show the relevance of these stories to current state policies on refugee immigration.

Auto/biography in Canada: Critical Directions widens the field of auto/biography studies with its sophisticated multidisciplinary perspectives on the theory, criticism, and practice of self, community, and representation. Rather than considering autobiography and biography as discrete genres with definable properties, and rather than focusing on critical approaches, the essays explore auto/biography as a discourse about identity and representation in the context of numerous disciplinary shifts. Auto/biography in Canada looks at how life narratives are made in Canada . Originating from literary studies, history, and social work, the essays in this collection cover topics that range from queer Canadian autobiography, autobiography and autism, and newspaper death notices as biography, to Canadian autobiography and the Holocaust, Grey Owl and authenticity, France Théoret and autofiction, and a new reading of Stolen Life, the collaborative text by Yvonne Johnson and Rudy Wiebe. Julie Rak’s useful “big picture” introduction traces the history of auto/biography studies in Canada. While the contributors chart disciplinary shifts taking place in auto/biography studies, their essays are also part of the ongoing scholarship that is remaking ways to understand Canada.

Spanning more than two hundred years of history, from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, Sisters or Strangers? explores the complex lives of immigrant, ethnic, and racialized women in Canada. Among the themes examined in this new edition are the intersection of race, crime, and justice, the creation of white settler societies, letters and oral histories, domestic labour, the body, political activism, food studies, gender and ethnic identity, and trauma, violence, and memory. The second edition of this influential essay collection expands its chronological and conceptual scope with fifteen new essays that reflect the latest cutting-edge research in Canadian women's history. Introductions to each thematic section include discussion questions and suggestions for further reading, making the book an even more valuable classroom resource than before.