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Dec. 1, 2006
Our identities investigated
Authors discuss Western Canadian Jewish society at book festival.
PAT JOHNSON
In the first Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival event to take
place outside the community centre, a full house braved the harshest
rains of the season to make their way to the Stanley Park Pavilion
Nov. 22 for a literary evening exploring Jewish identities.
Two Western Canadian Jewish authors explored ideas of community
and belonging, in the process divulging much about the distinctive
nature of various small Canadian Jewish communities.
Melanie Fogell, an academic speaker and a gifted deadpan wit, spoke
of growing up in Winnipeg's tight-knit and intense Jewish community
and being uprooted to the West Coast in adolescence.
"I may as well have landed on another planet," said Fogell.
"And I say that in the nicest way.
"It just didn't feel like Winnipeg," she said of her arrival
in Vancouver at age 15. "They were wearing saddle shoes and
I didn't know why. I couldn't figure it out or assimilate."
Fogell wrote Ambiguous Selves: New Jewish Identities, from
her perspective as a Jewish Western Canadian woman. Through her
observations and the anecdotes shared from the audience, a striking
picture was drawn of the cultural differences among Canadian Jewish
communities.
People on the West Coast, Fogell found, have "more distractions."
In discussions with the audience, the plenitude of outdoor recreation
opportunities was offered as a cause of British Columbians paying
less attention to interpersonal relations and more to kayaking.
The weather in other parts of Canada encourages indoor recreation,
which is closer and more interpersonal.
"In Winnipeg and Calgary, it's more about people," she
said.
Fogell spoke of how she married and moved to Calgary, where she
soon found herself mother to two children orphaned by a motor vehicle
tragedy. She would have been their aunt, but fate was to make her
their mother, thrown, Fogell said, "into a story already in
progress."
In struggling to fit into Calgary's Jewish community as a young
wife and mother, Fogell found herself drawn to Israeli women there,
who were struggling with their own variety of isolation within the
community. Unlike Jews who had come from, say, Vancouver or Montreal,
those who came from Israel looking for community among their new
Jewish neighbors were sometimes faced with an ambivalent reception.
Especially in earlier decades, when Zionist fervor was at its strongest
among Canadian Jews, the arrival of Israelis defied idealism.
"What are we to think then when Israelis leave the Promised
Land?" asked Fogell.
The mitzvah of welcoming the stranger was tossed around by Fogell
and the audience, noting that "welcoming" can be perceived
as overbearing. In Winnipeg, she said, "anonymity is not an
option." But as a 15-year-old newly arrived in Vancouver, she
struggled to find a community.
"Assimilated is a word that comes to mind," Fogell said
of the Jewish community here at the time.
Fogell was joined by Sid Tafler, author of Us and Them: A Memoir
of Tribes and Tribulations.
Tafler, originally a Montrealer who "felt invited to leave"
Quebec during the endless linguistic and constitutional battles,
said Jews are quite afraid of sudden rises in nationalism. Montreal,
he noted, has a large population of Holocaust survivors who may
be especially attuned to shifts in the political climate. While
tribalism has its place – "People want to be in their
group," said Tafler – most assume that civilization and
modernity has replaced tribal loyalties. Tafler, contending that
we may not be as far from our roots as we would like to believe,
suggested a parlor game-type of sociology.
He claims that if you ask most humans to make a list of the people
around them who are most important, it will usually tally at about
20 to 25, apparently the optimal size of most tribal groupings in
ancient history.
The particular tribe being discussed that evening was the Jews,
whom Tafler imagines as a flotilla of small crafts on a journey
of thousands of miles down a long river, sometimes calm, sometimes
roiling in rapids, some boats overturning, a small remnant continuing
on. He calls it a fluke or a miracle that the Jewish people, ever
in small numbers, nevertheless continue on from generation to generation.
Today, Jews probably make up a smaller proportion of the human population
than ever before, Tafler said. (Jews may have made up as much as
10 percent of the Roman Empire's population, he noted.)
While humans may not be far from our tribal roots, Tafler stressed
the progress toward civilization that Canadians have undergone in
the past half-century, from open anti-Semitism, institutionalized
racism against Chinese Canadians, First Nations, Francophones and
homosexuals, to one of the world's most progressive, constitutionally
equal societies.
"You can see how far we've come in a relatively short period
of time," he said.
Still, he warned, there is a train of thought that contends we are
"three meals away from chaos," meaning that as long as
economic stability exists, Jews and others are relatively safe,
but catastrophe can have unanticipated impacts.
Tafler marvelled at the phenomenon of Jews carrying on through history,
always a tiny population. Were it not for the Holocaust and millennia
of other cataclysms, Tafler said, there should be about 200 million
Jews in the world. Instead, there are 14 million. And this number,
through assimilation and a declining birth rate, could be halved
in a generation.
Such disappearance was not evident at the literary evening, however.
Many of the people at the Stanley Park Pavilion were members of
the emerging downtown Jewish community. With the development of
new neighborhoods on the downtown peninsula, such as Coal Harbor
and Yaletown, along with increasing density in the West End, the
Jewish population in the area has risen, leading to increased attention
from Jewish communal agencies, who are adapting to a higher demand
for services in a relatively new area of the city.
Rabbi Yosef Wosk, who moderated the evening's event, noted that
the emergence of the downtown Jewish community has been sudden and
rapid.
"We can say we were here when," said Wosk.
Pat Johnson is editor of MVOX Multicultural Digest, www.mvox.ca.
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