Books – Page 41

Survivors’ immense impact

Holocaust survivors who came to Canada after the Second World War remade this country’s Jewish community.

Before survivors arrived in numbers, beginning in 1947, Canada’s Jewish community had a few poorly resourced social service agencies. The demands created by thousands of new arrivals – many with significant emotional and physical challenges – spurred the growth of Jewish communal organizations across the country. In turn, those survivors have had an impact on the community in the successive seven decades that is incalculable. The impact of the Holocaust – and the arrival of its survivors – is perhaps the defining factor in the development of Canada’s Jewish community.

photo - Adara Goldberg — Adara Goldberg *(photo from Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival)*

“The Holocaust is a watershed moment and the scale of this watershed resettlement was unprecedented,” said Adara Goldberg, a Vancouverite and author of Holocaust Survivors in Canada: Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation, 1947–1955. “Many of the agencies across Canada only came to be as a result of the Holocaust. Jewish Immigrant Aid Services [JIAS] did exist, but this was a small organization that only dealt with small numbers up to this point. Having some 35,000 people come in, in less than a 10-year span, really trampled the organizations.”

Survivors who moved to the United States joined a vibrant Jewish community already in progress, while those who came to Canada found a Jewish community with little infrastructure. What exists of the Jewish community and its social service agencies today was built, in large part, for the survivors and, subsequently, by them.

To an extent, there was an unwillingness among Canada’s existing Jewish community to address the Holocaust experiences of the newcomers – those who did not experience the Holocaust may have been afraid of opening wounds or been unwilling to hear the horrors others experienced. There was also a history in Canada of immigrants getting off the boats and throwing themselves instantly into building a new life, leaving the past behind.

Still, Goldberg said, there was a recognition by people like the head of JIAS that these immigrants had some very particular needs.

“The problem was availability,” she said. “This is uncharted territory. Social workers themselves and the Canadian Jewish community were only learning with the survivors about how to treat victims of trauma … the idea of post-traumatic stress didn’t really exist.”

Getting the newcomers integrated was not only a matter of meeting social needs, she added.

“There is also a legal element to that,” Goldberg said. “The fact is, refugees who came to Canada under the auspices of either the Canadian Jewish Congress, or who received support from JIAS or who had relatives sponsor them, were liabilities. If they didn’t find work, if they didn’t have a home, if they became dependent, they risked deportation. They risked becoming a drain on the existing Jewish community, which was already really reaching its max in terms of what they could do.”

A symbol of success is that very few fell through the cracks, although many of the case studies in the book indicate that some survivors were miserable in their assigned living conditions or workplaces.

There was a realization after the war, as the magnitude of what would come to be called the Holocaust dawned, that Canada had failed the imperiled Jews of Europe in the 1930s, when there was still time.

“After the war, relationships changed and there was significant international pressure on Canada to help do its part in relieving the postwar refugee crisis of Jewish and also non-Jewish displaced persons,” Goldberg said. “On the one hand, we can say this was a humanitarian gesture.… There’s also a practical element that we can’t overlook in that Canada stood to gain something from allowing in the Holocaust survivor refugees. There was a need for skilled laborers and this is how most survivors did come in, they came in for skilled labor posts, so Canada benefited.”

The equation of immigration and Canada’s need for labor is underscored by the fact that there was no ministry of immigration at the time – until 1950, Canada’s immigration policy was administered by the ministry of mines and resources. The influx of Jewish and non-Jewish refugees postwar familiarized the Canadian government and public to the concept of receiving refugees on humanitarian grounds. The first major instance of this reconsideration came in 1956 after the Soviet Union crushed the democratic uprising in Hungary. Canada admitted 37,000 refugees in the course of a year.

Goldberg’s book begins with a refresher on Canada’s abominable record in the prewar period. Chapters then take on topics such as the unique requirements of young orphaned refugees; the double-edged sword of interned “enemy aliens” – Jews from enemy states, mostly Germany and Austria, whose nationality, in the eyes of Britain and its Canadian dominion, trumped their status as endangered victims of Nazism; the various programs under which refugees were admitted to Canada and how established Jewish communities, especially their women’s organizations, cared for refugees’ personal needs; the creation of social clubs and synagogues by and for survivors; the development of an ultra-Orthodox and Chassidic community here; and “transmigrants,” those who came to Canada after a sojourn elsewhere, often in Israel. She has included the stories of survivors who didn’t want to be found; those whose experiences in Europe led them to hide their Jewishness and their past as they began a new life in Canada. It is a monumental work.

A Toronto native, Goldberg wrote the book in fulfilment of her PhD at Clark University in Massachusetts and, while there are differences between the dissertation and the book, which was published in September by University of Manitoba Press, the book avoids the academic jargon that can exclude ordinary readers.

“As a social history that was created with the research that I did both in archives as well as through interviews and other sources, it was written with a wide readership in mind,” she said.

Goldberg eschews statistics in favor of personal case studies both from in-person interviews and records of social service agencies from decades past. The result is an introduction to hundreds of individuals and their stories, as well as a testament to the resilience of the survivors and the history of a small Jewish community rising – not always flawlessly – to the challenge of welcoming tens of thousands of co-religionists who had suffered unspeakable horrors.

The dissertation took about three years to complete and, after Goldberg moved to Vancouver, where she worked for three years as education director at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, she took the opportunity to do additional research that incorporates more local content. The book is enriched by her background as a trained social worker, which underpins a deep analysis of the successes and failures of social service agencies in those early years.

Refugees are the top global news story today and Goldberg sees lessons for the present in her book.

“It’s a very different crisis,” she said. “I think what we can do is, without trying to compare individual experiences, to remember the risk of nativist attitudes and what happened when Canada had very discriminatory, restrictive immigration policies 75 years ago. Canada accepted the fewest number of Jewish refugees of any country in the Western world … Canada had an opportunity at that time to distinguish itself, to take a very restrictive policy and widen the gates. They could have done this and they elected not to. What we can do now is reflect on the result of this inaction. History does not need to repeat itself. Canada can distinguish itself as a world humanitarian leader.

“Similarly,” she continued, “Holocaust survivors have contributed to all aspects of Canadian society. I imagine that so, too, do other refugees to Canada and so will other waves that come in the future. There is so much that we can gain.”

The Vancouver launch of Adara Goldberg’s book takes place on Nov. 25, 5:30 p.m., at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, as part of the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival. Admission is free.

Life-changing lecture

Avrum Nadigel (photo from Avrum Nadigel)

Not only is there no quick fix to making a relationship work, but there’s no quick fix for absorbing the main points of Avrum Nadigel’s Learning to Commit: The Best Time to Work on Your Marriage is When You’re Single. Its lessons can’t be summed up in a few bullet points – you’re going to have to read it.

That being said, Nadigel will have to make the audience at the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival “fall in love with” his book in less than 180 seconds. He’s part of the event A Literary Quickie, which takes place on Nov. 22, 10 a.m., at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver. The brunch event lineup includes authors Richa Dwor, A.D. Gentle, Rosa Harris, Revital Shiri-Horowitz, Paula Hurwitz, June Hutton, Evelyn H. Lazare, Olga Medvedeva-Nathoo and Marina Sonkina. Admission is by donation.

Nadigel has been a therapist for more than 15 years. He received his master’s of social work from McGill University in Montreal in 1997, and did post-graduate training with the Western Pennsylvania Family Centre, which teaches Bowen family systems theory. He also received supervision via Skype from author and family therapist Dr. David Freeman (who died in 2010). In Learning to Commit, Nadigel doesn’t just offer theories, but advice gained from personal and professional experience. Advice that changed his life, and he’s hoping it’ll help others.

Though Nadigel only lived in Vancouver for about six years, from 1999 to 2005, it was here that he first encountered Freeman, who was speaking at a singles event at the J. His words had a profound impact on Nadigel.

“For all I thought I knew about relationships (I was a practising therapist at that time), Freeman debunked many of my own assumptions, for example, that poor communication is the cause of relationship problems,” writes Nadigel. “He introduced novel ideas about romantic love, providing subtle warnings that the very things that cause a young lover’s heart to flutter can, down the road, be the catalyst of dissatisfaction and divorce. He encouraged us to focus on our own interests, because the more interesting we are to ourselves, the more we have to bring to the table in our relationships.”

Nadigel had come out west, lured by the Rocky Mountains. “From that moment on,” he said, “I knew I had to live near mountains, but also in close proximity to a Jewish community. Vancouver was an easy choice.”

He told the Independent, “It was a total ‘head west young man’ move. I was 30 years old. I sold everything I owned, loaded all of my guitars, some clothes and CDs (remember those?) and headed west. No job, no family, no relationship and only one friend in B.C.

“For money, I worked as a child protection worker, and then as an addiction therapist and family therapist…. Most importantly, I took courses at Emily Carr, composed music for films and learned how to mountain bike.”

He also came here to meet a local Jewish woman but, he said, “true to [his] commitment-phobic self,” he “couldn’t find anyone in Vancouver (or Victoria, Seattle or Calgary) to settle down with.” Eventually, on frumster.com, he met the woman who would become his wife, Dr. Aliza Israel – from Richmond. At the time, she was living and studying in Toronto. “Anyway, we dated long-distance (perfect for a commitment-phobe), and then I agreed to move wherever her residency would be. She was accepted into the Toronto psychiatry program, and the rest is history.”

The two were married in June 2007 at the J here because that’s where Nadigel first heard Freeman, which led to his rethinking about marriage and other things. “The JCC in Vancouver holds a very special place in my heart,” he said.

And so still does Freeman, one of the people to whom Learning to Commit is dedicated, “for providing me with a lighthouse; a way to navigate the rocky seas of my relationships.”

At least one of the ideas in the book seems counterintuitive – the admonition to not compromise.

“Too many relationship books/ speakers assume that compromise is the key to a successful relationship, and so our culture embraces this opinion – and that’s all it really is. And good people use this to avoid growing … discomfort, fear, etc.,” explained Nadigel. “Compromise is no virtue if it’s the first thing you reach for to avoid difficult discussions or situations. Now, more mature people are able to compromise without feeling like they’re betraying their values/principles, because they’re clear on what they stand for, and what they won’t put up with. They won’t compromise on big-ticket items, and will be willing to face the sting/consequence of staying true to their principles.”

In Learning to Commit, Nadigel writes, “According to Dr. Murray Bowen, togetherness and individuality are two opposing forces that we are all born with. We spend the rest of our lives trying to reconcile their often-contradictory impulses.” A well-differentiated person – someone who is confident of their values and principles, and doesn’t change their opinion or action “just to defuse tension” is able to balance those opposing forces.

“Differentiation is not selfishness,” stressed Nadigel. “It is not about a focus on my needs, damn everyone else. It’s about living a life guided by well-thought-out principles, some of which will address who I want to be/act/think with my partner, children, parents, colleagues, friends, etc. It’s about balancing feelings with good, clear thinking. Actually, one could say that immature, high-feeling-centric people are so fragile that the mere thought of considering another person’s point of view is crushing, whereas higher differentiated people can choose to be guided by their partner’s best interest. But the key here is choice!”

The lessons in Nadigel’s book are relevant for all relationships – in fact, he writes, “one of the main tenets of family systems theory [is]: ‘You will only succeed in future relationships in ways you have already succeeded with your parents, siblings and/or extended families.” They are also useful in dealing with controversy or difficult issues, in developing the ability to hear what you need to hear, even though you may not want to hear it.

To remain open, he explained, “you need two things – curiosity and (if possible) playfulness. These things are very hard to come by in high-tense situations, i.e. acrimonious marriage, Middle East discussions, anything involving high emotions mixed with perceived/real threats. Which is why I believe, as a blogger recently noted while discussing my book: ‘Doing some self-examination and exploration … while we are single might be the best marital therapy we’ll ever have.’ Curiosity and playfulness is much more likely when we’re single, or dating, than when mired in the marital muck of resentment, etc…. I think the best that one can do – in any area – is to share your thoughts as clearly as possible, and without any expectation that people are going to support your thinking or applaud your efforts. When you think about the qualities of great leaders/leadership, these attributes apply.”

For the full book festival schedule, visit jewishbookfestival.ca.

Hot off holiday press

In the last couple of months, three new Chanukah-themed picture books have been published. Most recently, out of Mahone Bay, N.S., is Hanukkah Lullaby. Out of New York City are Oskar and the Eight Blessings and The Parakeet Named Dreidel. All three are delightful.

Hanukkah Lullaby, written by Ruth Abrams and illustrated by Tia Mushka, is part of a series of books from Baby Lullaby Publishing. Until this holiday edition, the series – the books of which have various authors and illustrators – has focused only on places: in Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Saskatchewan, and Alberta; in the United States, Hawaii and Alaska. Each book, intended for a 0-to-6-year-old audience, has a link to its own song and video. The music for Hanukkah Lullaby was composed by Keith Andrews and the video was made by Jonah Peveril, both of whom have contributed to other lullabies in the series.

Hanukkah Lullaby follows one family’s celebration: enjoying the winter snow, making dreidels, lighting the chanukiyah, dreaming of the Maccabees, eating all the fried treats, spending time with Baba and Zayda, singing songs, telling the Chanukah story and having a lantern parade. The last two pages of the 18-page board book offer a very brief overview of the holiday’s symbols and rituals, and a paragraph summarizing the story of the Maccabees. Abrams’ lyric text and Mushka’s bold, colorful artwork make for a lovely read.

***

Oskar and the Eight Blessings (Roaring Brook Press), written by husband-wife team Richard Simon and Tanya Simon and illustrated by Mark Siegel, is for somewhat older readers, ages 4-8.

It begins, “Oskar’s mother and father believed in the power of blessings. So did Oskar … until the Night of Broken Glass. His parents put him on a ship to America. He had nothing but an address and a photo of a woman he didn’t know – ‘It’s your Aunt Esther.’ – and his father’s last words to him: ‘Oskar, even in bad times, people can be good. You have to look for the blessings.’”

When Oskar arrives in New York, it is the seventh day of Chanukah and he wants to reach his aunt’s – 100 blocks away – before she lights the chanukiyah. Along Broadway Avenue, he encounters a woman feeding some pigeons, a newsstand vendor, Count Basie, boys having a snowball fight, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and a Christmas tree seller. He is treated with kindness at every turn, and is able to reciprocate on more than one occasion. Siegel’s rich illustrations beautifully capture the darkness and the hope of Oskar’s journey.

In the author’s note that follows the story, Richard Simon writes about the inspiration for the book and its 1938 setting, including a bit about the real people the fictional Oskar meets along the way.

“Oskar has lost everything,” he writes, “but from his despair he awakens to his freedom: the choice to see the good in his new world. I like to think that this orientation of optimism is the key to our survival, as individuals and as a species. It is how we, as American Jews, have made a place for ourselves beyond the shadow of darkness that tried to destroy us.”

***

The playful and imaginative watercolor illustrations by Suzanne Raphael Berkson dovetail perfectly with Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story in The Parakeet Named Dreidel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Intended for kids age 5 to 8, the title character loses his way. As David and his parents celebrate Chanukah, David notices the yellow-green bird outside their window. A cold Brooklyn night, they quickly move aside the chanukiyah (so the bird won’t get burned by its candles), open the window and welcome it in. Initially frightened, the bird settles down, eats some millet, drinks some water, plays a little dreidel – and speaks some Yiddish! “Zeldele, geh schlofen.” (“Zeldele, go to sleep.”)

Despite posting notices around the neighborhood, no one claims the lost bird, who the family names Dreidel. The “photo” montage of Dreidel and David growing up together is wonderful. The bird really does become part of the family.

When, years later, David meets a woman named Zelda at college, it turns out that she is Dreidel’s Zeldele. But lest readers worry that Dreidel leaves David’s parents, the bird becomes part of a larger family when David and Zelda get married, their families come together, and the couple decides to start a family of their own.

All of three of these books are available from chapters.indigo.ca and their respective publishers in hard copy and electronic formats. Hanukkah Lullaby will be available at the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, Nov. 21-26, at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver.

Meet authors at book festival

Assaf Gavron (photo from JCC Jewish Book Festival)

As it does every year, the 31st annual Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival offers readers the chance to meet some of their favorite authors. Sean Michaels, the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize winner, starts it all off on Nov. 21 at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver’s Rothstein Theatre. Among the festival’s many highlights are Israeli writer Assaf Gavron and American writer Nomi Eve, to whom the Independent had a chance to e-speak recently.

Gavron’s latest novel, The Hilltop (translated into English from Hebrew by Stephen Cohen), deals with one of the most contentious and emotion-laden aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the settlements in the West Bank. It does so with humor and humanity – and an even eye, examining the larger societal issues through the troubled relationship of two troubled brothers. Family, bureaucracy, unintended consequences, and more, factor into the story.

JI: What is it about fiction that allows it to communicate controversial ideas or speak to controversial topics in a way that seems to be more easily received than other media, such as journalism, academia, documentary film?

AG: I think that usually when ideas are termed “controversial,” it is on a simplistic level – when you can sum it up in a sentence or two, it is easy to annoy, or touch a nerve, or whatever. The other forms of media you mention, like journalism or documentary, are also susceptible to this superficiality. Fiction gives you more time, and depth, to really get to the story and to the people behind it. And, whatever the subject is, it can’t remain on the simplistic level. Yes, hopefully it causes more thinking and a better understanding of complexities. I like that about reading fiction, but as to the reason why I choose to write, I think that, over the years, I learned that it is the kind of storytelling I am best at, and most comfortable with.

JI: When I used to ask my grandmother how she was doing, her response often was that she still had her sense of humor – once she lost that, then…. What purpose does humor serve in your writing, or is it “just” a matter of style?

AG: That’s how I write, it is part of me, part of how I communicate. I can identify with your grandmother. I think that it is important, and sane, not to take things too seriously. And not less so, probably more so, in situations that are perceived as sad and difficult and tragic. We must be able to smile. In writing, it is mainly entertainment. It is more fun and enjoyable to read something that makes you laugh. In my books, I would like to entertain as much as anything else, like making a point, educating, etc.

JI: Not everyone can put themselves into someone else’s shoes, something you seem to have mastered in your writing, including your latest novel, The Hilltop. Does that openness and empathy extend into your “real” life? What is it in your personal “toolkit” that allows you to at least write from multiple viewpoints with sincerity?

AG: I disagree. I think everyone can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. This is why people read books, go to movies, read newspapers or even just talk to each other – they are curious about the experiences of others and, when they hear or read or watch them, they are always imagining if it was them, what would they do, how would they react. But it is true that people are reluctant to identify or see the world through eyes of people they perceive as an enemy, or as very different, as an “other,” in the real life. Sure, I hope I’m as open in real life. I think it is crucial to fundamentally accept that there are others, and to attempt to get to know them. I guess that it is no more than this belief that is my “toolkit.”

JI: You write books, translate, create videogames, are in a band … could you share a little bit about your background and how you came to your expertise in these areas?

AG: First and foremost I’m a fiction writer. But I’m also a curious person, like to keep myself interested … so I tend to do other things as well. The band, for example, is a lifelong project of three friends, who decided to do this for the long run, with little interference to our “daily” life. This is why we release an album every six years and not more frequently. Translating and teaching I do sometimes for income and sometimes for interest. The computer game was a one-off project.

JI: Your write-up on Wikipedia notes that you were in Vancouver in 1997, studying “new media.” Do you still have Vancouver connections?

AG: I do! My first cousin lives there with her family. Having family was part of the reason I came, and what I heard and imagined of the city and the school, which offered what I was interested in studying at the time. I had a great year in Vancouver, had a lovely apartment in Kitsilano. That year, I also wrote what would be my second book. I have been back only once since then, in 2003, I think, so it’s been awhile. I’m really looking forward to this visit, my first as a writer.

JI: Where are you and your family currently based?

AG: We are in Omaha, Neb. I have been teaching here for the past year. I’m moving to your time zone, San Diego, in January for six months, and then next summer back home to Israel.

***

The main character in Nomi Eve’s second novel, Henna House, is Adara, born in Yemen in 1918, the year that Imam Yahya took control of the region. He passed many restrictive decrees, including the Orphans Decree, calling “for any Jewish child to be confiscated, converted and quickly adopted by a Muslim family if a father died,” writes Eve. When the story begins, Adara’s father is already ill.

The bulk of the novel follows Adara and her family – notably, two cousins – from the 1920s in Yemen to the early years of Israel, briefly touching upon Operation On Wings of Eagles, better known by its nickname Operation Magic Carpet, when almost 50,000 Yemenite Jews were airlifted to Israel between June 1949 and September 1950.

JI: Research is an essential part of your creative process, but you also said in one interview that reality limits your creativity. How did you navigate the need for both research/reality and imagination in your two novels, seeing as both are rooted in “real” historical spaces?

NE: History is much more than a backdrop in my fiction. It also provides soul and substance. But I never let myself feel straightjacketed by history. I make things up and let my readers know that this is fiction, not academic research that they are reading. In Henna House, the fact that I have a first-person narrator also helped me navigate this terrain. My narrator uses her memory and imagination to construct her own version of the past. Memory is porous, and doesn’t always hold truth. Memory is powerful and often finds truth in unlikely places.

JI: Have you reached your 100 Book Clubs goal?

NE: I did book club #143 tonight – it was a Skype visit to Toronto. I love my book club visits. Readers are my wildest dream, and I feel lucky each time I get to chat with a new group.

photo - Nomi Eve — Nomi Eve *(photo from JCC Jewish Book Festival)*

JI: In Henna House, you write about Mizrahi Jews. What is your background? Did you have a mix of traditions growing up, given that your father was from Israel?

NE: My family is Ashkenazi, but I have a Yemenite aunt. It is from her that I learned to love Yemenite Jewish culture. But most of what I learned about the history of the Jews of North Yemen and Aden I learned through my own research. The most fascinating things that I learned were about henna traditions, and the Orphan’s Decree. Both of these things became central to the plot of my book.

JI: Your two novels are both set in the past. What appeals to you about the past and imagining what it might have been like?

NE: I find it easier to write about the past than about the present. The past feels multi-dimensional to me, whereas the present feels one-dimensional. I think that I am attracted to the fierce power of memory and the perspective gained by the passage of time.

Assaf Gavron in conversation with Marsha Lederman takes place Sunday, Nov. 22, 8 p.m.; tickets are $18. Nomi Eve speaks with Israeli-Canadian writer Ayelet Tsabari on Tuesday, Nov. 24, at an intimate gathering at 6:30 p.m. ($16) and to a book club and book-lovers event at 8 p.m. ($18); to attend both, the price is $30. For tickets to these and other festival events, call 604-257-5111 or drop by the J in person. For tickets and the full festival lineup, visit jewishbookfestival.ca.

Elaborating on real history

The Middle East is awash in virulent antisemitism, from the battlefield to the classroom. An Anti-Defamation League global survey of anti-Jewish sentiment last year pinpointed the West Bank, Gaza and Iraq as the world’s most antisemitic lands in the world. More than 90% of those who took the survey in those areas expressed anti-Jewish views.

Some Middle East observers link the blind hatred of Jews in the Middle East to the work of Islamic preachers and Arab leaders who perpetuate the ideology of Nazi Germany. They say that antisemitism is the driving force behind the endless cycle of wars and that nothing that Israel does matters. They maintain that Israel’s enemies will fight until the Jewish state is wiped out and all Jews in the Middle East have been killed.

Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, in Nazis, Islamists and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Yale University Press), provide ammunition for those who argue that peace is impossible with antisemitic Palestinian and Arab leaders. Rubin, who died before the book was published, was a prolific writer and leading Middle East scholar at the Global Research in International Affairs Centre in Israel. Schwanitz, an accomplished German-American Middle East historian, was a visiting professor at GRIAC at the time of the book’s publication.

In their richly researched book, Rubin and Schwanitz document the ancestry of antisemitism in the Middle East over the past century, connecting some of the contemporary Arab and Palestinian leaders to the vitriolic antisemitism of the Nazi collaborator, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini.

Backed up by new archival material and previously published research, Rubin and Schwanitz maintain that profound doctrinal hatred for Jews remains the core reason for the Arab-Israel conflict’s enduring and irresolvable nature.

Take a look at Israel’s partners for peace. Heads of state who were once Nazi sympathizers ran regimes that lasted 40 years in Iraq, 50 years in Syria and 60 years in Egypt. An echo of the antisemitism of the 1930s reverberated through speeches of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iraqi’s Saddam Hussein, Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi and Saudi Arabia’s Osama bin Laden. A Nazi sympathizer educated Yasser Arafat.

However, Rubin and Schwanitz in this book undermine their own credibility by mixing well-documented historical accounts with sweeping pronouncements that seem to be driven by a narrow ideological bias. At times, they sound more like polemicists than historians. They focus on an extreme interpretation of Islam, painting 1.2 billion Muslims with one brush. They ignore history that does not fit easily into their portrait. And their perspective does little to shed light on the contemporary Middle East, where Muslims fight Muslims.

The most provocative assertion in the book is that the grand mufti was responsible for the Nazi gas chambers and crematoria.

Rubin and Schwanitz portray al-Husseini as the most powerful leader of the Arabs and Muslims around the world in mid-century. At the height of his power, he promised Adolf Hitler that the entire Arab people would rally around the Nazi flag and wage a war of terror against Britain and France if Germany would stop all Jewish immigration to Palestine and guarantee independence to countries in the Middle East.

Rubin and Schwanitz maintain that Hitler decided to kill all the Jews only after al-Husseini insisted that they not be deported to Palestine. None of the European countries would accept Jewish refugees. If Palestine would not accept them, the reasoning goes, Hitler had no choice but to build gas chambers.

But their theory has a few holes in it. Historians have never discovered any Nazi plans to transport all the Jews of Eastern Europe and Russia to Palestine. Britain was already restricting immigration. Hitler’s support for al-Husseini’s demand to stop deportations to Palestine was an empty gesture.

Most historians regard al-Husseini as a minor historical figure. Al-Husseini was part of the Nazi war effort and played a role in the death of thousands of Jews. But he was not as powerful or influential in the

Middle East as he is portrayed here. As Rubin and Schwanitz point out, al-Husseini had no plan for actually staging insurrections in support of Nazi Germany. He recruited only 1,000 soldiers outside of Iraq, although he promised 100,000 for the Nazi cause. It is hard to imagine that the Holocaust would not have happened without al-Husseini’s intervention.

Regardless, Rubin and Schwanitz do a good job of placing al-Husseini in the context of the Middle East’s historic ties to Germany. They begin the tale with Max von Oppenheim, an advisor to Kaiser Wilhelm II in the early 1890s, who urged the German ruler to use Islam to inspire a Muslim revolt in the colonies of Germany’s enemies. At that time, Britain, France and Russia controlled the Middle East, India and North Africa. Zionism was not relevant.

The kaiser made a formal pact in 1898 with the Ottoman Empire’s sultan, Abdul Hamid II. Germany anticipated the alliance would lead to an Islamic jihad throughout Muslim lands, but the righteous call to jihad had little impact. Muslims, Turks and Arabs saw themselves as divided by religion, ethnicity, regional interest and self-interest. They paid little attention in their daily lives to the sultan’s belligerent proclamations.

During the First World War, von Oppenheim ran Germany’s covert war in the Middle East, reinvigorating the policy of Islamic jihad. Germany pushed Sultan Mehmed V to trigger a pan-Islamic revolt, as well as attack Russia’s Black Sea ports, and established activist groups in Arab communities dedicated to spread jihad in Russia-ruled Caucasus and in Arab-populated lands. However, once again, the pan-Islamic revolts never materialized. Tribal leaders took the money from Germany and did nothing.

By the late 1930s, the dynamics had reversed. Al-Husseini sought out the support of Nazi Germany. Hitler was initially cool to an alliance, believing the dark-skinned people of the Middle East were inferior to his blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan nation, but he soon realized the Nazis and Muslims confronted common enemies – Britain, France and the Jews.

A strident antisemite who had been fighting Zionism since 1914, al-Husseini claimed the mantle of leader of transnational Islamism after Turkey, in 1924, abolished the Islamic Caliphate. He solidified his position within the Arab and Muslim communities through violence and murder.

Under his leadership, militancy became mainstream and moderation was regarded as treason. He turned Palestine into the defining issue of the Middle East. Anyone who did not support him or his views was a Zionist and imperial stooge. In the 1930s, he attracted attention for making passionate nationalist speeches in Jerusalem while crowds chanted “Death to Zionism,” rioted and killed Jews. His work clearly set the stage for Arab and Muslim leaders who followed his lead.

Meanwhile, in Germany between the wars, militant Islamists, backed by the disciples of von Oppenheim, solidified their control over mosques in Berlin and elsewhere, espousing an ideology that Rubin and Schwanitz say can be heard today from the pulpits. They cultivated relations with the leadership of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Iraq’s Ba’ath Party and radical factions in Syria and Palestine. By the time the Nazis looked to the Middle East, they found a ready-made network of radical antisemitic Islamists from Morocco to India, led by al-Husseini, with similar ideology, worldviews and interests. But the Islamic jihad failed once again to materialize.

Nazi ideology collapsed in 1945. However, a radical Arab nationalism, accompanied by a form of al-Husseini Islamism steeped in hatred of the Jews, flourished after the war. Little has changed despite the passage of decades, events and generations. Rubin and Schwanitz say al-Husseini’s legacy can been seen in the words and actions of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda. For them, as for the Nazis and al-Husseini, Jews are the villains of all history, the eternal enemy without whose extinction a proper world would be impossible.

Rubin and Schwanitz say the Arabic-speaking world’s historical connection with Nazi Germany was not solely responsible for the terrorism, conflict with Israel and anti-Jewish hatreds. However, they say, the historical relationships, along with the ideas and motives prompting it, help explain what has happened over the past 70 years. The forces that forged the partnership between al-Husseini and Hitler returned to help shape the course of Middle East history ever since. And it was not just the Nazi doctrine. In many cases, the individuals responsible for the Middle East’s post-1945 course had direct links to the Nazi era, they say.

“Comprehending this fact is the starting point for understanding modern Middle East history, its turbulence, tragedies and its many differences from other parts of the world,” Rubin and Schwanitz say.

Yes, they make a fascinating case for a starting point in trying to make sense of relations between Germany and the Middle East. But in this book they do not examine the record of contemporary Arab and Muslim leaders in much detail. They leave out other influences and other leading players that contributed to the making of the Middle East. Also, Rubin and Schwanitz seem to ignore that the antisemitism of the radical Islamists preceded their embrace of Nazism.

Rubin and Schwanitz have illuminated one diabolical aspect of a complex state of affairs – but much more remains to be said for a full understanding of the modern Middle East.

Robert Matas, a Vancouver-based writer, is a former journalist with the Globe and Mail. This review was originally published on the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library website and is reprinted here with permission. To reserve this book or any other, call 604-257-5181 or email [email protected]. To view the catalogue, visit jccgv.com and click on Isaac Waldman library.

Bonds of family, community

Following your dreams takes guts, hard work and perseverance. You have to admire someone who goes for it, whether or not they succeed. And if they succeed, it’s all the more impressive – and inspiring.

Two books came across my desk this summer via local connections. Emiliano’s Discovery is a first novel by Toronto-based Paula Hurwitz, whose uncle lives in Vancouver. Finding Home is a collection of non-fiction essays by Danita Dubinsky Aziza, whose mother lived here until recently moving to be closer to the family in Winnipeg. Both books were self-published with FriesenPress: Hurwitz’s in 2014, Aziza’s this year.

It might be an exaggeration to say that writing a novel was a dream of Hurwitz’s but she went to lengths to make it happen, a fact that can be seen from her acknowledgements. A lawyer by profession, she thanks a University of Toronto introduction to the novel course for giving her “the foundation to write this book,” as well as the Humber School for Writers, and several individuals. The end result is something of which to be proud.

Emiliano’s Discovery begins in Russia in 1903. The prologue in which Duvid, Malka and their family in Kishinev encounter the violent pogroms of the time sets the stage for Emiliano’s eventual search for family. It also reminds readers of the precarious world in which Jews seem to continually live. Chapter 1 takes us to Buenos Aires in 1994 and the terrorist bombing of the Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA).

Emiliano – about to graduate university and in need of employment – heads to the AMIA with his girlfriend, Lia. With the lineup barely moving, he suggests they go and grab a coffee, but she chooses to stay behind. “Just as Emiliano steps out [of the elevator] an enormous blast knocks him from his feet. He hears people yelling and feels debris falling around him. Then he loses consciousness.”

While Emiliano is directly affected by the attack, both physically and mentally, more than 10,000 kilometres away, in Winnipeg, Naomi’s “lazy summer day” – she doesn’t start Grade 12 for six weeks – is interrupted by a newscast about the tragedy. Long after she turns off the television, “she can’t shut out the horrific images replaying in her mind. If only she could figure out how to help. Doing something might calm her down.”

The novel alternates between Emiliano and Naomi, until their paths combine. They do so in Winnipeg, and that is one of the most interesting aspects of this story because the Winnipeg Jewish community actually did encourage Argentine Jews to immigrate to their city, and it’s kind of like getting a peek behind the scenes. Another compelling aspect of the story is the concept of how two families – one in Buenos Aires, the other in Winnipeg – could have ancestors from the same village who ended up in such completely different places. While the novel may wrap up its narratives a little too neatly for some readers, it doesn’t detract from their value.

Not quite so neat – in fact, quite chaotic at times, perhaps because it is an account of her real-life experiences – is the story told through essays by Aziza of her family’s decision to make aliya, their years in Israel and their ultimate return to Canada.

Aziza has done a commendable job in compiling the almost 40 essays that were initially written as stand-alone articles or blog-type pieces. Rhonda Spivak, editor of the Winnipeg Jewish Review, asked Aziza to write about her experiences for the online publication, and she did. The Jewish Federation of Winnipeg also asked her to share some of her stories on its website.

Written over four years (2008-2012), each article – and now, each chapter – conveys a lesson Aziza learned, and not always the hard way. From “start slowly” (“leh-at, leh-at” in Hebrew) as a way of coping with all the changes one faces as an immigrant, to “your children are not your children” and, therefore, you need to let them make their own choices, even if it’s to enlist, to the title lesson, “finding home,” which may not be where you think it should be, Aziza takes readers on her journey. She writes with humor and with honesty, and without embellishment, a style I like very much.

The impetus to make aliya – Aziza, her husband, Michel, their three kids and their dog – came 23 years prior to when the family arrived at Ben-Gurion Airport in 2008. Aziza, living in Toronto in 1985, reluctantly headed to the gym. There, she met “the cute guy with curly black hair” and, after a couple of weeks, “with gym bags flung casually over our shoulders, Michel and I collided at the end of the cement walkway that led to the overcrowded parking lot of the JCC.” Regular meetings followed and, in one of those early encounters, Michel asked her, “Danita, would you ever consider living in Israel?” To which she replied, “Oh, for sure, I would love to live in Israel! I have visited three times and it is such an amazing place!”

As she would find out, visiting and living somewhere are two very different things. Learning a new language, negotiating a foreign culture, being far from your aging parent, seeing your son enter the army and facing the prospect of your daughters following suit, building a new home (in their case, literally constructing a house) and many other factors are challenging aspects of any immigration experience. There are also many new discoveries and joys. But sometimes leaving a place – in this instance, Winnipeg – makes you realize that you might have been home all along.

And, as Aziza writes about her response to a friend who was curious whether she “had failed at living in Israel. With an air of confidence I acquired only after living in Israel, I told her, ‘I didn’t fail. I think that our family did more in four years there than most. I believe the failure would have been for us not to have gone to Israel in the first place.’”

It’s a thought that rings true.

The consequences of truth

Most of us love a good mystery. Add intergenerational secrets to the mix and you’ve just upped the grip quotient. Add to that a medical procedure that’s the stuff of nightmares and horror movies, and you’ve got a potential hit. Janet Sternburg’s memoir White Matter (Hawthorne Books, 2014) takes this recipe and adds a layer of truth.

Born and raised in Boston, surrounded by members of her mother’s large Russian-Jewish family, Sternburg knew from an early age that her uncle and one of her aunts had undergone lobotomies, the form of neurosurgery that severs the “white matter” of the frontal lobe from the rest of the brain in the attempt to alleviate emotional and mental distress. Though the procedure went out of vogue years ago, it’s clearly a surgery that still has the power to fascinate. Just last week, People magazine featured the story of Rosemary Kennedy, who, more than 70 years ago, was subjected to a lobotomy in a decision apparently made by her father in the hopes that it would make her “less moody” and “docile.” The decision to have the young Rosemary undergo a lobotomy is referred to in the article as the Kennedy dynasty’s “darkest secret.” In a family famous for its “dark secrets,” that’s saying something, and it gives some idea of what the decision to lobotomize two out of six siblings must have meant to the Sternburg family legacy.

Sternburg has written an engrossing tale about unraveling her family’s secrets, how she came to be a writer and what it is about the intersection between the personal and the medical that fascinates her most. The memoir lays bare a trove of family lore against a backdrop of shifting attitudes toward mental health and the dislocations of assimilation and generational trauma, as well as the changing roles of women. Sternburg has woven into her family chronicle the history of lobotomies and the contributions of notable figures in the world of neurobiology and psychiatry, some of whom came into close contact with her family. As a filmmaker and poet as well as a prose writer, she also references depictions of mental illness in the film and literary worlds, offering her writing additional depth and cultural relevance.

While the decision to lobotomize two family members would today be unthinkable, we still face complex decisions about how to help family members struggling with mental illness in the face of stigma, and fears of inheritance. Sternburg’s family’s decisions to lobotomize are described as desperate attempts to keep the family together, particularly after her easily enraged grandfather abandons the family and her distraught grandmother quickly becomes overwhelmed. With the siblings left to care for their fractured family, decisions are made that have far-reaching – and disturbing – consequences.

The book hasn’t received a lot of pick up, even though it was chosen as an “indie” book to read by Publishers Weekly, but it does deserve a readership. This story has resonance in an age in which the debate around the origins of mental health and the efficacy of various treatments – drugs versus talk therapy, for example – are as ongoing and fierce as they ever were.

Aside from the ghoulishness of the lobotomies themselves, what I found most disturbing about Sternburg’s story is the lack of family intimacy. Her mother’s family was competitive and easily offended, and their early home was full of rage. They seemed to have little knowledge of how to take care of each other’s needs or emotions, yet they were “so entwined that to turn one’s attention elsewhere was tantamount to betrayal.” The family’s desire to reduce conflict and alleviate their siblings’ emotional and mental distress is understandable, even if it was misguided.

As much as Sternburg’s family mystery held my interest, it hasn’t had the staying power of The Seven Good Years (Granta Books, 2015), a new memoir by Israeli writer Etgar Keret. This collection of biographical essays begins with the birth of Keret’s son Lev (during a terrorist attack) and ends with the death of his father, from cancer, seven years later. Known for his collections of short fiction, this is Keret’s first piece of non-fiction, and I hope it’s nowhere near his last.

Keret navigates these seven years (referencing the seven “fat” years of grain harvest in Joseph’s biblical dream) with his sharp insight, humor and compassion. The 36 essays are tight – spare and direct – and Keret creates a deep sense of intimacy with readers. He seems acutely aware of this effect: he has declined to publish this collection in Israel, or in Hebrew, calling it “too personal” for his home turf.

The son of Holocaust survivors, Keret also has had to cope with intergenerational trauma, but it seems to have had a salutary effect on his inner life. In one essay, he’s unafraid to pretend to have a foot amputated just so he doesn’t have to hurt a stranger’s (a telemarketer’s!) feelings. He is acutely aware of other people’s perceptions, and his honesty is compelling, moving, electric and laugh-out-loud hilarious. Throughout, his attention is turned towards reducing the emotional friction around him and he recognizes the effect that living in Israel’s high-tension environment has on himself, his family and even on his interactions with strangers. He describes apprehensions about his newborn son’s future, relates intense discussions with his wife – the check and balance against his anxieties – and conspires with friends, siblings and others to make sense of his world. Through all of this, he worries about whether or not Lev will do his compulsory army service, about Iran getting the bomb, perceived and real moments of antisemitism, his relationship with the Holocaust, and when the next war might break out.

Critics have called Keret’s writing self-deprecating, but I don’t connect with that reading of his work. I see his expressions of uncertainty and self-doubt as the building block of his empathy, the foundation of his profoundly funny and humane observations about his fellow human beings. As a bulwark against the intensity of existence, Keret seeks moments of “meditative disengagement from the world,” whether those moments are captured alone while flying from one writers festival to another, in being a first-time parent or in dreaming of a better world in which even the Iranian regime turns towards love.

What makes Keret’s writing comforting is the importance he places on familial honesty, on sharing intimate space even with strangers, and on finding the good. It’s writing that makes me feel more alive.

Basya Laye is a former editor of the Jewish Independent.

Can terrorism deliver results?

Does terrorism work? This is the question that opens Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015). Western leaders insist that the work of terrorists will never lead to the ends they seek, but one of the lessons from this book is that this may well be wishful thinking.

Anonymous Soldiers – the title is from the anthem of the Irgun, the Zionist paramilitary force led by Menachem Begin – is the latest book by Bruce Hoffman, an expert on terrorism.

In the aftermath of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Britain came to control the region known as Palestine, a victory that would prove confounding and tragic. Hoffman’s book is a story of endless miscalculations, under-preparedness and overreactions on the part of the British military and police.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was a statement of intent by the British government to create a Jewish national homeland in Palestine and the Jewish people there and elsewhere saw this as a sign that Britain would be their fiercest ally. However, almost from the moment the British Mandate began, until the forces of the empire departed with their tails between their legs three decades later, Palestine was riven with not only violent clashes between its Arab and Jewish residents, but by both those parties against the British and, as brutally detailed by Hoffman, fraternal conflict between Jewish militias.

The Haganah was the “establishment” militia, associated with the Jewish Agency and intended as a self-defence organization after the British proved incapable of or unwilling to protect the Jews of Palestine. In 1929, Arab riots led to mass killings of Jews and, while British police killed almost as many Arabs as the Arabs killed Jews, the balance demonstrated an inability of the British police and military to control the area. The diplomatic response was to attempt to appease the Arabs, which appears to be the first example in the book to prove that terrorism works.

The riots led to an investigative commission, a white paper and another British obfuscation on Zionism. The white paper blamed Arab violence on “excessive” Jewish immigration to the area in the mid-1920s and the purchases of land by Jews. This led some Zionists – notably those of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist party – toward the idea that Britain may not be a reliable ally. In 1931, Revisionists defected from the Haganah and formed Haganah-bet (later the Irgun), which did not see itself solely as a self-defence force but opened the door to “sabotage, bomb making and hit-and-run attacks – in other words, the core tactics of terrorism.”

From 1936 to 1939, Palestine was in a state of near civil war in the form of an uprising by the Arab populations against the British and the potential of more Jewish migration. At precisely this time, the fate of Jews in Europe was being sealed and countries, including Canada, were slamming shut the gates.

Clouds of war in Europe were accompanied by fear of Muslim uprisings in the vast British Empire. The priority, in the words of foreign secretary Lord Halifax, was to avoid “arousing antagonism with the Arabs.” Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister at the time, said it was “of immense importance to have the Muslims with us. If we must offend one side, let us offend the Jews rather than the Arabs.”

This, too, was a miscalculation that did not take into account the determination of the Irgun. British caving in the face of Arab violence was taken by the Irgun as proof that terrorism works.

And a third group, which had broken away from the Irgun – Lehi, also known as the Stern Group (or the Stern Gang by the British) – went further. They attempted an alliance with the Axis, viewing Hitler as “just another antisemite” and proposing a mutually beneficial partnership based, the author writes, “on the fatally erroneous assumption that for Hitler the crux of the Jewish problem in Europe could be solved by evacuation, not annihilation.”

Meanwhile, as terror was rocking the Middle East, Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader who was plugged into the British establishment, was mending fences in London and urging the Haganah to crack down on the Irgun and Lehi.

Weizmann was warned by then prime minister Winston Churchill that if the violence didn’t end, “we might well lose interest in Jewish welfare.”

Of course, the Irgun did not expect to defeat the British Empire militarily. “History and our observation,” Begin later said, “persuaded us that if we could succeed in destroying the government’s prestige in Eretz Israel, the removal of its rule would follow automatically.”

Weizmann’s diplomacy and the cooperation of the Haganah with the British forces in Palestine regained the trust of Churchill, but that was of limited value after the war leader lost the 1945 election and the Labor party came to power at Westminster.

The new prime minister, Clement Atlee, inherited a paralyzed Palestine, in which there seemed to be no winning position. At a 1947 conference, the British tried to share the mess with the United States, but that failed and they eventually dumped the problem at the podium of the new United Nations.

So, does terrorism work? In the Palestine example, Hoffman demonstrates that the Arab riots of 1921 resulted in restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine and the 1929 riots resulted in Britain backpedalling from its commitment to Zionism. The Arab Rebellion, from 1936 to 1939, resulted in a huge reconsideration of Britain’s policy in Palestine and, though the author doesn’t make this explicit, possibly the deaths of millions of European Jews.

On the Jewish side, violence seems to have had its intended effect, as well. “By September 1947, the Irgun had achieved its objective,” Hoffman writes. “Each successive terrorist outrage illuminated the government’s inability to curb, much less defeat, the terrorists. Already sapped by World War II, Britain’s limited economic resources were further strained by the cost of deploying so large a military force to Palestine to cope with the tide of violence submerging the country.”

The author sees the Irgun’s campaign as critical to understanding the evolution and development of terrorism in the second half of the 20th century and the already bloody 21st century. “Indeed, when U.S. military forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001, they found a copy of Begin’s seminal work, The Revolt, along with other books about the Jewish terrorist struggle, in the well-stocked library that al-Qaeda maintained at one of its training facilities in that country.”

How author lost faith

photo - Shulem Deen, author of the memoir All Who Go Do Not Return — Shulem Deen, author of the memoir *All Who Go Do Not Return*. *(photo by Pearl Gabel)*

One of my Haaretz blogs several months ago told the stories of two individuals who left the Orthodox fold. This past June, I nearly swallowed whole the new former-Chassid memoir everyone was talking about: Shulem Deen’s All Who Go Do Not Return. I then caught up with Shulem by phone, where we spent two hours musing about Talmud and kabbala, faith and questioning, whether the concept of dogma can be expressed in Chassidic Yiddish, what he sees when he revisits the film The Chosen and whether he still loves Beethoven, the first movie he ever saw (he doesn’t).

Those who have read the memoir or the press coverage of it know that, after he was declared a heretic, his Skverer Chassid community in New Square, N.Y., excommunicated him. Along with their five children, his wife – still a firm believer – moved with him to the nearby town of Monsey, before his marriage ultimately dissolved. He now lives in Brooklyn and is on the board of Footsteps, an organization dedicated to helping former Chassidim adjust to secular life. Tragically, his children refuse all contact with him.

I admitted to being a bit confused as I approached the topic. In my youth, I had learned that Judaism, more than any other religion even, encourages questioning. Is this true? I asked Shulem. Of modern Judaism, it is, he admitted. But not of orthodoxy. He cited a talmudic dictum that appears in his book: “He who asks the following four questions – what is above, what is below, what is the future, what is the past – it is better if he were never born.”

Shulem described what it was like to lose faith. “Once my faith fell apart,” he told me, “my worldview fell apart…. If one of these [principles] is not true then what is true?” Shulem likened it to existing in a Matrix-type world, or being a character in The Truman Show.

Yet, despite rejecting his Chassidism at enormous personal cost, and no longer believing in God, Shulem maintains a strong Jewish identity, including a commitment to “Jewish peoplehood, Jewish history, Jewish text, Jewish culture and Jewish tradition.”

He studies Talmud weekly, approaching the text as “literature,” as he puts it. Neither is he dismissive of Yiddish – the language that has effectively kept many Chassidim ignorant of English: another barrier to engaging with the secular world. Yet he enjoys reading Yiddish writers such as Sholem Aleichem, Chaim Grade and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and even grants spoken Yiddish press interviews as the need arises.

Where he draws the line is dogma.

Community-instilled religious dogma is what arguably led his children to reject him. Shulem is insightful about how things unfolded. “When a child is taught that his parent is wicked … what the child feels … is shame,” Shulem writes in the book. And, from this shame, comes a desire to distance oneself from the perceived source of the shame.

It’s enough to make any parent rage forever into the night. But, as a writer, Shulem was careful to contain his anger, feeling that deploying that emotion “would have impeded” the reader’s experience.

And yet, others’ anger was on his mind as he decided what to include. At one point, he ran into a former student. Without his beard, Shulem wasn’t immediately recognizable, until something clicked. “I know you,” the student said. “You hit me with a wire.” Shulem apologized, and left the exchange feeling “incredibly ashamed.” Including the scene about his act of corporal punishment was for him an “act of penance.”

Before our interview, I had noticed Shulem recommending the film The Chosen on Facebook. One of the favorite movies of my own childhood, my curiosity was piqued. What would a former Chassid get from a film about the tension between fundamentalism and modernity? Hadn’t he lived it enough? Not so, which is what makes Shulem such a thoughtful and appealing writer and interlocutor. “I think it’s brilliant. It’s beautiful,” he says of the film. His favorite scene? The rebbe’s tisch (communal meal). Unlike the contemporary tisch (a setting that Shulem wrote about in a poignant 2011 essay revealing the pain of a once-believer), he said of the film’s scene, “This is a 1940s world where a rebbe has only several dozen followers. It’s a very intimate, very spirited setting. Something very simple, yet devout.”

I was touched by Shulem’s ability to still be able to glimpse goodness in a system that had oppressed him; perhaps this is the definition of open-mindedness, that rare commodity among the ultra-religious.

Indeed, the broad themes of the film continue to speak to him. Given the increasing porousness between Chassidism and the outside world due to the march of technology, “people are testing the boundaries and trying to see what is possible while staying within the community,” Shulem said. And, while his book recounts his struggle to do just that, via a primitive AOL internet hookup, a job in Manhattan and – something he relayed to me – taking his daughters to the public library, his world eventually imploded. Part of this was due to the feeling that the ground was opening beneath his feet. And part of it stemmed from a problem all too common in modern life: basic marriage incompatibility.

To a non-Chassid, Shulem’s story is a fascinating glimpse into a hidden world, just as it is ultimately a universal story about the pursuit of personal truth, the attempt to be open-minded in a close-minded world and, ultimately, the bitter inability to control what others believe about the righteousness of one’s path.

Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She blogs at Haaretz and the Jewish Daily Forward. A version of this article was originally published on haartez.com.

Peddlers in new light

The award-winning Canadian film Lies My Father Told Me begins with a hunched over man on a horse-drawn wagon moving slowly through the snowy narrow streets of old Montreal. His grandson runs through the streets shouting Zayde, Zayde, as he tries to catch up with the wagon. The peddler occasionally cries out, rags, clothes, bottles. It’s a poignant scene that reflects the stereotypical view of how the first Jewish immigrants established themselves in the new world. However, the scene is misleading.

In one of the first histories to look at the role of the Jewish peddler in society, author and academic Hasia R. Diner in Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (Yale University Press, 2015) says that most Jewish immigrants who started off as peddlers were young men who headed out to the countryside with suitcases of merchandise, not weary old men with wagons.

More than three million Jewish people left home in search of a better life from the late 1700s to the early 1900s. They came from the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, Eastern Europe and Germany. They headed out to countless isolated corners of the world – Canada, the United States, Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Ireland, Wales and southern Africa. Peddling became the engine that fostered migration. A mass of ordinary people in their ordinariness made history. The peddlers were foot soldiers in a vast army of migrants that gave modern Jewish life much of its shape.

Diner, an award-winning professor of American Jewish history at New York University, does not tell the history of any single person, place or time. She relies on an academic approach rather than colorful storytelling, jumping across continents looking for similarities. She discovers them in abundance.

She finds that, regardless of where they came from or their destination, the experience of the Jewish immigrant was remarkably consistent.

On arrival, the Jewish immigrant – almost always a young man – connected with family members, friends or sometimes just a member of the Jewish community who helped them settle into the new world. The “greenhorn” would learn a few phrases in the new language and would be given merchandise to take on the road.

The new peddler did not carry the necessities of life. Rather, he sold a higher standard of living – sheets and pillowcases, picture frames, needles, threads, buttons, tablecloths, eyeglasses or suspenders. As he became more successful, he carried heavier items for sale in a horse-drawn wagon, such as stoves and bathtubs.

While in the countryside, the peddlers bought scrap, rags, metal, paper or anything else to be brought back to the city and sold. Many offered instalment plans to help their customers pay for their purchases. Within a few years, most peddlers opened their own stores in the city or moved on to other work. Their success encouraged family and friends to join them in the new land.

Diner contends that the waves of migration had a significant impact on the development of the countries that took them in. Industrialization, urbanization and social upheavals were transforming those societies at that time, and Diner says that Jewish immigration to the remote countryside played a significant role in the transformation that has previously not been acknowledged.

The Jewish peddlers solidified European colonialism in remote areas, bringing the city’s latest styles in clothing, furniture and tchotchkes to remote farms, mines, plantations, and logging and fishing camps.

The peddlers crossed economic, social and religious divisions. They blunted social isolation with news of the outside world, helped break down class barriers, spread the gospel of consumption and encouraged individual choice in communities where there was little.

Diner even detects an impact on the evolution of women’s rights. The peddlers dealt mostly with women while men were at work. Women decided which goods to buy, and when and how to pay for the merchandise. In other circumstances at that time, women were mostly in the background while men made the decisions. Meanwhile, in the Old Country, the women left behind temporarily, to care for families, assumed responsibilities previously carried out by their husbands and fathers.

Diner also knocks down several shibboleths about Jewish immigration to the new world.

Contrary to widely held perceptions, Diner found that most Jewish migration was not a response to pogroms, hatred and antisemitism. She disputes that Jewish immigrants went into business as a result of discrimination and that the immigrants relied on the Jewish community for financing their dreams because local banks would not do business with them.

Invariably, as Diner travels the world, several references to Canada pop up.

She writes about Max Vanger, who relied on peddling outside Halifax and Saint John in the early 20th century to provide him “with the bedrock upon which to get started in his new world.” The Finkelsteins’ store in Winnipeg in the 1880s provided merchandise for the new Jewish immigrants who went off to trade with “the Indians and English” in the surrounding territory.

The Baron de Hirsch Institute in the 1880s lent money to peddlers in Montreal. The Jewish Colonization Association had a committee to give out loans across Canada to peddlers to pay for licences and to help the immigrants establish themselves. The Toronto Mail and Empire newspaper in 1897 wrote about the number of Jewish peddlers who go about the city and out among the farmers in the country.

Similar to Jewish immigration in numerous other countries, peddlers in Canada moved on to shopkeeping, financing and other work. Isaac Cohen in Kingston, Ont., started out as a peddler, became a scrap-iron dealer and eventually built up one of the largest scrap-metal firms in Canada.

Peddlers in Canada, as in other countries, occasionally ran up against racism. Reflecting the attitudes of the times, Anne of Green Gables, the legendary children’s book set in Prince Edward Island, describes a devious crook as a German Jewish peddler.

Diner does an impressive job of placing the traditional image of the Jewish peddler in a new context. She convincingly transforms the lonely immigrant peddler into a leading actor in the social, religious and economic upheavals over a 150-year period. However, she should have spent more time on the personal anecdotes of the peddlers. More academic than writer, she leaves it up to the reader to imagine the emotional conversations and inner struggles that might have taken place. She reduces the lives of the immigrants to sweeping generalizations that sometimes feel like exaggerations to prove a point. She passes lightly over the difficulties in conditions in countries that the peddlers left behind, leaving many questions unanswered.

Occasionally, errors creep in that chip away at her credibility. She confuses Saint John, N.B., and St John’s, Nfld.; she says Reform Judaism was founded in the United States, not Germany.

On the whole, however, Diner provides a fascinating account of an overlooked and often misunderstood aspect of Jewish history. Hopefully, her work will lead to more books on Jewish migration and the history of peddling.