EP2: Hereness

Episode 2 : Hereness

We're continuing on our journey to discover the roots of the Jewish Left in Montreal. Episode Two takes us through the cultural impact of Yiddish, the role of Reading Circles, and the diversity of the Left's envisioned future for the Jewish People.

Thank you to our featured guests, in order of appearance:  Pierre Anctil, Shannon Hodge, Moishe Dolman, Aaron Krishtalka, Eddie Paul, Ester Reiter, and Sam Bick.

recollections with the JPL is a production of the Jewish Public Library Archives and Special Collections.

Thank you to all of our guests: Pierre Anctil, Sam Bick, Moishe Dolman, Shannon Hodge, Aaron Krishtalka, Melanie Leavitt, Eddie Paul, and Ester Reiter.

Visit JPL Curates to see licensing info, guest bios, related materials from the JPL Archives and Special Collections, and our further reading guide featuring works from JPL's catalogue.

Info:

Donate to the Jewish Public Library

Follow @jplarchives and @jpl_montreal on Instagram

JPLArchives.org

JewishPublicLibrary.org

Production and editing by Ezell Carter and Ellen Belshaw

Research support by Leah Graham, Sam Pappas, Maya Pasternak, and Eddie Paul

Mastering by Josh Boguski

Theme song and music by Danijel Zambo

Sound effects provided by Pixabay and the JPL Archives

Thank you to our sponsors, the Azrieli Foundation and Federation CJA

Transcript

[00:00:00] Melanie Leavitt: All roads, in many ways, tend to lead back to this very small community, you know, but yet that had such a profound effect on Montreal society and on Quebec society as a whole. It is our history as a community. It's, um, it's something that I feel is unfortunately has been largely overlooked and in many ways erased from our history.

our narrative, not only within the official narrative of Quebec history and Montreal history, but I'd say from within the Jewish community itself, unfortunately, that, that, that history that we have of that Jewish left has been largely forgotten.

[00:00:51] Ellen Belshaw: I am Ellen Belshaw. 

[00:00:53] Ezell Carter: And I'm Ezell Carter, and you're listening to episode two of Recollections, the Jewish [00:01:00] Public Library Archives and Special Collections Podcast. 

[00:01:04] Ellen Belshaw: If this is your first time joining us, we encourage you to listen to episode one, which provides the framework for this episode. 

[00:01:11] Ezell Carter: As a reminder, recollections is a weaving of several interviews to tell the story of the Jewish left in Montreal. Some of today's speakers you heard in episode one, but we'll be introducing a few more. As always, you can find more information in our show notes. 

[00:01:28] Ellen Belshaw: There, you can also find our newly minted study guide, courtesy of our reference archivist, Sam Papas, which further elaborates on these concepts and provides a sneak peek at what is coming up in our later episodes.

[00:01:40] HOSTS: Welcome to ReCollections.

[00:01:46] Ellen Belshaw: Got a, story, to tell us?. 

[00:01:55] Ezell Carter: Are we telling stories now? Okay. Um, okay, so [00:02:00] I was out to eat, um, this would have been maybe like three or four months back with my partner and our waitress, who was incredibly pleasant, very sweet person, um, was telling us that French was her sixth language and I was like, oh my god, I can't even.

I'm, I'm still trying to wrap my head around English. I asked her what the other languages were, um, and she said she was from Israel and one of them is Hebrew. And immediately I said, do you speak Yiddish? Because I work here, right? I hear Yiddish all the time. And she looked shocked and she said, no, nobody speaks Yiddish.

It's a dead language. And I just, it just completely shook me. I had no idea what to say to that. 

[00:02:40] Ellen Belshaw: Yeah, we live in kind of a microcosm here because it is so, the history is so rich and present in our work at the JPL. I know when I started working here, or soon after, um, I asked the director of the archives if I wanted to learn a relevant language, which one would be most useful, Hebrew or Yiddish?

She immediately said Yiddish. [00:03:00] Um, and it has been very useful. I'm, I'm, I wouldn't say I'm fluent or a speaker, but it has been very useful to be able to read the little bit I can and, and, and understand it a little bit. Um, 

and you're using for the work I do. 

[00:03:11] Ezell Carter: You're using Duolingo? 

[00:03:13] Ellen Belshaw: I am, yeah. And so... they're not the sponsor of the show.

[00:03:16] Ezell Carter: No, they're not . But it is really fascinating stuff. 

[00:03:20] Ellen Belshaw: There's been a resurgence too. I think that's why there's, Duolingo has picked it up recently as a, as a language. 

[00:03:26] Ezell Carter: Yes. And there, and alongside that resurgence of Yiddish, we have a resurgence of some of those ideals from the left. And so, um, it kind of just came full circle for me in that moment.

And, and here we are. And here, here we go. 

[00:03:39] Ellen Belshaw: Mm-Hmm. . In this episode, we're covering the cultural impact of Yiddish, the role of reading circles, and the diversity of the left's envisioned future for the Jewish people. Starting us off is Pierre Antille with the importance of Yiddish as a language, a culture, and a home.

[00:03:55] Pierre Anctil: You have to factor in This [00:04:00] Yiddish literature, which was being produced here, poetry, plays, novels, the Jewish public library, and, and how are you gonna understand what value it had for Jews unless you learn the language?

You cannot do a solid history of Montreal, Jewish Montreal, without knowledge of Yiddish. You're going to just stop. You're going to be stopped in the fifties. You can't go beyond. And the language was imported from Eastern Europe, of course. So you had to know also. [00:05:00] What existed in Eastern Europe at the time of the Great Migration, early 20th century, and how this group of people who came here were convinced deeply that Yiddish was part of their environment and they wanted to live at least part of their life as Jews in Yiddish.

[00:05:24] Shannon Hodge: I love that the library founded itself on those principles and that people still sometimes refer to it as the Yiddish Folks Bibliothek. 

[00:05:34] Ellen Belshaw: Shannon Hodge worked as the Director of the Jewish Public Library Archives for 13 years and has since taken up residence as the Corporate Archivist at Carleton University.

[00:05:44] Shannon Hodge: That's what those collections really speak to as well. The collections themselves grew out of, um, you know, the Yiddish, Yiddish literary, uh, communities. They grew out of people who were active in the workman's circle. 

[00:05:59] Moishe Dolman: I can tell you in [00:06:00] general about Yiddish. Of course there was, in the performing arts, there was Yiddish.

Yiddish is the mass language. You wanna appeal to Jews who speak in Yiddish. And this, and in addition, in previous generations in Yiddish, Yiddish is the back. You can even say the class struggle is the background for ordinary Yiddish culture in many ways, hearing Yiddish at home. Drew me to Yiddish, which I associated with the Jewish people and the masses of J.

The Jewish masses. The ordinary Jews that took,

in other words, everyday Jews. I associated that with Yiddish. 

[00:06:42] Aaron Krishtalka: My father, uh, had his eye out. To collect the, the documentary evidence of, uh, Jewish cultural [00:07:00] life. Collection was his life. 

[00:07:04] Ellen Belshaw: Historian Aaron Kryształka was born in wartime Montreal and brings to the table his lived experience growing up in a leftist Yiddish household.

[00:07:13] Ezell Carter: Aaron is frequently referred to as JPL royalty, in part due to the incredible collection of his father, Sholem Kryształka, housed here at the Archives. In it, you can find a wealth of ephemera from Jewish life in both Europe and Canada. Including everything from protest pamphlets to theatre playbills in Yiddish, English, and French.

[00:07:38] Aaron Krishtalka: And to him, a documentary evidence was, um, a poster announcing a lecture. A leaflet, either thrown in the door or collected somewhere else that people brought to him. Uh, a complete ticket, [00:08:00] Moritz Schwarz at the Monument National, and so on. And he grew up in Poland. Um, of course, a young intellectual and rebellious against the domination of religion over everything.

And the secularism, uh, was carried by the power of Yiddish as a literary language of expression and thought. It, it's, it, it's this connection that is so important about Yiddish for that generation at that time. And I, I, of course, I have to add, it's what makes the horror and tragedy of the, of the Holocaust, the more.

Uh, poignant because it simply wasn't a means of expression. Yiddish [00:09:00] was the carrier of the, uh, the secular enlightenment on a popular level.

By the time that he was leaving, he and my mother were leaving Poland, the, the Yiddish, Uh, press in Poland, the Yiddish theater in Poland had, uh, an enormous presence. A little bit of that tradition carried over into the Kenedar Adler. The education of the people then, to bring the people up. from shtetl, uh, uh, uh, ignorance to an enlightened view of life, to broaden that life, to include the arts, [00:10:00] to include music, to include theater and so on.

All of that was carried in Yiddish. 

[00:10:08] Eddie Paul: Um, I can tell you that, uh, My father's generation, uh, and this is, this is very common, my father would tell me that he, he spoke English at school, French in the schoolyard, and Yiddish at home. He didn't think, really, he didn't think twice about it. This was just how he got along.

Even though Yiddish was there. Not just their language, it was also their cultural destiny, even though there are political ramifications that Yiddish has. Uh, Yiddish as a political language, you know, just by virtue of the ways in which Yiddish became front and center, as it were, in this whole debate was, was evidence that, Um, language was, was really a very important factor.

[00:10:57] Ester Reiter: It's not so much a [00:11:00] story, but it's stuff about Yiddishkeit. 

[00:11:04] Ezell Carter: Ester Reiter is a historian, sociologist, author, educator, and activist who has bounced between the United States and Canada, but always in the Left. 

[00:11:16] Ester Reiter: It's, it's the, it's the Yiddish keit. And we're talking about politics, we're talking about women's activism and everything.

But one of the things, I, I feel so privileged to have grown up in a milieu where my understanding of what it means to be a Jew is, is so infused with the most wonderful music taught by wonderful musicians, dance taught by wonderful dancers, drama. You know, it's like the richness. And I'm not even getting anywhere near the literature.

I mean, my God, Chava Rosenfarb's work, Shom Aleichem [00:12:00] Peretz. It's the beauty of the language and the richness of that cultural tradition. It gives me, it just gives me a feeling that I know. And is it, it's kind of even hard to convey to people who didn't grow up in this tradition. Because a lot of people are fed up with Israel and they're fed up with this and they know they're not this and they're not that and, and I, I support a lot of those movements.

But I want to know, and which is why I like the left grouping that I'm part of, I want to know what I'm for. And I just think of the richness that, that, that I've, that I've enjoyed. And there are a group of young people who have sort of gone back into that, that Yiddish heritage, that you could be a Jew and taste this wonderful, very political, very [00:13:00] class conscious, very feminist stuff and just feel you know what you're for.

Yes, you fight bitterly what you're against, but you also enjoy and appreciate the beauty of what we're for.

[00:13:37] Moishe Dolman: When you're looking at the, at the origins of the labor movement, right, or the revolutionary movement, the people who were at the origins were people who were themselves probably men who were brought up in the old Yeshiva world where debate and reading is central to the culture. 

[00:13:59] Sam Bick: [00:14:00] Because of changes that happened in the 1860s in the Russian Empire, there was a whole generation of Jewish intellectuals, uh, fairly upper class Jews, who get to go to Russian schools or Russian forms of higher learning and read about, talk about, be in a similar room, if you will.

With those who are going to eventually lead the country and, um, yeah, so these reading circles are a really prominent feature of, uh, this kind of like leftist culture or just the intellectual culture of the time. Um, a reading circle was what led to the development of the Jewish labor boons in Vilna in the 1890s.

Uh, the, the major Russian political parties of the time. I mentioned this earlier, but I kind of want to touch on it again. This idea that culture and leftist struggle were really part of the same thing at that point. And so people, like there's a question of, or, or there's, there's, there's an ongoing question of, [00:15:00] Belief that, um, education and knowledge and information is kind of the way towards liberation and freedom.

So reading circles is kind of a way to practice your politics, share radical ideas, um, and kind of like serve as a network to, to meet like minded people. 

[00:15:20] Moishe Dolman: They would organize these reading circles. And, and, um, discussion groups, anarchist discussion groups, like the Mutual Aid Society. Officially in English, they're not really interested in promoting Yiddish, but they wind up doing it by necessity, so to speak.

[00:15:40] Sam Bick: And in Montreal, there is indication that a circle existed in the first ten years of the 1900s. Hirsch Hirschman, who's, uh, one of the founders of the Jewish People's Library, And someone, and as well as the, uh, Arbiter Ring in Montreal [00:16:00] and several other important institutions, um, he describes this mutual aid reading circle as a place to discuss and debate future societies.

In addition to the reading circle, um, the people involved in this reading circle, there were, they had bookstores, so Hirsch Hirschman had a bookstore, Louis Elstein had a bookstore, um, they were involved in planning events, they were involved in, uh, raising money for the Jewish labor booms in, in Europe.

They, they organized the first May Day on May 1st, 1906. Um, with the Socialist Party of Canada and, and a bunch of Irish, uh, IWI WW members. Um, yeah. So the, this, this, this reading circle, um, I think was kind of the nucleus or kind of the, one of the, in starting points of what blossomed into the, the Jewish left in [00:17:00] Montreal and the Yiddish cultural milia in, in Montreal.

So Hirsch and his wife Jenny, or Rucheni, come from Bukovina to New York and then move to Montreal in about 1902. And what starts out as a lending library in their apartment, where people can come and read and talk, develops into a bookstore on St. Laurent. That is rented out with a shoe polish guy because there was a belief that a bookstore wouldn't have enough foot traffic.

[00:17:33] Eddie Paul: Uh, Hersh Hershman was an anarchist. He, his tobacco store was the first iteration of, um, a reading circle that later became kind of the model of the Jewish public library. Uh, There were no formal Jewish anarchist groups, per se. I mean, there were small ones in Toronto. There was the Reuter Kreis, the Red Circle.

Uh, there was a small Jewish [00:18:00] anarchist group in Montreal called the Arbe de Freund, that, um, derived from a progressive mutual aid group. So, you know, all of these groups who, um, some of whom sat at the same table at certain meetings, periods of history and some of whom refused to sit at the same table and other periods of history.

These all formed the substrate, which was the Jewish left here in Montreal. Our resilience, Jewish resilience, is really predicated on a creative tension. It's predicated on an argument. It's predicated on, um, disagreement. Because with disagreement comes energy, and with that energy, energy feeds that resilience.

Uh, it's um, it's not a particularly unhealthy attribute of a culture to disagree. And I think that possibly is the reason why there were so many leftist groups. As I said, I think that um, We [00:19:00] have 18 centuries of Biblical commentary, Rabbis who were disagreeing with other Rabbis, disagreeing with other Rabbis, but it wasn't a, the disagreement was seldom acrimonious.

Certainly there were moments, but generally speaking that leads to a very creative literature and a very creative process. 

[00:19:21] Moishe Dolman: They had trouble recruiting non Jews because in the Yiddish style, which stems from the yeshiva world. You're constantly arguing. You're, everything is a question that leads to a question, which leads to a question, which leads to a question.

And, one of the, one of the founders, Harry Hirschman, of the, of the, um, Jewish Revolutionary Movement in Montreal, he describes a situation where they had, they had trouble recruiting non Jews, because non Jews would come in, you'd tell them, we need to overthrow capitalism, and replace it with, you know, You know, replace it with another kind of [00:20:00] society.

Socialist, communist, anarchist, whatever you want to call it. And they say, fine, great. OK, sounds great. See ya. Sounds good. Absolutely. But with the Jews, they have to argue over every little point. And even before they've As he describes, they, before they've reached the point where they're talking about the nature, whether or not it's possible to build such a society, they're already in heated debates over how to What, what the future society might look like and what's going to happen afterwards.

We haven't even arrived at the point where we're saying it's imminent in any way. But it's this constant debate, debate, debate, debate, debate, which you see not just among Jews, but Jews are certainly like, I mean, one of the great non Jewish revolutionaries. Victor Chernoff of the Socialist Revolutionaries, [00:21:00] as they were called, said he used to love to listen to the Jews argue about things, because they're always debating.

Everything is a debate. Everything is on the one hand, on the other hand, on the third hand, on the fourth hand. 

[00:21:11] Pierre Anctil: Um, there were many divisions in the Jewish left here. Um, one division was It's left Zionism or left nationalists on the one hand, and then on the other hand, the internationalists. So those in favor of a Jewish state or the support for a Jewish people and those who wanted to be part of the general overall revolution, which would engulf all of humanity.

Western society, basically the communists. 

[00:21:50] Eddie Paul: Bolshevik in Russian means majority. And this was the party led by Vladimir Lenin, which was the far left faction of the Marxist Russian social democratic labor [00:22:00] party. Uh, and they split from the Mensheviks. Minority party, um, the Congress in 1903, uh, in 1917, you know, your history, the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks seized power, and it was later renamed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and their ideology and their practices were based on Marxist Leninist principles, and this Bolshevism.

Uh, the Bund. which was founded in 1897, ironically in the same year as Zionism was the focus of the first Zionist Conference in Switzerland. The Bund was a A leftist movement that sought to create a home wherever Jews lived, and that was the, that was their definition of doykheit. Doykheit was the idea that Jews would [00:23:00] find a home wherever they settled.

And this was in distinction to Zionism, which saw Palestine as the ultimate utopian vision for where all, where all the Jews would settle. You know, once a state was created. So that was the distinction. That was the, that was principally the way in which the Bund emerged as a force in, um, within the Jewish left in the late 19th, early 20th, particularly the early 20th century.

[00:23:36] Moishe Dolman: The vast, vast majority of the Jewish left in Europe, where the Bund was based, their solution to the problem of anti Semitism was, if the Jews would assimilate, there would be no anti Semitism, because there's no Jews. We're going to free the Jews. We're going to free the Jews from the stigma [00:24:00] of being Jewish.

The Zionist position was this isn't going to happen because even if the Jews assimilate, they're not going to be satisfied with that. The Buns, this was not the Buns original position, even with regard to Yiddish. The Buns original position was let's teach the Jewish workers Russian and they'll join the general Russian movement.

But within a couple of years, they see, first of all, If you want to talk to Jewish workers, you got to talk to them in their own language, which is Yiddish, which is the language everybody speaks. Virtually everybody, except for the most assimilated bourgeois Jews, regardless of their politics, it's Yiddish.

And within a few years, these Yids, they're arguing, what's the matter with our culture? In Yiddish, what's the matter with the culture of the Jewish working class where it's, and it expresses itself in Yiddish?[00:25:00] 

[00:25:18] Pierre Anctil: When the Peretz and the Volksschule were founded in 1913, 1914, there was a major difference between the two, which was not easily perceptible from the outside, which is, if there's going to be a Jewish state, it's going to be in Yiddish, or it's going to be in Hebrew. And this was a, a, a, a language struggle, which, which really affected everything here.

[00:25:46] Eddie Paul: Jewish languages carry with them centuries of mentality suffused with identities of displacement, exile, and loss. Hebrew was, uh, primarily, primarily a language of prayer and study [00:26:00] for, for centuries. Yiddish, on the other hand, not only became the vernacular of Eastern European Jews, It also developed as a language of literature, culture, and music, and, uh, and drama.

And it wasn't just a language. It developed as a kind of cultural bulwark against assimilation in those Eastern European lands. But within the minds of, um, the Musculine, the Musculine were, um, proponents of an Enlightenment where they wanted Jews to assimilate. Um, within the minds of these people, um, And of people who were very active in the Zionist movements at the time, Hebrew was conceived as the language of the future and destiny of the Jewish homeland.

Whereas Yiddish was really regarded as a homeland in and of itself, the language itself was a homeland. Um, but for the Hebraists, Yiddish was [00:27:00] relegated as a jargon, which was the pejorative term for Yiddish, the jargon language, because it was regarded as a language of enslavement, exile, and subjugation.

[00:27:10] Moishe Dolman: The Zionists, at the beginning among the Zionists left, there were many Yiddishists and people who are speaking Yiddish, but within a short period of time, the Yiddishists are marginalized because of this view that Yiddish is the language of the so called exile and is the, it's an effeminate language, and we are trying to build a virile society.

And so they reject Yiddish and they reject the Ashkenazic pronunciation of Hebrew, which they also regard as effeminate, subservient and, uh, not dear to the kind of world we're trying to build. But at the beginning, if you go to the Zionist schools in Montreal, and we're talking [00:28:00] a hundred years ago, they're all talking Yiddish.

You have two, two main schools. Parachula and folkshule. Parachula, no, no Hebrew. Folkshule, Hebrew and Yiddish. I'm maybe simplifies it, simplifying a bit. But that's the, that's the drift of it. It's, it, they consider themselves Zionist schools, but they're also consider themselves left wing schools for the Jewish masses, and they are speaking and teaching in Yiddish.

[00:28:35] Eddie Paul: Somebody like Reuben Brainin, who was not a Montrealer, he came from, you know, he only was here for a few years, he saw Hebrew as the future of the Jewish people, but, you know, his first language was not Hebrew, his first language was Yiddish. Was there a class divide? I don't know that there was necessarily a class divide, but I think it was perceived as one.

Hebrew was not a spoken language at all. Um, It was, that, that I think was the, [00:29:00] that was the desire, uh, by people, desire of people like Brynan who wanted Hebrew to become the vernacular. He wanted Hebrew to become a spoken language, but he was outnumbered. There were just too many immigrants whose first language was Yiddish and, you know, that was, that was the language they were at home in.

Hebrew did not become a spoken language until 1948. You remember, up until 1948, there was no homeland. You know, so where do you situate a homeland? All of these nationalisms that took root after World War I, which didn't turn out all that well for the Jews, but, you know, the only nationalism the Jews ever had was this sense of a, of a homeland You know, that was to be created in British Mandate Palestine.

Not all Jews shared that. The Bundists certainly didn't. They saw their home in culture. and everything the culture implies. 

[00:29:55] Moishe Dolman: Doikayt, as we, the Bund [00:30:00] understood it, is very, very different from the way young people today understand the concept. When the Bund talked about Doikayt, they meant here ness, not here ism.

The Bund was a Marxist political party. And Marxists deal with something that we call praxis, that is the connection of theory to practice. The Bund's argument was, there's no Israel, there's no and there's not gonna be, the imperialist powers will never allow for a Jewish state. And so the Zionists, Especially the left Zionists, the Politsian and others, are distracting Jewish workers from the class struggle at home.

Whether it was originally in Russia, whether it was originally, or later on in Poland, where the Bund's [00:31:00] shift of power changed after the Bolsheviks took over in Russia and outlawed the Bund. 

[00:31:09] Eddie Paul: The point here was, Bundism and Zionism were two responses to revolutionary impulses in 19th century Eastern Europe, which were imported here.

In one respect, as strange as it may seem, Bundism and Zionism were opposite sides of the same coin. What they shared was a sense of future. Often this is characterized as here ness versus there ness. If you're familiar with the Motown song, Papa was a Rolling Stone, which ironically was produced by a group called The Undisputed Truth, there's a refrain in the song which goes, Papa was a rolling stone, wherever he laid his hat was his home.

This pretty Bundist idea of doikayt, or here ness. Anywhere you are, that place That's your home. The Zionists situated the idea of a homeland in the [00:32:00] ancestral territory, which, if you study early medieval cartography, was situated at the center of the known world. As is the case with most ideologies, um, Leave them alone at night, they get up to no good, but both were essentially utopian with messianic undertones.

And both had been, both were transported to North America from Eastern Europe. But to my mind, um, you know, as, as much as they were, uh, polar opposites, they stem from this sort of messianic vision of a better future. But where that future was situated was very different. It was either here or there.

[00:32:39] Moishe Dolman: Throughout most of history, the argument of the Bund was not that we don't need Israel because we're very happy where we are. The Bund's argument was we don't need Zionism because it just ain't gonna happen. It's not gonna happen. Forget about it. Concentrate [00:33:00] on the class struggle. They're telling you to think of something that's not going to take place.

And as a result, for example, today, what the Bund, when the Bund argued about doikayt, here ness as opposed to here ism, what the Bund was saying, we as Jews have the right to a Jewish life wherever we are living. Today, you very often see younger Jews love to reproduce the old Jewish life. Bundist poster saying there where we live, there.

Uh, that is where our home is, but they don't reproduce the bottom of the poster, which says for full Jewish civil and political rights in Poland. What separate, that's what this poster is all about. Not that we're happy where we are, but we have a right to be happy where we are and to live a Jewish life.

[00:33:58] Eddie Paul: So I don't think that [00:34:00] hereness necessarily. I don't think doikayt necessarily contradicts, um, the necessity that the Jews felt in assimilating, in becoming part of the society. There was, there was a way of being alone together. But, um, one of the things you can do sometimes is you can blame history. Um, in 1905, following the wave of pogroms in Russia, uh, the Bund, uh, was very popular.

Their popularity had been surging. Um, The loyalty to the Bund started faltering at some point because the pogroms had driven many of the Jews away from the Bund's more cosmopolitan vision, um, and towards some of the more nationalist radicalism of some of the labor Zionist parties that were also emerging at the time.

Uh, there was a socialist labor [00:35:00] party that was interested in building a Jewish homeland. They didn't really have a particular interest in Palestine. Uh, they had 27, 000 members, uh, One of the ones better known to us is the Po'alei Zion. And these were Marxist Zionists looking to build a Jewish Workers Republic in Palestine.

And this had almost 17, 000 members. And these parties all espoused variations on a kind of Zionist ideology. In Canada, though, I think that these Zionist groups established themselves primarily as a means to establish ways that a progressive society could be constituted in British Mandate Palestine.

You know, the idea of Zionists here was that the Zionists were not going to stay here. The idea was to make Aliyah and to go to the, you know, go to the land. But the ideas that were fermenting here, um, I [00:36:00] believe that Israel was going to be this sort of utopian land where you had people living communally.

Uh, you know, there were already experiments in the United States and Britain for these little utopian communities. But Israel, being a brand new state, a brand new country, this was going to be the place where communitarian idea was actually going to take hold. And that was firmly rooted in the left, the sort of leftist idea of equality and, um, you know, progressive ideas.

I think initially the idea was to live in peace, that, you know, there could be some cohabitation, coexistence. But, you know, the left held sway for a very, very long time in Israel. Um, the first, um, the first governments were certainly not, you know, they were Goldenear, they were the people who, uh, came from Eastern Europe.[00:37:00] 

But the generations have, generations cycled through that and that eventually moved further to the center and as we know to the right now. I'm not sure this is what you want, but this is, this is what you're going to get. Okay, now there were several active Zionist groups in Montreal in the early days of the 20th century.

The Po'alei Zion was an active one. It was a large one. There was the Dorsheid Zion, there was the Hovavei Zion, the Lovers of Zion, the Agudat Zion, the Baron de Hirsch Institute, which is mainly a philanthropic organization. You know, I was active, I was active in Hashemertz a year when I was younger, which is very far to the left.

They were, they were active. They were the furthest to the left of all of the Zionist groups that were around. There was Habonim, there was Dror Habonim, there was Betar, which was to the right. Now I was there just to meet girls, right? But I wasn't, I wasn't there to emigrate to Israel. And, but their idea, I think, you know, if they were transplanted to 2024, [00:38:00] they would see coexistence with the Arabs as being paramount.

[00:38:05] Pierre Anctil: So these differences were major and kept these people apart. They were all left leaning, but they did not see the world the same way. Um, this was visible in many other ways. Um, the, the, uh, unions that became organized, the, uh, circles, uh, intellectual, literary, artistic, uh, bore the. differences. Some of them were more internationalist and some more left leaning.

The Jewish public library, of course, was not internationalist in that sense. It was leaning towards a form of diaspora nationalism. So it's, it's, it's very interesting to note that among, even among the nationalists, there were major differences. [00:39:00] 

[00:39:00] Shannon Hodge: And all these people weren't just leaders in one area of the community, they were leaders in multiple areas of the community, whether it's children's education, or support of elderly people, or support of, um, the orphans homes, or theatre, or poetry, or the labour movement.

And it's, it's all interconnected, you can't really separate all of those things. So when you talk about the collections of the The Jewish public Library. That's really what it is. It's this interconnectivity between all of these, um, diverse individuals and diverse groups that make up, you know, what you could call, quote unquote, the Jewish community, but it's not it's communities.

[00:39:54] Ellen Belshaw: Thank you for tuning in to recollections. Be sure to follow along for episode three where we learn more about [00:40:00] labor movements and union organizing and set the tone for the start of the Cold War. 

[00:40:05] Ezell Carter: A very special thank you to today's guests, Aaron, Eddie, Esther, Moish, Pierre, Sam, and Shannon. 

[00:40:15] Ellen Belshaw: Recollections is a production of the Jewish Public Library Archives and Special Collections.

Production, editing, and operations by Ellen Belshaw and Ezell Carter. Research support from Leah Graham, Sam Pappas, and Eddie Paul. Mixing by Ezell Carter and mastering by Josh Boguski. 

[00:40:30] Ezell Carter: Musical score by Danjiel Zambo and sound effects provided by Pixabay. 

[00:40:33] Ellen Belshaw: Thank you to our sponsors, the Azraeli Foundation and Federation CJA. 

[00:40:36] Ezell Carter: You can find out more about this podcast and all of our other happenings at jpl- curates.

org. Or sign up for our Archives and Special Collections newsletter. 

[00:40:48] Ellen Belshaw: You've been listening to ReCollections. This is Ellen Belshaw 

[00:40:52] Ezell Carter: and Ezell Carter signing off in solidarity.[00:41:00] 

[00:41:09] HOSTS: We're just starting with. Yeah, I agree. The simplest answer is usually the importance. Today we're starting with. Just say today. They know if we're starting, it's today. I know, it just sounds This is the outtake we're taking. It doesn't sound, it doesn't sound like Oh my god, this is the outtake.