Blue Metropolis

International Literature Festival

YIDDISH CIRCUIT

YIDDISH CIRCUIT: KORN, MAZE, ZIPPER, ROSENFARB…

While Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen are household names in Montreal and beyond, there’s an earlier generation of acclaimed Jewish writers who lived in this city: Rochl Korn, Ida Maze, J.I. Segal, Yaacov Zipper, Chava Rosenfarb and others. They wrote in Yiddish, a language that once flourished here. Join translator-editor Goldie Morgentaler, writers Norman Ravvin and Sherry Simon, with host Shelley Pomerance, as they take you, with this podcast, on a virtual visit of Montreal’s Yiddish literary past.

Yiddish Circuit: Korn, Maze, Zipper, Rosenfarb… with Shelley Pomerance

An original text by Shelley Pomerance

Hi. I’m Shelley Pomerance, and I’m delighted you’ve joined me for this Blue Metropolis podcast about Yiddish Literary Montreal. On this virtual tour, you’ll hear from current and former Montrealers who have thoughts about this city’s Yiddish literary past: translator and editor Goldie Morgentaler, and writers Norm Ravvin and Sherry Simon…

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Chava Rosenfarb and the Jewish Public Library of Montreal

An original text by Goldie Morgentaler

My mother, the Yiddish writer Chava Rosenfarb, once told the journalist, Elaine Kalman: “There was a good reason why Jews called Montreal ‘the Jerusalem of North America’. . Take the Jewish Public Library! It was the centre, the vital heart and nerve of Yiddish and Jewish life in North America, not just in Canada…

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Yaacov Zipper’s Journals

An original text by Norman Ravvin

Even in translation Yaacov Zipper’s voice is elegiac; it sounds an end time. Zipper was raised in Tishevitz, a sizable town in eastern Poland. He came to Montreal in 1925, and by 1928 had taken the role of Principal at the Peretz Shule, a leading Yiddish day school that was located on Cadieux before it moved to a renovated factory building on Duluth Avenue East in 1942…

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Mount Royal, the Yiddish park

An original text by Sherry Simon

With a bit of imagination, you might, as you lift your eyes from the corner of Rachel and Parc, catch a glimpse of the Tower of Babel. The mountain as it rises from Jeanne-Mance Park has some resemblance to the celebrated painting by Breughel, beginning with the winding paths that gently ascend towards the summit and disappear into low hanging clouds…

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THE BEST PLACES

Yiddish Circuit: Korn, Maze, Zipper, Rosenfarb… by Shelley Pomerance

  • St Urbain Street & Mt Royal Avenue W.
    Montréal, QC, H2T 1N9
    Google Maps

Chava Rosenfarb and the Jewish Public Library of Montreal by Goldie Morgentaler

  • The Jewish Public Library (no longer located here)
    5253 Décarie Boulevard,
    Montreal, QC, H3W 3C3
    Google Maps

Yaakvo’s Zipper’s Journals by Norman Ravvin

Mount Royal, the Yiddish park by Sherry Simon

PROJECT COLLABORATORS

Shelley Pomerance

Arts journalist and broadcaster Shelley Pomerance is the host of Writers Unbound, a program on MAtv devoted to Montreal authors and their books, and of a bilingual online poetry reading series presented by the Centre des arts de Stanstead. She has been a programmer with Blue Metropolis Literary Festival, writes the English Books column for Montréal Centre_ville magazine and has presented talks for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens as well as for a number of Montreal festivals and libraries. For over 20 years she was a presence on CBC Radio as a host and arts reporter and has been a contributor to NPR and VPR in the US.

Goldie Morgentaler

Goldie Morgentaler is Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge, where she teaches nineteenth-century British and American literature, as well as modern Jewish literature. She is the translator from Yiddish to English of much of Chava Rosenfarb’s work including Rosenfarb’s seminal Holocaust novel, The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto. Her translation of Rosenfarb’s book of short stories, Survivors: Seven Short Stories won a Canadian Jewish Book Award and the Modern Language Association’s Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies. She is also the editor of Exile at Last: Selected Poems of Chava Rosenfarb, as well as, most recently, the editor and one of the translators of a collection of Chava Rosenfarb’s essays, called Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays, published by McGill-Queens University Press in 2019. This collection won a 2019 Jewish Canadian Literary Award. She has also translated several short stories by the Yiddish classical writer, I. L. Peretz, into English. She is the author of a book on Dickens and heredity, and of numerous articles on Victorian literature, including one on the translations of Dickens into Yiddish.

Norman Ravvin

Norman Ravvin is a writer, critic and teacher in Montreal. He teaches Jewish literature and history in Concordia’s Department of Religions and Cultures. His recent novel, published by Linda Leith in Montreal, is The Girl Who Stole Everything. The Globe and Mail cited it as one of the best books from Canadian independent publishers in 2019. His other books include the story collection, Sex, Skyscrapers, and Standard Yiddish, the novels Lola by Night and The Joyful Child, and the essay collection, Hidden Canada: An Intimate Travelogue. His books have won prizes in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec.

Sherry Simon

Sherry Simon writes widely about language and memory in cities from Montreal to Barcelona, Trieste, Calcutta, Lviv and Czernowitz. Her prize-winning Translating Montreal (2006) and Cities in Translation (2012) both appeared in French versions by Pierrot Lambert as Traverser Montréal and Villes en traduction. Translation Sites: A Field Guide explores places around the world (hotels, markets, gardens, monuments) whose meanings are shaped by a clash of histories and languages. She teaches in the French Department at Concordia University and is a member of the Académie des lettres du Québec.

BOOKSHOP SPACE
Chava Rosenfarb, Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019
Norman Ravvin, The Girl Who Stole Everything, Linda Leith Publishing, 2019
Sherry Simon, Culture in Transit, Vehicule Press, 2020
Cesario Lavery , Der Eydes, 2021
Ariela Freedman, A Joy to be Hidden, Linda Leith Publishing, 2019
Judy Batalion, The Light of Days, Harper Collins, 2021
David Homel, Lunging into the Underbrush, Linda Leith Publishing, 2021
Zelda Abramson, The Montreal Shtetl: Making Home After the Holocaust , Between the lines, 2019
Naomi Klein, How to Change Everything, PRH Canada Young Readers, 2021
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