Remembering Two of Montreal's Yiddish Women Poets: Esther Segal and Ida Maza

Abstract

Esther Segal and Ida Maza were Yiddish poets active in Montreal’s literary milieu from the 1920s through the 1960s. While both were recognized by their contemporaries as significant voices in Yiddish poetry, they have been remembered in very different ways. This study presents the careers and writings of Segal and Maza as well as their roles as cultural figures in Montreal’s Jewish immigrant community. It examines how their work has been disseminated and how they have been remembered. In the process, it raises questions of posterity in Yiddish literature: Who is remembered and included in the canon of Yiddish Canadian letters, and why? During the formative period of Montreal’s development as a Yiddish cultural center in the 1920s, the several women poets active in the expanding local literary milieu included Esther Segal (1895–1974) and Ida Maza (Maze/ Massey, 1893–1962). 2 Both immigrated to Montreal at a young age during the mass Jewish immigration to Canada from Eastern Europe. Both made their literary debuts in the early 1920s, and both wrote lyrical verse influenced by Yiddish modernist poetry. Both published primarily in literary journals and anthologies, and their writings were well received by their peers, locally and internationally. Yet Segal has fallen into obscurity, while Maza has been widely written about as a poet and activist. Still known in Canadian Yiddish cultural history as di mame (the mother), Maza hosted a literary salon where writers, artists, Jewish immigrants and refugees gathered to share their work and find support. Segal took no public role within the local cultural milieu, and her work has not been translated, nor has she been the subject of academic or popular discourse. In short, how these two poets have been remembered seems to have less to do with their poetry than with the roles they assumed in the local Yiddish cultural milieu.