Toronto Press Research Articles

No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging ed. by David S. Koffman

Reviewed by: No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging ed. by David S. Koffman Gerald Sorin (bio) No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging. Edited by David S. Koffman. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. 314 pp. No Better Home? begins with an audacious question: "Has there ever been a better home for Jews than Canada?" The question, however, seems rhetorical, inviting only one answer: "No. There's never been a better home for the Jews." But David Koffman, the editor of this extraordinarily rich anthology, has asked more than a dozen top-ranking specialists in Canadian Jewish history to take the question seriously and to shape their answers in scholarly articles, essays, and personal memoirs. Koffman says he raised the question "because it has seldom been asked" (3). One might argue, however, that it is seldom asked because it can't be answered. What, after all, do we mean by such non-academic categories as "better" or "best," or even by the concept of "home?" Putting aside these epistemological problems, there remain enormous methodological barriers to answering the question. A responsible conclusion would require comparing the quality of Jewish life in Canada, not only to the US, which has been done several times before, but to Jewish life in more than one hundred other diasporas over many continents, over the course of many centuries. Canada, with 390,000 Jewish residents, is the fourth largest Jewish community in the world, trailing only Israel, the US, and France, but not by very much. This alone merits the attention of Jewish historians, anthropologists, and sociologists and explains why they established the now long-standing field of Canadian Jewish Studies. It is not clear to me, however, whether the book at issue here, as good as it is, muddies the waters or serves as a useful exploratory start to answering the question it raises. Morton Weinfeld wisely restricts his comparative essay to the Western liberal democracies of the past two hundred years. He examines a series of data points which reveal aspects of Jewish self-possession and religious and communal freedom in a multicultural Canadian society. Weinfeld is confident that within his circumscribed comparisons, Canada has been the best home for Jews over the past two centuries. In her chapter, however, historian Hasia Diner takes issue with Weinfeld. Canada, she writes, certainly offered a better home than the various other "homes" Jews left behind. But this does not mean that immigrants to Canada made the best choice, particularly in comparison to destination USA. Diner points to the fact that in the vast compendium of information consumed by East European Jews considering a new home, "Canada occupied a decidedly minor role" (35). But how does that claim address [End Page 314] the question about the quality of life Jews actually experienced in their new location? The essay fails to say. Kalman Weiser's chapter demonstrates that Jewish intellectuals, especially those who visited Montreal in the first half of the twentieth-century, envisioned the city as a "Vilna on the St. Lawrence." They had reasonable expectations that Montreal's Jewish culture might prove fertile ground for Yiddish and Yiddishkeit when sheltered from some of the assimilating forces Jews faced in the US Jews were the largest immigrant group in Montreal, and Yiddish did indeed remain the third most spoken language in the city into the early decades of the twentieth century. Other essays by historians Harold Troper, Ira Robinson, and Richard Menkis pay attention to positive transformations in Canadian Jewish life over time, including increased political and cultural influence and more assurance of Jewish continuity through the growth of Jewish day schools. The picture is mixed, however. Robinson describes the institutional and demographic shifts that reshaped the Canadian Jewish experience, particularly in Montreal after the Parti Quebecois gained influence in the 1970s. The pronounced nationalism expressed in French Canada's "Quiet Revolution" was alarming to Jews who thought their safe and stable home, as one group among other minority groups, might be threatened. For some Jews, the reemergence of a radical French nationalism prompted memories of Canada's restrictive immigration policy toward Jewish refugees during the Holocaust years. The...

Editorial

Find information about UTP Journals. University of Toronto Press is Canada’s leading academic publisher and one of the largest university presses in North America, with particular strengths in the social sciences, humanities, and business. The Book Publishing Division is widely recognized in Canada for its strength in history, political science, sociology, Indigenous studies, and cultural studies. Internationally, UTP is a leading publisher of medieval, Renaissance, Italian, Iberian, Slavic, and urban studies, as well as studies in book and print culture.

John C. Appleby, Fur, Fashion and Transatlantic Trade during the Seventeenth Century: Chesapeake Bay Native Hunters, Colonial Rivalries and London Merchants

Find information about UTP Journals. University of Toronto Press is Canada’s leading academic publisher and one of the largest university presses in North America, with particular strengths in the social sciences, humanities, and business. The Book Publishing Division is widely recognized in Canada for its strength in history, political science, sociology, Indigenous studies, and cultural studies. Internationally, UTP is a leading publisher of medieval, Renaissance, Italian, Iberian, Slavic, and urban studies, as well as studies in book and print culture.

Opening doors to diversity in leadershipBobbySiuToronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2021, 315 pages, $38.95, hardback

Opening doors to diversity in leadershipBobbySiuToronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2021, 315 pages, $38.95, hardback

Tison Pugh. On the Queerness of Early English Drama: Sex in the Subjunctive. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. Pp 241.

This review considers On the Queerness of Early English Drama: Sex in the Subjunctive.

Romantic Capabilities: Blake, Scott, Austen, and the New Messages of Old Media by Mike Goode

Find information about UTP Journals. University of Toronto Press is Canada’s leading academic publisher and one of the largest university presses in North America, with particular strengths in the social sciences, humanities, and business. The Book Publishing Division is widely recognized in Canada for its strength in history, political science, sociology, Indigenous studies, and cultural studies. Internationally, UTP is a leading publisher of medieval, Renaissance, Italian, Iberian, Slavic, and urban studies, as well as studies in book and print culture.

Beowulf as Children's Literature ed. by Bruce Gilchrist and Britt Mize

Reviewed by: Beowulf as Children's Literature ed. by Bruce Gilchrist and Britt Mize Kim Zarins (bio) Beowulf as Children's Literature. Edited by Bruce Gilchrist and Britt Mize. University of Toronto Press, 2021. Over one hundred adaptations of the Old English poem Beowulf have been for children, yet this repository has not received a book-length treatment (3). Bruce Gilchrist and Britt Mize remedied the oversight with this edited volume, of interest to medievalists, children's literature scholars, Tolkien scholars, and education specialists. Britt Mize's introduction includes the volume's stakes: education's entanglement with literary production, the inclusion of canonical retellings in children's literature, and the racialized messages positioning Beowulf as a monument of "their own people's heritage," that is, white, Northern European heritage (7). Nationalism drives early adaptations of Beowulf. In "A Little Shared Homer for England and the North": The First Beowulf for Young Readers," Mark Bradshaw Busbee explores the first adaptation for children (Danish, not English), by N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783-1872). His 1820 Bjowulfs Drape landed on the curriculum and remained an influential staple in the Danish school system for generations. Scyld Scefing, the Danish people, and the "Goth" Beowulf are idealized in folksy language, while Grendel seems employed by the Catholic Church, preying on slumbering minds as slumbering Danes who require liberation from Beowulf/Luther; later, Beowulf dispatches Grendel's mother, "Jesabel," to Hell. I wanted context for these comparisons. Busbee notes Tolkien's debt to Grundtvig, though this chapter might elucidate why a Catholic like Tolkien despised allegory. The first English children's adaptation was written by a Victorian woman whom Renée Ward resurrects from obscurity in "E. L. Hervey's 'The Fight with the Ogre.'" Hervey's tale ends with Beowulf's triumph over the main antagonist, Grendel's mother—her head, not Grendel's, serves as his trophy. Beowulf is a monotheistic, masculine ideal, so much a man of action that there is no dialogue. Ward ends her chapter with a puzzle pertaining to Kate Greenaway's illustration of Grendel, which would seem to be a recycled illustration of the Norse giant Skyrmir—yet the publication in Hervey's volume predates the Norse publication. In "Tolkien, Beowulf, and Faërie: Adaptations for Readers Aged 'Six to Sixty'" Amber Dunai charts Tolkien's engagement with retelling Beowulf thrice, evoking different aspects of the poem: "The Hobbit thus marks a transitional point between the historically dominated Lay of Beowulf and the thoroughly folklorized Sellic Spell" (93). My question is whether this leaning toward Faërie is just another instance of adaptation of equal utility or aesthetic value to the historical one he employs first, or rather whether Tolkien's three adaptations suggest a trajectory moving toward what storytelling should do. In "Treatments of Beowulf as a Source in Mid-Twentieth-Century Children's Literature," Carl Edlund Anderson surveys this era's shift from "retelling" Beowulf in a straightforward [End Page 243] manner to "reusing" Beowulf more loosely, "to reflect on their own interests, ideas, and creative visions" (124). I wanted more information as to what these driving concepts are that made "reusing" essential. These terms imply aesthetic value judgements privileging "reusing," yet it seemed Anderson's examples of Ian Serraillier's blank verse or Rosemary Sutcliff's Dragonslayer speak to fidelity not as an erasure of creative power but a strict form employed to showcase it. Sutcliff "has reforged her influences into a finely wrought personal vision" exemplified in her elegiac conclusion: "And when the song was all sung, all the men went away, and left Beowulf's barrow alone with the sea wind and the wheeling gulls and the distant ships that passed on the Sail-Road" (118). Meanwhile, Bruce Gilchrist laments retellings move so far from the original that female representation in illustrations is lost, even today. In "Visualizing Femininity in Children's and Illustrated Versions of Beowulf," Gilchrist discusses the importance of Beowulf's women and how they are illustrated, or not, over time. As a teacher, I've found that Wealtheow's rhetoric is a hard sell among my monster-oriented students; Gilchrist reminds me to do her justice. Even as my students...

Writing the Empire: The McIlwraiths, 1853–1948. Eva-Marie Kröller

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Able to Lead: Disablement, Radicalism, and the Political Life of E.T. Kingsley. Ravi Malhotra and Benjamin Isitt

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The Fate of Canada: F.R. Scott’s Journal of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 1963–1971. Graham Fraser

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Trois récits utopiques classiques: Gabriel de Foigny, La Terre Australe connue, Denis Veiras, Histoire des Sévarambes, Bernard de Fontenelle, Histoire des Ajaoïens, éd. Jean-Michel Racault

Find information about UTP Journals. University of Toronto Press is Canada’s leading academic publisher and one of the largest university presses in North America, with particular strengths in the social sciences, humanities, and business. The Book Publishing Division is widely recognized in Canada for its strength in history, political science, sociology, Indigenous studies, and cultural studies. Internationally, UTP is a leading publisher of medieval, Renaissance, Italian, Iberian, Slavic, and urban studies, as well as studies in book and print culture.

The Making of a Museum. Judith Nasby

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A Great Revolutionary Wave: Women and the Vote in British Columbia. Lara Campbell

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Decoding Magic’s Cultural Roots

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Modest Hopes: Homes and Stories of Toronto’s Workers from the 1820s to the 1920s. Don Loucks and Leslie Valpy

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A Long Journey: Residential Schools in Labrador and Newfoundland. Andrea Procter

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Institutional Theatrics: Performing Arts Policy in Post-Wall Berlin. By Brandon Woolf. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021; 268 pp.; illustrations. $99.95 cloth, $34.95 paper, e-book available. - Theatre of Anger: Radical Transnational Performance in Contemporary Berlin. By Olivia Landry. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021; 236 pp.; illustrations. $56.25 cloth, e-book available.

Institutional Theatrics: Performing Arts Policy in Post-Wall Berlin. By Brandon Woolf. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021; 268 pp.; illustrations. 34.95 paper, e-book available. - Theatre of Anger: Radical Transnational Performance in Contemporary Berlin. By Olivia Landry. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021; 236 pp.; illustrations. $56.25 cloth, e-book available. - Volume 66 Issue 2

Monty and the Canadian Army. John A. English

Find information about UTP Journals. University of Toronto Press is Canada’s leading academic publisher and one of the largest university presses in North America, with particular strengths in the social sciences, humanities, and business. The Book Publishing Division is widely recognized in Canada for its strength in history, political science, sociology, Indigenous studies, and cultural studies. Internationally, UTP is a leading publisher of medieval, Renaissance, Italian, Iberian, Slavic, and urban studies, as well as studies in book and print culture.

Redefining Citizenship in Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand. Jatinder Mann

Find information about UTP Journals. University of Toronto Press is Canada’s leading academic publisher and one of the largest university presses in North America, with particular strengths in the social sciences, humanities, and business. The Book Publishing Division is widely recognized in Canada for its strength in history, political science, sociology, Indigenous studies, and cultural studies. Internationally, UTP is a leading publisher of medieval, Renaissance, Italian, Iberian, Slavic, and urban studies, as well as studies in book and print culture.

Curious Encounters: Voyaging, Collecting, and Making Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Adriana Craciun and Mary Terrall

Find information about UTP Journals. University of Toronto Press is Canada’s leading academic publisher and one of the largest university presses in North America, with particular strengths in the social sciences, humanities, and business. The Book Publishing Division is widely recognized in Canada for its strength in history, political science, sociology, Indigenous studies, and cultural studies. Internationally, UTP is a leading publisher of medieval, Renaissance, Italian, Iberian, Slavic, and urban studies, as well as studies in book and print culture.