06/27/2016
This beautifully illustrated labor of love captures a little-documented piece of Canadian Jewish history, when 20th-century Yiddish-speaking immigrants created a progressive counterculture, teaching children to strive for a better world. In the U.S., this milieu produced Noam Chomsky and Zero Mostel; in Canada, it birthed the Travellers singing group and the Lovin' Spoonful's Zal Yanovsky. Reiter invites readers into a passionate world of true believers who developed a remarkable infrastructure of schools, summer camps, fraternal help organizations, and cultural clubs that thrived on Yiddish heritage and absurdist humor while dodging RCMP surveillance, "red squads," and Quebec's repressive Padlock Law, which allowed the closure of any house or building where people were suspected of propagating communism. Firsthand accounts from octogenarian lifelong socialists, union members, and feminists help color a history that spans struggles from the Bolshevik Revolution and the Spanish Civil War to the social uprisings of the '60s and '70s and current frazzled Middle East politics. Reiter's often conversational writing can be repetitive and occasionally focuses too much on details of political factionalism and internecine fighting. That aside, Reiter provides a valuable contribution to the history of Canadian immigration, political movements, and a Jewish community whose stories beg for further documentation. (May)
