A Stone in My Shoe: In Search of Neighborhood

Poet George Ellenbogen’s memoir is more than a collection of anecdotes of his immigrant family and their journey from Franz Joseph’s Austro-Hungarian empire to Montreal in the 1920s. A Stone in My Shoe charts his discovery of how an immigrant Jewish neighborhood—a tight-knit shtetl with extended families that had its own shops, institutions, and daily Yiddish newspapers—sustained him and his family as well as thousands of others. The revelations ripple outward and what surfaces—the markers ...