Collected Writings: Poems, Stories and Essays on the Canadian Jewish Immigrant Experience

The Yiddish Book Center is more than an archive of out-of-print and discarded Yiddish texts. The center has grown to offer a physical and digital archive of ancestral memory. For instance, a single reference to a book written by Joseph J. Goodman in a Canadian Yiddish newspaper prompted Leah Jay Hammer to travel to Amherst, Massachusetts, where she encountered her grandfather's Collected Writings for the first time. The descendants of Goodman, a Russian immigrant to the Canadian Prairies, had been unaware of the book's existence. To aid the book's recovery, the family hired Hannah Berliner Fischthal as a translator, and another of Goodman's granddaughters, Harriet Goodman Hoffman, took over the role of editor. Collected Writings, originally published in 1919 in Yiddish by the Art and Literature Society of Winnipeg, Manitoba, is back in circulation through the self-publishing company Xlibris, now with extensive translations, appendices, and photographs. Hoffman's research usefully contextualizes not only Goodman's life, but also the lives of Jewish immigrants to North America. According to Sebastian Schulman, the Yiddish Book Center's Translation Project Coordinator, Goodman's book is perhaps the only volume to have been discovered, translated, and published after its discovery at the center.Collected Writings is a compelling example of the types of projects that the Yiddish Book Center facilitates through its archives and educational programs, showing how discoveries that enrich familial knowledge of ancestry and history can cross with endeavors of scholarly significance. More than simply a family memento, the book is a valuable artefact from a lesser-known community—that of Ashkenazi Jews who settled the Canadian Prairies, often as farmers. Joseph J. Goodman was born Chaim Tschernov in 1863 in a Russian shtetl. He immigrated with his family to the United States in the late 1800s, where he married another Jewish immigrant and moved to Winnipeg. His work placed him in a unique position to analyze and represent the Jewish Prairie experience: he held a relatively high rank with the Canadian government as an immigration inspector for the Canadian Pacific Railroad. His work took him through the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta to visit many small, rural Jewish communities. Goodman also had a regular column in the Manitoba Free Press, sometimes publishing under the pseudonym “Professor Incognitow [sic].” Yet Goodman's work was not without controversy: he was once accused of granting a certificate of naturalization to a Jewish man who had not yet fulfilled the residency requirement. Goodman's arrest made him a cause célèbre of Winnipeg's Jewish communities, and without enough evidence to prove his guilt, the charges were dropped.Goodman's life, like his writings, was tinged with his dual loves of Zionism and Canada; indeed, he named his son Wilfred Hertzl Goodman, after Wilfrid Laurier, the Canadian prime minister, and Theodore Hertzl. Collected Writings likewise focuses on Jewish experiences of Canada in sections divided between poems, translations, stories, and essays. Goodman's poetry displays a range of literary influences, from John Keats to the Song of Songs. Many are about, or in honor of, other poets, including A. M. Mandelboym and Shimon Frug. Fischthal, in her “Translator's Introduction,” distinguishes between Goodman's poetry and the New York Yiddish sweatshop poetry of the same period, suggesting that Goodman's writings were not aimed at the “utilitarian function” of “denouncing the evils of the workplace” (xxiii). Neither was he interested in nostalgic renderings of life in the old country. This analysis holds mostly true for the Collected Writings as a whole: Goodman is neither homesick nor explicitly political. His stories follow themes related to the Jewish immigrant experience, but without either decrying the new country or hearkening back to the old. For instance, in “Yankl Becomes a Canadian,” a Russian immigrant learns to identify himself with his adopted country through watching his children act in a school play about Canada. In an interesting iteration of the melting pot trope, Yankl ceases to distinguish himself from other white ethnic immigrants by emphasizing his Judaism, and begins to identify instead with the nation.Goodman's essays and translations tend to critique simplistic notions of immigrant assimilation, especially what he sees as the degradation of Jewish morals in the new world. In “Politeness and Importance,” for example, Goodman bemoans the loss of these characteristics that used to be “spiritual jewelry for the Jewish soul” (193), concluding that in the move to the freedom of the New World, Jews “lost control of our principles and grabbed onto chaos” (195). Goodman also attempts to delineate “Jewish Aesthetics,” comparing them to French and German, and to discuss methods of literary analysis in “Readers.” While these pieces tend towards broader, more esoteric themes, Goodman's most fascinating writings are those in which he relates his personal experiences as a Jewish immigrant to the Canadian West. Such pieces complement books like Rachel Calof's Story or Isa Milman's Prairie Kaddish, by providing valuable depth to the currently limited historical narrative of Jewish life on the Prairies. In “Flies and Little People,” Goodman recounts his frustrations with the law while working as an immigration official responsible for granting entrance to Canada for Jewish settlers from North Dakota. He also depicts the Jewish Sonnenfeld and Montefiore Colonies and recalls his travels to Calgary, Edmonton, Lethbridge, and Medicine Hat, the latter of which he terms “the Pittsburgh of Canada” (277). Goodman's accounts help to refocus characterizations of North American Jewish communities away from urban centers and towards smaller, more disparate rural populations, a shift supported by historical studies such as recent work by Jeanne Abrams and Linda Mack Schloff, along with Arthur A. Chiel's The Jews in Manitoba, upon which much of Hoffman's research is based.In bringing such a personal project to a wider audience, Goodman's family offers both an example of and a blueprint for the varied, wide-ranging projects that archival research, translation, and historical contextualization can produce. We certainly cannot control our ancestors, what they wrote or how they acted, and researching family history is always surprising and unpredictable. In a letter from Goodman's son included in the book, Wilfred Hertzl Goodman recalls his father's counsel to “be not proud of your ancestors, but take every care that your children shall have no cause to be ashamed of theirs” (330).

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