German-Canadian Studies

Pascal Maeder: Forging a New Heimat: Expellees in Post-War West Germany and Canada. V&R unipress GmbH, 2011. ISBN: 978-3-89971-805-8

Referring to the six million Germans that were transferred from Central and Eastern Europe to East and West Germany, the process of expulsion has commonly been divided into three archetypical forms. The flight of five million people who sought refuge from the Soviet armies, vigilante deportations during the months immediately after the defeat of German troops, and systematic removals of the remaining German population until 1955. Yet one group of people connected to the expellees but being parted from the land was also expelled from their homes although they always have been left out of figures and numbers when it comes to the topic of the expulsion of the Germans. In his study, Pascal Maeder expands the spectrum of the expulsion process to men and women that were neither captured, forced into labour camps nor in exile when they experienced their “expulsion” in absentia. But having lost their homes in the aftermath of World War II they too became German expellees. The book sheds a broader light on the expulsion and includes facets experienced by German men and women who at the time of their expulsion were not present in their homes in Central and Eastern Europe, but instead lived through their expulsion experience in exile or in prisoner-of-war camps.

Maeder’s concept asks for the nature of identity and nationality because at the root of the expulsion there is always ethnic nationalism. In the introduction Maeder explains the historic events of World War II that caused six million Germans to leave their homes in Central and Eastern Europe. Before the war tore Europe apart there were important historical developments that led into the European traditional idea of nationalism. Maeder summarizes three vast strands of scholarships which examine more closely the nexus between nationalism and expulsion. First of all, they are placing the expulsions into a pan-European decade of forced population movements, war, and dictatorships that did not spare human life in pursuit of their national objectives. Secondly, as a result oft the Versailles peace treaty system former minority groups formed new nation states. A population exchange to ‘unmix’ multi-ethnic nation states was considered a success and led to the international acceptance for policies as seen in Churchill’s comment in 1944: “There will be no mixture to cause endless trouble […] a clean sweep will be made.” Thirdly, there was the emergence of ethnic nationalism in the 19th century popularized by the American and French revolutions. The ‘National Idea’ rapidly became synonymous with the creation of ethnically and/or racially homogeneous nation states that came along with modern technological advances as citizenship, democracy and welfare.

Comparative exploration of the lives of expellees in West Germany and Canada allows an assessment of the widely acclaimed successful integration of expellees in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Meader focuses on the transnational character of migrant identities with their complex social construction and the interplay between the agency of people and the social realm they came to live in. The study sticks to Anthony Richmond’s multivariate systems model of international migration where immigrants must be classified as a reactive migrant group pushed by a high level of socio-political constrains. On this basis Maeder argues that, following Richmond, nationalism brought about both the expulsions of the Germans from Central and Eastern Europe and their integration into a new nation state. In their quest for personal security, expellees as knowledgeable agents inevitably reproduced elements of the nationalism which led to their expulsion and so enabled them to act upon their existence and produce and re-produce societies. Therefore, based on a set of socially constructed criteria the dynamic of nationalism leads individuals and population groups either to adopt a national identity or, if they can not partake or feel excluded from a national community, to move and re-negotiate a national identity outside the territory.

The clear structure of the book makes it easy to follow Maeder’s questions and answers. Written in five chapters, each chapter is divided into three parts where the first part describes the situation of the expellees in Europe, the second part shows in contrast the expellee’s life in Canada during the same period of time, ‘Beyond the Sea’ as Maeder calls it in the first chapter. In the third part of each chapter a brief conclusion sums up the essential issues and results.

In the first chapter he outlines the various facets of the expulsion as described above, followed by the immediate consequences for the persons involved. As Maeder states, it is obvious that the difference between the two groups of expellees is on the one hand an isolated experience in Canada, and on the other hand a mass phenomenon in occupied Germany. The second chapter focuses on the living conditions in occupied Germany and the attempts expellees made to get away from misery and death. Despite of greatest efforts, the vast majority of expellees in occupied Germany was unable to move overseas. Maeder therefore examines the forces and mindsets on each side of the Atlantic which pushed expellees to organize aid and immigration. Chapter three investigates how and where many expellees moved within West Germany or to Canada during the ‘migration boom’ of the early 1950s and the motives expellees had to move once again. In chapter four Maeder discusses the political mobilization and organization of expellees after the settling process in both Germany and Canada. In Germany, expellee leaders enjoyed national prominence and headed a wide network of political, professional, and socio-cultural organizations with a membership of two million people. Unlike the German expellees only a handful of Canadian expellees built small organizations with limited political ambitions. The last chapter details the main argument of the study and elucidates how and what type of national identities expellees negotiated during the course of their settlement in Germany and Canada. Maeder describes how expellees generated discourses that allowed them to express their ethno-cultural and social heritage in the modern world.

To the question of how expellees in Canada fared compared to their counterparts in West Germany, Maeder gives solidly researched answers that are leading even a reader without background information of post-war developments into a social and political discussion and stimulates further interest in the topic. Readers more knowledgeable about German history will be provided with supplementary knowledge. Adding to the history of German expellees, surely the Federation of Expellees itself will gain knowledge from Forging a new Heimat.

Christina Barwich, Kassel

Maike Storks
m.storks@yahoo.ca

Over the last two years, I conducted a research project on German migrants in Montreal. During the three-month long qualitative research project I worked closely with a small number of people in order to gain an in-depth understanding of their experiences, practices, and attitudes. I interviewed 17 German migrants and accompanied them in some of their activities. My interlocutors came from various regions in Germany, had immigrated between 1952 and 2006, and ranged in age between 25 and 79. As an anthropologist, I wished to learn how these German migrants experienced their migration, what being German meant to different German migrants, for whom it was significant, and how and when they lived their Germanness.

I explored two different ways of being German. First, German migrants enacted their Germanness locally in German associations and institutions in Montreal. These associations and institutions such as a card playing club or a parish constituted a meeting place for German migrants in Montreal and presented opportunities for practicing certain customs and traditions known from the homeland. For many, they evoked a feeling of belonging to a German community.

Second, Germanness was enacted transnationally (crossing national boundaries) through ties to friends and family members in Germany or Austria for example by video-calling or visiting each other. Being German might be part of people’s ordinary background and day-to-day life where German values, norms, and customs might be relevant. My research demonstrated that being German is not – as often presumed – necessarily confined to ethnic communities or ethnic groups. German migrants may also live their Germanness through their personal relationships to family members or friends overseas.

In addition to the fact that living one’s Germanness is not limited to ethnic groups, I found that there were also considerable limitations to the mobilization of such local groups or communities. Thus, many of my younger interlocutors could not identify with German customs that were practiced in German clubs and associations and they had no interest in participating in club activities and events. They expressed their Germanness in different ways. For this reason, a German ethnic group or community cannot automatically or even easily be drawn on.

In fact, most of the German migrants I worked with strived for invisibility and inaudibility: They did not want to be recognized as German migrants in Montreal. Therefore they kept a low profile by de-emphasizing markers that might indicate their Germanness such as food, clothing, and – most importantly – language. This was particularly the case in the domains of work and settlement. It was not a priority for most of my interlocutors to settle close to other Germans or to work with them. In the private realm and the domain of leisure, by contrast, the German background was more relevant. Therefore, the relevance of being German varied by domain of life.

Indeed, respondents seemed to seek a balance, identifying as German only in private but not in public. This balance, however, was fragile. On the one hand, many German migrants who used transnational ties in order to enact their Germanness in their every-day lives realized that these ties had become weaker over time due to prolonged periods of absence and new, changing experiences. On the other hand, many German migrants who used local associations to enact their Germanness were aware of the precariousness of their associations and institutions in Montreal which see their membership numbers decline. In conclusion, the German migrants I talked to considered their German background as relevant. But in the long term this relevance decreased weakening German associations and personal transnational ties.

Maike Storks conducted this research for her Master’s thesis in social and cultural anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, which she completed in December 2011. Her research was funded by the Spletzer Family Foundation and the Chair in German-Canadian Studies at the University of Winnipeg, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture, and Concordia University and its donors. Ms Storks is currently planning to publish her research and thus to make it available more broadly.

Vincenzo Pietropaolo, Harvest Pilgrims: Mexican and Caribbean Migrant Farm Workers in Canada. Foreword by Naomi Rosenblum. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2009. ISBN 978-1-897071-54-0.

A man working in a cauliflower field pauses briefly to pose for the photographer while other men look on from afar or continue their harvest work. Other photographs show men perched on apple trees or straining their backs carrying heavy loads of pears, seemingly oblivious to the photographer nearby. The photographer has also caught them looking lost upon arrival in Toronto; very tired in dark and dank accommodations they call home for six or eight months out of the year; and crying and laughing at reunions back home, in Jamaica and Mexico. The men and women in Vincenzo Pietropaolo’s black-and-white photographs are Canada’s “guest workers,” and Harvest Pilgrims tells their story.

From 1984 to 2006, Pietropaolo photographed temporary migrants working on farms in Southern Ontario. In the tradition of social documentary photography, since Jacob Riis’s exposure of sweatshop labour in 1880s New York City and Lewis W. Hine’s images of early 20th century child labour throughout the United States, Pietropaolo documents the living, working, and travel conditions of men and women from places such as Montserrat (British West Indies) and Monte Prieto (Mexico) who harvest tobacco in Otterville, tomatoes, cabbages, and cucumbers in Waterford, and apples, pears, and peaches in Clarksburg, Beamsville, and other farming communities throughout Ontario. They come, because they hope to earn enough money in minimum wage jobs to ensure their families’ survival. They come also, because Canadian employers cannot find locals willing to work seven days a week for up to sixteen hours a day, in dirty, dangerous, and degrading conditions. And they come, because Canadian consumers demand low food prices. For many workers, their seasonal journeys shape a large part of their lives in their twenties, thirties, and forties, as they return again and again, for years and sometimes decades.

The power of Pietropaolo’s photographs lies, foremost, in making visible those who are most invisible in Canadian society. Canadians are more familiar with the Mexican workers who sweat in California’s strawberry fields than with migrant labourers cutting their hands and breaking their backs in fields and greenhouses across Canada, from Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley to British Columbia’s Fraser Valley. Canadian consumers reap the fruits of migrants’ labour when they buy shiny apples in supermarkets: one photograph shows the hands of migrants workers, marked by the wax they apply to make those apples shiny. While Canadians have become “foodies,” reading up on the 100-mile diet and embracing locally grown produce, they seldom consider that “we’ve flown whole villages of Mexicans here to pick [tomatoes] for us, for low pay and in bleak conditions,” as activist Michele Landsberg says. In 2008, over 20,000 farm workers came to Canada, making up over half of the horticultural workforce (p. 11). If the average return flight of a migrant worker is 4,000 miles, then 20,000 return flights result in 80 million flight miles each year.

In the two decades of his photographic study of migrant farm workers in Ontario, Pietropaolo developed a deep understanding of the workers’ conditions, readable not only in his photographs but also in his insightful and informative essay on “living between two worlds.” He built relationships with both, workers and farm owners, and he traveled to Mexico and Caribbean countries to meet the workers and their families and friends in their home towns. He also conducted numerous interviews, excerpts of which accompany some of the photographs.

Harvest Pilgrims scratches at the myth of Canada as an immigrant nation. Canadian immigration policy has long pursued the goal of matching the supply of foreign workers with domestic employers’ demands for workers. Immigrant workers, whether the Displaced Persons and other European immigrants of the postwar period or those arriving more recently via federal and provincial points systems, have always had access to permanent residence and citizenship. Canadian temporary migrant programs began in 1966 with the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program. Such programs have not only exposed migrants to exploitation but also denied them access to permanent residence and Canadian citizenship. As Pietropaolo says, Canada’s “guest worker” policy “does away with a sense of mutual belonging.” (10) The immigrant nation is feeding on the sweat of those it excludes from becoming immigrants.

Pietropaolo is an accomplished photographer whose work has been exhibited across Canada and abroad. In her foreword, photographic historian Naomi Rosenblum places Pietropaolo’s work in a larger, albeit mostly U.S. American, development of social documentary photography. Maia-Mari Sutnik, curator of photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario, discusses the genre of documentary photography. Although it has the format of a coffee table book, Harvest Pilgrims might best be placed on the dinner table as a constant reminder of the real cost of our food.

Alexander Freund, University of Winnipeg

Peter Stalker, The No-Nonsense Guide to International Migration. 2nd ed. Oxford: New Internationalist, 2010. ISBN 978-1-904456-94-0

The No-Nonsense Guide to International Migration is a concise introduction to current developments and patterns in international migration. In six chapters, Peter Stalker, a British freelance writer and former employee of the International Labor Organization, surveys the scope of current global migration flows and stocks; individual push and pull factors as well as structural frameworks that explain why people migrate; the role of established migration routes and migrant networks in channelling migrants to specific destinations; the economic benefits for sending and receiving societies and the migrants themselves; and the role and position of international migrants in an economically increasingly unstable world.

Some 190 million people currently live outside the country of their birth. Stalker groups these migrants into the five categories: settlers, temporary workers, professionals, unauthorized workers (so-called illegal or undocumented migrants), and refugees and asylum seekers. Throughout the text, he discusses all groups, with a larger concentration, however, on temporary workers and professionals. Various governments keep track of these migrants by either monitoring flows of migration – the annual movements of people; or by monitoring the stocks of immigrants – the number of foreign-born or foreigners (i.e. non-citizens).

Stalker’s description of both individual and structural migration theories is highly accessible. Numerous examples make abstract explanations concrete. Without dismissing push-pull, dual-labour market, or world system models out of hand, Stalker discusses both their usefulness and their limitations. Like much research on international migration, Stalker’s focus too is on the economic aspects of migration, especially the international supply and demand of jobs and workers. Numerous statistics are presented in tables and graphs, accompanied by several useful maps.

Traditionally established paths of migrations, especially from former colonies to former empires, explain migrants’ choices of destinations: “Indeed the industrialized countries deliberately started almost all the major international flows of migration of the past century” (42). Family reunification policies reinforce such migrant streams. The diverse roles and complexities of migrant networks are presented in great detail, including networks of family and friends; state-sponsored programs such as in the Philippines, Vietnam, and China; the private economy of labor brokers – so-called “body shops”; smugglers who help people to cross international borders without documentation; and traffickers who use coercion and deception to bring forced workers (especially children and women as forced sex workers) into other countries.

In much of his discussion, Stalker attempts to dismantle a number of popular myths about immigration and immigrants. He convincingly demonstrates that rather than taking jobs away from natives or being a burden on the welfare system, immigrants make receiving societies richer. In making his case, he carefully considers all sides of the argument and therefore allows readers ample evidence to draw their own conclusions. Through remittances – measured in hundreds of billions of dollars each year – migrants also contribute to the economies of their home countries. Stalker concludes by arguing that international migration will probably increase over the coming years, because “the disruption caused by globalization and industrialization in general are more likely to provoke additional emigration” (129).

The No-Nonsense Guide to International Migration is a very readable book. On 143 pages, the author presents complex historical developments, current patterns, and diverse theories in a clear and engaging style that is accessible to an interested lay and undergraduate audience. Stalker’s narrative is global in reach, discussing migrations in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America as well as in the more familiar territory of North America, Western Europe, and Australia. Yet, perhaps somewhat restrained by the heavy research focus on the latter “traditional” immigration and emigration countries in the English-language literature, Stalker too focuses on North America and Europe. While the author does not shy away from showing his pro-immigration position and his sympathies for migrants, this is nevertheless an even-handed account of the current state of research on international migration. His at times bold statements provide useful guidance, such as when he counsels that highly complex migration theories such as the world systems theory may not always be the best tool to cut a clear path through the thicket of migration data and phenomena (p. 24-25). Numerous references, a short bibliography, a list of contacts and online resources, and an extensive index make this book into a useful reference work and an excellent introduction to a complex field of research and an important current issue.

Alexander Freund, University of Winnipeg

Vadim Kukushkin, From Peasants to Labourers: Ukrainian and Belarusan Immigration From the Russian Empire to Canada. Montreal et al.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-7735-3267-0

Our images of East European immigrants to Canada in the decades before the First World War are shaped by Clifford Sifton’s description of them as “stalwart peasants in sheepskin coats” settling the newly opened prairies, by the stories of Mennonites, Jews, and Doukhobors fleeing religious persecution, and by revolutionaries escaping the tsar’s police. These images, however, tell only part of history. The vast majority of Russian immigrants during the 1890s and early 1900s were not homesteaders or refugees. Most of the Russians who came to Canada between 1896 and 1914, Vadim Kukushkin argues in From Peasants to Labourers, were economic migrants. They were labourers who planned to temporarily work in Canada’s mining, logging, agricultural, or industrial sectors, and then return home to their families and communities. They were joining a large industrial labour system in the North Atlantic that stretched from the western regions of Siberia westward across Europe, the Atlantic Ocean, and North America to Canada’s Pacific coast. They were among three million immigrants that Canada received during this time period.

The industrial workers who migrated within this North Atlantic labour migration system came from Belarus and Ukraine west of the Dnieper river, but after decades of Russification, they often identified as Russian. This fluctuation of ethnic identity is one of the reasons that Canadian immigration historian have overlooked these migrants. Based on 2,800 personal files from the Russian imperial consulate in Canada, Kukushkin paints a picture of the migrants as young, married men trying to accumulate starting capital to build a life on the land in Russia. Overpopulation, landlessness, the beginning industrialization, a population boom were pushed the migrants away from their home. They were pulled by the images of “America” that had been created by immigration agents, advice literature, and pioneering migrants who sent letters home. The hurdles they had to overcome were significant. Anti-emigration legislation forced many to cross borders without documents. The immigrant labourers worked on Canada’s resource extraction frontier, in mining, lumbering, railway construction, and farming. During the winter months, they moved into industrial work in the urban centres, especially Montreal. Others worked in urban industry year-round.

Theirs was the familiar experience of sojourning, working in unskilled and dangerous jobs, living in cramped quarters in camps or ethnic neighbourhoods. Drinking, gambling, fighting, and sex dominated their spare time. Neither the Russian Orthodox Church nor various Protestant churches (especially Baptists) were successful at bringing the itinerant male workers into their fold. Socialist and social democratic organizations and parties were similarly unsuccessful. They maintained connections to family and homeland through letters and remittances. Sojourning also often meant that dreams of returning home remained unfulfilled. The First World War worsened the situation. While some returned to fight in the Russian army, others joined the Canadian forces or stayed to work in the arms industry. Many, Kukushkin points out, never saw their families again.

From Peasants to Labourers is a solidly researched and convincingly argued study that takes to heart Frank Thistlethwaite’s decades-old but still too often neglected call to look behind the salt-water curtain and study the homelands and origins of migrants as much as their experiences in North America. It is also informed by migration systems theory that goes beyond a listing of push and pull factors and takes into consideration migrant networks as well as local conditions. From Peasants to Labourers will work well in graduate seminars on migration history and will add to every immigration historian’s library.

Alexander Freund, University of Winnipeg

Adrian Myers
adrianmyers@stanford.edu
Stanford Archaeology Center

During this past July and August The Whitewater PoW Camp Archaeology Project team, which connects colleagues from Stanford University, Parks Canada, and Brandon University, undertook the final of three summers of archaeology field work in Riding Mountain National Park. The research project is using both historical and archaeological methods to illuminate daily life in this prison camp that held German soldiers in Manitoba during the Second World War.

With significant help from six Brandon University undergraduate archaeology students, and with funding from a Spletzer Family Foundation Research Grant in German-Canadian Studies, our team successfully completed this year’s goal of excavating twenty-five excavation units (of 1 square meter each) placed into 6 areas where the camp’s inhabitants dumped their trash (what archaeologists call “middens”).

The dig produced 60 boxes of artifacts, representing a wide range of behaviors and activities that occurred in the camp. The excavations revealed signs of the PoWs’ work logging in the park – such as broken saw blades and tools; signs of the institutional nature of the camp – found in the highly regular nature of the plain Hotel Ware ceramics and bulk size food tins; signs of recreation – demonstrated for example by alcohol and smoking paraphernalia, bits of carved antlers, and a broken ice skate; and perhaps even evidence of ideology and political affiliations – as represented in military uniform and clothing buttons and insignia, and military hardware.

One of the goals of the excavations into the trash middens is to test whether possible changes in political affiliation and ideology over time among the prisoners – perhaps related to political reeducation programs implemented by the Canadians – can be traced through the abandoned material culture. Three excavation units were placed immediately adjacent to the camp’s concrete garbage incinerator, and one intriguing trend in the excavated materials from this area is that among the burnt trash remains we recovered hundreds of buttons and other clothing hardware items, such as rivets, eyelets, clasps, and buckles – the majority of which are from German Wehrmacht field and dress uniforms.

The material evidence recovered clearly shows that the incinerator was being used to burn clothing, but the reason for this remains a mystery for now. One theory is that the camp used the incinerator to burn the clothing of sick PoWs, or to stem parasitic insect infestations. Another theory relates to this question of ideology; perhaps the PoWs burned their Nazi uniforms after changing political affiliation, or, at the end of the war prior to being sent back to Europe.

Having just recently completed the excavations, many questions remain unanswered. For the next year, Project Director Adrian Myers will be based at Simon Fraser University where he will undertake the analysis and cataloguing of the excavated artifacts, followed by archival research, oral history interviewing, and the writing of his PhD dissertation. Simultaneously, Professor Suyoko Tsukamoto and her students at Brandon University will be analyzing the butchered animal bones revealed by the excavations, which will tell us more about what the PoWs were eating in the camp.

Stay tuned for further results and developments as the project continues to uncover the lost history of German PoWs in Manitoba during the Second World War!

For pictures of excavations and artifacts and for regular updates, have a look at the project website at www.whitewaterpowcamp.com.

Rebecca Margolis, Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil: Yiddish Culture in Montreal, 1905-1945. Montreal et al.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-7735-3812-2

Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil is an engagingly written narrative of the history of Yiddish institutions in Montreal in the first half of the twentieth century, the heyday of Yiddish culture in Canada. For many decades, Yiddish served as the lingua franca of the Jewish diaspora, spoken by over eleven million people worldwide in 1939. Most speakers lived in Eastern Europe and many of them died in the Holocaust; the survivors dispersed across the globe and had to adopt Hebrew, English, or other languages of their new homes. Today, there are only some 350,000 Yiddish-speaking people worldwide. It is perhaps no wonder then that most people see Yiddish as a quaint language and culture. Thus, it is easy to forget that, as Rebecca Margolis argues, “for a period of several decades Yiddish culture thrived as a distinct expression of modern Jewish identity” (xiv). Although not as important as New York, Montreal served as one of the hubs in a “transnational ‘Yiddishland’” (xv).

Margolis begins her history in 1905, because after the failed Russian Revolution of that year, immigration of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews to Canada increased dramatically, swelling the Jewish working class of Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg and feeding the demand of the newly emerging garment industry for cheap labour. By 1931, a politically and culturally active, Yiddish-speaking population of over 150,000 shaped Canada’s urban centres. Although focusing on Montreal, each chapter positions the local story of Montreal in a larger transnational context, showing origins and links to Eastern Europe and other centres in North America.

The book concentrates on cultural community institutions – the main Yiddish newspaper, bookstores, libraries, journals, and books as well as schools and theatre – rather than philanthropic, social, or political organizations. These cultural institutions served two functions: “to acclimatize the local Eastern European immigrant community to its adopted home in Canada and to maintain and foster a distinctive cultural life” (39). This is an important point, because often these two functions are seen as mutually exclusive. Even nowadays, there is a general fear that immigrants resist integration if they continue to speak their mother tongue and maintain elements of their culture. But as much recent migration historiography has demonstrated, quite the opposite is true. Creating such cultural bonds provides relatively safe spaces for newcomers in often precarious situations, and it is from the relative safety of their neighbourhoods that they can venture into the host society’s other neighbourhoods and cultures.

These two functions are delineated in the successive chapters. The Adler, Montreal’s main Yiddish newspaper, was founded in 1907 and published as a daily from 1908 to the 1960s. Although it folded in the 1980s, for most of its existence it had turned a profit. The Adler was “the backbone of the city’s cultural Yiddish life” (39). It was the major vehicle for creating a “shared consciousness” (43). It achieved its success because it successfully met the needs and expectations of everyone in a diverse Jewish community, from workers via business people to intellectuals, from socialists to conservatives. The paper also raised funds for other institutions, reached out to readers across Canada, and rallied its readership in its fight against anti-Semitism. We learn a lot in this chapter about the publishers, editors, and writers and the content of the paper; unfortunately, we do not get a sense of how readers actually responded to and used the paper.

Other literary activities included the promotion of Yiddish literacy through bookstores, cultural organizations, and libraries, especially the Jewish Public Library that opened in 1914. Local poets and other writers were integral to building a strong literary community that could draw on the ever precarious local publications, literary journals, informal reading circles, mentorship systems, and a fledgling book publishing industry. In everyday life, the small group of Montreal Yiddish writers were united despite differences: “While shared backgrounds and socio-economic realities did not necessarily result in shared politics or ideologies of Jewish culture, the ideological schisms in the Canadian literary community were played out largely within the pages of local literary journals” (83). Consensus, community, and continuity reigned supreme. Although “most of Montreal’s literati were working-class immigrants,” they were backward-looking toward the Old Country and conservative in their writing. But they were also connected to the Yiddish world through the Public Library, which hosted guest speakers from Europe and North America.

A strong secular Jewish school system developed in Montreal on the eve of the First World War within and at the forefront of a larger transnational movement, and in response to the Christian denominational French-Catholic and English-Protestant school system in Quebec. Montreal’s secular Jewish schools thrived despite their clashes over nationalist and left-wing ideologies, and despite significant language attrition from the 1930s onward. Indeed, the emphasis on Yiddish language and culture played a significant role in producing a new generation of Yiddish writers. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, these schools constituted “one of the world’s very few networks of Jewish day schools outside of the Ultra-Orthodox world where Yiddish forms a compulsory component of the curriculum” (124).

The development of Yiddish theatre diverged from the development of other institutions. From the late 19th century to the Great Depression, most theatre productions were imported from New York. It was only after the Second World War that Montreal saw the beginnings of locally produced plays.

As Canada’s closed its doors to immigrants with the onset of the Great Depression in 1930 and implemented cold-hearted, anti-Semitic policies that barred refugees from Hitler Germany, and as younger generations preferred to speak English or French, the number of Yiddish-speakers in Canada declined significantly during the 1930s and 1940s. The decline of Yiddish culture accelerated in the second half of the twentieth century. And yet, Montreal continues to be a focal point of Yiddish culture in the world.

Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil is a story of harmony rather than conflict, community rather than individualism, and consensus rather than radicalism. One wonders at times whether the author fell victim to the powerful myth of a golden age. In much of this cultural conservatism, it is at times difficult to see the modernity of Jewish/Yiddish identity that Margolis posits at the beginning of her study. An analysis of gender and class relations and a sharper eye toward the pressures of anti-Semitism may have extracted further experiences of precariousness and conflict from the documents. Nevertheless, this is an engaging narrative that contributes greatly to the history of immigration and our knowledge of Canada’s ethnic groups.

Alexander Freund, University of Winnipeg

Teófilo Altamirano Rúa, Migration, Remittances, and Development in Times of Crisis. Lima: United Nations Population Fund, 2010. ISBN 978-612-45732-2-4

The book is available online: http://www.unfpa.org/public/home/publications/pid/6725

This book by Peruvian migration scholar Teófilo Altamirano Rúa is a global survey of internal and international migration and development in the early 21st century, particularly under the conditions of the global financial crisis of 2008. Although global in approach, Altamirano focuses on migrations within, away from, and into Latin American countries. Case studies emerge mostly from his fieldwork in Peru and the Peruvian diaspora. The major receiving regions he considers are North America and the European Union. At the centre of his study is the role of remittances in the human development of sending societies.

Remittances, the author argues, are the most important immediate result of international migrations. They are intricately linked: “There will be remittances as long as emigration exists” (30). Indeed, monetary remittances play a major role in the economies of those developing nations that see many of their people emigrate. “Globally, in underdeveloped countries,” Alamirano writes, “revenues from remittances are exceeded only by those from oil exports” (78). Remittances contribute greatly to the economies of several Central American and Caribbean countries: In 2006, they made up 36.9 per cent of the GDP of Haiti, 31 per cent of the GDP of Guyana, and 26.2 per cent of the GDP of Honduras; in El Salvador, they accounted for 18.1 per cent, and in Nicaragua for 17.7 per cent. In the larger South American economies, remittances, although numerically high, play a smaller role (ch. 1.7). In the Philippines, Mexico, Egypt, the Dominican Republic, Turkey, Morocco, Algeria and many other African countries “remittances total more than government social spending, private investment and international co-operation” (67).

Next to monetary remittances, there are also diverse non-monetary remittances in the form of material gifts to relatives and friends as well as “new virtual networks” created by science and technology professionals from around the world. Such networks, including, for example, Chinese Scientists and Academics Abroad, the Latin American Studies Association, and the Peruvian American Medical Society, constitute “knowledge remittances” or “cultural remittances” that cannot be measured or quantified but which nevertheless contribute to the sending and receiving societies’ economies and cultures and benefit their elites (70). Similarly, material gifts in some cultures may take on symbolic meanings that transcend their monetary value and contribute to people’s subjective well-being. Remittances are not the same all over the world, Altamirano explains, but rather shaped by diverse cultural and rural origins that inscribe different values and meanings in monetary and non-monetary remittances.

At the macro-economic level, remittances may have a smaller or greater impact on a country’s GDP. At the meso-level of the community and the micro-level of the individual household, remittances may have an even greater impact. Next to personal household remittances, the author describes collective remittances handled by various “Transnational Communities” – migrant groups’ organizations such as Mexicans’ Hometown Associations in Canada and the United States, that support the development of their hometowns in Mexico. Collective remittances, Altamirano argues, decrease poverty at the meso-level, because they create jobs for the poor and stimulate consumption. Although collective remittances can empower communities, they must nevertheless be supported by state intervention in order to be successful (86-87,142).

Within remittances lies a potential for human development that has not been sufficiently tapped. Remittances should be more effectively used for human development in emigration countries. They are also a healthier form of supporting human development: “Remittances can be sustainable, because they are generated not by the government, political parties or rich nations, but by the sacrifice of the migrants themselves” (78). The author describes a number of programs developed in sending societies that make remittances an integral part of their development policies. For example, in Peru, in a region where many families receive regular remittance payments, the Huancayo Municipal Savings Bank offers a line-of-credit for an investment in establishing a small business (102-107). The Mexican 3x1 program matches each dollar that Hometown Associations send in support of local development with three dollars from different government levels (107-114). The author discusses both the pros and cons of such programs, but generally agrees with the supporters; yet, he also emphasizes that “migration and remittances alone do not create human development” (150).

Alexander Freund, University of Winnipeg

Barbara Lorenzkowski, Sounds of Ethnicity: Listening to German North America, 1850-1914. Studies in Immigration and Culture 3. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-88755-716-3

In this finely crafted cultural history of ethnicity, historian Barbara Lorenzkowski explores the making of German-Canadian and German-American identities between 1850 and 1914. Using the local and regional press as well as other sources, she investigates how people in the transnational Great Lakes borderlands between Waterloo, Ontario and Buffalo, New York used German music and language as sites of ethnicity as an everyday practice. Unlike anthropologist Frederick Barth, Lorenzkowski does not set out to trace a pre-defined group’s establishment and maintenance of ethnic boundaries; rather, following Rogers Brubaker, she explores men’s and women’s actions as a transcultural praxis of “doing” or “enacting ethnicity” (6-7). Writings about language instruction and pedagogy (part one) as well as singers festivals (part two) help us understand a transcultural world of German sounds – both spoken and sung language. Taken together, the case studies trace the development of the culture and politics of language and music across six decades.

Reading through decades of the Berliner Journal, the main German-language paper in southern Ontario in the sixty years before the Great War, Lorenzkowski identifies the editors and journalists as “self-proclaimed guardians” of German language who, although bemoaning German-Canadians’ continual language “loss” and German-English mixing, unwittingly helped preserve some of this vernacular of the time (chapter 1). The journalists held the same convictions as some of the local businessmen, German teachers, and clergy. Lorenzkowski admits that her focus is on the middle-class and in particular on the (male) “ethnic gatekeepers” whose outlook was conservative and increasingly nationalistic. Sources other than those created by middle-class teachers and pedagogues, politicians, and journalists are rarely available. Yet, indirectly, these sources shed light on popular, working-class sounds of German ethnicity through the language guardians’ complaints about unrefined music and impure German language.

The ethnic guardians of German language were conservative in their aspirations but, especially when it came to language instruction (chapters 2 and 3), modern and progressive in their methods and rhetorical strategies. Motivated by the desire to retain German culture through German migrants’ ability to speak “pure” high German, they re-cast German as a modern language of culture and science that would benefit every Canadian and American, not only those of German heritage. They adopted progressive teaching methods that focused on the child and communicative language skills. In both countries, teachers and other language guardians bemoaned parents’ and children’s disinterest in the German language. They lamented the fact that while German was still spoken in private and public in Berlin and Buffalo, it had become a hybrid of German and English. One of the strengths of these chapters is that Lorenzkowski here paves a new path to studying ethnicity and language in terms of hybridity and cultural agency rather than language decline and loss.

Singing in nineteenth-century North America was not simply a form of entertainment. It was a multifaceted public performance of ethnicity, infused with the political aspirations of reformers and revolutionaries who had escaped into American exile after the failed German revolutions of 1848-49, and shaped by the expectations of diverse audiences. German men and women sang often and in many different contexts, be it at home, in church, or in public. Lorenzkowski focuses on the latter, and in its organized form of singing associations that formed all-male and mixed choirs. Music, more so than the spoken word, worked as a bridge rather than a border; singing could be enjoyed and practiced without knowing German. Thus, in Buffalo in 1860, thousands of North Americans – of German and many other backgrounds – gathered at a Singers’ Festival to hear dozens of formal and informal performances, culminating in a choir of 500 men singing German classics (chapter 4). Ten years later, singing, performing, and parading again were at centre stage as Berlin and Buffalo hosted peace jubilees to celebrate the end of the Franco-Prussian war and, at a time of increasing nationalism, Germany’s victory over France (chapter 5).

Male bourgeois German-American and German-Canadian gatekeepers fantasized that the new German unity would also lead to unity among German migrants. Here, Lorenzkowski carefully teases out the gendering and ethnicization of “German” “national” symbolism and rhetoric. While much more modest in the public display of their culture than their American “brethren,” German-Canadians in the Waterloo region boasted of their love to the Fatherland much more confidently than their cousins across the border, who felt compelled to clearly demonstrate their loyalty to American values and the American nation. The cross-border differences only increased as German-American society in Buffalo grew not only in size but also in class differences. From the 1880s to the outbreak of the First World War, singers’ festivals in Buffalo became an upper-middle and upper-class event that sought to discipline both people and culture, silencing audiences into the quiet and increasingly expensive appreciation of classical German music as high art (chapter 7). In Berlin, in contrast, the singers’ festivals continued to be the popular pastime of the lower middle and middle classes that enjoyed the lager beer and mirth at least as much as the popular folk tunes of their old home (chapter 6).

The abundance of male bourgeois sources, especially newspaper reports, allows for a rich depiction of male, urban, bourgeois ethnic culture – both imagined and lived – and throws spotlights on more marginalized groups’ experiences. It also demonstrates that we need to look for other sources if we want to better understand how women, workers, and rural folk “enacted ethnicity” in their everyday lives. Lorenzkowski must be applauded for writing a rich cultural history of German ethnicity in North America and developing a new and exciting path for future research.

Alexander Freund, University of Winnipeg

Marlene Epp, Mennonite Women in Canada: A History. Studies in Immigration and Culture 2. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-88755-706-4

This book tells the multifaceted history of Mennonite women in Canada by documenting their experiences as migrants, mothers, missionaries, citizens, and workers. Despite the long development of women’s history and feminist theory over the last half century, much of Mennonite history – like much of Canadian and other national histories – continues to be written from a presumably non-gendered but usually male perspective that subsumes women’s stories under men’s “universal” history. Thus, Marlene Epp, a historian at Conrad Grebel College in Waterloo, Ontario, who has published several historical studies on Mennonite women in Canada, treads carefully as she attempts to convince her presumably mostly conservative Mennonite readers that a feminist reading of Mennonite history is nothing to be feared.

As a social historian, Epp is interested in the interplay between prescribed and lived roles. She explores Mennonite women’s everyday interpretations of, submissions to, and rejections of predominantly male prescriptions of their roles in the household and family, church, work, and education through a great range of sources, including women’s diaries, fiction, cookbooks, oral histories, and denominational newsletters.

Using a great abundance of ego-documents, ranging from diaries and letters to memoirs and oral histories, Epp surveys the diversity of Mennonite women’s settlement experiences. Whether early nineteenth-century pioneers of late twentieth-century return migrants, Mennonite experiences were similar to those of other immigrants and refugees. At the same time, Mennonite women’s experiences were often significantly different from those of men, being, for example, fully excluded from the decision to migrate in the first place. Although migration became a site on which gender roles became destabilized, more often than not, rather than changed and challenged, they were reinforced and even rigidified. Here, a brief case study may have perhaps shed more light on how exactly gender relations were negotiated in times of insecurity.

Mennonite women’s lives were predominantly shaped by family reality and family ideology. Although Epp claims that “the centrality of family to Mennonite community life offered women a venue in which they had substantial influence,” and that “a woman’s family was thus a source of comfort, enjoyment, and sometimes empowerment,” (61) Epp provides mostly evidence to the contrary, viz that family “could also be limiting and constraining, and indeed a site of fear and danger” (61-62). Most Mennonite women married young and became mothers, often of a dozen or so children. Family size decreased – along with mortality rates and – during the 20th century but lagged behind the Canadian average. Epp details girls’ and women’s experiences from childhood via courtship and wedding to childbirth, the use of midwives, and birth control (or rather, lack thereof). Single women had an even more difficult life. Most common among single women were those who did not marry, whether by choice or not. They found somewhat secure niches in Mennonite society (or outside of it), living together in households of sisters, caring for parents or other kin, choosing careers, and being invited to take on administrative roles in church. But there were always two sides to the coin: “While single women themselves often flourished in their independence, career success, and non-marital relationships, lifelong singleness was historically viewed in mainly disparaging ways” (103). Infertile women and childless couples were often stigmatized. Single mothers and other women who had children outside of marriage were ostracized, humiliated, or even excommunicated (98).

Family relationships were shaped by biblical teachings about women’s duty to submit to and obey her husband. Some women believed that “true liberation is found in voluntary submission to divine authority” (115). Many others, however, “resigned themselves” to the hierarchical order and an unsatisfying marital relationship (114). Strong religious objections kept divorce rates among Mennonites low until the 1980s. At the same time, some Mennonites acknowledged that Mennonite beliefs were “contribute to domestic violence.” It was thus more difficult for Mennonite women and their children to escape “severe corporal punishment towards children, wife-battering, incest, and sexual abuse” (112).

Although church and religion profoundly shaped women’s lives, they were nearly completely shut out of church administration until late into the twentieth century. They could work as minister’s wives, but not as ministers; widows contributed to the church budget, but had no vote and had to learn about church decisions from their sons; with a large influx of Mennonite women after the Second World War, sex-ratios became skewed, leaving a large majority of church members (the women) ruled by a minority (the men). Only mission work allowed women to preach and prophesy, albeit “far from home” (145).

Mennonite beliefs and culture were characterized by the principles of nonresistance (pacifism) and nonconformity (living separate from the secular world). Men and women lived these principles in gendered ways. Epp states that nonconformity to the outside world required a high degree of in-group conformity, and this was based on a double-standard for men and women. Male church leaders sought to display Mennonite nonconformity through women’s dress. Women contested such practices at various points throughout the twentieth century, but through disapproving stares at church and other occasions, women also enforced the rules of women’s expected conduct. While nonresistance was highlighted by men’s refusal of military service, women could live out this central tenet of their religion through relief work, auxiliary services, and even military service as well as new paid employment opportunities at the Canadian home front. Both men and women had to decide how to relate to the political world: would they seek political office? Would they vote? Would they accept state support such as family allowances? Practices ranged widely.

In the arenas of homework and waged labour, Mennonite women largely followed Canadian trends. They were, like all women, caught between their community’s and society’s negative views of women’s, and especially mothers’, employment outside of the home, and financial pressures in times of migration, economic crisis, or personal dire straits. In both arenas, homework and waged labour, women found ways of expressing their creativity. They did so too through other art media such as painting, music, and writing.

Rather than a radical manifesto against Mennonite women’s oppression, Epp’s history is the careful yet effective documentation of Mennonite women’s resistance and submission to as well as creative engagement with complex and often subtle forms of silencing, marginalization, stunting and shunning, abuse and violence. Much of this oppression has been the result of the “Mennonite ethos” that values notions of subservience (being “the quiet in the land”), passive acceptance of pain (“Gelassenheit”, yielding to God’s will), serving others (“discipleship,” following Jesus’s example of bearing the cross), rejecting the material world, and the hegemony of the community (Gemeinschaft).

A clear and fine prose is one of the benefits of the author’s awareness that it is not only her academic peers but also the wider Mennonite community who will read this book. Unlike many other studies in Mennonite history, the book does not only speak to readers interested in Mennonite history. More broadly, this is a history of “religious” women that contributes greatly to the largely ignored social history of religious lives in Canada. A major strength of this survey is the depth of detail that is provided through hundreds of individual life stories, captured in oral history interviews, diaries, memoirs, and other ego-documents, mostly from the Kitchener-Waterloo-south Ontario and Winnipeg-south Manitoba regions. Mennonite Women in Canada will be the standard work on this topic for a while, serve as an important reference work for women’s and religious history, and may become a springboard for further research.

Alexander Freund, University of Winnipeg