TRANSMISSIONS OF NON-MATERIAL FAMILIAL JEWISH LEGACY LESLEY SIMPSON A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN HUMANITIES YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO JANUARY 2020 © LESLEY SIMPSON, 2020 ii Abstract This study explores acts of non-material familial Jewish legacy, beginning with the Jewish ethical will of Yiddish comic writer Solomon Rabinowitz in 1916, and closing with a collaboration of wordless music with legend in the contemporary moment in Canada. This research provides a modality of Jewish familial legacy that highlights individual voice to illuminate how individual memory moves as an active force, a dynamic Aleida Assmann describes in her essay, “Canon and Archive” as “active remembering” (Collective Memory Reader 334-337). This individual voice functions as a strategic disruption that has an impact on what is remembered, what is transmitted, as well as what is excluded and forgotten. In positioning the concept of transmission as its primary organizing principle, the dissertation examines four modes of transmission : the democratized machinery of oral performance embedded within Rabinowitz’s ethical will, the impact of an accidental transmission upon Canadian novelist Alison Pick, a counter transmission by Canadian teacher Henia Reinhartz linked with a postwar counter memorial movement and, in conclusion, an embodied transmission through wordless melody. Looking at individual strategic acts of non-material legacy as components of Jewish cultural memory, the project redefines what memorialization and modes of transmission can explore, upend and suggest. In its totality, this dissertation argues against a passive model of storage by examining these strategic creators and the reception of their works. In so doing, the project illuminates the field of individual acts of cultural memory. Reception reveals the intriguing and unpredictable afterlives of the transmissions. In moving voices from the periphery into the centre, this project explores the creative possibilities of historical remembrance as a form of moral witnessing, and reveals a spectrum of acts of resistance against erasure. iii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my husband Mark Guttman who cheered me on with his calm loveliness, astute vision, and generous heart, as well as my son Ira Halpern, who has been with me, in too many ways to enumerate, from the beginning. Lesley Simpson iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The education I have received enriched my life beyond measure. So, too, have the people I have met along this route. I was fortunate Marty Lockshin admitted me into the program. Adele Reinhartz assisted with my admission strategy. And when Sara Horowitz agreed to supervise me and Julia Creet and Ruby Newman joined my committee, I hit the home run. Sara Horowitz has been an anchor, support and guide. She created opportunities for me throughout the process. If a PhD could be compared to a marathon, Sara Horowitz functioned as that competent coach who was positioned at the next water station, advising about the route ahead. So many people helped along the way. Markus Reisenleitner assisted with practicalities of navigating the university. Scott McLaren, the humanities librarian at York University opened his office at the library. Yedida Eisenstat gave me a crash course in midrash and was so generous suggestions and resources from the moment I met her. Librarians at York University as well as the Azrieli Foundation’s Arielle Berger were generous with time, material and support. Brian Katz was beyond generous with resources, e-mails and long conversations about music. The Reinhartz and Walfish family went above and beyond. I want to thank Mordecai Walfish in particular for too many things to count here. Yael Seliger functioned as my unofficial committee, mentor, coffee pal, reading buddy as well as a library disguised as a human. My son Ira and I had many conversations about this project. I will be forever grateful for his intellect, company and questions. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract............................................................................................................................................ii Dedication ..................................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………….....iv Table of Contents.............................................................................................................................v List of Figures .............................................................................................................................. vii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter One: The Democratized Transmission………………………………………………….13 Chapter Two: The Accidental Transmission…………………………………………………….78 Chapter Three: The Counter Transmission …………………………………………………....121 Chapter Four: The Melodic Transmission……………………………………………………...181 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………220-222 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………….224-251 Appendices………………………………………………………………………………...154-155 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 Ritual of Protection by Shoshana Walfish (2011)………………………………...…..154 Figure 2 Ritual of Protection Revisited by Shoshana Walfish (2016)……………………..….. 155 1 This project began as an examination of Jewish ethical wills and paradigms of Jewish familial memory. I am defining an ethical will as an act of non-material legacy that has at its core an ethical concern, principle or transmission. Unlike a legal will, an ethical will does not concern itself with material assets, but is preoccupied with non-material legacy. The ethical will is not legally binding; it can be cherished or ignored, celebrated or forgotten. As I was investigating contemporary Jewish ethical wills, I became increasingly intrigued by issues of transmission, reception and interpretation. I want to explain the background of this dissertation briefly and how it evolved into its present form. In my original proposal in 2016, I had planned to create a national repository of Jewish ethical wills, and focus on material by Canadian Jewish women. There has not been any English research yet about Canadian Jewish ethical wills, and how they constitute a window into the inner lives of Canadian Jews, as a repository of modern experience. I imagined I would discover voices that had been unknown, silenced, or marginalized. Prior research includes Ruth Panofsky’s At Odds in the World: Essays on Canadian Jewish Women Writers (2008), as well as a Julie Spergel’s PhD dissertation Canada’s ‘Second History’ The Fiction of Jewish Canadian Women Writers (2009). I observed thematic overlap in representations of displacement, discrimination, and marginalization. Canadian Jewish women had been described as existing in a double ghetto, one from lack of full participation in Jewish community structures because of patriarchy, coupled with challenges of anti-Semitism. They were discriminated against twice, for gender as well as ethnicity. In Narrativity and Uniqueness in Canadian Jewish Women’s Holocaust Memoir, a PhD dissertation by Stephen McCullough (2006), the author examines Holocaust memoirs of eight 2 Canadian Jewish women. He argues from a feminist position to grapple with and understand Holocaust testimony and its implications for readers. He discovers that the writers do not make extensive explicit reference to their lives as Canadians. He argues that they wrote memoirs primarily to provide testimony about wartime injustices and that it is likely that their immigration challenges after the war pale by comparison. Like McCullough, I have found that the writers here do not foreground Canada as a place, except that it provides the site from which writers (and a musician) remember, recollect and interpret experience. Nor do they foreground any sense of what it means to be a Canadian. It is the site from which they are able to construct the transmission. McCullough also notes the spectrum of opinion about Canada ranges from writers who are grateful to the country, to others who find the level of anti-Semitism coupled with the robust Holocaust denial in the 1980s “disturbingly familiar” experiences that make this new world “insufficiently different” (407). In Between Gods, Alison Pick’s paternal grandparents flee Prague in 1939 by bribing a Nazi officer, and settle in Kitchener, Ontario. When they join the United Church, their conversion is driven not out of a belief in Christian doctrine, but as a price they would pay to be free from terror. The historical record illuminates the power of the terror in Canada. Michael Brown notes that Canada admitted fewer Jews per capita in the Nazi era than any other Western country (61), and that it was easier for a Ukrainian veteran of the Waffen SS to immigrate than a Jewish veteran of the death camps. Brown cites Harold Troper’s Old Wounds: Jews, Ukrainians and the Hunt for Nazi War Criminals (1988) . In this dissertation, Canadian places are included—Brian Katz dreams a melody in Elora, Ontario, Alison Pick recalls going to church with her father in Kitchener, Ontario and attends a conversion course in Toronto, Henia Reinhartz finds work in Montreal and then in Toronto at Tip Top Tailors, but 3 these sites function as chronological placeholders to tell another story. The issue of Canadianness is almost absent. I note the observation of Hannah Wirth Nesher who, in relation