From Immigration To Integration
The Canadian Jewish Experience:
A Millennium Edition
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From Immigration To IntegrationThe Canadian Jewish Experience:
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Gerald Tulchinsky
Canadian Jewish history is a subject in its own right, not a branch or pale reflection of the Jewish experience in the United States. Its contours were shaped by Canadian conditions, and did not necessarily reflect occurrences and trends that took place first among mainstream Americans and, years later, were experienced by their northern cousins. The Americanization of the Jews-their gradual or rapid adaptation to and acceptance in the mainstream of American culture, and the development of what might be called the American Jewish symbiosis-was not necessarily mirrored in Canada. The Canadian Jew who becomes chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada (Bora Laskin), or governor of the Bank of Canada (Louis Rasminsky), or a member of a federal Cabinet (Herb Gray), or a highly decorated officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force (Sydney Shulemson), or a leading literary figure (Mordecai Richler), is not simply the northern equivalent of an American Jew like Justice Brandeis, Henry Morgenthau, Bernard Baruch, Admiral Rickover, or Philip Roth.
To be sure, there are many significant - almost overpowering - resemblances between the American and Canadian Jewish historical experiences, and, in certain respects, the communities are so similar as to be almost indistinguishable. Without doubt, the more numerous and more highly developed American Jewish communities exercised strong and continuing influences on Canadian Jewry. After all, in both cases most of their people came from eastern Europe in sudden and vast immigration waves before 1914. And, of course, the cultural baggage they brought with them was identical in both countries: deeply pious, rigid Orthodoxy in many and a complex mix of philosophies such as Marxism, socialism, anarchism, Zionism, bundism, and other ideals among many of the young who had been exposed to the intellectual transformations outside their own narrow world. The historical development of both the American and Canadian Jewish communities was also highly similar, particularly in such things as post-1900 settlement patterns, cultural life (including the use of Yiddish in newspapers, theatres, and schools), and the economic struggle, especially in the clothing industry. These and other similarities, interchanges, and influences must be acknowledged.
What should not be conceded, however, is that all of the major forces that shaped the Jewish experience in Canada were the same as, or even similar to, those in the United States. Jonathan Sarna suggested, in a brief 1981 paper in the Canadian Jewish Historical Society Journal, where some important differences might lie.1 Notwithstanding the many strong similarities, Canadian Jewry experienced a significantly different evolution as a result of the national context in which it was situated. It is not enough to say that Canada was a different country. After all, Canada’s proximity to the American giant, and the similarity of peoples and outlook, inevitably resulted in very strong American influences affecting all aspects of Canadian life, including the evolution of the Jewish community. It is important to understand that at the same time there were different co-ordinates to the Canadian constitutional structure, political life, national composition, urban patterns, and economic development that all directly affected the evolution of Jewish life in Canada. Some of the most significant factors influencing the Jewish community in this country had no counterparts in the United States. Consequently, if Canadian and American Jewry have now in certain respects become indistinguishable from one another, they reached this commonality by different routes.
The duality of Canada’s national personality posed particularly acute problems for that very large part of Canadian Jewry - until recently it was nearly half - living in the province of Quebec. There the confessional school system established at Confederation put the Jewish community at a serious disadvantage, because there was no specific legal provision for Jewish children in either the Catholic or the Protestant system of schooling. Whether these children had a right to go to school was a testy legal and political question that was resolved in stages over nearly thirty years of struggle, between 1903 and 1930. 2 It was a battle for fundamental civil rights that were being denied them by the Protestant school commissioners of Montreal and the Quebec provincial government. Minor victories in the courts and in the legislative assembly after 1903 were the result of a galvanization of the Jewish community on a massive scale, which led to the emergence of a collective consciousness noteworthy for its major spokesmen, newspaper development, intense intracommunal debate, and greatly heightened awareness of the Jewish place in the legal, political, and social context of the province of Quebec. 3 Nothing like this kind of Jewish civil-rights fight occurred in the United States, because nowhere in the republic did the same kind of co-ordinates exist to bar the Jewish advance to social equality.
This crucial contest, with its ramifications through all sectors of life in a community that included almost half of the Jews in the Dominion, was only one feature of Canadian Jewish history that grew out of Canada’s duality. In fact, Quebec’s rapidly expanding Jewish community ran directly afoul of French-Canadian nationalism at its beginnings in the early 1800s, and during its efflorescence in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. In this era such nationalism, with its blend of what the French-Canadian historian Michel Brunet calls agriculturalism, anti-statism, and messianism, where, Denis Monière asserts, the Church regarded “the opposition forces… as the fiends of hell,” combined a militant ultramontane - a renewed adherence to Rome and the Pope - Catholic faith with the national rebirth of an agricultural, French-speaking republic on the St. Lawrence.4 Amongst those who believed in this visionary frame of reference, the Jew was a standing affront, a force fostering morals that threatened French Canada’s survival.5 Among other things, the Jew was the infidel, the Christ-killer whose continuing rejection of Christianity constituted an insult to the faith, and whose rapidly increasing presence in Montreal was seen as a dire threat to the purity of the French-Canadian ideal. He was also viewed by certain segments of French-Canadian society as the arch-traitor, the perfidious betrayer of France’s honour, as was proven in their eyes by the conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in 1894 for treason.6 The Jew came to be regarded as an economic threat as well, both as an unscrupulous exploiter in the clothing industry in which Jewish contractors worked the piecing-out system using Jewish and French-Canadian sweated labour in home or attic shops where eighty-hour weeks were not uncommon, and as a competitor in the market for unskilled and semiskilled jobs.7 The Jew was also perceived as the political and social radical and trade-unionist activist, the purveyor of insidious socialist and anarchist ideas that some French-Canadian clerical and lay readers saw as infectious and corrosive poisons in the pure springs of their people’s religious and social life.8 Thus, paradoxically, in the clothing industry the Jew was seen at one and the same time as exploiter and radical. In all, then, the Jew was included among those who constituted a threat to the destiny of the Québécois to survive and thrive as a distinctive Catholic and French agrarian polity in Quebec.
That the Jews attracted such animosity, which welled up repeatedly in some newspapers, pamphlets, and church sermons, should not surprise us. Jews were the largest minority in the province, outside the old-stock English-speaking groups, who - though separated by class and religious issues - nevertheless maintained a certain transcendent coherence and unity, and were headed by a tight, tough, wealthy, and influential elite. Montreal’s Jewish quarter, which by about 1900 stretched north from the docks along St. Lawrence Street to Dorchester, had mushroomed in size with the pre-1914 infusions of immigrants.9 By 1920 virtually the entire city section from the waterfront north, in a belt of a few blocks wide on either side of St. Lawrence-Main to the lower reaches of Outremont, constituted a huge, predominantly Jewish enclave of factories, shops, synagogues, and tightly packed housing. Although it was not the only sector of Montreal in which Jews lived, the fact that this "Jewish quarter" was at the geographical centre of the city and divided the French from the English sections of Montreal was also symbolic of the precarious marginality of the Jewish presence to both communities. Insofar as the anglophones were concerned, the Jews were not particularly welcome, as indicated by the treatment that Jewish pupils and teachers received from the Protestant board of school commissioners after 1900.10 The francophones, because of their closer physical proximity, far greater numbers, and political prowess, were able to manifest their antisemitism both on the street and in the political arena. However, the antisemitism of Montreal’s Anglo-Protestants, who made Jews unwelcome in their schools and severely restricted their entry into McGill University, was much more damaging to Jews. French and Anglo-Canadian antisemitism was a very serious business, and it had a long-lasting effect on the political and social well-being of the large Jewish population of Quebec.
Although these incidents - with the exception of the Plamondon case of 1910, in which Jews were publicly accused of practising abominations allegedly stemming from the Talmud - were in themselves relatively harmless, they did underscore the fact that antisemitism in Quebec seemed to possess a special force, a greater depth and virulence, than anywhere else in North America. After 1920 this antisemitism welled up time and again, not only to remind Jews of their inferior position in the eyes of some French-Canadian nationalist and ultramontane clerics, but also to reduce their presence in sectors where they had achieved some prominence.
Of course, antisemitism was not unique to Canada. The phenomenon is deeply rooted in Western Christian culture, and stems largely from religious sources. Antisemitism has found frequent expression in America in various forms reflecting these religious origins since colonial times. The same could be said of English Canada, where such sentiments also received widespread expression, most notably from the pen of Toronto’s leading late-nineteenth-century intellectual, Goldwin Smith. Still, it appears that antisemitism outside Quebec was not nearly as strong as the anti-Oriental feelings on the Canadian west coast, or the anti-Slavic attitudes on the Prairies.11 The special character, dimensions, and persistence of the French-Canadian variety from the 1920s onwards helped to shape the community consciousness of about half of Canada’s Jews-and, indirectly, through national organizations dominated by Montreal, of a significant portion of the remainder. If the Canadian Jewish community has been much more effectively governed in national organizations than American Jewry, this is largely attributable to the fact that Canadian Jewry has felt more threatened. A leading reason for the reactivation of the Canadian Jewish Congress after 1933 was the need to counter the increasingly virulent antisemitism in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada. Congress sought an alliance with B’nai Brith on this issue and thus the Joint Public Relations Committee was established in 1939 with a mandate to combat domestic antisemitism.
Governance through national organizations like the Congress, which was originally established in 1919, was also facilitated by another peculiar feature of Canadian Jewry: its overwhelming concentration in a few metropolitan centres after the 1880s. In contrast to the Jews in the United States, where by the 1840s significant Jewish communities existed in all major cities up and down the eastern seaboard, in the mid-West, and on the Gulf coast, Canada’s Jews before 1900 overwhelmingly chose Montreal and Toronto. Later, Winnipeg became a third centre. The Trois-Rivières community declined, the one in Quebec City withered, that of Victoria stagnated and dwindled, and the Maritime centres had barely begun in the nineteenth century.12 In the United States, even before the Civil War, there were about two hundred congregations in existence across the country, some of them in major Southern cities.13 In the 1870s, Cincinnati emerged as a leading centre of Jewish religious life, and Philadelphia as a major educational and cultural hub, while Chicago attracted a huge Jewish population after the 1880s. All of these communities were independent of New York, a city one-quarter Jewish by 1914 and the residence of about half of all America’s Jews. In Canada there were no counterparts to Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, or the other Jewish centres, which so diffused power and influence in American Jewry that national organizations have always been relatively weak. With a high concentration of Canadian Jews in two or three cities, and about half of them in one pre-eminent metropolis, countervailing influences did not develop here on anything like the scale that they did in the United States. Hence, Jewish national organizations were apparently able to establish themselves more effectively than their American counterparts.
After 1898, for example, the Federation of Canadian Zionist Societies was greatly envied by the Americans because of its impressive national structure, active branches, and tight organization, controlled from Montreal by the patrician Clarence de Sola.14 After its re-establishment in 1933, the Canadian Jewish Congress, which was also based in Montreal, attempted to serve as a forum for all shades of political, religious, and cultural expression. As a spokesman for Canadian Jewry on major issues, it was far more effective than the American Jewish Congress, which suffered from the rivalry of a number of competing national organizations.15 This is not to say that the Canadian Jewish community was more politically or intellectually homogeneous than the American, or always unified, or that, notwithstanding Montreal’s obvious importance, there were not competing regional and other interests. The leadership of Toronto’s Jewish community came to resent strongly the control of national organizations by the Montreal patricians, while in Winnipeg and elsewhere on the Prairies an independent spirit emerged early and persisted for many years.16 Yet virtually all elements agreed on the need for strong national organizations. B’nai Brith and Hadassah-WIZO, for example, operated independently of Congress, contributing to the development of Canada’s Jewish community through the national scope of their activities.
Certain factors help to explain this broad commonality of purpose. The most important one is the comparatively strong religious homogeneity of Canadian Jewry. This is another major point of difference between the two North American communities, and it constitutes an essential ingredient in any understanding of the contours of Canadian Jewish history. American Jewry was shaped and, until at least 1900, was dominated by the German immigrants who arrived in the United States during the 1840s and 1850s.17 The cultural baggage of some German Jews included fragments of the Enlightenment philosophy of Moses Mendelssohn and some of the influences of the new scientific study of Jewish culture, Wissenschaft des Judentums.18 From this early nineteenth-century German-Jewish Reform movement a new synagogue, theology, and liturgy had emerged, in which virtually all elements of Jewish particularism were expunged and Jewish universalism was celebrated; thus many Jews were transformed into Germans of the Mosaic persuasion. Jewish religious beliefs were reinterpreted and reformulated root and branch by the rabbis of the new Judaism. In their transposition to America, these Germans erected their Reform synagogues, established Cincinnati as their centre, and virtually dominated American Jewish religious life, so that by 1880, one authority claims, most of the 270 synagogues in the United States were Reform.19 Furthermore, they now became Americans of the Mosaic persuasion. Acquiring wealth, influence, power, and social prestige, the Loebs, Kuhns, Gimbels, Guggenheims, and others of "Our Crowd" began a process of merging into the American mainstream, while still others made significant contributions to American progressivism.20
North of the 49th parallel, the Jewish community developed in a much different way. Canada did not receive significant numbers of German Jewish immigrants with Reform impulses to overwhelm the existing institutions and thus escaped being heavily influenced by the Reform movement and its accompanying philosophy of emancipation. Not that Canadian Jews, small in numbers and concentrated in very few centres, refrained from trying to adjust economically, politically, and in every other way. But most of them had not been exposed to either the German-Jewish Reform synthesis or to the Enlightenment-influenced Orthodoxy of Samson Raphael Hirsch. Indeed, the most influential element culturally in Montreal until the 1880s was the "Spanish and Portuguese," while in Toronto, British and Lithuanians outnumbered all other elements.21 These dominant groups in Toronto and Montreal were essentially conservative and Orthodox in religious practice. Stephen Speisman, historian of Toronto Jewry, points out that until the early twentieth century “the division between the traditional and liberal wings of the [Holy Blossom] congregation appear to have been minor.... There were no major departures from orthodoxy while the congregation remained [without its own premises].” 22 And while certain Reform influences began to affect the main group in Toronto in the 1880s, the Montrealers remained adamantly, almost pugnaciously, Orthodox. Reverend Abraham de Sola and his son Meldola, who held the pulpit of the Shearith Israel synagogue in succession for about seventy years, acted as stout defenders of the old faith in Montreal, and successfully kept the tiny Reform group out of the mainstream of religious life in the community,23 notwithstanding the community outreach and involvement of Harry Joshua Stern of Temple Emanu-el.
The absence of a German migration to Canada large enough to overwhelm or replace the traditional communities is thus highly significant. For while American Jewry was greatly influenced by the Reform philosophy, Canada was affected to a much lesser degree, and in Montreal a certain counter-reformation spirit prevailed. Most of Canadian Jewry remained predominantly tied to the old faith, even though some assimilation was already under way. This outlook may also have reflected the comparatively conservative ethos of nineteenth-century Canada, where traditional values prevailed of Crown, established churches, and certain quasi-aristocratic trappings related to the British connection. Canadian Jews like the influential de Sola family saw themselves as defenders of the British tradition as well as of Jewish Orthodoxy. Although this outlook never had the philosophical respectability of the ideal German or American Jewish symbiosis, it did establish a certain British tone or shading for the community. In Canada, especially in Quebec, Jews knew that they were different and would remain so, equal in law perhaps but distinct, whereas in the United States there was a belief - especially among the second generation - in a large degree of integration into a culture which, because it was by definition republican, democratic, and libertarian, would allow the Jewish admixture.24
With Orthodoxy (even if it was only nominal) and tradition still firmly in place and centred in a very much smaller, more concentrated group of communities, by the 1880s and 1890s Canadian Jewry faced the wave of immigrants who continued to arrive until World War I. During the 1920s many of these dissimilarities between the two North American communities began to diminish. But not entirely: in both Canada and the United States the eastern European Jews, whether traditional or radical, came increasingly into communal prominence. They thronged into the clothing factories and concentrated themselves in urban ghettos, and in Canada a small but symbolically important group moved out to settle on the Prairies. Yet previously developed national differences in the two Jewries nevertheless continued to influence the ways in which certain institutions and organizations evolved, while the timing of national economic development somewhat affected the subsequent demographic distribution of Jews.25 Thus differences, some subtle and some blatant, continued. For example, Zionism has been, from the 1890s until the present, a continuous and dominant part of the Canadian Jewish identity. This is not to say that a majority of Canadian Jews have been openly Zionist, but significant segments of the old patrician and nouveaux riches elites have been so.26 American Jewry, or at least its leadership and moneyed elite, on the other hand, either held back from Zionism or actively opposed it.27 For many American Jews - especially those who shared the ideal of symbiosis, the goal implanted by the mid-nineteenth-century German immigrants - Zionism was a threat, because it raised the problem of dual loyalty. The nagging question of how one could become a Zionist - that is, one who believed in the return of Jews to the ancient homeland - while still being a loyal American dedicated to the achievement of cultural integration in the United States, could not be easily answered. Even after Louis D. Brandeis, the famous justice of the US Supreme Court, developed a partially satisfying answer to this dilemma, most of the old German community - now America’s Jewish elite - continued in a steadily militant anti-Zionist stance.28 And it is interesting to note that the Reform synagogue - the quintessential expression of the German-American Jewish quest for symbiosis - was a major vehicle for opposition to Zionism, although there were a few significant Reform leaders who actively espoused it. At the Cincinnati seminary, rabbinical students were taught by outspoken opponents of the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine; consequently this message was heard from many American Reform pulpits.29 When one American rabbi, Maurice Eisendrath, tried to bring this anti-Zionism into his Toronto Reform congregation in the late 1920s, the community was outraged and a sizeable secession from the synagogue took place, although the unrepentant rabbi continued his attack.30 He only ceased his opposition in the late 1930s, as did most of the rest of Reform Jewry, for one principal, terrible reason: the Holocaust.
The explanation of the more favourable attitude towards Zionism among Canadians brings us to another point: Jews in Canada did not understand that there were any tests of Canadian nationalism they had to meet. In Montreal, insofar as both French and English were concerned, Jews were pariahs, and barely tolerated. But the predominant strain of pre-1914 Canadian-nationalist thought, that of the imperial federationists, though expressing a narrowly British view of history, national character, and Canada’s mission, also indirectly implied an integration into British imperialism, a toleration, an openness, a liberality towards racial and cultural diversity, and a grudging acceptance in this polity in which freedom is said to wear a crown.31 From the standpoint of James S. Woodsworth’s Social Gospel outlook, Jews - like Ukrainians and Chinese - were communities that could be absorbed.32 It may be that the origins of the idea of the Canadian mosaic lie somewhere in these attitudes, and in the fact that there appears to have been no public ethos in English Canada that necessarily overrode all other loyalties. In any event, Canada was without the intellectual influences of the German Jews, who might have been inclined to think their way into a Canadian Jewish loyalty conundrum.
In these circumstances of no competing nationalism and no opposing Reform ideology, the Zionist movement in Canada thrived. Under the leadership of Clarence de Sola, a member of the Spanish-Portuguese "aristocracy" of Montreal Jewry who headed the Canadian Zionist Federation from 1898 to 1919, the movement grew. It spread quickly through the metropolitan centres, into small communities across the country and even into the few scattered farming colonies on the Prairies.33 So successful was this organization that de Sola proudly held it up as a model for Zionists in other countries to follow - especially for the Americans, who were grappling with a multitude of problems, the most serious being an intellectual justification of the movement’s first principles. No such problems bothered de Sola. His followers included many of the Russian, Polish, and Romanian Jews who were pouring into the country in the early 1900s, outnumbering all previous Jewish immigration. After 1901, when the nation’s Jewish population stood at well over 16,000, an average of 6,000 Jews arrived every year. By 1911, the Jewish population had reached almost 75,000, an increase of almost 370 per cent in just one decade.34 In 1913-14 alone, over 18,000 Jews reached Canada.35 Even during World War I, an annual average of 4,000 Jews arrived. The resurgence of Jewish immigration in the 1920s brought additional, though smaller, waves from the Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania. To most of these eastern European Jews, modern political Zionism came as one major vehicle of redemption from a hateful and oppressive czarist regime that was also, semi-officially, antisemitic. Consequently, they arrived in Canada with no predispositions towards symbiosis. Perhaps Zionism thrived also because some Canadian Jewish leaders like Clarence de Sola and Rabbi Ashinsky, of Montreal’s Shaar Hashomayim synagogue, saw the movement as a potentially integral part of British imperialism.36 De Sola waxed eloquent on this theory and later claimed to have broached the idea of a British pro-Zionist declaration with London officials several months before the famous Balfour Declaration of November 1917.
The Canadian Zionist Federation became a kind of national Jewish congress because of its countrywide support - though, even among both religious and secular Russian immigrants, this was not unanimous. It was followed by the Canadian Jewish Congress, a fundamentally Zionist organization, after World War I. Zionism thus went deeper into the Canadian Jewish context than into the American one, because of the conjuncture of separate and distinctive cultural, demographic, and political factors, and because of the unique constitutional and racial structure of Canada. Perhaps Canadian Jews, in reaction to French-Canadian antisemitism and nationalism, may even have absorbed some nationalistic influences from the French Canadians in Montreal. In any event, Zionism’s greater strength and support from Canadian Jewry was noted by the world leaders of the movement, and was expressed by higher per capita financial contributions and emigration to Palestine both before and after the proclamation of the State of Israel in 1948.
A further determining factor in Canadian Jewish history is that Canada continued to receive substantial Jewish immigration through the 1920s, while the tide to the US, though numerically larger, was, relatively, far less significant.37 The typical immigrants of 1923-24, when a major influx of 5,000 Jews arrived from Romania, were probably somewhat different from their counterparts of 1914. They had experienced first-hand the European turmoil of 1914-18, the massive upheaval of the Russian Revolution, the ensuing devastating civil war, and the terrible Ukrainian pogroms. Recent eastern European history and the modernization of Russia before 1914, as well as the resonances of the Old World (through the arrival of nearly 50,000 Jewish immigrants during the 1920s), probably had a deeper, more pervasive, and more lasting effect on the Canadian community, because of its relative size, than on the American one.38 Moreover, this immigration of the 1920s included a small number of young intellectuals, and likely had a strong enriching influence on Jewish cultural life in Canada.
Thus the contours of Canadian Jewish history were determined by a set of co-ordinates that were unique to the northern half of this continent, and that resulted in the evolution of a community with a personality different from that of American Jewry. Canada had a different history, polity, and culture, and different immigration, economic, and urban-growth patterns. Not surprisingly, there evolved here a community that was more traditional, more superficially unified, and more culturally homogeneous than that of our US cousins. While American Jewry yearned for integration into the mainstream of the great republic, Canadians strove to express their Jewishness in a country that had no coherent self-definition - except perhaps the solitudes of duality, isolation, northernness, and borrowed glory. In the United States, Irving Berlin wrote "God Bless America"; in Canada the quintessential Jewish literary figure, who is probably this country’s greatest twentieth-century poet - Abraham Moses Klein - wrote poems of anguish expressing longing for redemption of the Jewish soul lost in a sea of modernity. “Go catch the echoes of the ticks of time/ Spy the interstices between its sands,” he tells us in "Of Remembrance."39 And while he was able, in his collection of poems The Rocking Chair, to capture the culture of French Canada better than any anglophone has done in recent times, he reiterated throughout his career his Jewish frame of reference. Towards the end his thoughts returned to “the ghetto streets where a Jewboy dreamed pavement into pleasant Bible-land”:
It is a fabled city that I seek;
It stands in Space’s vapours and Time’s haze;
Thence comes my sadness in remembered joy
Constrictive of the throat;
Thence do I hear, as heard by a Jewboy,
The Hebrew violins,
Delighting in the sobbed Oriental note.40
We have seen some of the features that make Canadian Jewish history a separate study. To be sure, they are not entirely distinct from the American Jewish experience, as a reading of Henry Feingold’s superb survey, Zion in America, demonstrates.41 Many similarities exist, and as Canadian history is in certain respects both different from and similar to American history, the historical experience of at least one ethnic group in this country is a reflection of that reality. Can one perhaps generalize from this Jewish history to the history of other ethnic groups in Canada? It is not easy to answer this question. But if the Jewish experience is in any way representative, the peculiarities of this country’s history, culture, and pace of evolution must be considered in understanding the development of other communities as well.42
Comparisons between the collective experience of Jews and that of other ethnic groups in Canada must, of course, be cautious and tentative. Two such groups whose migrations overlapped with the Jews, Italians and Ukrainians, had cultural baggage and patterns of accommodation that were in many ways different. Unlike Jews, both Italians and Ukrainians were overwhelmingly of rural background, in many cases young, landless, peasant itinerant workers. While the United Sates had no more free land after 1890, Canada enjoyed a boundless, unpopulated, rural frontier and a large percentage of Ukrainians settled as pioneer farmers on the western prairies, where they quickly emerged in block settlements as a significant presence in its rural landscape.43 In the United States, Ukrainian immigrants did not have the same Great Plains experience and did not develop a strong collective identity. In rural western Canada, however, in the words of historical geographer Lubomyrk Luciuk: “Ukrainians...came to think of themselves as a group, bound together by religious, cultural, socio-economic, and political ties.” 44 The same process of communal self-identification affected Ukrainians in central Canadian industrial cities like Montreal, Toronto, and Hamilton, and in mining towns in northern Ontario and Quebec. In recent decades, scholars note, the self-identification and ethnic distinctiveness tended to wane amongst the second- and third-generation Canadian-born.45
While Ukrainians tended to be oriented towards permanent settlement, Italians before World War I, on the other hand, were mostly sojourners who hoped to work and save a sufficient stake to set up on a farm or in business in their home village. They were mainly young, single men who gravitated to occupations like construction jobs on Canada’s developing railways which, though often seasonal, paid them cash wages they could remit home.46 Seeking such labouring jobs, they usually avoided long-term and complicated occupational commitments like farming and, while they often worked out of remote bush camps, they were essentially urban dwellers. As sojourners they were occupants of boarding houses, not householders. Growing numbers of these Italian migrants stayed on, married, and formed communal associations and organized churches. Bolstered by the Italian influx into Canada between the wars, as historian John Zucchi describes, they developed an increasingly strong sense of communal identity and pride, a Canadian Italianata, in other words, that emerged in cities like Toronto.47
In the cities, both Italian and Ukrainian Canadians encountered other ethnic groups, including Jews. Here, geographical, political, and economic linkages brought them together - examples being the Communist Party for Jews and Ukrainians, and the clothing industry for Jews, Italians, and Ukrainians. At the same time, the distinctiveness of separate cultures has kept them, in large measure, discretely apart.
In this essay, therefore, we explore not just an important chapter in ethnic history, but also some facets of the only partially explored dimensions of Canada’s past and present personality. Further research on these themes will help us understand the role of ethnic minorities in helping to shape our unique Canadian mosaic.