'Westmount’s Sinai': Projecting a Jewish Landscape onto Montreal through Fiction

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
'Westmount’s Sinai': Projecting a Jewish Landscape onto Montreal through Fiction
Abstract
The author notes that for Canadian Jewish authors, every peak and every valley, every lake and every island, every forest and every plain, is a potential locus for mythic energy. In this brief article, he offers a glimpse into the implicit means by which Jewish authors project a specifically Jewish landscape onto their surroundings. Through a study of Chava Rosenfarb’s (1923-2011) short story "Edgia’s Revenge" (1994) and Leonard Cohen’s (1934-2016) novel The Favourite Game (1963), he explores both authors’ uses of Mount Royal and the Laurentian Mountains as sacred spaces in the tradition of earlier Jewish stories involving mountains and wilderness. The author concludes that these similarities are especially poignant when we consider Cohen and Rosenfarb’s very different experiences of being Jewish in the world—one a wealthy uptown Jew from Montreal and the other a Montreal immigrant survivor of the Holocaust.
Publication
Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes
Volume
Vol. 31
Pages
148-158
Date
Spring 2021
Language
en
URL
Citation
Toufexis, Jesse. “‘Westmount’s Sinai’: Projecting a Jewish Landscape onto Montreal through Fiction.” Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes Vol. 31 (Spring 2021): 148–158. https://cjs.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/cjs/article/view/40216/36396.
Find in a library
Permalink