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WORK TITLE: Holocaust Survivors in Canada
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Vancouver
STATE: BC
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Canadian
https://www.linkedin.com/in/adara-goldberg-173b5332/ * http://msupress.org/books/book/?id=50-1D0-33D8#.WKZCDjsrJPY * https://uofmpress.ca/books/detail/holocaust-survivors-in-canada * http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/author/6233 * http://www.cjnews.com/culture/books-and-authors/book-examines-survivors-early-experiences-in-canada
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 82091660
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Goldberg, Adele
Birth date: 1945-07-07
Place of birth: Cleveland (Ohio)
Affiliation: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Profession or occupation:
Computer programmer
Found in: Her Smalltalk-80, 1983: CIP t.p. (Adele Goldberg) galley
(Xerox Palo Alto Research Center)
NUCMC data from Computer Hist. Museum for Her Papers,
1973-2010 (Adele Goldberg was born July 7, 1945, in
Cleveland, Ohio. She received a BA in mathematics from
the Univ. of Michigan in Ann Arbor and a master's in
information science from the University of Chicago. In
1969, Goldberg began studying for her PhD in information
science at Stanford Univ. as a visiting Univ. of Chicago
student; she then became a research associate at
Stanford while working on her dissertation. She earned
her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1973. After
receiving her PhD, Goldberg went to work at Xerox Palo
Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) as a laboratory and
research associate, and in 1979 she became the manager
of its System Concepts Laboratory. At Xerox PARC,
Goldberg was a co-creator of the highly influential
programming language Smalltalk-80, along with Alan Kay,
Dan Ingalls, and other designers. The first
object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk
introduced many of the characteristics seen in personal
computers today, including the graphical user interface,
overlapping windows, point-and-click menus, dragging and
dropping, and icons. Goldberg wrote much of the
documentation for Smalltalk-80, including the books
Smalltalk-80: The Language and Its Implementation
(1983), Smalltalk-80: the Interactive Programming
Environment (1984), and Smalltalk-80: The Language
(1989), co-written with David Robson and considered the
definitive books on the subject. From 1984 to 1986,
Goldberg was the president of the Association for
Computing Machinery (ACM). In 1988, she co-founded a
spin-off business from Xerox called ParcPlace Systems
that commercialized Smalltalk-80 and provided licensing
of and support for it. She left ParcPlace in 1995, and
in 1999 she co-founded the technological consulting firm
Neometron. She has also acted as CTO for various
companies, served on advisory boards, and designed
online college courses in math and science)
================================================================================
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PERSONAL
Born July 7, 1945, in Cleveland, Ohio.
EDUCATION:University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, B.A.(mathematics); University of Chicago, M.S. (information science); Clark University, Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Ph.D., 1973.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Stanford University, research associate; Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, laboratory and research associate, manager of the System Concepts Laboratory, 1979; Association for Computing Machinery, president, 1984-86; ParcPlace Systems, cofounder, 1988; Neometron, cofounder, 1999; Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, education director.
AWARDS:Hebrew University, Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2016-17; Western Jewish Canada Book Award, Marsid Foundation Prize, 2016, for Holocaust Survivors in Canada.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Born July 7, 1945, in Cleveland, Ohio, Adara Goldberg wrote Holocaust Survivors in Canada: Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation, 1947-1955 in 2015. She is the former education director at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and a 2016-17 recipient of an Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellowship at Hebrew University. For her research, she utilizes oral documentation sources, memoirs, diaries, and social service agency records, to create a comparative analysis of child and youth Holocaust survivor resettlement and integration in postwar Commonwealth countries: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. Her research studies the role and influence of countries and cultures of resettlement on child and youth survivors’ postwar lives.
Goldberg earned a Ph.D. from the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University. She was a research associate at Stanford University. With degrees in mathematics and information science, she has had a long career in computers and information technology. She worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center as a laboratory and research associate and as manager of its System Concepts Laboratory. She also cocreated the programming language Smalltalk-80 and cofounded several technology companies.
Goldberg’s Holocaust Survivors in Canada tells the story of 35,000 Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution and their dependents who migrated to Canada between 1933 and 1955. The unprecedented scale of the relief effort on Canada’s part, along with the unique social, psychological, and emotional needs of the survivors, challenged the established Jewish community and resettlement agents alike. Revised from Goldberg’s doctoral thesis, the book traces the immigration, resettlement, and integration experience from the perspective of Holocaust survivors as well as the Canadians who processed and assisted them.
For her research, Goldberg drew on one hundred oral histories, archival materials, library collections, newspapers and magazines, case records from social service agencies, immigration files, and the oral histories of survivors and Jewish communal leaders from the period. The survivors were a diverse group, including refugees, orphans, sponsored immigrants, and transmigrants. She describes the challenges of these groups adapting to a new country, interactions with social workers, Jewish social service organizations, local Jewish communities, and emotional struggles responding to and recovering from genocide, all of this compounded by disparities in experience, language, culture, and worldview. Goldberg’s research also shows how this unprecedented demand for refugee resettlement services was difficult for the survivors and Jews who were already established in Canada. She also shares anecdotes and little-known facts about Holocaust survivors in Canada, such as rabbinic survivors who created the ultraorthodox community in Montreal and Jews who converted to Christianity.
The book is “meticulously researched and documented,” according to Nelson Wiseman in Canadian Ethnic Studies Journal. Wiseman added that the book “is in turns, informative, engaging, and also touching in drawing on the words of survivors themselves. Goldberg extends her attention beyond immigration and settlement to adaptation and adjustment. This book will interest practitioners in a variety of disciplines and fields.” Writing online at the Canadian Jewish News Web site, Jodie Shupac commented: “In their personal interviews with [Goldberg], many survivors shared their reasons for choosing Canada as a site of new beginnings, the ways average Canadians responded to them upon their arrival and their efforts to build new lives despite, Goldberg said, ‘all odds being against them.’” Writing in Choice, J.D. Sarna observed that unlike the monolithic group portrayed by American Holocaust survivors, for Canadian survivors, Goldberg “carefully attends to gender and devotes separate chapters to adults, war orphans, child survivors, Hasidim, atheists, and converts,” and in later years, to transmigrants from Israel and other lands. Sarna added that Goldberg’s research is comprehensive and straightforward.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Canadian Ethnic Studies Journal, Volume 48, number 2, 2016, Nelson Wiseman, review of Holocaust Survivors in Canada: Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation, 1947-1955, p. 179.
Choice, April, 2016, J.D. Sarna, review of Holocaust Survivors in Canada, p. 1222.
ONLINE
Canadian Jewish News, http://www.cjnews.com/ (November 3, 2015), Jodie Shupac, review of Holocaust Survivors in Canada.*
Adara Goldberg received her PhD from the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in 2012. She is the former education director at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and a 2016–17 recipient of an Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellowship at Hebrew University.
Awards
WINNER, Holocaust—the Marsid Foundation Prize, Western Canada Jewish Book Awards (2016)
Holocaust Survivors in Canada
Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation, 1947-1955
Adara Goldberg (Author)
In the decade after the Second World War, 35,000 Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution and their dependants arrived in Canada. This was a watershed moment in Canadian Jewish history. The unprecedented scale of the relief effort required for the survivors, compounded by their unique social, psychological, and emotional needs challenged both the established Jewish community and resettlement agents alike.
Adara Goldberg’s Holocaust Survivors in Canada highlights the immigration, resettlement, and integration experience from the perspective of Holocaust survivors and those charged with helping them. The book explores the relationships between the survivors, Jewish social service organizations, and local Jewish communities; it considers how those relationships—strained by disparities in experience, language, culture, and worldview—both facilitated and impeded the ability of survivors to adapt to a new country.
Researched in basement archives and as well as at Holocaust survivors’ kitchen tables, Holocaust Survivors in Canada represents the first comprehensive analysis of the resettlement, integration, and acculturation experience of survivors in early postwar Canada. Goldberg reveals the challenges in responding to, and recovering from, genocide—not through the lens of lawmakers, but from the perspective of “new Canadians” themselves.
Adara Goldberg received her PhD from the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University. She is the education director at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.
Dr. Goldberg completed her PhD studies in the History Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. She is currently pursuing her postdoctoral research at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University. Utilizing oral documentation sources as well as memoirs, diaries, and social service agency records, her research will create a comparative analysis of child and youth Holocaust survivor resettlement and integration in postwar Commonwealth countries: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the Union of South Africa. Through a cross-cultural and multi-national lens, her research will widen awareness of the role and influence of countries and cultures of resettlement on child and youth survivors’ postwar lives. Adara’s book, Holocaust Survivors in Canada: Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation, 1947-1955 (University of Manitoba Press, 2015) won The Marsid Foundation Prize at the 2016 Western Jewish Canada Book Award.
Main content starts below.
Adara Goldberg
Adara Goldberg
Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellow at Avraham Harman Center of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University
Vancouver, Canada Area
Higher Education
Current
Avraham Harman Center of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University, Freelance
Previous
Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University, Holocaust Centre of Toronto
Education
Clark University
Recommendations 6 people have recommended Adara
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connections
Summary
Specialties: Curriculum development
Instruction
Lecturing
Research
Oral History
Community outreach
Geriatrics
Experience
Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellow
Avraham Harman Center of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University
2016 – Present (1 year)
Researcher and Higher Education Professional
Freelance
August 2010 – Present (6 years 8 months)
An early project included curriculum development for a federally-funded project on the MS St. Louis Ship in relationship to Canada's pre- and post-Second World War immigration policy. More recently, I have conducted research for several private organizational and family projects, peer-reviewed manuscripts for two university presses, and contributed an introduction to a Holocaust survivors' memoir. I have also coordinated book launches, community events, and leadership programming.
In spring 2016 I published an invited entry on Canada and the Holocaust to The Canadian Encyclopedia (Historica Canada). I am currently engaged as an editor on a Holocaust survivor memoir project, serving as a research associate on a letters project through Clark University, and consultant on the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre's forthcoming virtual exhibit, Building New Lives.
I am looking for new projects through 2017. Please contact me with any questions.
Education Director
Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre
2012 – October 2015 (3 years)Vancouver, Canada Area
As Education Director at the VHEC, I managed all aspects of the organization's educational mandate. My responsibilities in this role included:
• Research and curatorial roles on several VHEC exhibits. Engaged in envisioning, planning and developing exhibits and educational initiatives, both travelling and virtual. The most recent project was a significant initiative to develop web-based testimony vignettes and teaching resources using the VHEC’s rich collections.
• The development, oversight, and promotion of school programs, including exhibit-based materials and companion teaching resources, docent training and program evaluations for five school programs.
• I helped organize, promote, and run adult education programming to coincide with various exhibits, cultural initiatives and commemorative events, including those offered in collaboration with other education groups and non-profits, faith groups, post-secondary institutions, and consulates. I also managed and cultivated relationships with advisory committees, and supervised interns and Young Canada Works students.
• The organization and delivery of the Annual Symposium on the Holocaust (now in its 40th year) and satellite symposium. 25,000 students and educators were served yearly at symposia, outreach events, and school programs.
• Development and oversight of two Biennial Shafran Teachers’ Conference and other professional development opportunities for BC educators and volunteers.
• Participation in educational outreach engagements through presentations and resource development for students, educators and university instructors; delivered talks on behalf of the VHEC at local and international conferences and workshops.
• Contributed and commissioned articles to the VHEC’s newsletter, Zachor.
• Participated in a strategic planning process, managed program budgets, and contributed to grant applications.
PhD, Holocaust History
Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University
August 2006 – May 2012 (5 years 10 months)
My dissertation, “We Were Called Greenies:” Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Canada, explores the resettlement, integration and acculturation experiences of Holocaust survivors from their perspective as well as those who sought to help them. It also examines the development of relationships between survivors, Jewish social service agencies, and the Jewish lay community.
During my academic tenure, I served as a Teaching Assistant for four lower- and upper-level undergraduate courses (2007-2009), and worked as a Program Coordinator for the First International Graduate Students’ Conference on Holocaust and Genocide Studies (2009).
Intern and Docent
Holocaust Centre of Toronto
September 2005 – May 2006 (9 months)
Organizations
Association for Jewish Studies
Canadian Historical Society
Association for Canadian Jewish Studies
Phi Alpha Theta
Skills
Community OutreachHistoryResearchPublic SpeakingEditingCurriculum DevelopmentProgram EvaluationSocial ServicesQualitative ResearchLecturingGrant WritingProposal WritingPeer TutoringNonprofitsHigher EducationSee 13+
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Publications
Holocaust Survivors in Canada: Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation, 1947-1955 (Winner of the Western Canada Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category)
University of Manitoba Press
September 2015
In the decade after the Second World War, 35,000 Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution and their dependants arrived in Canada. This was a watershed moment in Canadian Jewish history. The unprecedented scale of the relief effort required for the survivors, compounded by their unique social, psychological, and emotional needs challenged both the established Jewish community and resettlement agents alike.
Adara Goldberg’s Holocaust Survivors in Canada highlights the immigration, resettlement, and integration experience from the perspective of Holocaust survivors and those charged with helping them. The book explores the relationships between the survivors, Jewish social service organizations, and local Jewish communities; it considers how those relationships—strained by disparities in experience, language, culture, and worldview—both facilitated and impeded the ability of survivors to adapt to a new country.
Researched in basement archives and as well as at Holocaust survivors’ kitchen tables, Holocaust Survivors in Canada represents the first comprehensive analysis of the resettlement, integration, and acculturation experience of survivors in early postwar Canada. Goldberg reveals the challenges in responding to, and recovering from, genocide—not through the lens of lawmakers, but from the perspective of “new Canadians” themselves.
Authors:
Adara Goldberg
[Introduction] Ellen Foster and Kitty Salsberg, Never Far Apart
The Azrieli Foundation Survivor Memoirs Project
October 2015
Authors:
Adara Goldberg
“We Were Called Greenies:" Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Canada
Daniel Maoz and Andrea Gondos, eds., From Antiquity to the Post-Modern World: Contemporary Jewish Studies in Canada. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
2011
Authors:
Adara Goldberg
Report on the First International Graduate Students’ Conference on Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University
2009
Authors:
Adara Goldberg, Alexis Herr
[Encylopedia Entry] Canada and the Holocaust
Historica Canada - The Canadian Encylopedia
May 2016
Authors:
Adara Goldberg
Education
Clark University
Clark University
PhD, Holocaust, Genocide Studies
2006 – 2012
York University
York University
BSW, Social Work, Humanities
2002 – 2006
Activities and Societies: Mark and Gail Appel Program - Learning from the Past, Teaching for the Future (TFTF)
Honors & Awards
Western Canada Jewish Book Award, Holocaust category for Holocaust Survivors in Canada
Western Canada Jewish Book Award
June 2016
My book, Holocaust Survivors in Canada: Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation 1947-1955 received a Western Canada Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category.
Volunteer Experience & Causes
Co-Chair and Committee Member
Axis - Tikkun Olam Vancouver Committee
January 2015 – Present (2 years 3 months)Civil Rights and Social Action
Volunteer
Pi Theatre
April 2014 – Present (3 years)Arts and Culture
Mentor
Vancouver School Board's Making Contact Mentorship Program
October 2012 – May 2014 (1 year 8 months)Education
Committee Member
Vancouver School Board’s Multiculturalism and Anti-Racism Advisory Committee
January 2013 – April 2015 (2 years 4 months)Education
Causes Adara cares about:
Civil Rights and Social Action
Human Rights
Social Services
Recommendations
A preview of what LinkedIn members have to say about Adara:
I met Adara at a Holocaust and Genocide conference at Clark University in 2009. Our research interests overlapped, and I was immediately impressed at her passion for her project, the precision with which she undertook her research, and her ability to present her findings in an engaging manner. She is one of the most devoted scholars of the Holocaust that I have come across during my graduate education.
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I met Adara when she was conducting research for her dissertation at the OJA. She was extremely organized and meticulous with her work. She applied for the Stephen Speisman bursary soon after it's creation and was the first winner of this prestigious award. The committe was extremely impressed with her thesis and felt that it would make a great contribution to the fields of Holocaust Studies and Canadian history. I'm certain that she will be successful at anything she decides to pursue after she graduates.
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Adara Goldberg. Holocaust Survivors in Canada: Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation, 1947-1955
Nelson Wiseman
48.2 (Summer 2016): p179.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Canadian Ethnic Studies Association
http://www.confmanager.com/main.cfm?cid=128&nid=1805
Adara Goldberg. Holocaust Survivors in Canada: Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation, 1947-1955. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2015. 300 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. $24.95 sc.
Adara Goldberg, the Education Director at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, tells the story of Canada's settlement of 35,000 Jews (disclosure: I am the son of two of them) in the decade following the Holocaust. The product of a Ph.D. dissertation at Clark University, Goldberg's book is structured thematically and chronologically. Meticulously researched and documented, it draws on over 100 oral histories, newspapers and magazines, many archival and library collections, as well as secondary sources.
Canada's Jewish social agencies were overwhelmed and poorly equipped to handle the post-war newcomers, many of whom were traumatized and in need of psychological and emotional support, but the survivors adapted and integrated successfully into the established Jewish communities and Canadian society more broadly. However, the survivors were not cut from a single cloth nor was there uniformity in their settlement experiences; they included refugees, orphans, sponsored immigrants, and transmigrants. The latter, like me, came primarily from Israel in the early 1950s.
Survivors settling in western Canada found a warmer reception among the smaller Jewish communities than those who settled in Montreal and Toronto, the largest Jewish centres. The diversity of the activities of survivors matched the diversity of their backgrounds. Some contributed to rejuvenating Yiddish education, literature, and culture, some were religiously ultra-orthodox, others practised a more liberal form of Judaism, and still others forsook their ethno-religious origins, turning away from God. Some even converted to Christianity.
Before, during, and immediately after the war, Canada was the most ungenerous Western state in admitting Jews fleeing the Nazi extermination machine, as Irving Abella and Harold Troper's None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1948 has documented. Many Canadians, some of whom harboured virulent anti-Semitic feelings, looked down upon the Jewish survivors. Goldberg digs into Mackenzie King's diary for this telling entry: "we must nevertheless seek to keep this part of the Continent free from unrest and from too great an intermixture of foreign strains of blood," he wrote in 1938. "I fear we would have riots if we agreed to a policy that admitted numbers of Jews." Goldberg reminds us as well of Alberta Social Credit premier William Aberhart's propagation of the idea of an international Jewish financial conspiracy and of the anti-Jewish prejudice of Quebec's Roman Catholic clergy during the pre-war period. One of the book's two dozen illustrations is a photograph of a 1940 sign for an Ontario lodge stipulating "Gentiles Only."
Although Goldberg's focus is on the late 1940s and early 1950s, she also offers some details about Jews who came before and after that period. The few Jews who managed to enter the country in the late 1930s often arrived under false pretenses, like the two Jewish Czechs who posed as Roman Catholic farmers headed to Saskatchewan. In Toronto during the war, these two newcomers organized a liberal Habonim congregation, whose ideological roots are socialist and Zionist, for refugees and survivors. Goldberg estimates that of the 39,000 Hungarians who arrived in the aftermath of Hungary's Revolution in the latter half of the 1950s, a disproportionate 7,000 to 8,000 were Jews, many of whom were Holocaust survivors.
The survivors were commonly known as "greeners," signifying their lack of knowledge and sophistication. In counterpoint, my parents and their peers described the established Jews as "gaeller" (yellowed), that is, more experienced and more economically and culturally secure as Canadians. Neighbourhoods such as The Main in Montreal, Winnipeg's North End, and the Spadina/College district of Toronto served as venues for the formation of survivor "clubs" whose members shared the trials they had endured and the new challenges they faced in Canada.
In her last chapter, "Mothers and Misters: Parenting, Work, and Gender," Goldberg mines the reports of Montreal social workers affiliated with Jewish social agencies to shine light on the challenges faced by young female survivors who, in the absence of their mothers, had a minimal understanding of child-rearing practices and in a context of few affordable child care facilities. Procreation rates in the displaced persons camps of post-war Europe had been among the highest in the world, a manifestation to Goldberg of the triumph of Jewish endurance over the genocidal oppression of the Nazis. Goldberg also retells in this chapter how Dachau death camp survivor and Canadian abortion rights trail-blazer Henry Morgentaler gained sponsorship to the country. The Yiddish poems, stories, and essays of his wife, Chava Rosenfarb, had caught the eye of a Montreal Yiddish publisher. He introduced her work to a North American audience so that when the couple arrived at Montreal's Windsor Station, dozens of writers and poets assembled to greet her.
Holocaust Survivors in Canada is in turns, informative, engaging, and also touching in drawing on the words of survivors themselves. Goldberg extends her attention beyond immigration and settlement to adaptation and adjustment. This book will interest practitioners in a variety of disciplines and fields including sociology, history, anthropology, literature, social work, religious, gender, and Jewish studies.
Nelson Wiseman
Department of Political Science, University of Toronto
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wiseman, Nelson. "Adara Goldberg. Holocaust Survivors in Canada: Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation, 1947-1955." Canadian Ethnic Studies Journal, vol. 48, no. 2, 2016, p. 179+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471474247&it=r&asid=e49bf2fc75aad17a8b7deab47028de1a. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A471474247
Goldberg, Adara. Holocaust survivors in Canada: exclusion, inclusion, transformation, 1947-1955
J.D. Sarna
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1222.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Goldberg, Adara. Holocaust survivors in Canada: exclusion, inclusion, transformation, 1947-1955. University of Manitoba, 2015. 300p bibl index (Studies in immigration and culture, 14) ISBN 9780887557767 pbk, $24.95; ISBN 9780887554940 ebook, contact publisher for price
(cc) 53-3650
FC106
Can. CIP
Goldberg's model study, revised from a PhD at Clark University, chronicles in illuminating detail the experiences of some 40,000 Jews, most of them Holocaust survivors, who migrated to Canada between 1933 and 1955. Her book fills a vacuum between None Is Too Many (CH, Jan'84) by Irving Abella and Harold Troper, which examines Canadian immigration policy, and Delayed Impact (CH, Apr'01, 38-4639) by Frank Bialystok, which shows how survivors shaped Holocaust memory. Goldberg (education director, Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre) focuses on the immigrants themselves: their challenges, interactions with social workers, and efforts to find work and build families. In contrast to students of Holocaust survivors in the US, who generally portray them as a monolithic group, the author carefully attends to gender and devotes separate chapters to adults, war orphans, child survivors, Hasidim, atheists, and converts, as well as those who arrived later as transmigrants from Israel and other lands. The chapter entitled "Keeping the Faith" is particularly fresh and significant. While Goldberg overlooks Yiddish sources and pays little attention to the Yiddish community so ably described by David Roskies in A Bridge of Longing (CH, Nov'95, 33-1357) as well by as other writers, her research is otherwise comprehensive and her writing straightforward and readable. A valuable contribution to Holocaust studies. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.--J. D. Sarna, Brandeis University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sarna, J.D. "Goldberg, Adara. Holocaust survivors in Canada: exclusion, inclusion, transformation, 1947-1955." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1222. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661781&it=r&asid=8b76c6a64a2d49fb1d8c632cdc801e9a. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661781
Book examines survivors’ early experiences in Canada
By Jodie Shupac, Online Editor -
November 3, 2015
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'Holocaust Survivors in Canada: Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation, 1947-1955'
'Holocaust Survivors in Canada: Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation, 1947-1955'
While there is no shortage of writing on Holocaust survivors in Canada, Adara Goldberg’s Holocaust Survivors in Canada: Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation, 1947-1955, published this fall by University of Manitoba Press, explores a specific period that Goldberg says scholarship on the subject has tended to skip over.
Holocaust Survivors is based on research that Goldberg, a native Torontonian and currently the education director at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, conducted for her PhD dissertation at Clark University’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
It examines the first-hand immigration, resettlement and integration experiences of the roughly 35,000 survivors who came to Canada in the decade after World War II.
Though books like Irving Abella and Harold Troper’s None Is Too Many famously address Canada’s immigration policy toward Jewish refugees during and after the Holocaust, Goldberg’s book is unique insofar as it highlights, in her words, “the ordinary and day-to-day struggles of survivor integration, not from a legal perspective, but from the perspectives of the individuals themselves.”
Adara Goldberg
Adara Goldberg
Further, Goldberg said the time in question is often overlooked, because “people have been so obsessed with hearing gruesome wartime stories and then looking at the lives that were ultimately built [after the trauma], but the period in between can seem mundane.”
She noted, however, that it’s an important period that “tells us how human beings cope with trauma and rebuild. It also tells us a lot about Canadian society at that time.”
Using archival materials such as case records from social service agencies and immigration files, as well as the oral histories of survivors and Jewish communal leaders from the period, Goldberg has created a window into the foundational experiences of Holocaust survivors in Canada, most of whom came from eastern Europe.
Having conducted some 125 interviews with survivors, their descendants, congregational leaders, scholars and former social service workers, she was able to illustrate the ways survivors navigated Canadian society and rebuilt their lives after immense trauma.
In their personal interviews with her, many survivors shared their reasons for choosing Canada as a site of new beginnings, the ways average Canadians responded to them upon their arrival and their efforts to build new lives despite, Goldberg said, “all odds being against them.”
While it’s known, she said, that the general Canadian public wasn’t particularly well disposed to Jewish refugees at the time, she sought to look at how the survivors were treated by local Jewish communities when they first arrived. The book’s focus ultimately became what Goldberg referred to as a “trifecta” of survivors, the Canadian Jewish community already in Canada, and the Jewish social service agencies that were charged with caring for the new Jewish arrivals.
Goldberg said her research revealed how much this unprecedented demand for refugee resettlement services was difficult for both the survivors and Jews who were already established in Canada.
While survivors’ integration experiences and initial encounters with local Jewish communities were generally a “mixed bag,” she said, most survivor accounts relate that the Canadian Jews’ reception of them was fairly ambivalent or cold.
This wasn’t because the Canadian Jews were “cruel or ill-intentioned” stressed Goldberg, whose own grandparents were all born in Canada, her great-grandparents having come from eastern Europe, but was reflective of the moment in history. “People didn’t know about post-traumatic stress disorder then, and the Holocaust, as much as Canadian Jews knew about it, was probably impossible to comprehend,” she said.
Goldberg emphasized that she makes no judgment about Jews who were already living in Canada. “These early interactions were so strained by language, culture, worldview, different experiences. It takes a long time for any group to overcome these things,” she said.