Thursday, August 08, 2019
A WINDOW INTO HASIDIC LIFE
In places across North America and beyond, where there are insular Orthodox communities, there are frictions between those Orthodox communities and their neighbours. Some of these frictions seem to be the same the world over: there are bylaw battles over eruvim and over the erection and duration of sukkot. There are disputes about educational provision. There are concerns about gender segregation.
In Quebec, these tensions are both emblematic of the larger picture of Hasidic life in a secular society and also, as the only place in North America that has banned religious symbols on public employees, unique. And one of the things that makes Quebec's tensions so unique is that they have led to the rise of the Hasidic woman's voice in dialogue with her neighbours in an act of bridge building.
This act is not insignificant. If the Hasidic characters in francophone non-Jewish Quebecois writer Myriam Beaudoin's 2006 novel Hadassa are curious about what a non-Jewish person in Quebec does, thinks and knows, the same sentiment could be said to exist tenfold in reverse, both within and outside of the book. Beaudoin's French-language book purports to be about "un monde à part, enveloppé de mystère et d'interdits, mais séduisant et rassurant" (a world apart, shrouded in mystery and taboos, but seductive and reassuring). It was nominated in 2007 for the Prix des libraires du Québec and won, the same year, both the Prix littéraire des collégiens and the Prix littéraire France-Québec. In 2011, another non-Jewish francophone writer in Quebec named Abla Farhoud also took on the subject of local Hasidim with her book titled Le sourire de la petite juive (The Smile of the Little Jewess). And in 2014, non-Jewish Quebecois filmmaker Maxime Giroux directed Félix et Meira, a film about a married Hasidic mother and a single Quebecois man, star-crossed lovers of Montreal's Mile End, which won "best Canadian film" at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival and was submitted in 2015 to the Academy Awards as Canada's foreign-language contender.
By virtue of their chosen subject, these books and film appear to follow in the success of the short story collection Lekhaim!: Chroniques de la vie hassidique à Montréal (later published in English as Rather Laugh Than Cry), which was written by a Hasidic woman in Quebec in 2006. Yet in many ways, Beaudoin, Farhoud and Giroux's tales more closely resemble the narratives of secular Jewish writers like Eve Harris and Julia Dahl that render Hasidic life exotic – and somewhat tragic. Beaudoin's story includes a romance between a gentile and a Hasidic woman, Farhoud's highlights the growing internal struggle of a Hasidic girl who feels confined by her religious identity and Giroux mixes the two scandalizing ingredients to produce his stirring drama. The author of Lekhaim!, on the other hand, writes her stories about and within the Hasidic community. The stories of the Hasidim she presents are the stuff of everyday, made interesting not through sensationalism but through humour and pathos.
Despite the quotidian subject matter, the book was met with much success in francophone Quebec. The writer, whose real name is known to many residents in Outremont, the Montreal borough in which she resides, calls herself "Malka Zipora" for her book, though she refers to herself throughout, more significantly, only as "a Hasidic mom," making herself a representative of her community. In writing her stories for a general audience, Zipora "gingerly" draws "aside the shades to the window in (her) home," to provide "glimpses of many universal emotions and stories," which are essential to the Hasidic residents' communication and coexistence with their neighbours. The language suggests hesitation and also a sense of modesty. Still, if Hasidic communities are known for their insularity and difference, Zipora is undermining both by drawing aside her metaphorical shades.
But she is also doing something else surprising, which she does not name. She is giving voice to a group that has often been spoken for (in the media and literature, by non-Jewish Quebecois and secular Jews), but has rarely spoken: Hasidic women. This speaking is a speaking back, for when they are spoken for, Hasidic women are doubly rendered silent through the erasure of their own voices and the voices that represent them.
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