Freedom; or, How a Family of Survivors Found Its Place in Jewish Montreal

We present here the second chapter from the memoirs-in-progress of the renowned scholar and author Ruth R. Wisse. Chapter 1 can be found here. Further installments will appear over the next months.

Ruth Wisse’s books include The Modern Jewish Canon, A Little Love in Big Manhattan, If I Am Not for Myself, No Joke, and Jews and Power. A Hebrew edition of Jews and Power is about to be released by Toby Press in Israel.

Escaping Europe in the summer of 1940 won for our family the gift of life, but the gift package came without instructions. My own template drew from the biblical story of the exodus—that is, the journey from slavery into freedom, but with a twist. After their flight from Egypt, the children of Israel are doomed to spend 40 years in the desert because it takes that long for the whining and backsliding rabble just to begin its transformation into a liberated people. Thanks to our parents, who were the farthest thing imaginable from those ancestral dawdlers and snivelers, it took us just four months to reach our destination, and we never looked back.