Word: yiddisher
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...Jewish refugee from Romania, Wisse attended an officially Protestant high school, going to the mandatory Christmas assemblies and saying the Lord's Prayer every morning. Yet the Montreal of her youth was also a Yiddish cultural mecca, after Jewish immigrants settled in Canada in the 1920s and again after World...
...maternal side of Wisse's family came from Vilnius, the present capital of Lithuania. In the city once known as the "Jerusalem of Lithuania" for its centuries-old leadership of Jewish intellectual and spiritual life, her grandmother ran a Yiddish publishing house. In Montreal, Wisse's mother sought to keep alive the family publishing tradition by organizing Yiddish literary salons, where major Yiddish writers and poets congregated...
...Since there were no Yiddish publishing houses in Montreal, everyone who attended would contribute $10, a large sum in those days, toward the purchase of the [visiting writer's] book so it could be privately published," Wisse recalls. "It was a wonderful house to grow up in, excellent preparation for a career in Yiddish studies, though at the time, the last thing I wanted, of course, was to study Yiddish literature...
...visit by the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever to her mother's salon changed Wisse's mind...
...asked me, `Why don't you teach Yiddish literature?' And I said, 'What would I do, teach Sholom Aleichem?''' recalls Wisse...