Various Positions Read Free

dramatic and heavyset, with a flair for cooking. Masha’s personality initially clashed with the quiet formality of the Cohens. Her English was poor and she always spoke in a deep voice with a Russian accent; some Cohens thought thatNathan had married beneath him. She had trained as a nurse and her caring manner, essential for her physically ailing husband, soon made her acceptable to the larger family. Her zestful behavior, however, unsettled some of the more demure aunts and uncles.
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    THE ARRIVAL of Lazarus Cohen to rural Ontario in 1869 followed the arc of nineteenth-century Jewish immigration to Canada. He established himself in Maberly and after two years sent for his family who were still living in what was then Lithuania. By 1883, he had moved to Montreal, where his son had been going for religious training and where Jewish settlement was expanding. Lazarus was from a devout and scholarly family, a rabbi who reinvented himself as a businessman in the new world. His younger brother Hirsch was also a rabbi and later became the Chief Rabbi of Canada, celebrated for his powerful, rumbling, resonant voice, perhaps the source of Cohen’s own unique sound. Lazarus proved to have a talent for business and in 1895, after he had moved to Montreal, became president of W.R. Cuthbert & Company, brass founders who, between 1896 and 1906, formed the first Jewish dredging firm in Canada. They had a fleet of dredges and a government contract to deepen almost every tributary of the St. Lawrence River between Lake Ontario and Quebec.
    Lazarus was intensely involved in the Jewish community and in 1893 visited Palestine on behalf of a Jewish settlement group, the first direct contact by Canadian Jews with their homeland. He also became chairman of the Jewish Colonisation Committee of the Baron de Hirsch Institute, which had been organized to settle Jewish immigrants in Western Canada. In 1896 he became president of Shaar Hashomayim Congregation, a post he held until 1902. He wore a flowing white beard, favored cultured English to Yiddish, and spoke with a slight Scottish brogue, since he had first settled in the county of Glengarry before coming to Canada. He died on November 29, 1914, at age seventy, two weeks after he had been re-elected president of his synagogue. He was eulogized for being conversant with both the Talmudand English literature and for harmonizing the ancient traditions with modern culture.
    In 1891 Lyon Cohen, eldest son of Lazarus, married Rachel Friedman and they had four children: Nathan, Horace, Lawrence, and Sylvia. Like his father, Lyon contributed to the foundation of Canadian Jewish life in Montreal. With Samuel William Jacobs, he began the first Jewish paper in Canada,
The Jewish Times
. In 1904, at only age thirty-five, he was elected president of Shaar Hashomayim, the largest and most prominent congregation in Canada. He was also a member of the Board of Governors of the Baron de Hirsch Institute of Montreal and became president of the institute in 1908. He transformed its building into the first active Jewish Community Centre of Montreal and established the first Hebrew Free Loan Society and the Mount Sinai Sanatorium in Ste-Agathe. In 1922 he became chairman of the Montreal Jewish Community Council, which he had helped to found. He was an “uptown” English-speaking Jew from Westmount, a stark contrast to the Yiddish-speaking “downtown Jews” of St-Lawrence and St-Urbain streets.
    In 1900, Montreal was populated mostly by francophones but controlled largely by anglophones. Two thirds of the population was French, concentrated east of St. Lawrence Boulevard or “The Main,” as it is called. The English lived on the west side of the city, in the mansions of the Golden Square Mile, in Westmount, and in the working class Irish ghetto, Griffintown. Jewish settlement was concentrated along The Main, the dividing line between English and French, the conciliatory geographic division of the two