Newfoundland Books - Saltfish and Shmattes

SALTFISH AND SHMATTES

By ROBIN MCGRATH
Awards: 2004 Geldert Medal

This new history of the Jews in Britain’s oldest colony traces the three waves of settlement of Jews in what is now Newfoundland and Labrador. As early as 1770, Jews came from the Channel Island, Devon and even Palestine, brought by fish, furs and the storms of the North Atlantic. Some were merely visitors, like the scholarly Rabbi Haim Carigal, while others like Postmaster Simon Solomon stayed, but all made their mark on the rough and tumble society they found themselves in. During the 1890s, the pogroms of Russia and Poland brought a different group of settlers; peddlers and tailors, merchants and farmers, all ready and willing to open up the isolated outports to a new form of retail trade. During the Second World War, a flood of American servicemen and allied merchant mariners changed life on these North Atlantic shores forever. When the war was over, dozens of families of Holocaust survivors chose Newfoundland and Labrador as the place to rebuild their lives, enriching the culture of Canada’s newest province and reminding the Livyers of what they had fought for. Today, Newfoundland and Labrador is a multicultural society and its Jewish citizens are welcoming new immigrants from around the world to join them as true Newfoundlanders and Labradorians. This broad sweeping and lively history draws on folk history and song, as well as previously undiscovered documents, to trace the individuals and families of Jewish heritage who for two centuries called The Rock home.