Members Only Events

10:30 am PT / 1:30 pm ET / 8:30 pm Israel Time

In this presentation, doctoral candidate Vardit Lightstone will address the creative ways that migrants to Canada from 1900 to 1930 forged a new hybrid culture and identity, and how they express that in their life stories.

When Eastern European Jews migrated to Canada, they created a Canadian Eastern European Jewish culture and identity; by doing so, they expanded the international Yiddish map and Yiddish culture. Vardit has uncovered previously unknown memoirs and personal narratives by these migrants and will discuss how they tell the stories of their own lives, connecting their early lives and experiences in Eastern Europe to their lives and experiences in Canada.

Vardit Lightstone is a doctoral candidate in a Joint Education Placement Program between the University of Toronto and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on the life stories of Yiddish-speaking immigrants to Canada from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her research she interrogates both the folk literary genre of life stories and the ways migrants use folklore as they adapt to their new situations.