A Stone in My Shoe: In Search of Neighborhood - Softcover

Ellenbogen, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1550653563 ISBN 13: 9781550653564

Publisher: Véhicule Press, 2013

Synopsis

Poet George Ellenbogen’s memoir is more than a collection of anecdotes of his immigrant family and their journey from Franz Joseph’s Austro-Hungarian empire to Montreal in the 1920s. A Stone in My Shoe charts his discovery of how an immigrant Jewish neighborhood—a tight-knit shtetl with extended families that had its own shops, institutions, and daily Yiddish newspapers—sustained him and his family as well as thousands of others. The revelations ripple outward and what surfaces—the markers of his parents’ navigation in a new world and his own youth in the 1940s and 1950s Montreal—extend to all. They become part of the universal map in which readers will recognize their own quirky courses into childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

About this title

About the Author:

George Ellenbogen is a poet and an emeritus professor of English at Bentley University. He is the author of Morning Gothic: New and Selected Poems and The Rhino Gate Poems. He lives in Boston.

Review:

"George Ellenbogen is a memorialist of exceptional talent. Not only does he depict scenes from his childhood with an eye for what is touching, but his writing is poetic and his descriptions lovingly crafted." - Pierre Anctil, University of Ottawa

"There is celebration here, hard won, and ultimately gratitude, for the hardiness and holiness of growing up in a neighbourhood where community triumphed over recklessness, and relationship and reconciliation over the vagaries and freedom of adventure."-Di Brandt

About this edition

• Publisher: Véhicule Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1550653563
• ISBN 13: 9781550653564
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160