Eli Mandel's Family Architecture: Building a House of Words on the Prairies

Abstract

The latter half of Eli Mandel's career took him to Toronto and abroad, but his writing in these years moved ever back to his childhood home in Estevan and his connection, through his grandfather who was a rabbi and a shochet, to the Jewish pioneering colony at Hirsch, Saskatchewan. In his collection, Out of Place, Mandel offers an oblique and haunting account of the effect on him as a writer, as well as on the Canadian landscape itself, of the now vanished Jewish colonies at Hirsch and Hoffer. He makes, as well, an explicit connection between his struggle to address the fate of Hitler's victims and "the place of the Jewish dead on the prairies." The juxtaposition of these themes helps us address the role of memory and Jewish history in Mandel's work.