A Stone in My Shoe

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.