Saint-Laurent Boulevard

In nineteen oh seven, Hirsch Wolofsky’s fruit shop on Saint-Laurent Boulevard burned down. Its owner had arrived from Poland seven years earlier. There, his trading license had been taken away; in Montreal, he first made a living as a tailor, then by selling fruit. Journalism remained the work he wanted to pursue, but the shop’s income paid for his apartment and stock. The fire destroyed precisely that income.

Wolofsky received an insurance settlement and invested it not in a new business, but in a publishing venture. Together with four partners, he published Keneder Adler—“the Canadian eagle.” The first issue appeared on August thirtieth, nineteen oh seven. It was a weekly newspaper in Yiddish, the everyday language of many Jews then arriving from Eastern Europe.

The choice of boulevard was exact. From the end of the nineteenth century, new residents came here from the port, rented rooms, and opened shops, workshops, restaurants, and theaters. French-speaking neighborhoods lay to the east, English-speaking ones to the west, and Saint-Laurent Boulevard became the strip between them. Hence its nickname, The Main, a shortened English term for “main street.” Numbers on cross streets are still counted from Saint-Laurent Boulevard and marked “east” or “west.”

Wolofsky offered the people on this in-between strip a newspaper in their own language. His partners soon left the venture, and he remained solely responsible for the enterprise. By nineteen ten, Keneder Adler had become a daily newspaper with about ten thousand subscribers. It printed local news and literature, explained how the new country worked, and even introduced readers to Japanese poetry. Drawing on the newsroom and its circle of readers, Wolofsky helped establish the Montreal Jewish Public Library, the Canadian Jewish Congress, and the Jewish General Hospital.

In nineteen twenty-four, the newsroom moved into a newly built building a little north of Duluth Avenue. The publishing company remained its main tenant until nineteen seventy, while the newspaper itself continued to appear until nineteen eighty-eight.

The newsroom is no longer here, but the four-story building remains. Carved side by side on its façade are a Star of David, an English rose, a Scottish thistle, an Irish shamrock, a French fleur-de-lis, and a Canadian maple leaf.