Identity and Community: Reflections on English, Yiddish, and French Literature in Canada

In Identity and Community, Irving Massey, a Jewish Canadian from Montreal, reexamines his cultural roots and connections. This issues of Canada and Canadian identity lie at the heart of his book, as he struggles with questions of the personal, the communal, and the political in his own background and in the discussion of three authors representative of different Canadian cultures with which Massey identifies. In an unusual coupling of topics, Sir Charles G.D. Roberts is taken as an instance of Anglophone individualism; Ida Maza, of centripetal Jewish solidarity; and Michel Tremblay, of a beleaguered but expansive Francophone communitarianism.
Identity and Community is not intended to be a survey of Canadian literature and the whole spectrum of its attitudes toward community and identity. Instead, the book concentrates on a small number of examples and couples them with a theoretical study of the larger issues.