Rosa Finestone Remembers Yiddish in Montreal

When she was a young girl, Rose Finestone would go to the Yidishe Folks-Bibliotek (Jewish People's Library) on Esplanade, climb up the stairs, and listen to the librarian, Rochl Eisenberg, tell stories. Eisenberg, who later married Melech Ravitch, was an important member of the library's staff for twenty-eight years, from 1926 until she and her husband left Montreal in 1954. Ms. Finestone also remembers attending a Yiddish book club led by Lerer Zipper, Yaacov Zipper was known, and the similarities between the Yiddish literature she read and and the works her husband read at a Hebrew book club.