“Late Autumn in Montreal” – A poem by Y.Y. Segal

Yakov Yitzhak (Jacob Isaac) Segal, a major Yiddish-Canadian poet, was born in Koretz, a small village in Ukraine. He immigrated to Canada in 1911 and settled in Montreal, where he worked first in a pants factory, later as a teacher in secular Yiddish schools, and finally as a journalist and editor for the Yiddish-language daily Der Keneder Odler (‘The Canadian eagle’). For a time (1923–8) he lived in New York, where he came under the influence of a group of modern Yiddish poets, Die Junge (The Young Ones). After his return to Montreal, where he lived until his death, he became a close friend of A. M. Klein. Segal, who found his own poetic voice in childhood before coming to Canada, had his first Canadian poem published in Der Kanader Odler in 1915.

The poem here reproduced was translated by Miriam Waddington and was published in Canadian Literature 42 (1969). I put it here because we talk about it in the upcoming episode of our podcast on early Jewish communities in Canada.

Y.Y. Segal portrait. Date unknown.

The worm crawls into the dark earth,
The wind glitters and sharpens his sword,
And where did all the coloured leaves fly to?
The branches are lost in their hard grey sleep,
The skies seem high and lift up higher.
Their clear light drips blue over the roof tops,
And the stillness assures us that all is well.
Our churchy city becomes even more pious,
And on Sundays the golden crosses gleam brightly,
The big bells ring out hallelujahs
And the little bells answer with an amen.
The tidy peaceful streets dream in broad daylight
And smile serenely at me who am such a Jewish Jew
That even in my way of walking everyone can hear
The music of my ancestral song
And the rhythm of my Hebrew prayer.