A Stone in My Shoe: In Search of Neighborhood

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.

George Ellenbogen is a poet and an emeritus professor of English at Bentley University. He is the author of Morning Gothic: New and Selected Poems and The Rhino Gate Poems. He lives in Boston.