A Stone in My Shoe: In Search of Neighborhood

Poet George Ellenbogens memoir is more than a collection of anecdotes of his immigrant family and their journey from Franz Josephs Austro-Hungarian empire to Montreal in the 1920s. A Stone in My Shoe charts his discovery of how an immigrant Jewish neighborhooda tight-knit shtetl with extended families that had its own shops, institutions, and daily Yiddish newspaperssustained him and his family as well as thousands of others. The revelations ripple outward and what surfacesthe markers of his parents navigation in a new world and his own youth in the 1940s and 1950s Montrealextend to all. They become part of the universal map in which readers will recognize their own quirky courses into childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.