Rifke

Rifke (Rosalie Wise Sharp) grew up in North Toronto, which felt to her like a foreign place because there were no other Jewish families there in the late 1930s. Yiddish was spoken in her household, and the food, dress, and customs of Ozarow the Polish shtetl (small Jewish town) from which her parents emigrated were all maintained. Rifke s peers took lessons in tap-dancing, ice-skating, the piano, and the flute; activities that didn t translate into the Yiddish vocabulary at the Wises, where only hard work, no nonsense, and book-learning were