News at Eleven: The pioneer Jews she [Isa Milman] writes about

were granted free land because, in the words of John A. Macdonald, the then prime minister of Canada, "A sprinkling of Jews in the North West would do much good. They would at once go in for peddling and politics. . . ." But more than affording the opportunity to peddle and politic, this resettlement allowed the Jewish pioneers to escape the harsh persecutions of their native lands, which Milman's poems powerfully evoke.

Among the most striking works in the book is "A Few Restrictions Regarding the Jews of Romania, 1885-1900":

a restriction forbidding Jews to be peddlers
a restriction forbidding Jews to be shopkeepers
a restriction forbidding Jews to be craftsmen

from The Jewish Daily Forward: Northern Commemoration

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