From the Canadian Jewish Review, September 8, 1922 It will be remembered that Sarah Bernhardt was born in Paris in 1844 of Dutch Jewish parents and was received into the Roman Catholic Church at the request of her father. She has recently given an interview to Miss Elsie Roow, of the New York Herald, in…
My Mother’s Secret, by J. L. Witterick, and other titles So many books, so little time. In my years of reviewing books, I have always endeavoured to focus not only on works from great international writers (Ozick, Englander, Stern, Roth, et al) but also on works from lesser known writers from our own national community.…
Some time in the late 1940s or 1950s, when my aunt and uncle moved from a house on Toronto’s Vaughan Road, they left behind several old family photographs hidden in the rafters of the basement ceiling. Luckily the new owners of the home were considerate enough to save the old photos. Decades went by. Sometime…
From the Globe and Mail, 2001 Harry Barberian, who began his culinary career as a short order cook in a circus railroad dining car, and went on to found the landmark Toronto steakhouse that bears his name, has died after complications from abdominal surgery. He was 71. His restaurant, Barberian’s, specialized in steaks — New…
The late eminent American genealogist Rabbi Malcolm Stern once observed that there is nothing so fascinating to a person as his own genealogical research, and often, nothing so boring as being stuck at a dinner table with a family-tree enthusiast who insists upon endlessly discussing their latest research. With her recent book The Juggler’s Children:…
◊ The following articles describe a tragedy that unfolded in Toronto’s Jewish district on Adelaide Street West near Spadina in 1914. I was particularly riveted by the sad drama because this is where some of my relatives were living at the time — practically in these very addresses — and one of my grandfather’s ‘landsmen’…
Review of KRAKOW: A Guide to Jewish Genealogy, by Geoffrey M. Weisgard in association with Gesher Galicia. Softcover, 114 pages. Published 2011, www.geshergalicia.org Like JewishGen and Jewish Records Indexing Poland, Gesher Galicia is one of the great success stories of the Jewish genealogical world, offering a wealth of highly useful and easily accessible information and…
It has been 25 years since Canada’s leading publishing house McClelland and Stewart brought out A Basket of Apples and Other Stories by Shirley Faessler, a book that quickly won critical acclaim for its lively and colourful re-creation of the world of the Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants in the Kensington Market neighbourhood of Toronto in the…
In the year 1839, had you been a traveller along the road from Rzeszov to Cracow, you would have been obliged to show a passport in Podgorze, the suburb of Cracow on the Austrian side of the Vistula (“Weichsel”) River. After submitting to a cursory inspection from Austrian officials, your vehicle would have crossed the…
My Father Is A Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud, by Janna Malamud Smith (Counterpoint Berkeley) One hundred years after his birth in 1914, acclaimed novelist and short-story writer Bernard Malamud has been surprisingly overlooked by biographers — in large part because his family had blocked access to his private papers. But in recent years…
