Toronto author Kitty Wintrob tells the captivating story of her experiences as a ten-year-old Jewish girl evacuated from London’s East End at the start of World War Two. Swept up as a girl in the greatest civilian evacuation in British history, she has written a heartfelt memoir of her time in foster homes in the countryside…
The Jewish Hour
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The Jewish Hour: The Golden Age of a Toronto Yiddish Radio Show and Newspaper Author Michael Mandel delves into the pages of a Toronto Yiddish newspaper to tell the story of a Yiddish radio show involving his father and many others in Toronto of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The book documents Mandel’s quest to…
One Foot in America (novel)
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One Foot in America, a novel by Yuri Suhl, is a sweet coming-of-age tale that paints a vivid picture of what life was like for Jewish immigrants in North America, particularly Brooklyn, in the 1920s and 1930s. Sol Kenner, the likeable young narrator, describes his experiences from the time he leaves the port of Antwerp at age fourteen…
Finding Home: In the Footsteps of the Fusgeyers
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The Fusgeyers (Yiddish for wayfarers) were Jews who fled persecution in Romania in the early 1900s to find refuge, ultimately, in the New World. One hundred years later, author Jill Culiner retraces their steps on foot in the search for lost remnants of this epic journey. Culiner uncovers a largely forgotten corner of Jewish history, revealing the persistence…
100 Years in Canada: the Rubinoff-Naftolin Family Tree
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Thousands of people across Canada, the United States, Israel and many other countries are related to the Rubinoff and Naftolin families of Toronto, whose ancestors came from the Russian provinces of Minsk and Moghilev (now Belarus) in the early 20th century. Researched and written by Toronto genealogist Bill Gladstone, One Hundred Years in Canada: the…
A Basket of Apples: Stories by Shirley Faessler
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Possessing a remarkable ear for dialogue and a keen eye for the biting ironies of life, Shirley Faessler brings the magic of a born storyteller to these linked stories about a coterie of Jewish immigrants in Toronto’s Kensington Market in the 1920s and 1930s. All six of her Kensington Market stories are presented here for the first…
A Toronto baseball team from 1880
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From the Toronto Evening Telegram, April 1919 Thirty-nine years ago up on the the old grounds in Queen’s Park, near where now stand the Parliament Buildings, the Clipper Baseball Club performed. That was in 1880, a long time ago, it is true, but not too long for even some of the present day “regulars” to…
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Toronto Jewish Records Toronto Jewish Deaths (1939 – 1942) Plus some indexed burial records 1949-1966 Background: This database offers a thorough and richly detailed index of more than 1,450 Jewish death records that occurred in Toronto from the beginning of 1939 to the end of 1942. Every identifiable Jewish record is included, including those for…
Toronto Jewish Births (1880-1917)
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Toronto Jewish Records Background: This database contains a very thorough indexing of about 8,000 records, representing almost all of the Jewish births registered in Toronto between 1907 and 1917, plus hundreds more from 1880 to 1906; and some “strays” from other towns. There were inevitably some that could not be identified as Jewish and were…
Christine (The Girls I Might Have Married, part III)
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From A Series of Sketches by a Prominent Bachelor, Canadian Jewish Chronicle, 1919 Read Part I Read Part II Part III (Continued from last week) From being foreman in a shop to being my own master was not such a big step after all, and I was barely twenty-four when I opened up a small factory…
