From the Beth Sholom Bulletin, Toronto, Spring 2013 It is a busy day for Gerald and Naomi Goldenberg as they help plan some last-minute details for the upcoming wedding of one of their grandchildren. But even so, they kindly take a few minutes to sit down with me in the den of their Briar Hill…
From the Canadian Jewish News, December 2004 What do you get when you put a popular shtetl folk tale into a pot and add some flavourful compositions for full orchestra, rich klezmer sounds, a pinch of Hanukkah seasoning and live narration by Barbara Budd, the Toronto-based actor and co-host of the immensely popular CBC radio…
From the Globe and Mail, 1999 ◊ I wrote this article for the Globe’s Ideas & Beliefs column in 1999, a mere six years after Rabbi Schneerson’s death, when the Lubavitch world seemed to be pulling apart over the issue of his messianic status and who would be his successor. Don’t know what’s happened…
Genie Milgrom, the author of My 15 Grandmothers, was one of numerous captivating speakers at the five-day International Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Boston in August 2013. Although she was born into a Roman Catholic family of Spanish origin in Havana, Cuba, Milgrom felt an affinity for Judaism from a young age. She was five…
Here is the front page of the Toronto Star, as delivered to my home in north Toronto on Friday November 22, 1963, with the first news of the Kennedy assassination. The editors had just enough time to strip the page of its earlier content and replace it with the huge headline plus a few sentences…
Literary critics often express hallowed praise for writers who have contributed brilliant works to English literature but whose first language was not English. Two supreme examples come to mind. Polish-born Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) did not learn English until he was in his twenties, yet he became one of the language’s great novelists and story tellers…
My father rarely spoke about his war experiences, so when he did so one evening in December 1987, I recorded the conversation as best I could remember it in my journal. At a restaurant for dinner, my father reminisced about the old days: but what else do people reminisce about? Britain declared war against Germany…
From the Canadian Jewish News, Summer 2013 With his latest novel A Bird’s Eye, prolific Toronto writer Cary Fagan has created what may be his best work since his acclaimed first novel, The Animals’ Waltz, won the Canadian Jewish Fiction Prize in 1994. A Bird’s Eye marks a return for Fagan to the small-canvas, miniature…
From the Canadian Jewish News, February 2013 Novelist Susan Glickman is the latest in a series of Canadian novelists, scholars, scriptwriters and performance artists to become enchanted by the legend of Esther Brandeau, the first known Jew to set foot in New France. As a young single Jewish woman, Esther Brandeau would not have been…
From the Canadian Jewish News, October 2012 As legions of Barbra Streisand fans pay exorbitant prices (reportedly up to $500) for tickets to see her during her latest (and perhaps last) world tour — which includes a concert at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre on Oct. 23rd 2012 — it seems a fortuitous time for the…
