About 60 descendants of Ezekiel Solomons, an 18th-century Jewish fur trader who operated a trading post in what is now Michigan, gathered recently for a first family reunion at Fort Michilimackinac in Mackinaw City, Michigan, about 50 miles south of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Sheldon and Judith Godfrey, a husband-and-wife-team of historians from Toronto, were…
Tarnobrzeg, Poland, formerly known as Dzikow, cannot be accused of being a pretty town. With a population of 40,000, it is perched on the eastern bank of the Vistula, in a region known for the production of sulphur. One pictures a dreary, blighted place, surrounded by dark denuded hills. In 1757, a 15-year-old Christian boy…
Toronto novelist Alison Pick, whose book Far to Go was on the list of 13 contenders for the 2011 Man Booker prize announced in July, says she has benefited from the honour even though Far to Go did not make the three-title short list that the Man Booker jury released on September 6. “I think…
Two centuries ago, as part of a wave of reforms that swept Europe after the American and French revolutions, the locks were removed on the ghettos in which the Jews had been confined since medieval times, and the inhabitants were permitted to move freely in and out at all hours as they pleased. Whereas previously…
Some three decades ago, when Aaron Lansky and friends began climbing into Dumpsters to rescue discarded Yiddish books, he had no idea what sort of treasures might turn up or how far the venture would carry him. Today — one million books later — he is the founder and president of the National Yiddish Book…
One hundred years ago, in September 1908, British writer Israel Zangwill’s influential play The Melting Pot premiered in New York, simultaneously winning widespread popular acclaim and sweeping pans from the critics. When Theodore Roosevelt saw it, he leaned over the edge of his presidential box and exclaimed “That’s all right!” in great apparent satisfaction. But…
In her day Fannie Hurst was one of America’s highest-paid authors, but ask any bookstore clerk today for one of her 18 novels, such as the bestselling Imitation of Life, and chances are you’ll receive only a blank stare. Between 1914 and 1930, Fannie Hurst’s phenomenal literary career blazed meteorically across the pages of popular…
Who today has heard of the American writer Anzia Yezierska? Her life was the sort of rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags tale that she specialized in telling in her short stories and novels like Salome of the Tenements and The Bread-Givers. She and her large impoverished family sailed from Poland in the 1890s and settled into a cramped tenement…
One of the most remarkable Jewish genealogical record books is a 340-year-old parchment manuscript of more than 100 pages, belonging to the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnatti. Dating from about 1660, the manuscript records the lineages of the eight Jewish clans then in Kaifeng, China. All of the city’s roughly 1,000 Jews used only seven…
A group of eminent Jewish genealogists recently announced the formation of a new facility, the International Institute of Jewish Genealogy, that will be housed in the Jewish National and University Library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Although still in an early stage of development, the Institute’s board expects it to become a major force…
