Mary Antin, born in the Lithuanian (now Belarussian) town of Polotsk in 1881, recorded her memoirs of the Old Country and of coming to America in The Promised Land, a book first published in 1911. The Promised Land is a valuable first-person account of the myriad concerns and experiences surrounding the journey from the squalid…
From a Ruined Garden: a marvelous distillation of memory
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Where might you expect to hear a tale of an enchanted Passover seder where all participants fall asleep at the table before even the first glass of wine is consumed? Or of a blind cantor who, during a brief visit to town, sings so sweetly in synagogue that the whole community is mesmerized for weeks?…
Radiant Days, Haunted Nights: Yiddish Tales
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Radiant Days, Haunted Nights: Great Tales from the Treasury of Yiddish Folk Literature (Overlook Press) presents an intriguing collection of obscure Yiddish folk tales, translated for the first time by Joachim Neugroschel and spanning more than four centuries. The collection begins with the midrashic “Song of Isaac,” written by an anonymous author about 1510, and concludes…
‘The Dickens of the Jewish world’
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As if paying respects to a beloved head of state, a vast crowd exceeding 100,000 in number lined the route of the funeral procession for Sholom Aleichem when he died at age 57 in New York City in May 1916, just over 80 years ago. Among Yiddish writers, Sholem Aleichem ranked among the three most…
Journey to a 19th-century shtetl
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Back about a century and a half ago, the town of Kamenets was a typical Russian-Polish shtetl consisting “of 250 old houses, black and small with shingled roofs,” and with some 450 Jews listed in the Revizski Skazki, the official government registry. However, most of the town’s Jews did not appear in the registry. Fearful…
Journeys of David Toback
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It is sometimes said that heredity is destiny — a phrase with some apparent truth in The Journeys of David Toback, an old (Yiddish) diary edited (in English) by Carole Malkin and published by Schocken Books. For David Toback, who became bar-mitvahed in a dirt-poor Ukrainian village in 1888, the pair of tefillin that his…
Talking politics with A. B. Yehoshua
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Like a latter-day prophet of Israel, the distinguished Jerusalem-born novelist A.B. Yehoshua utters a variety of lamentations — mostly of a political nature — and explains that “it is the task of the intellectual to say what he thinks.” His biggest lament seems centered around Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he accuses of poisoning…
Nathan Shaham’s Rosendorf Quartet
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Israeli author Nathan Shaham, who gave separate English and Hebrew readings from his 1987 novel The Rosendorf Quartet in Toronto recently, is amazed that the book has become a bestseller, won prestigious literary prizes, and been translated into several languages, including Chinese and Russian. “I never tried to have this book published abroad,” said the…
Biblical novel set in 1st century
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Andrew Sanders, a resident of both Toronto and Haifa, is the author of a new work of historical fiction, Hanina My Son: A Novel of the First Century (Gefen, 2001), which has already appeared in Israel in Hebrew translation. Hanina My Son is set during a time of fighting between the Pharisees and Sadducees, the…
Edeet Ravel’s Ten Thousand Lovers
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Montreal resident Edeet Ravel admits that she’s been fairly negligent until recently about getting her writing into print. A teacher at a Montreal-area high school until last year, the Israeli-born author expresses amazement that the British publisher Headline found her letter on its slushpile of unsolicited manuscripts and was interested enough to ask to see…
