There Is No Other (Exile Editions) offers a collection of compelling stories by former Torontonian Jonathan Papernick (now of Boston), in which we meet a caretaker who has a vision of the Virgin Mary in a Reform Temple in Boston; an angry Jewish kid who comes to a school Purim party wearing a Mohammed costume…
Winterhouse won fiction prize for good reason
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If truth were told, not all past winners of the fiction prize in the annual Helen & Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Awards have been outstanding reads. Once in a rare while a winner has been selected merely because it was the best of a bad lot and pickings were slim that year. Fortunately, that’s…
The End of the Jews: Novel
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Like David Homel’s Midway, The End of the Jews by Adam Mansbach is a witty literary miniature with Jewish characters. Published in 2008, it tells the story of three interlocking characters — a grandfather and grandson both named Tristan Brodsky, and Nina Hricek, a teenaged photographer in Czechoslovakia. The narrative unfolds in the present tense…
Homel’s ‘Midway’
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The first several chapters of David Homel’s sixth novel Midway are written with such sure-footedness of structure as to float the promise of a story that would really be going places. The protagonist is Ben Allan, a middle-aged Montreal college prof who writes an award-winning paper on an obscure 19th-century psychological condition called dromomania, an…
Ravvin’s ‘Joyful Child’
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At the heart of The Joyful Child, the new novel by Norman Ravvin (Gaspareau Press) is a subtle, charming sketch of a father-son relationship. The joyful child of the title is four-year-old Nick, innocent, playful, wide-eyed and curious. His father is Paul, whose life seems to be drifting away from its moorings even as his…
A Trove of Yiddish Letters
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North York resident Debbie Rose, who has been fervently researching her family tree for the past several years, has found a large trove of old Yiddish letters of historic significance that she hopes to get translated into English. The letters, some dating back to the end of the 19th century, belong to a relative in…
Stray Cats: A Memoir
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Born on Toronto’s Grace Street in 1927, Evelyn Wolfe became a well-to-do Forest Hill matron, cable-TV talkshow host, Jewish book-club organizer and social convener at the Beth Tzedec congregation, Judging from her recent autobiography Stray Cats & Other Loves (Mosaic Press,2005), she fulfilled each of these roles energetically and with style. A born raconteur, the…
Essential Canlit from William Weintraub
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Iconic Canadian author Mordechai Richler figures prominently in Getting Started: A Memoir of the 1950s, by William (“Why Rock the Boat?”) Weintraub (McClelland & Stewart, 1999). As a young print and radio journalist stationed in Europe, Weintraub kept up a lively correspondence with Richler, Mavis Gallant and Brian Moore during a period of heightened literary…
Waxing Lyrical with Al Waxman
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Al Waxman is sitting in a bookstore café in downtown Toronto, not far from his childhood stomping grounds in the Kensington-Spadina neighborhood — territory he made famous in the legendary King of Kensington television show which propelled him to fame three decades ago, near the start of his celebrated career. Around the corner is a…
David Vanek’s Fulfilment
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David Vanek, a retired provincial criminal court judge, has produced a highly readable volume of memoirs that illuminates his family’s early history in the Toronto area, numerous historical matters pertaining to the local Jewish community, and his 21-year career on the Ontario bench. Fulfilment: Memoirs of a Criminal Court Judge (Dundurn Press, 1999) shows the…
