“To be a Jew and a Canadian is to emerge from the ghetto twice.” When Mordecai Richler made that insightful observation in 1971, Canada was still a literary backwater and postwar Canlit was just beginning to explode onto the international scene. Today, as Michael Greenstein demonstrates in a newly published anthology of Canadian Jewish writing,…
Category: Canadiana
Obit: sculptor E. B. Cox (1914-2003)
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From the Globe and Mail, 2003 E. B. Cox, a much-admired Toronto-area sculptor who prided himself on achieving artistic and commercial success without ever taking a penny in government grants, died last summer at the age of 89. E. B. was a young associate of some of the Group of Seven with whom he went…
Profile: Author Norman Ravvin
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In Lola By Night (paperplates books), a second novel from Montreal-based author Norman Ravvin, the heroine, Lola, is a young bestselling romance novelist from Barcelona who sets off on a quest to learn more about her late father and his connection to a decades-old murder. Lola’s existential journey takes her to Vancouver and New York,…
Ravin’ Over Ravvin: Sex, Skyscrapers and Standard Yiddish
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For a writer who has staked out his literary territory somewhere between Franz Kafka and Edgar Allen Poe, and who typically weaves Jewish themes into his work, the name Norman Ravvin — with its etymological allusions both to Poe’s “raven” and the word “rabbi” — seems almost too linguistically appropriate to be cited as the…
Avner Mandelman, innovative short-story writer
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“Darkness,” the fourth story in Avner Mandelman’s new collection Cuckoo, tells the story of an Israeli woman who opposes her sister’s romance with a Yemenite Jew and attains a Yemenite black-magic remedy to put an end to the match. Told in the first person by the woman’s young son, this short and simple reminiscence seems…
Allan Levine’s Jewish detective
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Winnipeg writer Allan Levine has introduced a Jewish literary detective in his first novel, The Blood Libel (Great Plains Fiction). The novel is set in Winnipeg’s North End in 1911, when the streets were teeming with impoverished immigrants. Levine’s protagonist, 28-year-old Sam Klein, works in a brothel and turns gumshoe after a rabbi is accused…
The 1911 census is a powerful tool
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The 1911 census of Canada, which became available to the public in mid July for the first time, is a tremendously valuable resource for family tree researchers whose relatives were in Canada in the first decade of the 20th century. It is the latest in a wave of genealogical resources — the Ellis Island data…
Obit: Anthony Adamson (1906-2002)
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Anthony Adamson, the architect who designed Upper Canada Village and oversaw the restoration of Hamilton’s Dundurn Castle, has died in Toronto (May 2002) at the age of 95. Descended from some of the most wealthy and historic families in Upper Canada, Adamson used to joke that he had been “relatively successful in the inheritance business.”…
Obit: Isabel LeBourdais (1909-2003)
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When Isabel LeBourdais first heard that an Ontario court had condemned a 14-year-old boy to death for the rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl, she was appalled that the criminal justice system showed no interest in giving a deeply maladjusted teenager the psychological therapy he so obviously required. But her opinion quickly changed once…
Obit: Sylva Gelber (1910-2003)
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Sylva Gelber, who gained national prominence in the late ‘60s as director of the Women’s Bureau in the federal department of labour, was an outspoken advocate of women’s rights who helped to introduce equal pay legislation, maternity leave and women’s pension benefits into Canadian society. Known for her wit, humour and a love of music,…
