Panorama of Toronto harbour, 1910 THE following book is a wonderful resource for genealogists who are researching particular families that were in Canada in the early 1930s, and anyone interested in the history of the Jewish community in Canada up to that era. Titled “Canadian Jewry: Prominent Jews of Canada,” it describes itself as “A History…
Note: this piece was written in response to the so-called “falsified passports affair” of 1997, when Israel was lambasted for falsifying Canadian passports as a means of assisting in its war on Muslim fundamentalist terror. * * * HORATIO: I am much disturbed and aggrieved, Plutonius, at the extent of the trickery and deception practised…
Note: Written in the height of the Mubarak years, long before his overthrow during the so-called Arab Spring of 2011. Bartering is a way of life in this bustling, dirty, exotic city of 15 million people. From the moment you arrive, you will be beseeched and cajoled to buy perfume, eat a shishkebab, hire a…
Edmund de Waal, London-based author of The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss, has described this memorable book as “a biography of a collection and the biography of my family.” The collection he refers to is an assortment of some 264 netsuke, tiny elegant figurines carved by Japanese craftsmen in…
A rare panoramic photograph of Toronto harbour, taken in 1910 from the top of one of the city’s first skyscrapers, has been transferred into video format and posted with some analysis and description onto YouTube. Toronto author and publisher Bill Gladstone, who maintains the website www.billgladstone.ca, came across the rare photograph in the US Library…
Humanity’s future: will it be “earthbound” or “spacebound”? My uncle, the artist Gerald Gladstone, posed this question to me recently outside Yorkdale shopping centre in North York. We were standing in the parking lot near The Bay, beside one of his major works, a bronze colossus called Universal Man, which was installed there in late…
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…
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…
Since I first started writing professionally nearly 35 years ago, I’ve always held the dream of getting published in the New Yorker. So far, it hasn’t happened. As the saying goes, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else what’s a heaven for? In the meantime, I’ve read many interesting books about the celebrated Manhattan-based…
William E. Dodd, the United States’ newly appointed ambassador to Germany in 1933, was a Jeffersonian democrat, a history professor working on a volume on the old American South, and a Sunday farmer with old-fashioned values who seemed so out of step with his new posting that one magazine called him “a square academic peg…
