From the Canadian Jewish News, February 2016 The powerful Holocaust movie Son of Saul, which is up for the “best foreign film” prize at the Academy Awards on February 28, presents a gut-wrenching view of Auschwitz-Birkenau from the point of view of a sondercommando: part of a group that herds prisoners into the gas chamber, processes…
Category: Holocaust
180 million pages of Holocaust records at International Tracing Service
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From Canadian Jewish News, November 2015 Containing some 180 million pages of Holocaust-related documents, the vast archives of the International Tracing Service (ITS) of the Red Cross in Bad Arolson, Germany, was subject to strict German privacy laws until 2007, when an 11-country international commission decided to open it up to public access. Today copies…
Profile: Margie Wolfe of Second Story Press
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Born in Germany to Holocaust-survivor parents after World War Two, Toronto publisher Margie Wolfe has for many years been engaged in the pivotal task of exporting published Holocaust books to some 50 countries around the globe, both in their original English and translated into about 40 languages. Holocaust books for young readers are a main…
Ottawa prof wins Yad Vashem prize for Holocaust research
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Ottawa history professor Jan Grabowski used the recently accessible records of thousands of wartime trials of Nazi collaborators while researching his book, “Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland,” which earned him the 2014 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. Some 40,000 to 50,000 collaborator trials occurred in Poland after…
Review: Alison Pick’s Between Gods
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Seven years ago, as Toronto author Alison Pick began researching and writing what would become her prize-winning novel Far to Go, she realized that the seeds of two different projects — one a fictional manuscript, the other a closely allied memoir — were struggling for dominance within her mind. Giving priority to the novel, she…
Review of The 40s: The Story of A Decade (New Yorker)
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Monuments Men, a new movie directed by George Clooney and starring Clooney and an impressive roster of A-list actors, tells the story of the special Allied unit tasked with rescuing artistic treasures looted by the Nazis from European museums and galleries during World War Two. The film is based loosely on Robert Edsel’s 2009 book…
Why Canada should admit Jewish refugees from Europe (1939)
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Economics of Refugees : Canada Could Strike a Great Blow for Democracy From Saturday Night, March 1939 By Gwethalyn Graham ◊ Gwethalyn Graham (1913 – 1965) was a Toronto-born writer, whose 1944 novel Earth and High Heaven was the first Canadian book to reach number one on the New York Times best-seller list. Graham won the…
‘My Mother’s Secret’ (Witterick) is riveting read
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My Mother’s Secret, by J. L. Witterick, and other titles So many books, so little time. In my years of reviewing books, I have always endeavoured to focus not only on works from great international writers (Ozick, Englander, Stern, Roth, et al) but also on works from lesser known writers from our own national community.…
A concise guide to Krakow — for genealogists
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Review of KRAKOW: A Guide to Jewish Genealogy, by Geoffrey M. Weisgard in association with Gesher Galicia. Softcover, 114 pages. Published 2011, www.geshergalicia.org Like JewishGen and Jewish Records Indexing Poland, Gesher Galicia is one of the great success stories of the Jewish genealogical world, offering a wealth of highly useful and easily accessible information and…
Quirky novel set in Bathurst Manor
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From the Canadian Jewish News, April 5, 2014 Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew, by Stuart Ross (ECW Press) I hadn’t heard of Stuart Ross before reading Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew. I was therefore surprised to find that we are “landsleit” — both from Bathurst Manor — and that he is quite prolific, with more than a dozen books…
