“A literary master living among us” is how the influential Globe and Mail newspaper described Montreal author Yehuda Elberg after his two brilliant novels, Ship Of The Hunted and The Empire of Kalman the Cripple, rolled off the presses nearly four years ago. Translated from the original Yiddish, the books were published in English by…
From the Canadian Jewish News, January 13, 2005 Hy Burstein can’t quite explain his passion for riding horses, only that it first hit him as a teenager and that it’s still going strong six decades later. Born to Russian-Jewish immigrants in Toronto in 1928, he recently published Ride ’em Jewish Cowboy, a book describing his…
Born in 1887 to Jewish parents in Kalamazoo, Mich., American novelist and playwright Edna Ferber was a hardworking, overly modest, frequently self-effacing writer who read the critics too carefully and was too easily wounded by their sloppily-aimed slings and arrows. Convinced, for instance, that no one would want to read her novel So Big, she advised…
From the Canadian Jewish News, January 2013 London-based writer Salman Rushdie was happy to sell his novel The Satanic Verses to Viking Penguin in February 1988. But six months after the novel appeared, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him for his blasphemous insult “against Islam, the Prophet and the Qur’an.” Instantly he became…
After the death of her mother when she turned ten, Judith Friedland learned to be resilient. She met the expectations for upper-middle-class women in Toronto in the 1940s and 1950s, which included post-secondary education, marriage, and motherhood. While raising a family and supporting her husband’s academic career, she continued her formal education through part-time study…
Book Review: Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, & Life in the Kingdom of Poland. By Glenn Dynner. Oxford University Press, 2014. Despite various expulsions, evictions and repressive tax measures meant to force them out of business, Jewish-run taverns were a ubiquitous presence in Poland from roughly the 17th to the late 19th centuries. Polish historians have often…
From A Series of Sketches by a Prominent Bachelor, Canadian Jewish Chronicle, 1919 Read Part I Read Part II Part III (Continued from last week) From being foreman in a shop to being my own master was not such a big step after all, and I was barely twenty-four when I opened up a small factory…
Part II of A Series of Sketches by a Prominent Bachelor, written for the Canadian Jewish Chronicle Read Part One When I reached the age of 21, I had become the foreman of my department and was earning $25 a week. This was in the days when a man who earned fifteen hundred a year had a…
Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-old Author, by Herman Wouk (Simon & Schuster) ◊ Note: This review of Herman Wouk’s memoir was first published in 2016. Herman Wouk died on May 17, 2019, age 103. This slim volume, which the author describes as a “non-autobiography,” will be of special interest to people interested in…
Although his name may be little known even within the Canadian Jewish community, Meyer Joshua Nurenberger was an internationally-known Jewish writer and publisher who founded the Canadian Jewish News. During a journalistic career that stretched from the 1930s into the 1990s, Nurenberger interviewed Albert Einstein, covered the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, and was editor of…
