Swan’s Way, a book by French author Henri Raczymow that has been recently released in English translation (Northwestern University Press), is a probing literary inquiry into the once-celebrated Jewish dandy in late 19th-century French society upon whom writer Marcel Proust modeled Charles Swann, a major character in his famous novel Remembrance of Things Past. Raczymow,…
Category: Literary
Obit: Chaim Potok
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Many astute readers consider Chaim Potok, the New York-born, rabbinically-trained author who died last July, as being categorically unlike most other notable Jewish scribes of his generation because his books open a unique window into the Orthodox Jewish world. While acclaimed American writers such as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth tended to write…
The Dream of Scipio, by Ian Pears
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British author Iain Pears has created a literary character named Gersonides, based on the actual medieval French Jewish philosopher of the same name, known to Talmudists as Levi ben Gershom or by the acronym Ralbag. The character appears in Pears’s new novel, The Dream of Scipio (Knopf Canada, 2002), itself a complex intellectualized study of…
Family Saga from Erica Jong
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American writer Erica Jong, best known for her sexually explicit 1973 bestseller Fear of Flying, flew into town peddling her seventh novel, Inventing Memory: A Novel of Mothers and Daughters (HarperCollins, 1997), a four-generational family saga stretching between Russia circa 1880 and America in 2005. “I was never much interested in my roots until I…
Dara Horn’s In the Image
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Twenty-six-year-old New Jersey-born author Dara Horn, whose first novel In The Image has generated a wave of enthusiastic reviews and awards, says that one of the stories that inspired her to write it was a sort of urban myth about Jewish immigrants who, upon reaching America, tossed their tefilin into New York harbour. She first…
Blue Monday: Grunberg writes a blue streak
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Arnon Grunberg, a 26-year-old native of Amsterdam, wrote the novel Blue Monday (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1997) on a dare. It has sold 70,000 copies in Holland and been republished in various translations. Blue Monday has been compared to Roth’s Goodbye Columbus; Grunberg’s often-pixilated protagonist, also called Arnon, is a sort of Jewish Casanova who vividly…
Obit: Miriam Waddington (2004)
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To the many friends and critics who feel that Canadian-Jewish poet and writer Miriam Waddington did not get the recognition she deserved in life, her recent death in Vancouver seems especially sad and ironic because it occurred only weeks before she would have gained what may very well be her largest popular reading audience and…
Simchovitch’s Fiery Mountain
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Readers of the Yiddish Forward may have noticed several published notices in the New York-based newspaper a while ago congratulating Toronto poet and writer Simcha (Sam) Simchovitch for passing the milestone of his 85th birthday. Simchovitch is known as one of Canada’s senior Yiddish writers, yet he’s also achieved recognition for his literary contributions in…
Two by Sherman: Clusters and The Well
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The author of nine books of poetry including the recent Clusters, Kenneth Sherman has received considerable critical recognition, yet he acknowledges he still labors in relative obscurity in an age when the public has lost much of its passion for poetry. The Toronto writer teaches English composition at Sheridan College and creative writing at York…
Libby Scheier’s “seething inferno of words”
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In “Why Poems Should Not Be Fictions,” one of the pieces in Libby Scheier’s Kaddish For My Father: New and Selected Poems, 1970-1999 (ECW Press, 1999), the Toronto poet seems to imply that there’s already too much artifice in the world and that the poet should perform her art unmasked, without resorting to a narrative…
