American literary critic Alfred Kazin spoke at the International Festival of Authors on the subject of his latest book, God and the American Writer (Knopf, 1997) — namely, the supreme relevance of God to public discourse in America in the last century, versus God’s supreme irrelevance to public discourse today. Whether they were believers or not,…
Category: Literary
Harold Bloom’s Book of J
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She lived in Jerusalem almost 3,000 years ago, in the time of King Solomon and his hapless son and successor, Rehoboam. A contemporary of the historian who chronicled Solomon’s court, she wrote in the Phoenician-Old Hebrew script, probably using a reed pen on sheets of papyrus that were later glued into scrolls. Known to modern…
Chaim Grade letters find home in YIVO
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Readers of Jewish literature will be interested to know that a cache of about 50 letters by Lithuanian-born novelist and poet Chaim Grade (1910-1982) have surfaced in Toronto. The letters belong to Sally Eisner, a longtime North York resident who, together with her late husband Leon Eisner, was a close friend of the New York-based…
Amy Bloom’s Away
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A new sub-genre of Jewish literature seems to be emerging in which the subjects move or have moved across North America in a northwesterly direction. We saw it earlier this year in Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, about an alternate postwar history in which a Jewish homeland is established not in Israel but…
Kvetching All the Way to the Bank
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With two new books in print to follow his 2005 bestseller Born to Kvetch, and enjoying a new popularity with Jewish audiences who delight in his erudite knowledge of Yiddish, Toronto writer Michael Wex can no longer be said to be languishing in obscurity. In the round fullness of middle age, the Lethbridge-born Yiddishist put…
Melech Grafstein and Sholem Aleichem
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It was just over a century ago, in 1908, that a young Jewish lad in Warsaw, Poland, had a brief personal encounter with Sholom Aleichem that he would remember for the rest of his life. Melech Grafstein, then a 15-year-old Bundist and Yiddish theatre devotee, had earlier seen him reading on stage and also davening…
Roskies’ Yiddishlands is evocative memoir
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Soon after her arrival in Canada in 1940, Masha Roskies sat down to a meal at her sister-in-law’s house in Montreal and, seeing that only “Canadian bread” (the white, fluffy stuff called Wonder Bread) was on the table, asked for a piece of real bread instead. When her aunt curtly replied that “this was what…
Montreal novel wins Jewish Book Award (2009)
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The White Space Between, the novel by Montrealer Ami Sands Brodoff that won the 2009 Canadian Jewish Book Award for fiction, focuses on Willow Ives and her mother, Jane Ives, a Czech-born Holocaust survivor formerly known as Jana Ivanova, and Willow’s need to understand the persistent gaps in her mother’s past. Much of the story…
Cary Fagan’s Valentine’s Fall
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Huddie Rosen leaves North York after high school, acquires a wife and kids and alternate world as a bluegrass musician in Prague, then revisits his former haunts in Toronto as his marriage and alternate world seem on the verge of collapse. But there’s much more to Valentine’s Fall, the latest novel by Toronto author Cary…
Insightful guide to American Jewish fiction
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The esteemed Jewish Publication Society of Philadelphia has just published American Jewish Fiction, a new literary guidebook that is a delight to browse, genuinely thought-provoking to read, and also happens to bring immense credit to one of our own. The author is Josh Lambert, who was born and raised in Toronto, where he graduated from…
