From the Canadian Jewish News, February 2013 Novelist Susan Glickman is the latest in a series of Canadian novelists, scholars, scriptwriters and performance artists to become enchanted by the legend of Esther Brandeau, the first known Jew to set foot in New France. As a young single Jewish woman, Esther Brandeau would not have been…
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…
For years the magazines sent him rejection letters, inferring that his short stories about a pair of Jewish cloak and suit makers in New York were about as unmarketable as last year’s suits and dresses. But in the early 1900s Montague Glass broke through to the big time as major American magazines like The Saturday…
From the Canadian Jewish News, April 2013 Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler, by Trudi Kanter In a voice as fresh, direct and charming as Sylvia Plath’s, the late writer Trudi Kanter tells the story of her journey through war-torn Europe, seeking safe haven for herself and her beloved Walter, two Austrian Jews hoping to…
The Book of Mischief: New & Selected Stories, by Steve Stern. Published by Graywolf Press. Once, as a young teenager, I had an uncanny, almost otherworldly experience that seemed to free me momentarily from the confines of my familiar world. I’d had an emotional scene at home (the details are forgotten) and needed an escape.…
From the Canadian Jewish News, ca 2001 For The Time Being (Knopf, $22) is Annie Dillard’s personal meditation on eternity, morality, mortality, the nature of divine justice and other philosophical issues. The book is a spiralling intellectual investigation that moves from the birth ward of a modern hospital to an archaeological dig in China to…
Not surprisingly, American author Michael Chabon originally developed the premise, story and characters for his latest novel, Telegraph Avenue, as the script for a 1999 television pilot that never got off the ground. Like many of his previous books, including his 2000 Pulitzer-prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Telegraph Avenue is brimming…
With the Eaton Centre and Scarborough block party shootings in Toronto, and the Dark Knight and Sikh Temple shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin, gun crimes have been screaming from the headlines all summer. Seems a perfect time, then, to look at Robert Rotenberg’s third police procedural crime novel, Stray Bullets. As he demonstrated in his…
It has been 50 years since a group of rabbis in Baltimore staged a protest against the racial segregation that was still a sad fact of life in many parts of America, including various restaurants in Baltimore. In February 1962, a time of heightened civil rights protests, the rabbis decided to target two local restaurants,…
In lieu of baseball cards, some American Orthodox boys have turned in recent decades to collecting Torah personality trading cards that feature images of revered “Gedolim” (Giants) from Moses Maimonides to Rabbi Moishe Feinstein, with lists of famous published works on the back in lieu of batting statistics. The happy invention of a Baltimore accountant,…
