Libka Hoffman was born in Cape Town, South Africa soon after her Jewish parents emigrated there from Lithuania about 1930. But Libka — the protagonist of In A Pale Blue Light, an extraordinary first novel by Toronto writer Lily Poritz Miller — is radically at odds with her society. As she enters her teenage years…
Category: Literary
Crossing the Yellow Line into Murder-Mystery Territory
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Toronto lawyer and writer Robert Rotenberg has produced a credible “police procedural” murder mystery called Old City Hall that is set in Toronto and features the famous building of the title — now home to an array of criminal courtrooms — as an iconic centrepiece of the story. Rotenberg’s debut novel focuses on Kevin Brace,…
The Featherbed offers portrait of tenement life
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With The Featherbed, Toronto writer John Miller gives us a credible depiction of tenement life on New York’s Lower East Side of a century ago, but with a number of jarring twists. Anna and Sadie, sisters who haven’t seen each other in more than 50 years, are reunited at the funeral of their mother, who…
Tale of the missing wedding ring
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Some years ago, Leslie Robbins of Toronto lost her diamond wedding ring, which she had placed in a secret hiding place within her home. For two years the ring did not turn up. After thoroughly searching her home, Robbins filed an insurance claim and began to plan a European vacation with the insurance money that…
Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Hotel
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“Harpo Marx, having played a mute in all his films, was probably the most articulate of all the Marx brothers,” declares Barbara McGurn as we sit in the Oak Room of New York’s famed Algonquin Hotel, awaiting the entrance of cabaret performer K.T. Sullivan. The next moment McGurn, who is equal parts literary scholar and…
The enduring legacy of A. M. Klein
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Ask any Jewish writer in Canada to name some of his or her most important influences, and before long the name of A.M. Klein is certain to arise. In an unofficial survey of contemporary Canadian writers whose works explore Jewish themes or feature Jewish characters, this writer found that almost all of them were quick…
Czech-Sudeten Jews the focus of Far to Go
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Toronto novelist Alison Pick, whose book Far to Go was on the list of 13 contenders for the 2011 Man Booker prize announced in July, says she has benefited from the honour even though Far to Go did not make the three-title short list that the Man Booker jury released on September 6. “I think…
Zangwill’s ‘Melting Pot’ a Century Later
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One hundred years ago, in September 1908, British writer Israel Zangwill’s influential play The Melting Pot premiered in New York, simultaneously winning widespread popular acclaim and sweeping pans from the critics. When Theodore Roosevelt saw it, he leaned over the edge of his presidential box and exclaimed “That’s all right!” in great apparent satisfaction. But…
The Forgotten Fannie Hurst
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In her day Fannie Hurst was one of America’s highest-paid authors, but ask any bookstore clerk today for one of her 18 novels, such as the bestselling Imitation of Life, and chances are you’ll receive only a blank stare. Between 1914 and 1930, Fannie Hurst’s phenomenal literary career blazed meteorically across the pages of popular…
Yezierska: From the tenement to Hollywood
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Who today has heard of the American writer Anzia Yezierska? Her life was the sort of rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags tale that she specialized in telling in her short stories and novels like Salome of the Tenements and The Bread-Givers. She and her large impoverished family sailed from Poland in the 1890s and settled into a cramped tenement…
