In April 2001, the Toronto Jewish Film Festival screened a 42-minute documentary on Emma Goldman, the legendary American-Jewish anarchist and feminist who spent several periods of exile in Toronto. Coleman Romalis’s film Emma Goldman: The Anarchist Guest presented a refreshing and overdue account of Goldman’s productive years in Toronto. A recent book pays more attention…
Category: Biography
Legendary Passion: Hellman & Hammett
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From the moment Lillian Hellman met Dashiell Hammett in a Manhattan nightclub in 1930 until his death in 1961, she was “not only his best friend but also his only friend,” yet so thoroughly did she mythologize their relationship, and so widespread was her reputation for lying, that Gore Vidal once wickedly pondered: “Did anyone…
Mordechai Richler bio
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A new critical biography of Mordecai Richler by Reinhold Kramer, a Manitoba English professor, offers an engaging, thorough and microscopic examination of the life and letters of the iconic Canadian Jewish novelist and essayist, complete with some penetrating psychological insights. In researching Mordecai Richler: Leaving St. Urbain (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), Kramer attained access to…
Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer
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Louis B. Mayer, the Hollywood titan who built and ran Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as his personal fiefdom for three decades, was “probably the greatest single force in the development of the motion picture industry to the heights of prosperity and influence it finally attained,” according to Variety, the film industry Bible. To those who knew him, Mayer…
Salinger bio is balanced, thorough
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Kenneth Slawenski’s J. D. Salinger: A Life, published by Random House just one year after its subject’s death at age 91, is an impressive, balanced, thorough and masterful literary biography of one of America’s most famous — and famously reclusive — authors. Salinger’s most famous character, Holden Caulfield of Catcher in The Rye fame, once…
Morgentaler: a ‘difficult hero’
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As Catherine Dunphy was in the early stages of researching her newly-published biography Morgantaler: A Difficult Hero, Canada’s well-known abortion crusader asked her over lunch if she would like to “witness a procedure.” A short time later, Dunphy was chatting at Morgantaler’s Toronto clinic with a stripper named Dominique, eleven weeks pregnant, as the doctor…
Through the Eyes of The Eagle
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When Russian-Polish immigrant Hirsch Wolofsky decided to launch a Yiddish daily newspaper in Montreal in August 1907, it was clearly an idea whose time had come. Impoverished Russian-Jewish masses, fleeing pogroms, revolution and war, had begun settling in Montreal in record numbers. Strangers in a strange land, they read New York Yiddish papers like the…
Gone but not forgotten: author Margaret Mitchell
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Timorous and untested as an author, Margaret Mitchell persuaded herself during her seven-year literary labour that the manuscript she was working on was so terrible it would never be printed. Like a woman enceinte but too modest or superstitious to tell anyone, she kept the project a secret from friends and acquaintances. Only her husband…
