Jewish and Mormon officials met this week to discuss allegations that church members are still posthumously baptizing many deceased Jews, including thousands of Holocaust victims. Seven years after the church signed an agreement to do all it could to stop the practice, new evidence has emerged that the church=s vast International Genealogical Index lists as…
Tag: American
More genealogical adventures (Jassem, McCartney)
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Peter Jassem’s surname was always a puzzle to him as he grew up in a Polish home in Krakow. Jassem certainly wasn’t a Polish name; neither was it Belarussian, Latvian or Ukrainian. His father said it may have come from the town of Jassy (Iasi) Romania but Peter wasn’t convinced and suspected the truth even…
It’s worth the trip to Salt Lake City
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As of this writing, more than 600 people have registered for the 20th International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, scheduled for Salt Lake City, July 9 to 14. Most are American but some will be coming from as far away as South America, Europe, Israel and Australia. Why are so many Jews shlepping to Utah? Along…
Klavir family ‘together again for the first time’
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Toronto legal secretary Debbie Klavir-Donda and her aunt, Shelagh Klavir, a travel agent, are preparing to welcome about 100 relatives to a family reunion next month at a resort in Huntsville, Ont. With the exception of their own small family circle in Toronto, all of the various Klavir relatives are flying in for the “reunion”…
Kerry family comes full circle
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About a century ago, Fritz Kohn, a 29-year-old Czech-born Jew living in Austria, visited a government office in Vienna and officially changed his name to Frederick Kerry, for all intents and purposes abandoning his Jewish heritage at the same time. When Kerry and family arrived at Ellis Island in 1905, they were listed as Germans…
Profile: Gail Carson Levine
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For New York-area author Gail Carson Levine, fairy tales sometimes do come true. The highly successful children’s author, who gave a reading recently (2004) at Toronto’s Bialik Day School, is the creator of Ella Enchanted, a young person’s novel that has been turned into a movie by Miramax Films. The film stars Anne Hathaway and…
Winchester on the Frisco quake of ’06
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Simon Winchester has just produced (1995) another non-fiction gem: A Crack in the Edge of The World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (HarperCollins). The bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa opens this recent non-fiction book with a view of the earth from the moon, and a description of…
Wisse’s Jewish Canon
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In 1859 a London literary professor, David Masson, made a notable attempt to classify the novel, which was still a relatively young phenomenon, into distinct categories or genres. Influenced by Aristotle, Masson mapped out 13 different categories of novel. As if anticipating the work of Northrup Frye a century later, he also presented a unified…
Two by Safran Foer
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Quick: can you name two prominent authors who made stunning literary debuts while still in their early 20s, each with an effervescent and picaresque first novel that contains a set of smaller stories within the novelistic framework? Hint: one is contemporary Jewish-American, the other British Victorian. Hailed by the New York-based Forward newspaper as one…
Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women
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A compelling short story anthology, Found Treasures: Stories By Yiddish Women Writers (Second Story Press, 1994) has sold more than 5,000 copies and has thus attained the status of a Canadian bestseller. The book has gone into a second printing and, according to co-editor Frieda Forman of Toronto, has been picked up as an alternate…
