In a literary career that stretched roughly from 1940 to his death in 1986, Bernard Malamud wrote a handful of acclaimed novels, including The Natural, The Fixer and The Assistant. Between the novels, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author refined his artistry by writing short stories. For the first time, all of Malamud’s short fiction has been…
Tag: American
Kurzweil’s classic ‘From Generation to Generation’
by •
It has been almost 25 years since novice Jewish genealogist Arthur Kurzweil wandered into the Jewish Division of the New York Public Library to search the card catalog for references to the Galician shtetl of Dobromil, where his father and numerous ancestors had lived. Kurzweil had heard enough family legends and stories about the town…
A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico
by •
It has been only about two decades since tales began surfacing in the popular press of Hispanic-Catholic families in the American Southwest who lit candles in secret on Friday evenings and retained other long-held family customs bearing unmistakeable resemblance to Jewish rites. Some families abstained from work or travel on Saturday, circumcised newborn boys, drained…
Film: Mendelsohn’s memorable Judy Berlin
by •
It’s hard to convey the essence of Judy Berlin (1999), though not the excited reactions it tends to generate. An American-made black-and-white feature written and directed by Eric Mendelsohn, Judy Berlin focuses on the intertwined lives and aspirations of a curious ensemble of characters (some Jewish) living in a Long Island commuter town called Babylon…
Schmelvis: the ‘King’ as Jewish
by •
Evan Beloff, co-producer of a new documentary that demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that American rock idol Elvis Presley was Jewish according to halakha or Jewish law, was only half-joking when he said that the film uses Elvis “as a metaphor for identity — I think it’s a quest film about Jewish identity.” Titled “Schmelvis:…
Of bats, owls and the Center for Millennial Studies
by •
Owing to a paucity of documentation, historians will probably never resolve their centuries-old debate over how long or how deeply the masses of European were gripped by a millennial fever at the close of the first Christian millennium around the year 1000. Was there widespread hysteria and terror, as many historians of the “romantic school”…
Find your family’s passenger lists
by •
As I am researching the history of my mother’s huge Toronto mishpocha (family), I’ve attempted to locate as many ships’ passenger manifests as possible showing the arrival of relatives to Canada from their various towns in Belarus, beginning about a century ago. The recently established web site of the National Archives’s Canadian Genealogy Centre (www.genealogy.gc.ca)…
Genealogy as a labour of love
by •
“I’m working on a book of family history,” Sara Edell Kelman declares, as she shows me her massive collection of archival documents, ketubot, photographs, Yiddish letters and other family memorabilia, spilling out of diverse albums, binders and boxes. “No, it’s more than one book — it’s a series of books. There’s a lot of stuff…
The sound of no hands clapping
by •
What is the best sort of critical reception to give a newly-published book of revisionist history that exonerates Hitler, minimizes the evil of the Holocaust, and knowingly perpetrates other intellectual frauds? For Michael R. Marrus, the author and professor of European history at the University of Toronto, the answer is simple: no critical reception at…
Al Waxman is ‘Lost in Yonkers’
by •
With the production of Lost In Yonkers that opened Feb. 4 at the Atlantis Theatre, director Al Waxman has delivered his third theatrical hit in as many years to the Toronto theatre-going public. This production of Neil Simon’s Tony and Pulitzer prize-winning 1990 play is solidly put together, delivering all the laughs, drama, pathos and…
