David Bezmozgis, celebrated author of the prize-winning book Natasha and Other Stories, was on skates in North York Centennial Arena recently, along with a camera crew and a group of teenaged actors in skates and hockey uniforms. All were involved in filming a scene from Victoria Day, a feature film that Bezmozgis is directing, based…
Tag: canada
Melech Grafstein and Sholem Aleichem
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It was just over a century ago, in 1908, that a young Jewish lad in Warsaw, Poland, had a brief personal encounter with Sholom Aleichem that he would remember for the rest of his life. Melech Grafstein, then a 15-year-old Bundist and Yiddish theatre devotee, had earlier seen him reading on stage and also davening…
Roskies’ Yiddishlands is evocative memoir
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Soon after her arrival in Canada in 1940, Masha Roskies sat down to a meal at her sister-in-law’s house in Montreal and, seeing that only “Canadian bread” (the white, fluffy stuff called Wonder Bread) was on the table, asked for a piece of real bread instead. When her aunt curtly replied that “this was what…
Montreal novel wins Jewish Book Award (2009)
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The White Space Between, the novel by Montrealer Ami Sands Brodoff that won the 2009 Canadian Jewish Book Award for fiction, focuses on Willow Ives and her mother, Jane Ives, a Czech-born Holocaust survivor formerly known as Jana Ivanova, and Willow’s need to understand the persistent gaps in her mother’s past. Much of the story…
Cary Fagan’s Valentine’s Fall
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Huddie Rosen leaves North York after high school, acquires a wife and kids and alternate world as a bluegrass musician in Prague, then revisits his former haunts in Toronto as his marriage and alternate world seem on the verge of collapse. But there’s much more to Valentine’s Fall, the latest novel by Toronto author Cary…
Sherman, Wiseman, Michaels, Shrayer (for Chanukah)
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Anyone who cares about the state of contemporary Jewish writing should not neglect to read What the Furies Bring, a new book of essays by Toronto essayist-poet Kenneth Sherman (Porcupine’s Quill). By itself, Sherman’s choice of subject matter is compelling. His essay topics include “Yiddish and the Jewish Canon,” “Anne Frank and the Search for…
Winterhouse won fiction prize for good reason
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If truth were told, not all past winners of the fiction prize in the annual Helen & Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Awards have been outstanding reads. Once in a rare while a winner has been selected merely because it was the best of a bad lot and pickings were slim that year. Fortunately, that’s…
Homel’s ‘Midway’
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The first several chapters of David Homel’s sixth novel Midway are written with such sure-footedness of structure as to float the promise of a story that would really be going places. The protagonist is Ben Allan, a middle-aged Montreal college prof who writes an award-winning paper on an obscure 19th-century psychological condition called dromomania, an…
Ravvin’s ‘Joyful Child’
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At the heart of The Joyful Child, the new novel by Norman Ravvin (Gaspareau Press) is a subtle, charming sketch of a father-son relationship. The joyful child of the title is four-year-old Nick, innocent, playful, wide-eyed and curious. His father is Paul, whose life seems to be drifting away from its moorings even as his…
A Trove of Yiddish Letters
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North York resident Debbie Rose, who has been fervently researching her family tree for the past several years, has found a large trove of old Yiddish letters of historic significance that she hopes to get translated into English. The letters, some dating back to the end of the 19th century, belong to a relative in…
