Some years ago, shortly after my 90th birthday, I wrote an autobiography. The exercise helped me recall many episodes from my more than eight decades in Toronto since coming here with my family from England at the beginning of the First World War. As I described in the book, I had a multifaceted career. I…
Tag: history
The Jews of Curacao
by •
Jewish passengers on Caribbean cruises often become excited after their ship docks at Curacao, the little stringbean-shaped isle 63 km off the coast of Venezuela, when they discover that the island is home to a Jewish community with roots that go back nearly 400 years. A rugged and hilly outcropping, Curacao is part of the…
A daughter tells her mother’s story
by •
Shortly after her mother Frances died in 1989, writer Helen Epstein began visiting the university library near her Boston-area home, browsing through books on death, on Jews and on Central Europe. “I was mourning my mother,” she explains in her latest book Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History, “and if…
Descendants of Michigan’s first Jewish settler ‘reunite’
by •
About 60 descendants of Ezekiel Solomons, an 18th-century Jewish fur trader who operated a trading post in what is now Michigan, gathered recently for a first family reunion at Fort Michilimackinac in Mackinaw City, Michigan, about 50 miles south of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Sheldon and Judith Godfrey, a husband-and-wife-team of historians from Toronto, were…
Postcards from the past
by •
A picture, according to proverb, is worth a thousand words, but sometimes the power of a photograph to illuminate a setting seems to go well beyond the descriptive abilities of language. Genealogists are often keen, therefore, to find good generic photographs, illustrations and other visual materials to enhance their family tree research. As defined by…
Rabbinic ancestry? Prove it first
by •
Arthur Kurzweil, the pioneering American Jewish genealogist, tells a remarkable story about how a passing remark from his mother’s cousin, Maurice, led him to a significant family discovery. Maurice recalled being told after playing a childhood prank, “That’s no way to behave, especially since you are an ‘ainicle’ of the Stropkover Rebbe.” Learning that the…
Of Berliners, Oppenheimers and Rothschilds
by •
From about 1840 to roughly 1900, one sort of Jewish immigrant was so familiar in North American cities that he was caricatured in novels, newspapers articles and comic strips. According to the stereotype, he was a prosperous merchant, garbed in bowler hat, business suit, and thick moustache. He manufactured or traded in pianos, fine watches,…
History of anti-semitism within the Social Credit
by •
Norman Jaques, a former Social Credit MP from Alberta, earned a special place in the annals of Canadian antisemitism 60 years ago when he wrote a virulently anti-semitic letter on House of Commons letterhead, thus tarring two reputable institutions with a single brush. In the summer of 1943, as the Nazi Holocaust was raging in…
A search for six of the Six Million
by •
Sometimes when author Daniel Mendelsohn was a boy, elderly relatives would cry at the sight of him, so great was his resemblance to his great-uncle Shmiel Jaeger. From some handwriting on the back of a photograph, Mendelsohn knew that Shmiel and his wife Ester and their daughters Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele and Bronia had been “killed…
‘Devil in Babylon’ astute study of jazz age
by •
Allan Levine, the hybrid Winnipeg novelist, historian and school teacher, says he is putting his Jewish detective hero Sam Klein on the shelf for a while, even though his trio of Sam Klein mystery novels “has done well in Canada and in Germany, where I did a five-city book tour last fall.” The Sam Klein…
