Part II of A Series of Sketches by a Prominent Bachelor, written for the Canadian Jewish Chronicle Read Part One When I reached the age of 21, I had become the foreman of my department and was earning $25 a week. This was in the days when a man who earned fifteen hundred a year had a…
From the Toronto Star Weekly, July 5, 1913 One popular fellow-singer proposed a jaunt to the Eastern States — Stopped on Yonge Street — How a pretty pianist saved herself from pursuer — jabbed him with hatpin If a girl in any vocation in Toronto would be thought safe from molestation you naturally would presume…
Exclusive Report, February 3, 2013 Former Toronto Mayor David Crombie easily charmed a full-house audience at a January 30th meeting of the North Toronto Historical Society in Northern District Library. Although Crombie’s advertised topic was “North Toronto 1912, Then and Now,” references to North Toronto were few and far between. But it didn’t seem to…
Our first day in St. Petersburg, Russia, we took a tour that showed off the magnificence of this city of exquisite palaces, cathedrals, prospekts and Venetian-style canals. We saw the Peter and Paul Fortress, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the Admiralty, the Church of the Resurrection, Nevsky Prospekt, Smolny Cathedral, miscellaneous grand palaces, Palace Square and the…
It’s been more than 40 years since comedy writer Mel Brooks first conceived of the idea for what would become The Producers, the $10-million musical that opened December 11, 2003 at Toronto’s Canon Theatre, courtesy of real-life theatre producers Ed and David Mirvish. In town for the opening, Brooks appeared on stage at the show’s…
“Harpo Marx, having played a mute in all his films, was probably the most articulate of all the Marx brothers,” declares Barbara McGurn as we sit in the Oak Room of New York’s famed Algonquin Hotel, awaiting the entrance of cabaret performer K.T. Sullivan. The next moment McGurn, who is equal parts literary scholar and…
Frank Shuster, the straight man in the legendary comedy team of Wayne and Shuster, has died in Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital of pneumonia at the age of 85. He and his partner Johnny Wayne, who died in 1990, performed as a comic duo for 56 continuous years since first teaming up together for some comic…
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:…
For a writer who has staked out his literary territory somewhere between Franz Kafka and Edgar Allen Poe, and who typically weaves Jewish themes into his work, the name Norman Ravvin — with its etymological allusions both to Poe’s “raven” and the word “rabbi” — seems almost too linguistically appropriate to be cited as the…
Well over a century after the fact, there can be little pain in admitting that a distant cousin of mine, born to wealth and social status, was the subject of a spectacular bankruptcy proceeding in London, England in the 1860s. An account of his failed business affairs appeared in the London Times. I suspect the…
