Bernard Wasserman and Renata Moon, the central characters in Benevolence, are a middle-aged, childless couple straining to regain their former closeness even as they struggle with barriers that separate them from their clients in their professional lives, he as a doctor who assesses patients involved in organ transplants, she as a psychotherapist who helps patients…
Tag: literary
100 Years Ago: Toronto’s Dickens society in 1912
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From the Star Weekly, February 3, 1912 Toronto boasts the largest Dickens society in the world Centenary of Famous Novelist Will Be Celebrated with Much Feeling Next Wednesday — Over 1,000 Members in Dickens Fellowship Next Wednesday (February 7, 1912), the centenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, will be celebrated throughout the English-speaking world…
New story collection from Nathan Englander
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You remember Nathan Englander. He’s the former yeshiva bocher turned short story writer who dazzled the critics about a dozen years ago with For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, a debut collection of stories that inspired raves and comparisons to Babel, Malamud and Singer. Not even his subsequent novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, could…
Mature writer Jacqueline Park scores with first novel
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After a distinguished career as a television scriptwriter and a professor of dramatic writing, Winnipeg-born Jacqueline Park, at 72, has achieved every writer’s dream: an acclaimed and commercially successful first novel. The book, a sweeping historical epic of the Italian Renaissance, is called The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi. Published by the prestigious American…
ADD fails to slow 67-year-old author
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Alvin Abram says he learned early in life that if you have a lemon, you have to learn to make lemonade. The 67-year-old author, speaker, businessman and award-winning volunteer has coped with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) since childhood and has faced a number of crises head on. He married Marilyn Epstein in 1960, and together…
Singer’s literary legacy appraised at his centenary
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In the early 1920s, a young man who proofread copy for a Yiddish literary magazine in Warsaw asked the editor to consider publishing a short story he’d written. After due consideration, the editor said he found the story greatly flawed, but would publish it anyhow. And what was wrong with it? the brash novice wanted…
Ruth Wisse: a litterateur with political smarts
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Ruth Wisse, the noted author and professor of Yiddish literature, told a large gathering at the Leah Posluns Theatre during the 16th annual Jewish Book Fair that she was greatly influenced in her salad days by a circle of New York liberal intellectuals that included Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Harold Rosenberg as well as “my…
Book Review: The Hare with Amber Eyes
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Edmund de Waal, London-based author of The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss, has described this memorable book as “a biography of a collection and the biography of my family.” The collection he refers to is an assortment of some 264 netsuke, tiny elegant figurines carved by Japanese craftsmen in…
A compendium of Canadian Jews in the arts
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Note: this compendium of Canadian Jews in the arts appeared in a special supplement of the Canadian Jewish News in 2005. * * * Jewish poets were composing lines and Jewish painters composing scenes long before Canada was founded; and, as evidenced in the Canadian Jewish New’s weekly Eye on Arts column, there is no…
Cliff Goldfarb organizes conference on Arthur Conan Doyle
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It’s “elementary” that Toronto lawyer, author and “bootmaker” Clifford Goldfarb would be centrally involved in organizing the Conan Doyle conference slated for Toronto later this month (October 2006). A fan of Conan Doyle since his youth, Goldfarb is vice-chair of the Friends of the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection at the Toronto Reference Library and former…
