When Toronto author Cary Fagan began writing the first draft of the novel that would become Sleeping Weather (Porcupine’s Quill), he had little notion that its protagonist, Leon Stone, had been in prison or that Leon’s father, Mordecai, had been an habitue of the racetrack. “I knew nothing about the racetrack,” says Fagan. “When I…
Tag: novel
Howard Engel’s Memory Book
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Howard Engel, creator of the popular Jewish literary detective Benny Cooperman, was perplexed to discover, one morning about four years ago, that the pages of his morning newspaper seemed filled with an unfamiliar foreign typescript, resembling Serbo-Croatian. Actually, an overnight stroke had left him with alexia sine agraphia, a rare mental condition that had deprived…
Matt Cohen’s Last Seen
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Matt Cohen strides into the Future Cafe on Bloor Street West wearing a hat that looks suspiciously like the hat favoured by one of the two brothers who are the main characters in his latest novel, Last Seen (Knopf). Over a cup of coffee, however, the fifty-four-year-old Kingston-born novelist insists that it isn’t strictly necessary…
Burstow’s House on Lippincott
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Bonnie Burstow had been thinking about writing a non-fiction book about “trans-generational trauma in Holocaust survivor families,” but then she decided to handle the subject as a novel instead. “I wanted something that would appeal to a broader audience than Jews and psychologists,” explains the 61-year-old psychotherapist and instructor at OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies…
Appignanesi’s Losing the Dead
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Lisa Appignanesi, a child of Holocaust survivors who grew up in Montreal, recounts her parents’ wartime experiences in Losing the Dead (McArthur & Co., 2000), a family memoir that takes the form of a personal quest of research and discovery. Appignanesi (nee Borensztejn), born in postwar Poland and now living in London, has already proved her…
Two by Safran Foer
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Quick: can you name two prominent authors who made stunning literary debuts while still in their early 20s, each with an effervescent and picaresque first novel that contains a set of smaller stories within the novelistic framework? Hint: one is contemporary Jewish-American, the other British Victorian. Hailed by the New York-based Forward newspaper as one…
Reconstructing Hungarian-Jewish world
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As Montreal-area author Elaine Kalman Naves was preparing to write the book that eventually became Journey To Vaja: Reconstructing the World of a Hungarian-Jewish Family (McGill-Queen’s University Press), she considered carefully whether to present the story as a non-fiction chronicle or as a novel. The book tells the story of the Weinbergers, a farming family…
Yehuda Elberg: Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man
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“A literary master living among us” is how the influential Globe and Mail newspaper described Montreal author Yehuda Elberg after his two brilliant novels, Ship Of The Hunted and The Empire of Kalman the Cripple, rolled off the presses nearly four years ago. Translated from the original Yiddish, the books were published in English by…
Obit: Yiddish writer Yehuda Elberg (1912-2003)
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From The Globe & Mail Six years after his two brilliant novels, Ship Of The Hunted and The Empire of Kalman the Cripple, rolled off the presses in English for the first time, Yiddish author Yehuda Elberg has died in his sleep in Montreal at the age of 91. A Holocaust survivor who helped set…
Talking politics with A. B. Yehoshua
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Like a latter-day prophet of Israel, the distinguished Jerusalem-born novelist A.B. Yehoshua utters a variety of lamentations — mostly of a political nature — and explains that “it is the task of the intellectual to say what he thinks.” His biggest lament seems centered around Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he accuses of poisoning…
