A rare panoramic photograph of Toronto harbour, taken in 1910 from the top of one of the city’s first skyscrapers, has been transferred into video format and posted with some analysis and description onto YouTube. Toronto author and publisher Bill Gladstone, who maintains the website www.billgladstone.ca, came across the rare photograph in the US Library…
Sometime between 1905 and 1908, my mother’s grandparents said goodbye to their parents and their village of Zhlobin, Belarus, and brought their children with them to Canada. For decades, although they were divided by a wide gulf of geography and history, family members sent letters in Yiddish back and forth between the Old World and…
Sorel Etrog, one of Canada’s most notable sculptors, recently attended a ceremony in Reviers, a town along the Normandy coast of France, at which one of his works was unveiled to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Canadian landing on D-Day. The sculpture, called “Sunbird II,” is made of bronze, weighs about 900 pounds, and…
Producing an acclaimed first collection of short stories was a “snap” for Joan Oliver, a Toronto writer whose book Lines of Truth and Conversation merited inclusion in the Globe and Mail’s list of the 100 best books of 2005. “Snap” is the title of perhaps the collection’s most charming tale, about an eight-year-old girl’s search for…
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…
The following is a newspaper profile of newspaper vendor Sammy Lichtman that appeared in the Toronto Star on July 31, 1913 under the heading “Sammy Lichtman is Afraid to Go Home to Austria.” Lichtman, who was then 25 years old, went on to become a major newspaper distributor who built up a chain of newspaper stores.…
HOLY BLOSSOM’s Out of the Cold program, which has been operating at the mid-Toronto synagogue since the mid-1990s, continues to be one of the most excellent programs of its kind in the city. This is an article I wrote a few years ago for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. It was published in numerous cities across…
A. Douglas Tushingham, the Royal Ontario Museum’s chief archaeologist for 27 years, participated in many major international digs, including several in Jerusalem and Jericho with the eminent British archaeologist Dame Kathleen Kenyon, yet his greatest moment of glory may have come as a result of a spectacular project that had nothing to do with archaeology:…
Dr. Arthur Squires, former chief of medicine at Toronto’s Wellesley Hospital, was such an outstanding physician that many of his patients, colleagues and friends formed the Squires Club, an organization to honour him upon his retirement in 1974. Although Dr. Squires died in late June at the age of 92, the Squires Club lives on.…
Toronto native Ken Sherman loved fishing as a boy at Jackson’s Point, where his family had a summer cottage. But these days, whenever he tosses out a line, it’s usually a line of poetry. At 50, Sherman is celebrating the publication of his 10th book — The Well: New and Selected Poems (Wolsak and Wynn,…
