Devotion of Workers in Sweat Shops and Other East Side Hebrews to the Drama – The Productions of the Official Playwrights – Ways of the Yiddish Actors. From The New York Sun, October 18, 1896 New York is the only city in the world where the Jewish stage has achieved anything like prosperity. While in…
Born in Germany to Holocaust-survivor parents after World War Two, Toronto publisher Margie Wolfe has for many years been engaged in the pivotal task of exporting published Holocaust books to some 50 countries around the globe, both in their original English and translated into about 40 languages. Holocaust books for young readers are a main…
From Growing Up Jewish: Canadians tell their own stories (1997) My earlier recollection goesback to the very early 1920s, sitting on the stoop of our dry-goods store on Spadina Avenue and Baldwin Street (southeast corner), watching the Sunday evening church parade go by. These were the strollers emerging from two nearby Christian churches, the Western Congregational Church, just…
From Canadian Jewish News, February 2014 Aaron Lansky, president and founder of the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., announced at last summer’s Jewish genealogy conference in Boston that Yiddish over the next few years “will take its place as the first completely digitalized and accessible literature in human history.” The Yiddish Book Center is…
From the Canadian Jewish News, January 2014 Ninety years ago, New York newspaper editor Abraham Cahan was at the epicentre of international Jewish affairs — not a newsmaker himself but an opinion-maker, someone who had an extraordinary and powerful influence on the Jewish masses in New York, around the Diaspora and in pre-state Israel. As…
Suffering was Terrible — Little Children Lay Naked on the Bare Earth — Their Parents Half-Clad, Lay Beside Them — No Breeze in Narrow Alleys From The Toronto Star, July 4, 1911 If you really want to appreciate what a heat wave means, go through “The Ward.” You will see sights there that you have…
Literary critics often express hallowed praise for writers who have contributed brilliant works to English literature but whose first language was not English. Two supreme examples come to mind. Polish-born Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) did not learn English until he was in his twenties, yet he became one of the language’s great novelists and story tellers…
Even the children have their deposits — One lad of four opens his own account — Hard business to transact From the Toronto Daily Star, January 26, 1906 That Toronto in common with American cities has an increasing foreign population is shown in many ways, but in none more clearly than in the fact that…
An Actor Struts and Frets Across the Yiddish Stage No More By S. H. Abramson From the Canadian Jewish Standard, January 1937 The recent passing of my old friend Joe Gordon at the Mount Sinai Sanitarium, after an illness of six years, brings to mind a host of memories. During my last visit to Joe…
The following pages are from the souvenir booklet published by the Hebrew Sick Benefit Society of Toronto in 1935 upon the commemoration of its 35th anniversary. It contains many greetings, advertisements and other items from individual members, often listing family names and other details about family history. Most of the pages are in Yiddish. Each…
