For most of his adult life North York resident Mayer Kirshenblatt’s hobby was sailing and taking camping trips into the bush. But at his family’s repeated urging, the retired paint-and-wallpaper merchant took up the painter’s easel about 1990 to record on canvas the many colorful scenes he remembered from his boyhood in Poland. Kirshenblatt was…
Tag: Yiddish
Jerry Gray still traveling with Travellers
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By his own telling, Jerry Gray had one of the most thrilling experiences of his life in late June (2011). In front of a sold-out house at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall, he stood at the conductor’s podium, raised a baton, and led the 385-voice Mormon Tabernacle Choir and a full orchestra in a rousing rendition…
The man who rescued a million Yiddish books
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Some three decades ago, when Aaron Lansky and friends began climbing into Dumpsters to rescue discarded Yiddish books, he had no idea what sort of treasures might turn up or how far the venture would carry him. Today — one million books later — he is the founder and president of the National Yiddish Book…
ONE FOOT IN AMERICA: An overlooked classic of immigrant fiction
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It has been nearly half a century since American literary critics Irving Howe and Leslie Fiedler each cited a remarkable forgotten novel, Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, during a symposium on “The Most Neglected Books of the Past 25 Years.” Initially published in 1934, Call It Sleep sold a few thousand copies before sinking into…
Photos capture ‘the Way We Were’
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A photograph, the old saying goes, is worth a thousand words. Sometimes, however, a photograph’s worth cannot be measured in words. By capturing an ephemeral moment in exquisite detail, a photograph can be far more articulate than language. Irreplaceable images of our culture from days past can be infinitely instructive as to how we lived.…
Postcards from the past
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A picture, according to proverb, is worth a thousand words, but sometimes the power of a photograph to illuminate a setting seems to go well beyond the descriptive abilities of language. Genealogists are often keen, therefore, to find good generic photographs, illustrations and other visual materials to enhance their family tree research. As defined by…
Wex: kvetching all the way to the bank
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Bouquets, encomiums, kudos and raves have deservedly been heaped upon Toronto’s own Michael Wex for this splendid and erudite treatise Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (HarperCollins softcover) which has catapulted him from near-obscurity onto the New York Times bestseller list. Some of us know Wex for his storytelling abilities…
Ravvin’s scholarly ‘House of Words’
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In A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity and Memory (McGill-Queens, 1998), Norman Ravvin brings a personal level to a collection of scholarly essays that are mostly about Jewish literature. In the introduction, he briefly describes his grandfather’s experience as an itinerant shochet or ritual slaughterer on the Prairies in the 1930s. Author of Sex,…
“Why I left the Old Country”
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In 1942 the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which had only recently relocated from Vilna to New York City, sponsored a contest for the best autobiography by a Jewish immigrant on the theme, “Why I Left the Old Country and What I Have Accomplished in America.” More than 200 autobiographical essays were submitted, written mostly…
Adventures of a Yiddish Lecturer
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I believe that Isaac Bashevis Singer, Norman Levine, Philip Roth and probably numerous other Jewish writers have penned comical reminiscences about their experiences delivering lectures on various subjects to Jewish audiences. To this list we must add the relatively unknown name of Abraham Shulman. An American essayist and former contributor to the New York Daily…
