Martin Friedland, the University of Toronto law professor and author of an impressive and influential shelf of books, jokes that he’s not about to change the “O.C.” on his business cards to a “C.C.” just because the Governor General recently upgraded his status within the Order of Canada from “officer” to the much more distinguished…
Tag: canada
My Jerusalem, by Bronwyn Drainie
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Canadian writer Bronwyn Drainie, the wife of a newspaper reporter assigned to the Middle East, returned from Israel earlier this year (1994) after living in Jerusalem for two years, and promptly wrote a book capturing her unique perceptions as a self-styled “outsider” to both Jewish and Israeli society. My Jerusalem: Secular Adventures in the Holy…
A study of Toronto’s Orthodox Jews
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Etan Diamond, an American academic, has written a full-length study of the Orthodox Jewish community of Toronto and its pioneering movement northward from the inner city into the suburbs in the postwar era. Published recently by the University of North Carolina Press, Diamond’s And I Will Dwell in Their Midst: Orthodox Jews in Suburbia devotes…
Obit: MPP Lorne Henderson (1920-2002)
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Lorne Henderson, who represented the former Lambton riding in the Ontario Legislature for 23 years and served in cabinet for seven of those years, was a grass-roots politician who knew an astonishing number of his constituents by their first names. Raised on a farm in Enniskillen Township in southwestern Ontario, he was first elected to…
H. Halpern Esq. continues long family tradition
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“The name Halpern has been over the doors of men’s wear stores in this city for more than 75 years,” says Meredith Halpern, manager of H. Halpern Esq., an upscale boutique for gentlemen in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel on Toronto’s Front Street W. Generations of Torontonians bought their bar-mitzvah suits at the original…
Hundert’s study of 18th-century Opatow, Poland
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Professor Gershon Hundert, the distinguished historian and chair of the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University, beguiled an audience of Jewish genealogists last summer in New York with midrash-like tales of early Jewish history in Poland. For centuries, the Jews felt very comfortable in Poland, Hundert said, referring to stories that even the name…
From Kamenets-Podolsk to Winnipeg: The History of the Lechtziers
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Reuven Lexier, a Toronto orthopaedic surgeon, recently published this handsome 150-page volume that documents his family’s experience in Canada from the moment his great-great-grandparents, Shimon and Chana Lechtzier, settled in Winnipeg with their four sons and two daughters in 1882. Lexier spent about 10 years gathering the 196 photographs, archival documents, newspaper clippings and memorabilia…
House of Sand and Fog’s Vadim Perelman
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Vadim Perelman, the Hollywood commercial director who has made a remarkable debut as a feature-film director with the recently-released House of Sand and Fog, grew up in Kiev and immigrated as a teenager with his mother to Edmonton, where he finished high school and attended the University of Alberta. In a recent interview with the…
Conversation with screenwriter Len Blum
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Sitting in the study of his Forest Hill home, Len Blum hands the visitor a paperback copy of Howard Stern’s scatalogical memoir Private Parts, whose cover bears the promise, “Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture.” Then Blum — the 45-year-old, award-winning screenwriter who commutes regularly between Toronto and New York — admits that he’s…
Profile: Poet Seymour Mayne
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One needs a “strong sense of perseverance” to be a poet, says Seymour Mayne, the Ottawa professor and wordsmith whose recent slim volume September Rain (Mosaic Press) is the 29th book of poetry he’s published since 1964 — “ken eina hora, almost 41 years ago.” Educated at the Talmud Torah in his native Montreal, Mayne…
