Winnipeg writer Allan Levine has introduced a Jewish literary detective in his first novel, The Blood Libel (Great Plains Fiction). The novel is set in Winnipeg’s North End in 1911, when the streets were teeming with impoverished immigrants. Levine’s protagonist, 28-year-old Sam Klein, works in a brothel and turns gumshoe after a rabbi is accused…
Tag: canada
Kacer’s Hiding Edith & Gabi’s Dresser
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Once upon a time, Kathy Kacer’s mother, Gabi, hid from the Nazis in a wooden dresser in her family home in Czechoslovakia. Gabi was then a girl whose survival depended on successfully eluding the German soldiers who were rounding up the Jews in her town. Little could she have known that seven decades later, her…
Barney Danson (1921-2011)
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Barnett (Barney) Danson, the Canadian politician and Cabinet minister, died October 17, 2011 at the age of 90. Born to a Jewish family in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, Danson joined the Queen’s Own Rifles in 1939, rose to Lieutenant Colonel and lost an eye in the Battle of Normandy. He returned to Canada and joined his…
Obit: Roger Boisvert, internet pioneer in Japan
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From The Toronto Globe and Mail, 2001 If it is true that part of Roger Boisvert’s phenomenal success as an internet pioneer in Japan may be attributed to his being in the right place at the right time, that luck failed him miserably on September 30, 2001. After taking a wrong turnoff on a Los…
Obit: Eric Armour Beecroft (1903-2001)
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Eric Armour Beecroft, a Toronto-born political economist who worked for the U.S. Roosevelt administration during the Second World War and helped establish the World Bank, has died (2001) in Toronto of pneumonia. He was 98. Through a diverse and illustrious career that stretched from the 1920s through the 1970s, Prof. Beecroft held professorships at universities…
The 2002 arson attack at Toronto’s Anshei Minsk
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The morning after firefighters quenched a late-night arsonist’s blaze at Toronto’s Anshei Minsk Synagogue, congregants arrived to a chilling sight: thousands of prayer and holy books, charred by fire and soaked by firefighters’ hoses, were littered across the building’s front steps and the adjoining sidewalk. While the building sustained damage estimated at several thousand dollars,…
Norman Levine’s ‘The Ability to Forget’
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The Ability to Forget, a compelling new collection of short stories by Canadian expatriate writer Norman Levine, is a welcome addition to his much-praised ouevre, which includes By A Frozen River, Canada Made Me and other celebrated collections going back decades. Levine’s trademark first-person narration is usually as sparse as it is sparkling. These 15…
Kaminkers come together in Toronto
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About 220 relatives of the Kaminker family, all descended from a common ancestor born about 1806 in Pomuran, Galicia, are preparing to come together for a four-day reunion this weekend in Toronto. Besides Toronto, participants are coming from Buffalo, Detroit, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Dallas and other American cities, as well as from Argentina, France, Ukraine…
Find your family’s passenger lists
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As I am researching the history of my mother’s huge Toronto mishpocha (family), I’ve attempted to locate as many ships’ passenger manifests as possible showing the arrival of relatives to Canada from their various towns in Belarus, beginning about a century ago. The recently established web site of the National Archives’s Canadian Genealogy Centre (www.genealogy.gc.ca)…
Pierre Berton’s ‘No Jews Need Apply’
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Pierre Berton’s column “No Jews Need Apply,” which originally appeared in Maclean’s in November 1948 and was reprinted in last week’s CJN, offered a penetrating look at the discreet, country-club-style antisemitism that was rife in Canadian society. Berton, who died last month, pointed out that people with names like Greenberg were frequently denied job interviews,…
