Lisa Appignanesi, a child of Holocaust survivors who grew up in Montreal, recounts her parents’ wartime experiences in Losing the Dead (McArthur & Co., 2000), a family memoir that takes the form of a personal quest of research and discovery. Appignanesi (nee Borensztejn), born in postwar Poland and now living in London, has already proved her…
Tag: canada
Wisse’s Jewish Canon
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In 1859 a London literary professor, David Masson, made a notable attempt to classify the novel, which was still a relatively young phenomenon, into distinct categories or genres. Influenced by Aristotle, Masson mapped out 13 different categories of novel. As if anticipating the work of Northrup Frye a century later, he also presented a unified…
Adele Wiseman’s ‘Road Not Taken’
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It has been 50 years since Winnipeg-born writer Adele Wiseman scored the highly impressive professional coup of winning the Governor General’s literary award for her first novel, The Sacrifice. But Wiseman, who was 28 in 1956 and widely considered to be at the start of a very promising career as a novelist, disappointed the expectations…
Survivors: stories by Chava Rosenfarb
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Chava Rosenfarb, the celebrated Yiddish writer who has lived in Canada for more than half a century, has finally seen one of her books get published in her adoptive homeland. With the publication in 2005 of Survivors (Cormorant Books), a collection of seven short stories about Holocaust survivors, Toronto-based Cormorant Books has become the first…
Obit: Yiddish writer Yehuda Elberg (1912-2003)
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From The Globe & Mail Six years after his two brilliant novels, Ship Of The Hunted and The Empire of Kalman the Cripple, rolled off the presses in English for the first time, Yiddish author Yehuda Elberg has died in his sleep in Montreal at the age of 91. A Holocaust survivor who helped set…
Biblical novel set in 1st century
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Andrew Sanders, a resident of both Toronto and Haifa, is the author of a new work of historical fiction, Hanina My Son: A Novel of the First Century (Gefen, 2001), which has already appeared in Israel in Hebrew translation. Hanina My Son is set during a time of fighting between the Pharisees and Sadducees, the…
Edeet Ravel’s Ten Thousand Lovers
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Montreal resident Edeet Ravel admits that she’s been fairly negligent until recently about getting her writing into print. A teacher at a Montreal-area high school until last year, the Israeli-born author expresses amazement that the British publisher Headline found her letter on its slushpile of unsolicited manuscripts and was interested enough to ask to see…
Obit: Miriam Waddington (2004)
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To the many friends and critics who feel that Canadian-Jewish poet and writer Miriam Waddington did not get the recognition she deserved in life, her recent death in Vancouver seems especially sad and ironic because it occurred only weeks before she would have gained what may very well be her largest popular reading audience and…
Sugarman’s Forms of Gone
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Toronto-born poet Yerra Sugarman has won a prestigious American literary award for a debut collection of poems, Forms of Gone, that captures the experience of being a daughter of Holocaust survivors growing up in a survivor community in north Toronto. A university instructor who has lived in New York for more than 20 years, Sugarman…
Simchovitch’s Fiery Mountain
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Readers of the Yiddish Forward may have noticed several published notices in the New York-based newspaper a while ago congratulating Toronto poet and writer Simcha (Sam) Simchovitch for passing the milestone of his 85th birthday. Simchovitch is known as one of Canada’s senior Yiddish writers, yet he’s also achieved recognition for his literary contributions in…
