As Montreal-area author Elaine Kalman Naves was preparing to write the book that eventually became Journey To Vaja: Reconstructing the World of a Hungarian-Jewish Family (McGill-Queen’s University Press), she considered carefully whether to present the story as a non-fiction chronicle or as a novel. The book tells the story of the Weinbergers, a farming family…
Tag: history
Mary Antin’s The Promised Land
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Mary Antin, born in the Lithuanian (now Belarussian) town of Polotsk in 1881, recorded her memoirs of the Old Country and of coming to America in The Promised Land, a book first published in 1911. The Promised Land is a valuable first-person account of the myriad concerns and experiences surrounding the journey from the squalid…
Radiant Days, Haunted Nights: Yiddish Tales
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Radiant Days, Haunted Nights: Great Tales from the Treasury of Yiddish Folk Literature (Overlook Press) presents an intriguing collection of obscure Yiddish folk tales, translated for the first time by Joachim Neugroschel and spanning more than four centuries. The collection begins with the midrashic “Song of Isaac,” written by an anonymous author about 1510, and concludes…
Journey to a 19th-century shtetl
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Back about a century and a half ago, the town of Kamenets was a typical Russian-Polish shtetl consisting “of 250 old houses, black and small with shingled roofs,” and with some 450 Jews listed in the Revizski Skazki, the official government registry. However, most of the town’s Jews did not appear in the registry. Fearful…
Appelfeld’s ‘Age of Wonders’
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Addressing the question “Is it possible to write fiction about the Holocaust?”, Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld told a large gathering in Toronto recently that man’s nature compels him “to express not only his joy but also his pain” and that concentration camp inmates sometimes sang songs that “were as mighty as the suffering from which…
The Dream of Scipio, by Ian Pears
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British author Iain Pears has created a literary character named Gersonides, based on the actual medieval French Jewish philosopher of the same name, known to Talmudists as Levi ben Gershom or by the acronym Ralbag. The character appears in Pears’s new novel, The Dream of Scipio (Knopf Canada, 2002), itself a complex intellectualized study of…
Harold Bloom’s Book of J
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She lived in Jerusalem almost 3,000 years ago, in the time of King Solomon and his hapless son and successor, Rehoboam. A contemporary of the historian who chronicled Solomon’s court, she wrote in the Phoenician-Old Hebrew script, probably using a reed pen on sheets of papyrus that were later glued into scrolls. Known to modern…
Historic plaque for Kensington Market
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Several hundred people attended a plaquing ceremony in the Kensington Market area on Sunday May 25 as a plaques was unveiled designating the once-Jewish neighbourhood in downtown Toronto as a national historic site. The event was sponsored by Parks Canada and included speeches by important delegates, including the Hon. Jason Kenney, secretary of state for…
Roskies’ Yiddishlands is evocative memoir
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Soon after her arrival in Canada in 1940, Masha Roskies sat down to a meal at her sister-in-law’s house in Montreal and, seeing that only “Canadian bread” (the white, fluffy stuff called Wonder Bread) was on the table, asked for a piece of real bread instead. When her aunt curtly replied that “this was what…
All Other Nights is Horn’s best yet
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Dara Horn’s third novel combines her trademark cleverness, depth of Jewish knowledge, and strong literary sensibility into a fast-paced adventure-intrigue in which Jewish characters make a significant difference in the American Civil War. Jacob Rappaport, the 19-year-old son of a New York industrialist, joins the Union Army rather than accept the poor match his father,…
