Eighty years ago, as Yiddish writer and playwright Sholem Asch celebrated his 50th birthday in 1930, he seemed to be riding on top of the world. His newest book, Fam Mabul, was a critical and popular success among Yiddish readers– it would soon become vastly more popular in its English translation as Three Cities —…
From the Canadian Jewish News, December 2004 What do you get when you put a popular shtetl folk tale into a pot and add some flavourful compositions for full orchestra, rich klezmer sounds, a pinch of Hanukkah seasoning and live narration by Barbara Budd, the Toronto-based actor and co-host of the immensely popular CBC radio…
“A literary master living among us” is how the influential Globe and Mail newspaper described Montreal author Yehuda Elberg after his two brilliant novels, Ship Of The Hunted and The Empire of Kalman the Cripple, rolled off the presses nearly four years ago. Translated from the original Yiddish, the books were published in English by…
A windowless, doorless chamber, set high up into the wall of an antiquated synagogue and accessible only by ladder, is not normally the sort of place to which a traveller dreams of arriving. However, it was precisely such a room that Solomon Schechter, a Cambridge professor of Talmudic literature, was determined to reach when he…
From the Canadian Jewish News, April 8, 2020 Note: I compiled this quiz for the Canadian Jewish News, and it ran as the cover story on the very last issue that was published. Answers appear below. ♦ QUESTIONS 1. What wartime Canadian novel dealt centrally with Jewish characters and themes and won a Governor General’s…
From the Canadian Jewish News, January 2013 London-based writer Salman Rushdie was happy to sell his novel The Satanic Verses to Viking Penguin in February 1988. But six months after the novel appeared, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him for his blasphemous insult “against Islam, the Prophet and the Qur’an.” Instantly he became…
From A Series of Sketches by a Prominent Bachelor, Canadian Jewish Chronicle, 1919 Read Part I Read Part II Part III (Continued from last week) From being foreman in a shop to being my own master was not such a big step after all, and I was barely twenty-four when I opened up a small factory…
Part II of A Series of Sketches by a Prominent Bachelor, written for the Canadian Jewish Chronicle Read Part One When I reached the age of 21, I had become the foreman of my department and was earning $25 a week. This was in the days when a man who earned fifteen hundred a year had a…
Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-old Author, by Herman Wouk (Simon & Schuster) ◊ Note: This review of Herman Wouk’s memoir was first published in 2016. Herman Wouk died on May 17, 2019, age 103. This slim volume, which the author describes as a “non-autobiography,” will be of special interest to people interested in…
Although his name may be little known even within the Canadian Jewish community, Meyer Joshua Nurenberger was an internationally-known Jewish writer and publisher who founded the Canadian Jewish News. During a journalistic career that stretched from the 1930s into the 1990s, Nurenberger interviewed Albert Einstein, covered the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, and was editor of…
