Frank Marsh was born in Lamaline, a remote coastal village in Newfoundland, and came to touch the lives of many people in Ontario, and even in distant India, by dint of his professional vision and dedication. A rural school-teacher who founded Newfoundland’s Eastern College and then became the province’s assistant deputy minister of education, Marsh…
Review: Sourcebook for Jewish Genealogies and Family Histories
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Sourcebook for Jewish Genealogies and Family Histories, by David. S. Zubatsky and Irwin M. Brent, is an updated edition, with substantial additions, of a two-volume bibliographic reference tool for genealogists that was published years ago. The revised work, published 1996, offers more than 22,000 entries pertaining to some 12,000 family names, culled from a variety of…
An encounter with David Cronenberg
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Twenty years ago this summer (i.e., the summer of 1974) this reporter was a 20-year-old film student at York University, who had been lucky enough to find some meager employment as a pre-production assistant for a $180,000-budget feature film being shot in Montreal. The working title was Orgy of the Blood Parasites, the director was…
Sholem Asch Reconsidered
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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 —…
Memoir of a Russian Jewish Family
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Yesterday, A Memoir of a Russian Jewish Family by Miriam Shomer Zuner is a lovely reminiscence by Miriam Shomer Zunser, the American daughter of Yiddish novelist Nochim-Mayer Shaikevitsch. It was originally published in 1939 and a second edition, edited by Zunser’s granddaughter Emily Wortis Leider, was printed by Harper & Row in 1978. Zunser’s unself-conscious…
The Strange Case of Ben Hecht
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Eighty years ago this summer, in June 1931, New York publisher Covici Friede announced that A Jew in Love, a new novel by Ben Hecht (1894-1964), had been banned in Canada and in bookstores in Boston and other American cities. Anyone who opened the book — the front page of which described the Jewish protagonist…
Restoring Jewish heritage sites with Sam Gruber
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The first time Sam Gruber stepped inside the Tempel Synagogue in Krakow, Poland, he was “incredibly moved” by what he saw. Considered the lone surviving example of the great 19th-century synagogues of Poland, the sumptuously decorated Moorish-Gothic structure had been built as a Reform synagogue in 1862. It had been enlarged in 1892 and again…
Profile: Deepak Chopra, growth-industry guru
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From out of the infinite void comes a new book by Deepak Chopra — How To Know God: The Soul’s Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries — along with Chopra himself, fresh off an early-morning flight from Washington DC, visiting Toronto as part of an 18-city promotional tour. At 53, the Californian growth-industry guru appears…
A sketch of artist Gerald Gladstone
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Humanity’s future: will it be “earthbound” or “spacebound”? My uncle, the artist Gerald Gladstone, posed this question to me recently outside Yorkdale shopping centre in North York. We were standing in the parking lot near The Bay, beside one of his major works, a bronze colossus called Universal Man, which was installed there in late…
Novel highlights Jews in South Africa
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Libka Hoffman was born in Cape Town, South Africa soon after her Jewish parents emigrated there from Lithuania about 1930. But Libka — the protagonist of In A Pale Blue Light, an extraordinary first novel by Toronto writer Lily Poritz Miller — is radically at odds with her society. As she enters her teenage years…
