Since I first started writing professionally nearly 35 years ago, I’ve always held the dream of getting published in the New Yorker. So far, it hasn’t happened. As the saying goes, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else what’s a heaven for? In the meantime, I’ve read many interesting books about the celebrated Manhattan-based…
Wex: kvetching all the way to the bank
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Bouquets, encomiums, kudos and raves have deservedly been heaped upon Toronto’s own Michael Wex for this splendid and erudite treatise Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (HarperCollins softcover) which has catapulted him from near-obscurity onto the New York Times bestseller list. Some of us know Wex for his storytelling abilities…
Ravvin’s scholarly ‘House of Words’
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In A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity and Memory (McGill-Queens, 1998), Norman Ravvin brings a personal level to a collection of scholarly essays that are mostly about Jewish literature. In the introduction, he briefly describes his grandfather’s experience as an itinerant shochet or ritual slaughterer on the Prairies in the 1930s. Author of Sex,…
Sherman’s ‘Void and Voice’
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Void & Voice: Essays on Literary and Historical Currents by Kenneth Sherman (Mosaic Press, 1998) opens with two short gem-like reminiscences, The Tailor Shop and Silver Braids, recalling the author’s grandfather and grandmother, respectively. Early in the century, Sherman’s grandfather opened Sherman Custom Tailors at College and Bathurst streets in Toronto, an establishment that brims…
A search for six of the Six Million
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Sometimes when author Daniel Mendelsohn was a boy, elderly relatives would cry at the sight of him, so great was his resemblance to his great-uncle Shmiel Jaeger. From some handwriting on the back of a photograph, Mendelsohn knew that Shmiel and his wife Ester and their daughters Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele and Bronia had been “killed…
Marmur ‘On Being A Jew’
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The Holy Blossom Temple has just published On Being A Jew: A Reform Perspective, a new book of writings (1994) by Rabbi Dow Marmur to mark his tenth anniversary as spiritual leader of the Temple, home of the largest Reform congregation in Canada. “This book was the alternative to a dinner,” said Rabbi Marmur at…
‘Devil in Babylon’ astute study of jazz age
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Allan Levine, the hybrid Winnipeg novelist, historian and school teacher, says he is putting his Jewish detective hero Sam Klein on the shelf for a while, even though his trio of Sam Klein mystery novels “has done well in Canada and in Germany, where I did a five-city book tour last fall.” The Sam Klein…
‘Garden of Beasts’ is chilling non-fiction
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William E. Dodd, the United States’ newly appointed ambassador to Germany in 1933, was a Jeffersonian democrat, a history professor working on a volume on the old American South, and a Sunday farmer with old-fashioned values who seemed so out of step with his new posting that one magazine called him “a square academic peg…
Close Up: Cecil B. DeMille
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Cecil B. DeMille and the Golden Calf, a 508-page hardcover biography by Simon Louvish (Faber & Faber, 2008) covers the life and career of the legendary American film director from his birth in 1881 to his death in 1958, two years after he completed his last and most famous film, The Ten Commandments. DeMille always…
Shteyngart shines in Super Sad True Love Story
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Gary Shteyngart, the Russian-born Jewish writer who emigrated to America in 1979 at the age of seven, spoke only Russian in his parents’ home and did not lose his Russian accent until he was a teenager. His third novel, Super Sad True Love Story, from which he is scheduled to read at the International Festival…
