Sitting in the study of his Forest Hill home, Len Blum hands the visitor a paperback copy of Howard Stern’s scatalogical memoir Private Parts, whose cover bears the promise, “Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture.” Then Blum — the 45-year-old, award-winning screenwriter who commutes regularly between Toronto and New York — admits that he’s…
Profile: Poet Seymour Mayne
by •
One needs a “strong sense of perseverance” to be a poet, says Seymour Mayne, the Ottawa professor and wordsmith whose recent slim volume September Rain (Mosaic Press) is the 29th book of poetry he’s published since 1964 — “ken eina hora, almost 41 years ago.” Educated at the Talmud Torah in his native Montreal, Mayne…
Rafi Aaron on Osip Mandelstam
by •
This year’s Jewish Book Fair (2006) features Toronto poet Rafi Aaron, whose few published volumes to date have traveled surprisingly far and gained impressive renown in the world. On November 12, Aaron and friends are due to present a celebration in words and music of the life and poetry of Osip Mandelstam, the legendary Russian-Jewish…
Anthology: Contemporary Jewish Writing in Canada
by •
“To be a Jew and a Canadian is to emerge from the ghetto twice.” When Mordecai Richler made that insightful observation in 1971, Canada was still a literary backwater and postwar Canlit was just beginning to explode onto the international scene. Today, as Michael Greenstein demonstrates in a newly published anthology of Canadian Jewish writing,…
Hana’s Suitcase keeps on travelling
by •
A child’s suitcase that was abandoned by its owner at a German death camp during the Nazi era has become the unlikely epicenter of a remarkable literary success story stretching from Toronto to Tokyo and touching many thousands of hearts around the world. The small, brown, slightly tattered suitcase is clearly marked as the property…
Obit: sculptor E. B. Cox (1914-2003)
by •
From the Globe and Mail, 2003 E. B. Cox, a much-admired Toronto-area sculptor who prided himself on achieving artistic and commercial success without ever taking a penny in government grants, died last summer at the age of 89. E. B. was a young associate of some of the Group of Seven with whom he went…
Tulchinsky’s Five Books of Moses Lapinsky
by •
Sonny Lapinsky, the memorable hero of Karen X. Tulchinsky’s engaging novel The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky (2003) is a Toronto boxer who wins the world middleweight crown at Madison Square Gardens in 1948 and again in 1954. Like a champion boxer, the novel itself has impressive staying power and seems nowhere near ready to leave…
Paradise now: a wetland called Cootes
by •
Cootes Paradise, a wetland and woodland covering 840 hectares on the western perimeter of Lake Ontario, is the focus of what may be the largest freshwater restoration project ever attempted, according to research scientists at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington. These days, the Cootes Paradise wetland is little more than a shallow muddy lake.…
Morley Torgov & The War to End All Wars
by •
Sitting in his elegant apartment in midtown Toronto, novelist-lawyer Morley Torgov explains why his latest novel, The War To End All Wars (Malcolm Lester Books) took him 17 years to write. Whenever he felt challenged about the direction of the story, he’d put the manuscript into a drawer, sometimes for a year or more at…
Teleky’s The Paris Years of Rosie Kamin
by •
Toronto writer Richard Teleky has won a prestigious literary prize — the Harold Ribalow Award for the Best Novel of the Year on a Jewish Theme — for his first novel, The Paris Years of Rosie Kamin (1999). The award, which includes a $1,000 cheque, is administered by the American Jewish organization Hadassah, which published…
