When Toronto author Cary Fagan began writing the first draft of the novel that would become Sleeping Weather (Porcupine’s Quill), he had little notion that its protagonist, Leon Stone, had been in prison or that Leon’s father, Mordecai, had been an habitue of the racetrack. “I knew nothing about the racetrack,” says Fagan. “When I…
Howard Engel’s Memory Book
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Howard Engel, creator of the popular Jewish literary detective Benny Cooperman, was perplexed to discover, one morning about four years ago, that the pages of his morning newspaper seemed filled with an unfamiliar foreign typescript, resembling Serbo-Croatian. Actually, an overnight stroke had left him with alexia sine agraphia, a rare mental condition that had deprived…
Literary Tribute to Matt Cohen
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Uncommon Ground, a fresh collection of articles, essays, excerpts and interviews just published by Knopf Canada (2002), offers a wonderfully luminescent window onto the legacy of the multifaceted and elusive Canadian writer Matt Cohen, who died in December 1999. The book is being offered as a “festschrift” or celebration of Cohen and his work. It…
Matt Cohen’s Last Seen
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Matt Cohen strides into the Future Cafe on Bloor Street West wearing a hat that looks suspiciously like the hat favoured by one of the two brothers who are the main characters in his latest novel, Last Seen (Knopf). Over a cup of coffee, however, the fifty-four-year-old Kingston-born novelist insists that it isn’t strictly necessary…
Obit: Matt Cohen (1942-1999)
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An overflow crowd of hundreds of people filled the main hall and also a secondary hall at Hart House at the University of Toronto last week for a memorial service for Toronto novelist Matt Cohen, who died December 2, 1999 of lung cancer at the age of 56. Cohen authored some thirty books between the…
Burstow’s House on Lippincott
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Bonnie Burstow had been thinking about writing a non-fiction book about “trans-generational trauma in Holocaust survivor families,” but then she decided to handle the subject as a novel instead. “I wanted something that would appeal to a broader audience than Jews and psychologists,” explains the 61-year-old psychotherapist and instructor at OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies…
Appignanesi’s Losing the Dead
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Lisa Appignanesi, a child of Holocaust survivors who grew up in Montreal, recounts her parents’ wartime experiences in Losing the Dead (McArthur & Co., 2000), a family memoir that takes the form of a personal quest of research and discovery. Appignanesi (nee Borensztejn), born in postwar Poland and now living in London, has already proved her…
100 Great Jewish Books
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In a bid to promote notable Jewish books written in the past 150 years, the National Yiddish Book Center of Amherst, Ma., has announced a list of “The 100 Greatest Works of Modern Jewish Literature.” The list includes works in all languages and will serve as a “redefinition of the Jewish canon,” said Center president…
Wisse’s Jewish Canon
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In 1859 a London literary professor, David Masson, made a notable attempt to classify the novel, which was still a relatively young phenomenon, into distinct categories or genres. Influenced by Aristotle, Masson mapped out 13 different categories of novel. As if anticipating the work of Northrup Frye a century later, he also presented a unified…
Two by Safran Foer
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Quick: can you name two prominent authors who made stunning literary debuts while still in their early 20s, each with an effervescent and picaresque first novel that contains a set of smaller stories within the novelistic framework? Hint: one is contemporary Jewish-American, the other British Victorian. Hailed by the New York-based Forward newspaper as one…
