It was just over a century ago, in 1908, that a young Jewish lad in Warsaw, Poland, had a brief personal encounter with Sholom Aleichem that he would remember for the rest of his life. Melech Grafstein, then a 15-year-old Bundist and Yiddish theatre devotee, had earlier seen him reading on stage and also davening…
Bad Arolsen & the International Tracing Service
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Funded solely by Germany and managed by the Red Cross, the International Tracing Service (ITS) of Bad Arolsen, Germany, has built up a vast Central Names Index of more than 50 million reference cards pertaining to some 17.5 million people, mostly victims of the Holocaust and family members who made inquiries about missing relatives after…
Roskies’ Yiddishlands is evocative memoir
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Soon after her arrival in Canada in 1940, Masha Roskies sat down to a meal at her sister-in-law’s house in Montreal and, seeing that only “Canadian bread” (the white, fluffy stuff called Wonder Bread) was on the table, asked for a piece of real bread instead. When her aunt curtly replied that “this was what…
Montreal novel wins Jewish Book Award (2009)
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The White Space Between, the novel by Montrealer Ami Sands Brodoff that won the 2009 Canadian Jewish Book Award for fiction, focuses on Willow Ives and her mother, Jane Ives, a Czech-born Holocaust survivor formerly known as Jana Ivanova, and Willow’s need to understand the persistent gaps in her mother’s past. Much of the story…
Colourful History of Warner Brothers
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You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story (Running Press) is an engaging, fully illustrated coffee-table book recounting the many cinematic milestones and many more B-films churned out by the Warner Brothers Studio, one of the major filmmaking factories of Hollywood’s golden era. One of the most significant films to emerge from the hallowed Warner…
Cary Fagan’s Valentine’s Fall
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Huddie Rosen leaves North York after high school, acquires a wife and kids and alternate world as a bluegrass musician in Prague, then revisits his former haunts in Toronto as his marriage and alternate world seem on the verge of collapse. But there’s much more to Valentine’s Fall, the latest novel by Toronto author Cary…
Insightful guide to American Jewish fiction
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The esteemed Jewish Publication Society of Philadelphia has just published American Jewish Fiction, a new literary guidebook that is a delight to browse, genuinely thought-provoking to read, and also happens to bring immense credit to one of our own. The author is Josh Lambert, who was born and raised in Toronto, where he graduated from…
Kreitman’s Dance of the Demons
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“I do not know of a single woman in Yiddish literature who wrote better than she did,” Isaac Bashevis Singer once commented about the little-known novelist and story writer Esther Kreitman, whose 1936 book, The Dance of the Demons, has just been reissued by the Feminist Press of New York. In truth, Singer might have…
Moonlight, Romance & Jewish Songwriters
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“There may be trouble ahead,” begins Irving Berlin’s famed 1936 song, Let’s Face the Music and Dance, and if you are a fan of the classic American songbook and singers, you can easily hear Fred Astaire singing that line in your head. The song is remarkable, according to author David Lehman, because it puts all…
More Wit & Wisdom from Michael Wex
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Michael Wex, the Toronto writer, raconteur and Yiddishist whose previous non-fiction book Born to Kvetch climbed to the top of the bestseller lists, now presents us with an equally learned and funny manual about how to be a human being — humane, considerate, and wise enough to do the right thing. How to Be a…
