David Vanek, a retired provincial criminal court judge, has produced a highly readable volume of memoirs that illuminates his family’s early history in the Toronto area, numerous historical matters pertaining to the local Jewish community, and his 21-year career on the Ontario bench. Fulfilment: Memoirs of a Criminal Court Judge (Dundurn Press, 1999) shows the…
Warm Toronto Memoirs
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•Mama and Her Mitzvahs: Stories and Reminiscences, by Sophie Stransman (2002) provides a loving, anecdotal portrait of a golden-spirited woman who, with her husband, operated a small dry-goods store in the heart of Toronto’s Cabbagetown during the Depression. Rachel and Elia Siegel were the proprietors of Siegel’s Groceteria, an authentic mom-and-pop operation that stood on…
Neil Simon memoir
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•If the word “bittersweet” has often been associated with phenomenal American playwright Neil Simon, one need only read his recent memoir Rewrites (Simon & Schuster, 1997) to understand why. In it, he shares a string of typically good-humored tales of his quick ascent up the ladder of theatrical success, from his days of writing for television…
Rosalie Sharp’s ‘Improbable Life’
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•Rosalie Wise Sharp, a daughter of Polish immigrants, always felt that heaven had mismatched her with her parents, Joseph and Ydessa Wise, who ran a dry goods store on north Yonge Street at a time when few Jews lived in north Toronto. Later, fate matched her up with husband Isadore Sharp, founder of the international…
Emma Lazarus bio
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•Emma Lazarus, who died 120 years ago at the premature age of only 38, fixed her place in American literary history through her poem “The New Colossus,” which famously graces a bronze plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Some of its stanzas are too well known to bear repeating even today, but,…
Growing up Catholic in Jewish ‘hood
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•Ted Schmidt, a Catholic educator who edits the independent Catholic Times newspaper, has written and published a book in which he recounts his experiences “growing up Jewish” on Palmerston Blvd. in the Bloor-Bathurst neighbourhood of downtown Toronto. With Shabbes Goy: a Catholic Boyhood on a Jewish Street in a Protestant City (2001) Schmidt has laid down an engaging…
Rapoport’s ‘House on the River’
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•Nessa Rapoport, a New York writer-editor originally from Toronto, has written House on the River, a meditative account of a summer journey by houseboat through the Trent-Severn waterway of southern Ontario that contains reminiscences of her happy visits to her grandmother’s cottage in Bobcaygeon when she was a girl. Motivated by a desire to show…
Oral bio of Richler
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•When Michael Posner began his oral biography of Mordecai Richler, his plan was to assemble a collection of entertaining anecdotes about the legendary Montreal writer, but soon realized that psychological insights about Richler would produce a more revealing portrait. “When I began to do the interviews, I thought, ‘This could be more than just anecdotes,…
Nestel’s Holocaust memoir
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•On October 12, 1941, a day of bloody infamy, the Nazis massacred about 12,000 Jews in the Jewish cemetery in the Ukrainian town of Stanislawow, also known as Ivanofrankivsk. But as evening drew nigh, the weary killers halted the carnage, providing an unintended reprieve to another 6,000 Jews, including the author and her infant daughter.…
Leonard Cohen bio
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•It seems so long ago that Leonard Cohen, the gravelly-voiced songwriter-poet from Westmount, first won international acclaim with compelling songs like Suzanne and So Long, Marianne, at once deeply romantic and mystical. With ten books of poetry, two novels and a dozen albums to his credit, and three more tribute albums of his songs in…