American literary critic Alfred Kazin spoke at the International Festival of Authors on the subject of his latest book, God and the American Writer (Knopf, 1997) — namely, the supreme relevance of God to public discourse in America in the last century, versus God’s supreme irrelevance to public discourse today. Whether they were believers or not,…
Tag: American
On the Road with Rabbi Steinsaltz
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“Let my people know” is the chief motto of Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, one of the pre-eminent “talmud hakhums” of our generation and the subject of this engaging book by Arthur Kurzweil. Widely regarded as a genius, Steinsaltz has penned dozens of books in which he attempts to bring the fire of Jewish mysticism down to…
Breaking Bread with Joel Hecker
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Dr. Joel Hecker, who for more than a decade has been an associate professor at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in the Philadelphia area, visited his home town of Toronto recently to lecture on his book, Mystical Bodies, Mystical Meals: Eating and Embodiment in Medieval Kabbalah, an erudite study published by an American university press in…
Chaim Grade letters find home in YIVO
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Readers of Jewish literature will be interested to know that a cache of about 50 letters by Lithuanian-born novelist and poet Chaim Grade (1910-1982) have surfaced in Toronto. The letters belong to Sally Eisner, a longtime North York resident who, together with her late husband Leon Eisner, was a close friend of the New York-based…
Amy Bloom’s Away
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A new sub-genre of Jewish literature seems to be emerging in which the subjects move or have moved across North America in a northwesterly direction. We saw it earlier this year in Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, about an alternate postwar history in which a Jewish homeland is established not in Israel but…
Hubble: Universe In A Mirror
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Regarded by many as one of America’s greatest scientific accomplishments, the 18-year-old Hubble Space Telescope has added immensely to our cosmological knowledge and has changed our conception of the universe. The Universe in A Mirror, a new book by American science writer Robert Zimmerman, offers a history of the epoch-making telescope as well as fascinating…
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…
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…
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…
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…
