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…
Tag: biography
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…
I.B. Singer: Prolific Even in Death
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In Love and Exile, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s revealing autobiographical trilogy, he describes an early story, “In the World of Chaos,” that was never published. Its hero “was nothing less than a corpse who didn’t know that he was dead,” Singer recounted. “He wandered across Poland, attended fairs, called on rabbis, even allowed himself to be…
Telushkin paints vivid portrait of I.B. Singer
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Seven years after the death of Isaac Bashevis Singer and 20 years after he won the Nobel Prize for literature, the literary world has produced three significant new books by and about the man who is one of the most important and popular Jewish writers of modern times. The last few months have seen the…
Obit: Henry Roth, author of Call It Sleep (1907-1996)
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Call It Sleep — what else might one call the hiatus of 60 years that Henry Roth took between publication of his first now-classic novel Call It Sleep (1934) and his next, A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park (1994)? Now sleeping the sleep of the eternal, Roth left us with six semi-autobiographical novels that…
The immortal Abraham Cahan
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“Dis a choych?” These three little words, which appear in Abraham Cahan’s sparkling story The Imported Bridegroom (1898), may be among the most sublimely ironic utterances in all of modern Jewish literature. The story opens with the unmarried Flora idly reading Little Dorrit as her wealthy father, Asriel Stroon, prepares to visit Pravly, his childhood…
Mary Antin’s The Promised Land
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Mary Antin, born in the Lithuanian (now Belarussian) town of Polotsk in 1881, recorded her memoirs of the Old Country and of coming to America in The Promised Land, a book first published in 1911. The Promised Land is a valuable first-person account of the myriad concerns and experiences surrounding the journey from the squalid…
God and the American Writer
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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,…
Harold Bloom’s Book of J
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She lived in Jerusalem almost 3,000 years ago, in the time of King Solomon and his hapless son and successor, Rehoboam. A contemporary of the historian who chronicled Solomon’s court, she wrote in the Phoenician-Old Hebrew script, probably using a reed pen on sheets of papyrus that were later glued into scrolls. Known to modern…
Surviving the Censor: The Unspoken Words of Osip Mandelstam
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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…
