Sitting in the study of his Forest Hill home, Len Blum hands the visitor a paperback copy of Howard Stern’s scatalogical memoir Private Parts, whose cover bears the promise, “Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture.” Then Blum — the 45-year-old, award-winning screenwriter who commutes regularly between Toronto and New York — admits that he’s…
Tag: canada
Profile: Poet Seymour Mayne
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One needs a “strong sense of perseverance” to be a poet, says Seymour Mayne, the Ottawa professor and wordsmith whose recent slim volume September Rain (Mosaic Press) is the 29th book of poetry he’s published since 1964 — “ken eina hora, almost 41 years ago.” Educated at the Talmud Torah in his native Montreal, Mayne…
Anthology: Contemporary Jewish Writing in Canada
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“To be a Jew and a Canadian is to emerge from the ghetto twice.” When Mordecai Richler made that insightful observation in 1971, Canada was still a literary backwater and postwar Canlit was just beginning to explode onto the international scene. Today, as Michael Greenstein demonstrates in a newly published anthology of Canadian Jewish writing,…
Hana’s Suitcase keeps on travelling
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A child’s suitcase that was abandoned by its owner at a German death camp during the Nazi era has become the unlikely epicenter of a remarkable literary success story stretching from Toronto to Tokyo and touching many thousands of hearts around the world. The small, brown, slightly tattered suitcase is clearly marked as the property…
Obit: sculptor E. B. Cox (1914-2003)
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From the Globe and Mail, 2003 E. B. Cox, a much-admired Toronto-area sculptor who prided himself on achieving artistic and commercial success without ever taking a penny in government grants, died last summer at the age of 89. E. B. was a young associate of some of the Group of Seven with whom he went…
Tulchinsky’s Five Books of Moses Lapinsky
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Sonny Lapinsky, the memorable hero of Karen X. Tulchinsky’s engaging novel The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky (2003) is a Toronto boxer who wins the world middleweight crown at Madison Square Gardens in 1948 and again in 1954. Like a champion boxer, the novel itself has impressive staying power and seems nowhere near ready to leave…
Paradise now: a wetland called Cootes
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Cootes Paradise, a wetland and woodland covering 840 hectares on the western perimeter of Lake Ontario, is the focus of what may be the largest freshwater restoration project ever attempted, according to research scientists at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington. These days, the Cootes Paradise wetland is little more than a shallow muddy lake.…
Teleky’s The Paris Years of Rosie Kamin
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Toronto writer Richard Teleky has won a prestigious literary prize — the Harold Ribalow Award for the Best Novel of the Year on a Jewish Theme — for his first novel, The Paris Years of Rosie Kamin (1999). The award, which includes a $1,000 cheque, is administered by the American Jewish organization Hadassah, which published…
Profile: Author Norman Ravvin
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In Lola By Night (paperplates books), a second novel from Montreal-based author Norman Ravvin, the heroine, Lola, is a young bestselling romance novelist from Barcelona who sets off on a quest to learn more about her late father and his connection to a decades-old murder. Lola’s existential journey takes her to Vancouver and New York,…
Ravin’ Over Ravvin: Sex, Skyscrapers and Standard Yiddish
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For a writer who has staked out his literary territory somewhere between Franz Kafka and Edgar Allen Poe, and who typically weaves Jewish themes into his work, the name Norman Ravvin — with its etymological allusions both to Poe’s “raven” and the word “rabbi” — seems almost too linguistically appropriate to be cited as the…
