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: canada
Matt Cohen’s Last Seen
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Matt Cohen strides into the Future Cafe on Bloor Street West wearing a hat that looks suspiciously like the hat favoured by one of the two brothers who are the main characters in his latest novel, Last Seen (Knopf). Over a cup of coffee, however, the fifty-four-year-old Kingston-born novelist insists that it isn’t strictly necessary…
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…
Burstow’s House on Lippincott
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Bonnie Burstow had been thinking about writing a non-fiction book about “trans-generational trauma in Holocaust survivor families,” but then she decided to handle the subject as a novel instead. “I wanted something that would appeal to a broader audience than Jews and psychologists,” explains the 61-year-old psychotherapist and instructor at OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies…
Appignanesi’s Losing the Dead
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Lisa Appignanesi, a child of Holocaust survivors who grew up in Montreal, recounts her parents’ wartime experiences in Losing the Dead (McArthur & Co., 2000), a family memoir that takes the form of a personal quest of research and discovery. Appignanesi (nee Borensztejn), born in postwar Poland and now living in London, has already proved her…
Wisse’s Jewish Canon
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In 1859 a London literary professor, David Masson, made a notable attempt to classify the novel, which was still a relatively young phenomenon, into distinct categories or genres. Influenced by Aristotle, Masson mapped out 13 different categories of novel. As if anticipating the work of Northrup Frye a century later, he also presented a unified…
Adele Wiseman’s ‘Road Not Taken’
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It has been 50 years since Winnipeg-born writer Adele Wiseman scored the highly impressive professional coup of winning the Governor General’s literary award for her first novel, The Sacrifice. But Wiseman, who was 28 in 1956 and widely considered to be at the start of a very promising career as a novelist, disappointed the expectations…
Survivors: stories by Chava Rosenfarb
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Chava Rosenfarb, the celebrated Yiddish writer who has lived in Canada for more than half a century, has finally seen one of her books get published in her adoptive homeland. With the publication in 2005 of Survivors (Cormorant Books), a collection of seven short stories about Holocaust survivors, Toronto-based Cormorant Books has become the first…
Yehuda Elberg: Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man
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“A literary master living among us” is how the influential Globe and Mail newspaper described Montreal author Yehuda Elberg after his two brilliant novels, Ship Of The Hunted and The Empire of Kalman the Cripple, rolled off the presses nearly four years ago. Translated from the original Yiddish, the books were published in English by…
Obit: Yiddish writer Yehuda Elberg (1912-2003)
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From The Globe & Mail Six years after his two brilliant novels, Ship Of The Hunted and The Empire of Kalman the Cripple, rolled off the presses in English for the first time, Yiddish author Yehuda Elberg has died in his sleep in Montreal at the age of 91. A Holocaust survivor who helped set…
