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…
Tag: canada
Kvetching All the Way to the Bank
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With two new books in print to follow his 2005 bestseller Born to Kvetch, and enjoying a new popularity with Jewish audiences who delight in his erudite knowledge of Yiddish, Toronto writer Michael Wex can no longer be said to be languishing in obscurity. In the round fullness of middle age, the Lethbridge-born Yiddishist put…
Historic plaque for Kensington Market
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Several hundred people attended a plaquing ceremony in the Kensington Market area on Sunday May 25 as a plaques was unveiled designating the once-Jewish neighbourhood in downtown Toronto as a national historic site. The event was sponsored by Parks Canada and included speeches by important delegates, including the Hon. Jason Kenney, secretary of state for…
Bezmozgis directs ‘Victoria Day’
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David Bezmozgis, celebrated author of the prize-winning book Natasha and Other Stories, was on skates in North York Centennial Arena recently, along with a camera crew and a group of teenaged actors in skates and hockey uniforms. All were involved in filming a scene from Victoria Day, a feature film that Bezmozgis is directing, based…
Melech Grafstein and Sholem Aleichem
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It was just over a century ago, in 1908, that a young Jewish lad in Warsaw, Poland, had a brief personal encounter with Sholom Aleichem that he would remember for the rest of his life. Melech Grafstein, then a 15-year-old Bundist and Yiddish theatre devotee, had earlier seen him reading on stage and also davening…
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…
Montreal novel wins Jewish Book Award (2009)
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The White Space Between, the novel by Montrealer Ami Sands Brodoff that won the 2009 Canadian Jewish Book Award for fiction, focuses on Willow Ives and her mother, Jane Ives, a Czech-born Holocaust survivor formerly known as Jana Ivanova, and Willow’s need to understand the persistent gaps in her mother’s past. Much of the story…
Cary Fagan’s Valentine’s Fall
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Huddie Rosen leaves North York after high school, acquires a wife and kids and alternate world as a bluegrass musician in Prague, then revisits his former haunts in Toronto as his marriage and alternate world seem on the verge of collapse. But there’s much more to Valentine’s Fall, the latest novel by Toronto author Cary…
Sherman, Wiseman, Michaels, Shrayer (for Chanukah)
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Anyone who cares about the state of contemporary Jewish writing should not neglect to read What the Furies Bring, a new book of essays by Toronto essayist-poet Kenneth Sherman (Porcupine’s Quill). By itself, Sherman’s choice of subject matter is compelling. His essay topics include “Yiddish and the Jewish Canon,” “Anne Frank and the Search for…
Winterhouse won fiction prize for good reason
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If truth were told, not all past winners of the fiction prize in the annual Helen & Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Awards have been outstanding reads. Once in a rare while a winner has been selected merely because it was the best of a bad lot and pickings were slim that year. Fortunately, that’s…
