From The Globe & Mail I am one of this city’s great silent army of working poor, and so my name is Legion. I am just one of the masses, evidently, poor and huddled, yearning to breath free; one of the anonymous faces that wash up in the courtrooms of Old City Hall each morning,…
by Ellen Weiser If you’re a baby boomer, or more accurately, a Jewish Toronto baby boomer, undoubtedly you have fond memories of a time and place that lives only in our dreams. Let me take you back to where I’m constantly accused of living … in the past. If anything, it was cheaper. For myself…
From Canadian Jewish News, 1982 Marriage may be likened to a city besieged: those without despair of getting in, those within despair of getting out. – Abraham Drayanov I have often wondered who makes couples happier, the rabbis who marry them or the lawyers who obtain their divorce. But this sentiment notwithstanding, the smoothest of…
Irving Howe (1920-1993), the New York intellectual who was a zealous socialist all of his life, received what he called his fifteen minutes of fame from a remarkable scholarly achievement that seemed a world apart from his leftist political convictions. His book, World Of Our Fathers, which was published in 1976, became a national bestseller…
From the Toronto Star Weekly, September 2, 1922 Stenographer holds up the mirror to wives If Wives Could Get a Little Office Training Husbands Would Be Better Understood By Mayme Ober Peak In life’s triangles the stenographer seems to play a leading role. The movies and the colourful pens of the fictionist are wont to…
My father rarely spoke about his war experiences, so when he did so one evening in December 1987, I recorded the conversation as best I could remember it in my journal. At a restaurant for dinner, my father reminisced about the old days: but what else do people reminisce about? Britain declared war against Germany…
Note: this piece was written in response to the so-called “falsified passports affair” of 1997, when Israel was lambasted for falsifying Canadian passports as a means of assisting in its war on Muslim fundamentalist terror. * * * HORATIO: I am much disturbed and aggrieved, Plutonius, at the extent of the trickery and deception practised…
There were bull-frogs in the creek on the other side of Wilson Heights, Jackie told us: monstrous bull-frogs, the biggest he had ever seen. He had brought one home like a warrior returning from battle with a spoil. But he said the granddaddy of them all, the Moby Dick of bull-frogs, was still in the…
Toronto native Ken Sherman loved fishing as a boy at Jackson’s Point, where his family had a summer cottage. But these days, whenever he tosses out a line, it’s usually a line of poetry. At 50, Sherman is celebrating the publication of his 10th book — The Well: New and Selected Poems (Wolsak and Wynn,…
In A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity and Memory (McGill-Queens, 1998), Norman Ravvin brings a personal level to a collection of scholarly essays that are mostly about Jewish literature. In the introduction, he briefly describes his grandfather’s experience as an itinerant shochet or ritual slaughterer on the Prairies in the 1930s. Author of Sex,…
