On an autumn day in 1890, Daniel Baldinger, a 35-year-old married Orthodox man living in Krakow, reached a monumental decision: he would divorce his wife of ten years, Reizel, because she had not borne him any children. Daniel was soon remarried to a much-younger wife, Lieba, who eventually grew to love him and worried that…
Tag: history
Yiddish letters knit together ‘A Thousand Threads’
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When he turned 18, Tsvi Shapiro decided to leave his home shtetl of Butrimantz rather than be conscripted into the Lithuanian army. With a half-brother working as a lawyer at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in New York, he should have had an excellent chance of being admitted into America and fulfilling his dream of…
Two guidebooks from Ruth Ellen Gruber
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After several years stationed in Europe as a freelance political journalist, American writer Ruth Ellen Gruber was startled to discover that a magnificent old synagogue had been restored in the Hungarian town of Szeged. “I never had any inkling that such a synagogue could exist outside of a major city,” she recalled. Shortly afterwards, she…
Mildred Wyman’s Forest of Trees
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What does it take to produce a three-volume family history that extends to nearly 900 pages? In the case of Mildred Wyman, who recently self-published a triple-decker family history titled A Forest of Trees, it has taken eight years of intensive research and writing, dozens of taped interviews with relatives, and the editorial discipline to…
From Kamenets-Podolsk to Winnipeg: The History of the Lechtziers
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Reuven Lexier, a Toronto orthopaedic surgeon, recently published this handsome 150-page volume that documents his family’s experience in Canada from the moment his great-great-grandparents, Shimon and Chana Lechtzier, settled in Winnipeg with their four sons and two daughters in 1882. Lexier spent about 10 years gathering the 196 photographs, archival documents, newspaper clippings and memorabilia…
Prince of Egypt transforms the Exodus story
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Based on the Biblical story of the Exodus, Dreamworks Studio’s visually stunning animated musical The Prince of Egypt opens across North America during the lucrative Christmas market (1998), and the studio hopes to see profits on the $70 million production soon. The first full-length animated film to focus on a Biblical narrative, The Prince of…
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: Eric Armour Beecroft (1903-2001)
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Eric Armour Beecroft, a Toronto-born political economist who worked for the U.S. Roosevelt administration during the Second World War and helped establish the World Bank, has died (2001) in Toronto of pneumonia. He was 98. Through a diverse and illustrious career that stretched from the 1920s through the 1970s, Prof. Beecroft held professorships at universities…
Weiner’s Jewish Roots in Ukraine and Moldova
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Ten years ago (in 1988), Miriam Weiner wrote a letter to a regional museum in Priluki, Ukraine, requesting information on any Jewish documents there. Back then, relations between Western and Iron Curtain countries were still affected by the deep freeze of the Cold War. In the 1980s, relatively few Jewish genealogists attempted to correspond with…
Pierre Berton’s ‘No Jews Need Apply’
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Pierre Berton’s column “No Jews Need Apply,” which originally appeared in Maclean’s in November 1948 and was reprinted in last week’s CJN, offered a penetrating look at the discreet, country-club-style antisemitism that was rife in Canadian society. Berton, who died last month, pointed out that people with names like Greenberg were frequently denied job interviews,…
