◊ From the Canadian Jewish News, March 2020 As Jews throughout history have been all too aware, tragedy, whether large or small, is never all that distant from the everyday realm of human affairs. This sad chain of events took place in Prague in 1693 and 1694. The central figure was a twelve-year-old boy named…
A WONDER WOMAN AT MASSEY HALL Helen Keller Spoke to Large Audience Who Were Spellbound. HER FAMOUS TEACHER Mrs. Macey Taught Blind, Deaf Mute to Speak and Hear. From the Toronto Star Weekly, January 1914 A magnificent audience almost filled Massey Hall last night, attracted by the appearance of Helen Keller and her almost as…
Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-old Author, by Herman Wouk (Simon & Schuster) ◊ Note: This review of Herman Wouk’s memoir was first published in 2016. Herman Wouk died on May 17, 2019, age 103. This slim volume, which the author describes as a “non-autobiography,” will be of special interest to people interested in…
August 2018 The moment I stepped out of the car, I realized that this was the first time a member of my family had been back in our ancestral town in more than 130 years. I was in Konin, in the Lodz district of Poland, the town where my paternal ancestors had lived for generations…
Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind has proven to be one of the most thought-provoking non-fiction books published in recent years. It’s such a stimulating book that I reread it recently. Originally written in Hebrew, the English-language version of Sapiens appeared in 2014 and quickly became a publishing sensation. Having dominated the…
Rhea Clyman, an accomplished journalist born to a Jewish family in Toronto in 1904, wrote many front-page newspaper stories in the late 1920s and 1930s about political events and their tragic human consequences in Russia, Ukaine and Germany, but died in near-obscurity in New York in 1981. Clyman wrote rare and chilling eyewitness accounts of…
Four years ago, a Pennsylvanian antiques collector purchased a trove of old scrapbooks and photo albums at an estate sale in the town of Red Lion, Pa. The cache, which included hundreds of photographs including some taken in the Warsaw Ghetto between 1940 and 1943, cost only $10. Discovering that the material was related to…
The number of Jews who fought in the First World War has always been difficult to tally because Jews fought on both sides and in multiple armies involved in the conflict. On the Allied side, at least 500,000 Jews served in the Russian Army, about 250,000 served in the United States Army, roughly 50,000 in…
Seeking the Fabled City: the Canadian Jewish Experience, by Allan Levine (McClelland & Stewart) Proficient, prolific, and preternaturally talented, Winnipeg-based historian Allan Levine has produced a robust new history of the Jewish experience in Canada that seems both compelling and fresh. Seeking the Fabled City — the title comes from a line by the late…
The Ward Uncovered: The Archaeology of Everyday Life, edited by Holly Martelle, Michael McClelland, Tatum Taylor, and John Lorinc. (Coach House Books, 2018) In recent years the history of the old “Ward” neighbourhood of downtown Toronto has been reclaimed and remembered in books, museum exhibits, and, most significantly, a vast archaeological dig behind City Hall…
