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…
Where might you expect to hear a tale of an enchanted Passover seder where all participants fall asleep at the table before even the first glass of wine is consumed? Or of a blind cantor who, during a brief visit to town, sings so sweetly in synagogue that the whole community is mesmerized for weeks?…
Addressing the question “Is it possible to write fiction about the Holocaust?”, Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld told a large gathering in Toronto recently that man’s nature compels him “to express not only his joy but also his pain” and that concentration camp inmates sometimes sang songs that “were as mighty as the suffering from which…
Readers of the Yiddish Forward may have noticed several published notices in the New York-based newspaper a while ago congratulating Toronto poet and writer Simcha (Sam) Simchovitch for passing the milestone of his 85th birthday. Simchovitch is known as one of Canada’s senior Yiddish writers, yet he’s also achieved recognition for his literary contributions in…
This year’s Jewish Book Fair (2006) features Toronto poet Rafi Aaron, whose few published volumes to date have traveled surprisingly far and gained impressive renown in the world. On November 12, Aaron and friends are due to present a celebration in words and music of the life and poetry of Osip Mandelstam, the legendary Russian-Jewish…
Funded solely by Germany and managed by the Red Cross, the International Tracing Service (ITS) of Bad Arolsen, Germany, has built up a vast Central Names Index of more than 50 million reference cards pertaining to some 17.5 million people, mostly victims of the Holocaust and family members who made inquiries about missing relatives after…
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…
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…
On October 12, 1941, a day of bloody infamy, the Nazis massacred about 12,000 Jews in the Jewish cemetery in the Ukrainian town of Stanislawow, also known as Ivanofrankivsk. But as evening drew nigh, the weary killers halted the carnage, providing an unintended reprieve to another 6,000 Jews, including the author and her infant daughter.…
The Jews of Hungary: History, Culture, Psychology (Wayne State University Press) by Raphael Patai is a monumental 720-page treatise that traces the history of the Jews of the Carpathian basin from their origin in Roman times to their near-obliteration in 1944 and beyond, right up to the present moment. Patai, who died recently at 86, was…
