A comment that Saul Cantor’s daughter, Rochelle, made more than five years ago inspired him to write his memoirs. She said to him, in 2000, “I know some of the things about your life, but there are a lot of things I don’t know,” he writes in his recently published book, From Then to Now:…
Tag: memoir
Kelman family pay tribute to their mother
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As a tribute to the memory of Rebbitzen Mirl Fish Kelman, her children recently published a book, Mother’s Memoir and Family Recollections, in which they describe her influence on the Toronto Jewish community and tell how she overcame adversity and raised a family of communal leaders. The life of the matriarch of the Kelman family…
Israeli infiltrated Germany’s neo-Nazi movement
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Having boldly infiltrated the top echelons of Germany’s neo-Nazi movement, former Israeli paratrooper Yaron Svoray felt more than mildly uncomfortable the day in 1992 that he sat with about 30 neo-Nazis in the woods and an elderly ex-SS guard put a gun to his ear, screaming, “Juden! Juden!” Quickly, Svoray leaned forward, out of range…
Caught in a nightmarish Abyss of Despair
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Born about 1620 in Ostrog, Volynia, Rabbi Nathan Hanover and his family were among the countless Jews in Ukraine and eastern Poland whose lives were disrupted by the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648 and the intermittent attacks that continued for years afterwards. Hanover travelled extensively over the region of devastation, speaking with many affected people and…
Moored in Morocco: tale of an 18th-century Jewish traveller
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From the earliest days of Hebrew printing to the present, Jewish readers have found great favor in literary accounts of Jewish travellers, especially those who, like the famed 12th-century Benjamin of Tudela, provided first-hand descriptions of the holy city of Jerusalem. One of the acknowledged classics of the genre is Travail in an Arab Land,…
My Life in the Mossad
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Nearly 30 years ago Michael Ross, a Canadian from Victoria, went on a backtracking tour to Europe and decided to spend the winter on an Israeli kibbutz, a decision that changed his life. In Israel, he fell in love with both the land and a local woman. He got married, converted to Judaism, became a…
Jack Klajman’s Out of the Ghetto
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Jack Klajman, a 69-year-old furrier in London, Ont., has written Out of the Ghetto, a book that describes how he survived the Holocaust. The book was published recently by Vallentine Mitchell, a British publishing house, and should soon be available at bookstores in Canada. Out of the Ghetto details Klajman’s experiences as a child in…
David Eisen, the doctor who loved history
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Dr. David Eisen, Toronto’s first Jewish radiologist, was always intrigued with Jewish history. The youngest son of a Galician peddler who came to Toronto about 1902, David Eisen attended the University of Toronto’s medical school from 1917 to 1922, and joined the Mount Sinai Hospital after graduating. A quarter of a century ago, Eisen published…
A daughter tells her mother’s story
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Shortly after her mother Frances died in 1989, writer Helen Epstein began visiting the university library near her Boston-area home, browsing through books on death, on Jews and on Central Europe. “I was mourning my mother,” she explains in her latest book Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History, “and if…
The man who rescued a million Yiddish books
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Some three decades ago, when Aaron Lansky and friends began climbing into Dumpsters to rescue discarded Yiddish books, he had no idea what sort of treasures might turn up or how far the venture would carry him. Today — one million books later — he is the founder and president of the National Yiddish Book…
