Nessa Rapoport, a New York writer-editor originally from Toronto, has written House on the River, a meditative account of a summer journey by houseboat through the Trent-Severn waterway of southern Ontario that contains reminiscences of her happy visits to her grandmother’s cottage in Bobcaygeon when she was a girl. Motivated by a desire to show…
Tag: memoir
Nestel’s Holocaust memoir
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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 Wickedly Witty Sondra Gotlieb
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The title of Sondra Gotlieb’s latest book, Dogs, Houses, Gardens, Food and Other Addictions (McArthur & Co., 2002) is an accurate summary of its contents, and only a writer as comically gifted as Gotlieb could turn this seeming dross into gold. A native Winnipegger who became the famous “Wife of” a Canadian diplomat, Gotlieb is…
Barney Danson saga
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Barney Danson, who served as the Member of Parliament for York North from 1968 to 1979, has published a book of memoirs, Not Bad For A Sergeant, that is must reading for anyone interested in Canadian politics and the Trudeau legacy in particular. Jewish readers will find the book especially illuminating because of the light…
The Tailor’s Daughter
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Writers who dedicate their pens to preserving community history generally do so as a labour of love, knowing their literary efforts will probably not capture a large reading audience nor generate large royalty cheques. Over the last decade, Miriam Bassin Chinsky has revisited the lush vineyards of her north Toronto childhood to write a series…
Orchestrating the American Dream: Bernstein family history
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Sam Bernstein, a New England industrialist who acquired the franchise to the Frederics hair-styling machine in the mid-1920s, became a remarkable overnight success after America was seized by a permanent-wave craze at the height of the flapper era. “One day in 1927, I didn’t have a nickel to my name,” he used to say. “The…
The Jewish ghetto in literature
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An intriguing collection of essays throws a new light into the dark world of the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe as seen by a cavalcade of Jewish writers including Heinrich Heine and Joseph Roth, and numerous others who have been all but forgotten. Ghetto Writing: Traditional and Eastern Jewry in German-Jewish Literature from Heine to…
