With The Featherbed, Toronto writer John Miller gives us a credible depiction of tenement life on New York’s Lower East Side of a century ago, but with a number of jarring twists. Anna and Sadie, sisters who haven’t seen each other in more than 50 years, are reunited at the funeral of their mother, who…
Tag: novel
Czech-Sudeten Jews the focus of Far to Go
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Toronto novelist Alison Pick, whose book Far to Go was on the list of 13 contenders for the 2011 Man Booker prize announced in July, says she has benefited from the honour even though Far to Go did not make the three-title short list that the Man Booker jury released on September 6. “I think…
ONE FOOT IN AMERICA: An overlooked classic of immigrant fiction
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It has been nearly half a century since American literary critics Irving Howe and Leslie Fiedler each cited a remarkable forgotten novel, Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, during a symposium on “The Most Neglected Books of the Past 25 Years.” Initially published in 1934, Call It Sleep sold a few thousand copies before sinking into…
Shteyngart shines in Super Sad True Love Story
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Gary Shteyngart, the Russian-born Jewish writer who emigrated to America in 1979 at the age of seven, spoke only Russian in his parents’ home and did not lose his Russian accent until he was a teenager. His third novel, Super Sad True Love Story, from which he is scheduled to read at the International Festival…
Ozick’s Foreign Bodies
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Foreign Bodies, Cynthia Ozick’s sixth and possibly best novel, is modeled after The Ambassadors, a late novel (1903) by her idolized “Master,” Henry James, that he considered his best work. James’s novel explores what was perhaps his favourite theme: the juxtaposition of uncouth America and the more refined, cultured world of Old Europe. Ozick’s aim,…
Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations
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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…
Earth and High Heaven explores mixed marriage taboo
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Gwethalyn Graham’s novel Earth and High Heaven (1944) is said to bear the distinction of being the first book published in Canada by a non-Jewish author that deals centrally with Jewish themes and characters. Since the former bestseller has been out of print for two decades, its recent reissue by Cormorant Books of Toronto seems…
Tulchinsky’s Five Books of Moses Lapinsky
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Sonny Lapinsky, the memorable hero of Karen X. Tulchinsky’s engaging novel The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky (2003) is a Toronto boxer who wins the world middleweight crown at Madison Square Gardens in 1948 and again in 1954. Like a champion boxer, the novel itself has impressive staying power and seems nowhere near ready to leave…
Morley Torgov & The War to End All Wars
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Sitting in his elegant apartment in midtown Toronto, novelist-lawyer Morley Torgov explains why his latest novel, The War To End All Wars (Malcolm Lester Books) took him 17 years to write. Whenever he felt challenged about the direction of the story, he’d put the manuscript into a drawer, sometimes for a year or more at…
Teleky’s The Paris Years of Rosie Kamin
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Toronto writer Richard Teleky has won a prestigious literary prize — the Harold Ribalow Award for the Best Novel of the Year on a Jewish Theme — for his first novel, The Paris Years of Rosie Kamin (1999). The award, which includes a $1,000 cheque, is administered by the American Jewish organization Hadassah, which published…
