Winnipeg writer Allan Levine has introduced a Jewish literary detective in his first novel, The Blood Libel (Great Plains Fiction). The novel is set in Winnipeg’s North End in 1911, when the streets were teeming with impoverished immigrants. Levine’s protagonist, 28-year-old Sam Klein, works in a brothel and turns gumshoe after a rabbi is accused…
Tag: novel
Kacer’s Hiding Edith & Gabi’s Dresser
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Once upon a time, Kathy Kacer’s mother, Gabi, hid from the Nazis in a wooden dresser in her family home in Czechoslovakia. Gabi was then a girl whose survival depended on successfully eluding the German soldiers who were rounding up the Jews in her town. Little could she have known that seven decades later, her…
Grace Paley, Ariel Dorfman, Thomas Keneally at IFOA
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Numerous writers of special interest to the Jewish community appeared recently at the Harbourfront International Festival of Authors, Toronto’s pre-eminent literary event. Their presence insured that Jewish themes were well represented. American Jewish writer Grace Paley, interviewed publicly by Toronto newspaper columnist David Lewis Stein, spoke engagingly about art and politics, the two activities to…
Bestseller based on ancient menorah
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The massive golden menorah from the Holy Temple of Jerusalem is the coveted object that fuels the modern-day action-adventure in Saskatchewan-born author David Gibbins’s second novel Crusader Gold, published this year by Headline Press of Britain and available under that imprint in Canada. Gibbins, who appeared at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto in…
Rill’s thrillers
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“I write to entertain, I don’t write to preach,” said Eric Rill on a recent visit to Toronto, during a publicity tour (2004) for his latest book, The Innocent Traitor (Georgetown Publications). A former top executive in the hotel industry originally from Montreal, Rill’s first novel, Pinnacle of Deceit, a political thriller, was a surprise…
Two by David Liss
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Ever since Poe, the detective has figured as a major archetypal hero in modern fiction. Literary detectives have emerged in so many personas and guises that there are now more than a minyan’s worth of Jewish gumshoes in the bookshops, ranging from Howard Engel’s Benny Cooperman to Harry Kemerman’s Rabbi David Small. (An internet search…
The Family Orchard, family history novel
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Nomi Eve, author of The Family Orchard, has taken sections of her family history, as supplied to her by her father, a genealogist, and used them as the foundation for a novel that spans two centuries and the familiar Jewish terrain from Eastern Europe to the land of Israel. As she advises, references to actual localities…
Blurb on ‘Crossing the Distance’
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Toronto Life had less than great expectations last winter when it published a short but blistering diatribe about newscaster Evan Solomon’s not-yet-published first novel, Crossing the Distance. The manuscript needed massive editorial work, sneered the magazine, and its intended publisher, McClelland & Stewart, had taken it on merely because of its author’s high media profile.…
Two by Cynthia Holz
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Bronx-born Cynthia Holz first came to Canada as a correspondent for Business Week, then left journalism so she could focus on writing fiction. She’s been a resident of Toronto since 1976. After two dozen of her stories were published in Canadian magazines, Random House published 10 of the best in Home Again, a short story…
Novel set in Bathurst Manor
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Whereas writers of first novels often agonize over finding a publisher, that was not the case for Elyse Friedman, a 36-year-old Torontonian who has produced four screenplays and much comic material for radio and television. Friedman’s first novel, Then Again, was snapped up by Random House, a major Canadian publisher, which has championed the book…
