Producing an acclaimed first collection of short stories was a “snap” for Joan Oliver, a Toronto writer whose book Lines of Truth and Conversation merited inclusion in the Globe and Mail’s list of the 100 best books of 2005. “Snap” is the title of perhaps the collection’s most charming tale, about an eight-year-old girl’s search for…
Tag: stories
Tale of the missing wedding ring
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Some years ago, Leslie Robbins of Toronto lost her diamond wedding ring, which she had placed in a secret hiding place within her home. For two years the ring did not turn up. After thoroughly searching her home, Robbins filed an insurance claim and began to plan a European vacation with the insurance money that…
New book from JGS Toronto
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To mark its 25th anniversary, the Jewish Genealogical Society of Canada (Toronto) has published a book of 44 genealogy-related stories written by its members. The stories in Tracing Our Roots, Telling Our Stories are diverse and range freely over geography and time, encompassing both the Old World and the New from a couple of centuries…
The Forgotten Fannie Hurst
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In her day Fannie Hurst was one of America’s highest-paid authors, but ask any bookstore clerk today for one of her 18 novels, such as the bestselling Imitation of Life, and chances are you’ll receive only a blank stare. Between 1914 and 1930, Fannie Hurst’s phenomenal literary career blazed meteorically across the pages of popular…
Yezierska: From the tenement to Hollywood
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Who today has heard of the American writer Anzia Yezierska? Her life was the sort of rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags tale that she specialized in telling in her short stories and novels like Salome of the Tenements and The Bread-Givers. She and her large impoverished family sailed from Poland in the 1890s and settled into a cramped tenement…
Adventures of a Yiddish Lecturer
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I believe that Isaac Bashevis Singer, Norman Levine, Philip Roth and probably numerous other Jewish writers have penned comical reminiscences about their experiences delivering lectures on various subjects to Jewish audiences. To this list we must add the relatively unknown name of Abraham Shulman. An American essayist and former contributor to the New York Daily…
Bernard Malamud’s Collected Stories
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In a literary career that stretched roughly from 1940 to his death in 1986, Bernard Malamud wrote a handful of acclaimed novels, including The Natural, The Fixer and The Assistant. Between the novels, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author refined his artistry by writing short stories. For the first time, all of Malamud’s short fiction has been…
Not Quite Mainstream offers rich assortment
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A new collection of 17 short stories by Canadian Jewish writers, published by the Red Deer Press of Calgary, demonstrates both the diversity and literary acumen that we have come to expect from our writing community, pasat and present. Not Quite Mainstream: Canadian Jewish Short Stories is edited by Norman Ravvin, the gifted short-story writer…
Anthology: Contemporary Jewish Writing in Canada
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“To be a Jew and a Canadian is to emerge from the ghetto twice.” When Mordecai Richler made that insightful observation in 1971, Canada was still a literary backwater and postwar Canlit was just beginning to explode onto the international scene. Today, as Michael Greenstein demonstrates in a newly published anthology of Canadian Jewish writing,…
Ravin’ Over Ravvin: Sex, Skyscrapers and Standard Yiddish
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For a writer who has staked out his literary territory somewhere between Franz Kafka and Edgar Allen Poe, and who typically weaves Jewish themes into his work, the name Norman Ravvin — with its etymological allusions both to Poe’s “raven” and the word “rabbi” — seems almost too linguistically appropriate to be cited as the…
