Alvin Rakoff, author of the previous novel & Gillian, is proof of the old maxim that you can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy. An accomplished film producer and director based in London England, he now offers us — with Baldwin Street (Bunim &…
Tag: stories
Avner Mandelman, innovative short-story writer
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“Darkness,” the fourth story in Avner Mandelman’s new collection Cuckoo, tells the story of an Israeli woman who opposes her sister’s romance with a Yemenite Jew and attains a Yemenite black-magic remedy to put an end to the match. Told in the first person by the woman’s young son, this short and simple reminiscence seems…
Norman Levine’s ‘The Ability to Forget’
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The Ability to Forget, a compelling new collection of short stories by Canadian expatriate writer Norman Levine, is a welcome addition to his much-praised ouevre, which includes By A Frozen River, Canada Made Me and other celebrated collections going back decades. Levine’s trademark first-person narration is usually as sparse as it is sparkling. These 15…
The art of magazine profiles
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The New Yorker or Maclean’s Magazine: which has perfected the art of the magazine profile to a higher degree? Magazine lovers will recognize that the question is rhetorical and doesn’t require an answer. After all, it was the New Yorker that invented, about 1927, the modern intimate journalistic essay we recognize as a magazine profile.…
Blurb about ‘Times Square Rabbi’
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Proferring an eight-step program for recovery based on the teachings of Maimonides, Rabbi Yehudah Fine prowls the mean streets of Manhattan, seeking young people to redeem from their chosen hells in his book Times Square Rabbi (Hazelden). Fine’s gritty, true-to-life realism rings completely true — and it is: this is a non-fiction account of the…
Powerful stories from Nora Gold
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Fortunately for lovers of fiction, Warwick Publishing, a Toronto-based publishing house that usually publishes non-fiction, has departed from its specialty to present Marrow and Other Stories, a debut collection of short stories from Toronto author Nora Gold. Gold, a professor at McMaster University, offers seven literary creations of varying lengths in the book. They range…
Englander’s triumph
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I picked up the New Yorker’s Summer Fiction Issue recently, delighted to see that Nathan Englander, the 29-year-old author of the recent short story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, had made it onto that magazine’s list of 20 Writers for the 21st Century. This comes as no great surprise. Englander’s first published work…
Survivors: stories by Chava Rosenfarb
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Chava Rosenfarb, the celebrated Yiddish writer who has lived in Canada for more than half a century, has finally seen one of her books get published in her adoptive homeland. With the publication in 2005 of Survivors (Cormorant Books), a collection of seven short stories about Holocaust survivors, Toronto-based Cormorant Books has become the first…
Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women
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A compelling short story anthology, Found Treasures: Stories By Yiddish Women Writers (Second Story Press, 1994) has sold more than 5,000 copies and has thus attained the status of a Canadian bestseller. The book has gone into a second printing and, according to co-editor Frieda Forman of Toronto, has been picked up as an alternate…
I.B. Singer: Prolific Even in Death
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In Love and Exile, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s revealing autobiographical trilogy, he describes an early story, “In the World of Chaos,” that was never published. Its hero “was nothing less than a corpse who didn’t know that he was dead,” Singer recounted. “He wandered across Poland, attended fairs, called on rabbis, even allowed himself to be…
