A child’s suitcase that was abandoned by its owner at a German death camp during the Nazi era has become the unlikely epicenter of a remarkable literary success story stretching from Toronto to Tokyo and touching many thousands of hearts around the world. The small, brown, slightly tattered suitcase is clearly marked as the property…
Tag: toronto
Obit: sculptor E. B. Cox (1914-2003)
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From the Globe and Mail, 2003 E. B. Cox, a much-admired Toronto-area sculptor who prided himself on achieving artistic and commercial success without ever taking a penny in government grants, died last summer at the age of 89. E. B. was a young associate of some of the Group of Seven with whom he went…
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…
Rakoff’s Baldwin Street
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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 &…
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…
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…
Barney Danson (1921-2011)
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Barnett (Barney) Danson, the Canadian politician and Cabinet minister, died October 17, 2011 at the age of 90. Born to a Jewish family in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, Danson joined the Queen’s Own Rifles in 1939, rose to Lieutenant Colonel and lost an eye in the Battle of Normandy. He returned to Canada and joined his…
Laundry has spotless reputation
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Three-quarters of a century after his grandfather and great-uncle founded Careful Hand Laundry & Dry Cleaners, company president Brian Chelsky celebrated the company’s 75th anniversary last month (2004) with a party for about 75 employees, suppliers, relatives and friends in its main location at 2700 Dufferin St. near Briar Hill. “When you spend $150 and…
