Books – Page 2 – Jewish Independent

Dayson successful in business, love

Dayson Here portrays Ben Dayson’s innate business acumen and his economic success, as well as his unwavering devotion to his wife, Esther.

Following the publication of the Nemetz family biography Don’t Break the Chain: The Nemetz Family Journey from Svatatroiske to Vancouver, in 2017, comes a new book called Dayson Here: The Story Behind the Voice, compiled and written by Shirley Barnett and Philip Dayson.

Anyone who met Ben Dayson knows he was larger than life. Standing at five feet, six inches (or thereabouts), he was a giant among men. People knew him for many things, but primarily his business success, his deep and abiding love for his “beautiful wife” Esther, and his close family. What’s missing from that picture are his modest beginnings in Ukraine, the journey that brought him to Vancouver, and the man behind the voice. The new book, comprised mainly of direct quotes from Dayson – thanks to the Dayson/Barnett families and the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia – and black-and-white photos, tells a more intimate story of his life. My favourite quote of his is: “I know nothing and you know even less!” Pure Ben Dayson.

The book portrays not only Dayson’s innate business acumen and the extent of his economic success, but also his unwavering devotion to his wife, Esther. She was the epicentre of his life, the voice of reason and the sole calming influence in his life.

It’s no secret that Dayson was an extraordinary character. He made his presence known, and loved to “work a room.” Within the space of a few hours, he could be loud, moody and assertive in his office, then morph into a charming, polite man in a social setting.

Dayson was very interested in real estate development, first residential and, later on, commercial. He had a natural business sense, despite having little to no formal education. There’s no question that his obsession with building and developing fed the fire in his belly. He’d often drive friends around to visit his buildings.

Starting life in Canada wasn’t easy, but, with determination and sheer energy, he parlayed his first business ventures into greater and greater things. Ironically, his difficult start in life (his father died when Dayson was 15) primed him for later success. Having witnessed pogroms and antisemitism, Dayson was determined to have a better life for himself and his family. When a cousin in Kamsack, Sask., sent papers to help him come to Canada, that gave Dayson the impetus to build that good life. Traveling from Ukraine to Moscow, then Riga, Berlin and Rotterdam, Dayson’s world opened up. In Rotterdam, “he became acquainted with new things in life – chocolate, coffee, white bread and girls.”

But Dayson became impatient to get to Canada. In anticipation of his future, he bought a few essentials: a new suit, a pair of shoes and a hat, which left him with only $7. His arrival in Canada took him from Halifax to Montreal to Winnipeg and then to Kamsack, where he settled in 1927. Beyond most everything else, gaining Canadian citizenship was one of his proudest accomplishments. A more patriotic man you could not find.

Friends from his hometown sent word that Esther Nemetz, who grew up just blocks from Dayson in Ukraine, was living in Vancouver – and she was a beauty. Despite never having met her, Dayson began a correspondence with her in 1931. He courted her by mail, despite that she was engaged to a doctor from London, Ont. Dayson’s trademark perseverance won the day and their romance grew. As some people know, Dayson began life as Boruch Deezik, but, at the urging of his wife-to-be, he Americanized his name and became Ben Dayson.

Nemetz’s six brothers had done well since their arrival in Canada and she benefited from their generosity, having the “wedding of her dreams,” after which, the couple moved to Viscount, Sask., where Ben Dayson had already purchased a general store. The book recounts that “Esther sold her furs and diamond rings to help buy inventory.” Their business grew, they made more money, and became community leaders.

Working together as partners, Ben and Esther Dayson grew their family and built a good life. They moved to Saskatoon and bought a meat market, which also did well. In 1949, Esther suggested they move to Vancouver, since her six brothers and two sisters lived there. Living in the big city, the Daysons involved themselves in the Jewish community, surrounded themselves with extended family and expanded their social circle.

In 1951, Dayson discovered real estate and became consumed by it; he built numerous apartment buildings in Vancouver, Richmond, Burnaby, New Westminster and West Vancouver. He had a remarkable sense of what would work and what wouldn’t in the real estate world. He was a pragmatist and a savvy, self-taught businessman. In the 1970s and 1980s, he discovered industrial property, and the book paints a picture of a tenacious but principled man who always got what he wanted. Unless his wife vetoed it.

Throughout their life, Ben and Esther Dayson were great philanthropists and ardent supporters of Israel. Among the many causes they supported was the Richmond Public Library, where I was first introduced to Ben. Having built the first high-rise apartments in Richmond and benefited from them, Dayson felt he owed a debt of gratitude to Richmond. So, in 2004, the couple gave $50,000 to the Richmond Public Library Endowment Fund, one of the library’s largest single donations.

An avid reader and lover of books, Ben Dayson also gave most of his personal Judaica book collection to the library, and established the Ben and Esther Dayson Judaica Collection at the Brighouse (Main) Branch. Thanks to the Daysons, the library is now home to one of the Lower Mainland’s largest Judaica collections, and includes Jewish books, DVD movies and newspapers. In 2004, Ben Dayson was awarded the British Columbia Library Association Keith Sacré Library Champion Award for his support of libraries, literacy and public access to information.

As a senior librarian at the Richmond Library, I had the honour and pleasure of working closely with Ben Dayson to develop this collection. He maintained a hands-on approach to the collection, and would regularly buy and donate Jewish-themed books to the library. Always insisting on an accurate (and usually immediate) accounting of the books he donated, I would often get calls from him, asking (telling?) me to come to his home with the library’s laptop, so I could type out an author/title list of the books he donated.

This was a regular occurrence. But I remember one particular time when there was a bad snowstorm. It was a Friday night and my home phone rang at around 8 p.m. It was Dayson. He said, “I have books for you. Come and get them.” I recall asking him, “You mean right now?” To which, naturally, he replied, “Yes.” It was around 2006 and I didn’t yet own a personal laptop. Knowing that few people ever say no to Ben Dayson (and live to tell the tale), I drove through the snowstorm to his home, bearing a pad of paper and a pen. The rest is history.

Dayson Here: The Story Behind the Voice is filled with fascinating information about the Dayson family business. But there are also plenty of surprising and humorous anecdotes demonstrating how passionate Ben Dayson was about issues that offended him personally. He pursued causes until he got a satisfactory resolution, or was forced to give up the fight, like when the government revoked his driver’s licence at age 95.

As Shirley Barnett said so eloquently in her father’s eulogy, Ben Dayson “lived his life loud and clear.” It’s nearly impossible to encapsulate the enormity of his personality, but this book does just that, with humour, honesty and love. His headstone says it all: “Once met, never forgotten.”

Copies of Dayson Here are available at the RPL Brighouse branch, the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver or by contacting the authors directly.

Shelley Civkin is a happily retired librarian and communications officer. For 17 years, she wrote a weekly book review column for the Richmond Review, and currently writes a bi-weekly column about retirement for the Richmond News.

Artistic telling of strike

The book 1919: A Graphic History of the Winnipeg General Strike by the Graphic History Collective and artist David Lester is not education for education’s sake, but rather a “useful organizing tool,” according to the preface. “This comic book revisits ‘the workers’ revolt’ in Winnipeg to highlight a number of important lessons that activists can lean on and learn from today as they fight for radical social change,” notes the collective.

Lester, a Vancouver-based illustrator, musician, and graphic designer and novelist, will give the talk Getting Graphic with Labour History on June 7, 7 p.m., at the B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union Lower Mainland Area office. He will also give a presentation as part of the World Peace Forum Society event 100 Years After the Winnipeg General Strike, in which Jewish community member Gary Cristall (activist and grandson of a 1919 solidarity strike activist) and others will participate on June 8, 2:30 p.m., at SFU Harbour Centre, Room 7000. In addition, he and members of the collective are participating in a few panels at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (congress2019.ca), taking place at the University of British Columbia June 1-7, and are then heading to Cumberland, B.C., for a June 23 event during the Miners Memorial Weekend.

In the Acknowledgements section of 1919, the Graphic History Collective describes itself as “a not-for-profit arts collective. For us, solidarity is not just a winning strategy in class struggle. It is our artistic methodology. In taking seriously the idea that we can accomplish more by working together, we prioritize collaboration…. As GHC members, we volunteer and share our artistic vision and share our artistic, writing and administrative skills.” The collective recognizes the many people who “contributed knowledge, labour and funding to this project. Most importantly, we recognize that this comic book would not have been completed without David Lester’s incredible talent and artistic labour.” Other GHC members who contributed are Sean Carleton, Robin Folvik, Kara Sievewright and Julia Smith; Prof. James Naylor of Brandon University’s history department wrote the book’s introduction.

“In 1919, 35,000 workers in Winnipeg, Manitoba, staged a six-week general strike between 15 May and 26 June,” the narrative begins. Lester’s two-page depiction of the strikers gathering at Portage and Main gives an idea of the vastness of the protest and the small area within which it took place. It is easy to see how people would have had nowhere to run and the panic that would have ensued when the Royal Northwest Mounted Police and the “special constables,” violently broke up the strike on “Bloody Saturday,” June 21, 1919. The police were among those who had voted to strike but were given dispensation to work by the strike committee; however, the city dismissed the whole force on June 9. The mayor, the Citizens’ Committee of One Thousand (formed of business leaders and others) and the federal government opposed the strike and worked together to end it by various means, using fear of immigrants (aka racism) and eventually violence to do so.

1919 gives a history of the pivotal event from the perspective of the strike leaders, workers and their supporters. The textual narrative drops away, for the most part, in the telling of what happened on Bloody Saturday and the impact of Lester’s images builds as the day progresses, from 9:30 a.m. to 11, to 2:20 and so on. Just before 3:35 p.m., two strikers are shot, one dies on the spot, the other from gangrene. The violence continues. At 4 p.m., the special constables take control. By 6 p.m., Canadian Army Service Corps trucks – equipped with machine guns – are patroling Main Street. By the end of the day, in addition to the two strikers killed, many are wounded and 94 people are arrested. The book then describes some of what happened in the trials that followed, and the strike’s legacy.

Lester shares some of his artistic process and inspiration in the essay “The Art of Labour History,” especially the Bloody Saturday pages, and this is followed by a photo essay called “The Character of Class Struggle in Winnipeg.” The notes are useful in providing context for some of the images, and the bibliography shows the depth of research. Short bios of the contributors and a list of the Manitoba unions that supported the publication conclude the book.

“Art bears witness to the injustices of the world and, in reflecting on the pain and struggles of the past, offers hope in working together for a better present and future,” writes Lester. “Art can aid the momentum of progressive social change, and that is what keeps me going…. I am trying to capture and convey the inspiration and spirit of solidarity in class conflict. That is the art of labour history.”

Diversity in retirement

For Prof. Michelle Pannor Silver, author of Retirement and Its Discontents, an individual should be the one to decide when they start to work less. (photo from sociology.utoronto.ca)

Not long ago, it was a given that, when you reached the age of 65 or so, you would retire. But, that is no longer the case.

Michelle Pannor Silver, an assistant professor in the University of Toronto’s sociology department and its Interdisciplinary Centre for Health and Society, explores some of the reasons for this, as well as the difference between planning for retirement and the experience of it, in Retirement and Its Discontents: Why We Won’t Stop Working, Even If We Can (Columbia University Press, 2018).

Pannor Silver’s interest in the topic started when she was tasked with helping wind down her father’s office.

“My real initial motivation for studying retirement at all, and really for the book, was my dad’s experience,” Pannor Silver told the Independent. “I wrote about this in the book, that, when I was in my 20s, my dad developed dementia. It became really clear that he was not able to continue seeing his patients. And he was quite active in Jewish Big Brothers. That was something that was a big part of his work as a social worker. That’s the way he identified, as a social worker. He was a psychotherapist.”

This experience led Pannor Silver to the U.S. Health and Retirement Study, and she spent many hours and years examining people’s retirement trajectories. In her dissertation, she focused on, among other things, the relationship between the type of work people did and several different health measures, before and after they retired.

“After spending a lot of time looking at data points, I became really interested in talking to real people about what their retirement was like and, really, to discuss what retirement meant,” she said. In quantitative analysis, you make certain assumptions, she explained, “like how this person works this many hours and, therefore, they are fully employed, versus this person who works that many hours and then stopped … and, so, I’m going to code that one as retired.”

To verify or refute such assumptions, Pannor Silver interviewed people.

“I started really basic – just asking people what it means to them to be retired,” she said. “That helped me realize that, boy, this is a loaded term. It seems so simple, so straightforward, and the media gives us these clues about what it’s supposed to mean – you’ll see these commercials with these people who are retired, but are running on the beach, so retirement must mean running on the beach holding hands. Or, there are other ones that are about saving for retirement, so it must mean that it’s something you do when you stop working.”

A focus of Retirement and Its Discontents is ageism, and what it means to be told by society that it is time for you to stop doing the thing you have probably spent most of your adult life doing. The people she features found that life without work wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

“The people I interviewed, many talked about being pushed into retirement – being told it was time to make room for the next generation,” she said. “Some of them did it of their own volition. They weren’t really forced into it, but they assumed it was time for them to move over. They looked at how old their fathers had been when they retired, and decided that a certain age was going to be their benchmark. It’s really about the fathers who they looked at, and some of them saw their fathers retiring and dying the next year, or very shortly thereafter. And they thought they’d better retire then, too, so they could live a little before the end comes for them.”

The idea of when to retire is influenced by media messaging. Some of Pannor Silver’s Canadian study participants talked about “freedom 55,” the advertisements for it and how that has always been in their mind as the magic number at which to retire.

Pannor Silver’s study included international participants. And, while the magic age may differ, “the thing they shared – whether they were forced by existential pressures or because of their own internal ideas about when they ought to retire – first of all, they ended up living longer than their parents. All the [financial planning] models people generally have are wrong,” she said, “and that has, of course, implications for the public pension systems that are out of whack, too.

“But, my book really speaks to the experience of people facing the norms on a sort of anachronistic or out-of-date understanding of what retirement is and are disappointed by their experiences because of that – because of the expectations … that it should happen at this certain time and should be a certain way that would lighten and free them. Yet, they felt kind of burdened with life without work.”

Pannor Silver hopes that readers of her book will discard the idea that retirement should be associated with a chronological age. She would like to see them open themselves up to the idea that there are many different ways people can experience retirement.

“I think that, for many people, retirement is a bad word they don’t even want to use,” said Pannor Silver. “My point is to share the experiences of varied, different types of people who, for various reasons, retired in traditional ways … and had to find their own way around it … to sort of rewrite and create their own retirement experiences.

“For them, it was very surprising and, hopefully, others take some comfort in recognizing it’s a really challenging transition, a really important time of life. There’s so much attention paid to the early stages in life – finishing high school, getting into university or that initial career transition, and career mobility and trajectory, but very little attention is paid to later career transitioning. And that was my goal – to be able to say, ‘Here’s a set of people’s experiences.’ And, people tell me that these experiences have really resonated with them…. We can’t just assume that, because an employee is reaching a certain age, it means he or she should be passed up for promotion, cast aside or ignored. It ought to be up to the individual to say, ‘I have other things I want to do,’ or whatever the reason is – to make the decision on their own, that, now, they choose to make a transition to working less.”

While Pannor Silver’s target market is people approaching retirement, she is hoping that the book will also influence the employers, managers and others who are deciding – on the basis of incorrect assumptions or ignorance – to overlook certain parts of their workforce.

“I have Olympic athletes who I interviewed for the book, homemakers, doctors and CEOs … it’s a varied group of individuals,” said Pannor Silver. “But, their experiences are all people who were incredibly dedicated to their work. Their work was their life’s work, and the point is to contribute to an ongoing discussion about what retirement is now … what we can assume about it and what we should not assume.”

Pannor Silver’s next book will examine the importance of physical movement in the later stages of life.

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.

Don’t sit in your chair all day

Dr. James A. Levine studies the health benefits of adding more movement to our lives. (photo from James Levine)

We are sitting too much – both at work and in our off hours. And all this sitting is doing us damage. But it’s not only about our health. It’s about how much we could be getting done, both professionally and personally.

When people read health-related articles or listen to health news, they “mentally categorize this information as health information. I think that is a mistake,” said Dr. James A. Levine, president of Fondation Ipsen, which, under the auspices of the philanthropy network Fondation de France, tries to promote scientific knowledge. “This isn’t about health. In the workplace, it’s about productivity: data suggests productivity – widgets produced per hour – improves by about 10 to 15%. In school, academic performance improves by about 10%, compared to kids who don’t engage in these activities and trials. Thinking about this as a health issue underserves the reader. Really, it’s about having a vital, exuberant, productive, happy life.”

While Levine – author of the 2014 book Get Up! Why Your Chair is Killing You and What You Can Do About It (St. Martin’s Press) – is a proponent of movement, he said sitting occasionally is not a bad thing. What is contributing to ill health, he said, is our culture of rolling out of bed, getting into our cars, sitting at an office desk and then driving back home to sit some more. Many of us shop online, order in meals, watch TV, play video games, check texts, email, use social media and go to sleep. Many of us are spending well over half the day, every day, seated.

“I think approximately 28 different chronic diseases and conditions are associated with excess sitting,” Levine told the Independent. “They range from excess body weight and obesity to metabolic conditions, such as diabetes, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease, to certain types of cancer, such as breast cancer … to mental health issues, such as low mood and depression, to mechanical problems in the body, such as back and joint pain, and all the way through to quite interesting and quite subtle conditions, such as impaired productivity, lower innovativeness, and so forth.”

There is no simple solution. “It’s easy to conjecture that a few simple tricks can solve problems like this,” said Levine. “But, if you think about it logically, if it’s taken society 50 years to get us down onto our bottoms, there can’t just be a few simple tricks to get us up. The modern workplace is actually designed to keep people seated, because it was felt, incorrectly at the time, in the ’50s and ’60s, that, if you kept a person at their desk, they’d be more productive. But, in fact, that’s been proven to not be the case.”

For some, like Levine, getting movement back into our lives means getting a walking desk. For others, it may involve having meetings with colleagues while we walk.

“Our brain neuros are continuously changing through neuroplasticity,” said Levine. “So, in other words, you can take a person with the brain structure of sedentary and convert them, through intervention, into a person who moves more. The reason this occurs is through neuroplastic factors that change the brain’s structure and biochemistry in response to, in this case, intervention.”

The younger a person is, the more neuroplastic their brain is and, hence, more adaptable, he said. The opportunity for an intervention to have the greatest impact is in childhood. As we age, it is harder for us to change.

“We did studies in primary schoolchildren which were fascinating,” said Levine. “We gave them five-minute motion stimuli or games during their lesson and we found that there was a disproportionate response in the children. In other words, if you give children a little nudge, they’ll move a great deal. You just have to give them permission to move. We found that, in slightly older children, ages 11-14, if you give them the same lesson, the children will double their daily activity. If, at the highest level, you alter the structure of the classroom, whereby movement is permitted … children will double their daily physical activity merely by changing their environment.”

For children, he said, the freedom to move will result in a 50% increase in activity; for adults, it will result in a 25 to 30% increase.

A first step to getting on a healthier track includes reading up on the topic, alerting your mind to the need to activate your body. When it comes to action steps, Levine advised people to start small and build on that.

“Look for two activities a day that you did seated, but that you can also do walking – things like weekly meetings with your manager, walk and talk,” he said. “Every lunch time, I won’t sit for half an hour. I’ll eat and sit for a quarter of an hour and walk for the other 15 minutes. I do it every single day. Every week, I’ve watched my kid go play hockey in the arena. Yeah, I’ll be there in the beginning, but I’m going to do a half an hour walk. We’re not talking about adding exercise. We’re talking about transferring sedentary time into moving time.

“My meetings are walk and talk. When I go out with my kids, we always walk and talk. When I go for an evening out with my wife, we walk to the opera or movie, or before dinner. If your evening out is too far to walk from home to, find a place to park your car that is walking distance to the venue. Park there and walk. While standing desks are good, moving while standing is even better. If not possible, consider placing your phone away from you, so you’ll need to get up to answer it and walk around your desk while you talk.

“Then, commit to your plan,” he said. “Yes, you’ve found five opportunities during the week to get up and move. You’ve built environmental cues to remind you to do it – on the fridge, the desk – and check it off on a weekly basis when you’ve met your goal.

“The last and final step might surprise you, because it may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s equally important to the other steps – get a good night’s sleep.”

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.

A story told in art and poetry

Olga Campbell’s acrylic painting “Remembering,” above, and bronze sculpture “Twins II” are just two of many artworks she includes in A Whisper Across Time.

Grief is many-faceted. Sometimes, we’re not even aware for what we’re grieving. One of the most beautiful passages in Olga Campbell’s A Whisper Across Time: My Family’s Story of the Holocaust Told Through Art and Poetry (Jujabi Press, 2018) is the following poem:

“I was born with a very deep sadness / a sadness and an anger / as a child I didn’t question this / it was the way it was / when I got older my mother had cancer / she died when I was twenty-two / I thought that my sadness was caused by her death / I had no idea that it was caused by her life.”

“A Whisper Across Time is a heart-warming, emotional journey that reminds us of the suffering and pain that war, intolerance and persecutions create, not only for those who had to endure atrocities but also for the children of the survivors,” notes Dr. David Lee Sheng Tin, author of two books on spiritual health and growth, in the foreword.

In A Whisper Across Time, Campbell gives clear voice to the whispers in her ear, “whispers across time.”

“This is the story of one family out of millions of families who went through the Holocaust,” writes the artist, whose mother lost all of her family during the Second World War. It is “the story of survival and death,” “of how trauma of such magnitude is passed from one generation to another to another….” It is also an ardent call for readers to remember Rwanda, Rohingya, Bosnia, Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, Cambodia…. “[O]ne of every 113 people on the planet is a refugee,” writes Campbell, noting, “by the end of 2016, there were 65.6 million refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced people in the world” and that “racism, antisemitism and ultra-nationalism are on the rise.” She pleads, “eighty years ago, the world looked away / we must not look away now.”

In an interview with the Jewish Independent last November about the exhibit of the same name that helped launch the book, Campbell updated that statistic. “Our world is a chaotic place right now, somewhat reminiscent of the period before the war,” she told writer Olga Livshin. “There are over 68 million people around the world that are refugees or displaced. My book is not only about my family. It is a cautionary tale. It is about intergenerational trauma and its repercussions across time.” (See jewishindependent.ca/whisper-across-time.)

In 2005, Campbell mounted the exhibit Whispers Across Time. “This art show dealt with memories and losses,” she writes in the book. “Many of the pieces in the show were fragmented, partial in appearance, reflecting both a presence and an absence.”

image - “Twins II” by Olga Campbell — “Twins II” by Olga Campbell.

The exhibit featured masks, rusted metal figures, ceramic sculptures, photographs, mixed media and texts that, explains Campbell, “echoed the same theme of loss and regeneration – a life spirit which emerged from the devastation of the past.” Even reduced in size to fit on the pages of a book and taken out of a gallery setting, this artwork is powerful.

In A Whisper Across Time, Campbell shares some of what she has discovered about her mother, Tania, and father, Klimek Dekler, as well as about her maternal grandmother, Ola Akselrod, and her mother’s identical twin sister, Mania, and brother-in-law, who was also an identical twin, but Campbell hasn’t been able to determine which brother – Manasze or Efraim Seidenbeutel – her aunt married. Campbell recounts how her parents met, the atmosphere leading up to the war, and how her parents survived. Her father’s family also survived. There are no records, says Campbell, of what happened to her grandparents or her aunt during the Holocaust; the Seidenbeutel brothers were murdered at Stutthof concentration camp, a few days before it was liberated.

“My mother must have been completely traumatized by her experiences and her losses,” writes Campbell. “She lived and worked and loved, she still danced … sometimes. But the joy in her heart was not so big. The light inside was dim. And, at night, when she was alone in her room, she cried.”

In A Whisper Across Time, Campbell also talks about preparing for the 2005 exhibition, and some of the strange happenings that occurred, such as how multiple attempts to photograph the art failed – a broken camera, saved images that wouldn’t open on the computer. Her use of language, both in poetry and prose, is emotive without being overly sentimental. And her artwork evokes an emotional reaction, often involving some sadness and always demanding contemplation.

For more on Campbell and to purchase A Whisper Across Time, visit olgacampbell.com.

Historic cemetery full of life

Victoria’s historic Jewish Cemetery. (photo from Amber Woods)

Who could imagine that a book about a cemetery would be so full of life? But then, the people who populate Amber Woods’ Guide to Victoria’s Historic Jewish Cemetery (Old Cemeteries Society, 2018) were among the most vivacious of sorts, starting with the daring, westward-bound pioneers eager to start a new life on a new frontier, to those who went on to be well-known judges (Samuel Schultz), politicians (David Oppenheimer) and artists (Reuven Spiers). Written on the cemetery’s gateway, the phrase Beit HaChayim (House of the Living) welcomes visitors.

The cemetery has had a storied existence. There have been fires, upkeep challenges, pleas to the public to locate graves of prominent individuals and, sadly, in recent times, the desecration of five gravesites in late 2011.

photo - Amber Woods — Amber Woods *(photo from Amber Woods)*

The discovery of gold along the Fraser River in 1858 brought an influx of people to the region, mostly from California, Jews among them. Jews arrived largely as merchants and proved adept at figuring out what was needed in the community. Having already developed trading networks, they did not need to rely on the Hudson’s Bay Co. (HBC) for supplies or for getting their goods to other markets, and “could move quickly from one business to another.”

On May 29, 1859, a group met to create the basis of a Jewish community, including a synagogue and a cemetery, in Victoria. A cemetery committee was formed and, on Oct. 1 that year, 1.7 acres of land was purchased from Roderick Finlayson, the chief factor of the HBC. In February 1860, the cemetery was consecrated, making it the first Jewish cemetery – and the oldest non-indigenous cemetery – in continuous use in Western Canada.

The first funeral at the cemetery, on March 20, 1861, was the result of a most unsavoury encounter. Businessman Morris Price, an immigrant from Prussia, was in his shop in Cayoosh, what is now Lillooet, on Feb. 1, 1861, when three men entered. He was found dead the next day. All the perpetrators were found guilty; two were executed, the third convicted of manslaughter and given a shorter 12-month sentence for his cooperation with officials. As Victoria’s was the only Jewish cemetery at the time in the region, Price’s remains were sent from the mainland.

Herein, too, are remembered several who were prominent in Victoria’s early commercial hub – liquor salesman, saloon operator and real estate tycoon Max Leiser; clothier Frederick Landsberg, who learned Chinook to trade with First Nations people and who would later go into curios, real estate and, finally, philanthropy; and restaurateur H.E. (Henry Emanuel) Levy, who opened the first gourmet establishment in the Pacific Northwest, the very “unkosher” sounding Levy’s Arcade Oyster Saloon, which became a local hangout. Levy’s son, Arthur, followed in the family business, setting up various popular diners, such as the Poodle Dog Café. Once retired from the restaurant business, Arthur Levy began a mission of world peace, which saw him correspond with many a noted statesman of his time, including Nikita Khrushchev, David Ben-Gurion and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Many of those buried at Victoria’s historic Jewish Cemetery lived the sort of life that could have been turned into a novel or film – tales of shipwrecks, of bankruptcies turned into successes.

There are fascinating biographies, such as that of Samuel Schultz, who, despite living to be a mere 51 years of age, did more in those years than most do in a lot longer. Schultz was a musician, athlete, activist and lawyer. He is credited with pitching the first no-hitter in British Columbia, played flute and clarinet for the Victoria Symphony, composed music, served as a correspondent for several newspapers and was a founding member of the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith and became the first Jewish judge in Canada.

Then there is Lewis Lewis, who served twice, in non-consecutive terms, as one of the first presidents of Victoria’s Temple Emanu-El (now Congregation Emanu-El). His is a story shrouded in questions. “Much of the information available about Lewis Lewis is contradictory, incomplete or, in some instances, false,” Woods writes. Many myths and mysteries exist about this early Jewish settler, from his place of birth in Eastern Europe to how he changed his name, from the story of his arrival in Victoria, to his legacy within the local community.

The historic Jewish Cemetery is situated four kilometres from downtown Victoria, where Fernwood Road meets Cedar Hill Road. Visitors enter through the pedestrian gate of the main entrance.

Woods’ book is part of the Stories in Stone series organized by the Old Cemeteries Society. Copies can be purchased at the Jewish Community Centre of Victoria, Congregation Emanu-El, area bookstores (Bolen, Munro’s and Ivy’s) and online at jewishvictoria.wordpress.com.

Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.

Persistence a common theme

There is a bounty of books to read and review at the Jewish Independent. One of the many perks of my job is that I have so much culture literally at my fingertips. But, given the weekly deadlines and other demands of running a newspaper, I can’t always be au courant. So, hopefully I will be forgiven for reviewing four books published last year for this Passover issue: a memoir, a work of fiction (perhaps 😉 and two young adult novels. I’m excited to report that two of the books were written by people who have written for the JI and one was written by a local community member.

My favourite podcast is Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! And, even though I don’t run, one of my favourite magazines is Running Room. I’m not sure how I got onto their mailing list, but I always enjoy reading people’s inspirational stories of why they started running, I like the recipes and nutritional advice and the training tips, which are useful for other types of exercise. Anyway, all that to say I was excited when the host of Wait Wait, Peter Sagal, who is Jewish, came out with his new book, The Incomplete Book of Running (Simon & Schuster, 2018).

Sagal shares personal stories about why he started running, some of the marathons in which he has participated and people he has met along the way, notably a couple of runners who were blind (or almost), for whom he acted as a guide. Scattered throughout, he offers various facts and figures about running; its health benefits, as well as its downsides (I did not know about, to put it delicately, the digestive issues long-distance runners can face). He speaks somewhat vaguely but openly about the dissolution of his first marriage and he is refreshingly honest about his struggle with depression.

Running has helped Sagal deal with difficult circumstances, and continues to not only be a form of exercise for him, but something that informs how he lives. Among other things, running has taught him persistence and has made him more courageous; it has contributed to his “faith in the possibility of positive change” and his realization of just how enduring is love.

I admit that, despite Sagal’s enthusiasm, reading about multiple marathon experiences, as a non-runner, got a little tiresome. And the book isn’t chronological, so I wasn’t always sure of what point we were at in Sagal’s life. But, those minor criticisms aside, I enjoyed the book a lot, especially Sagal’s conversational style of writing and his humour. Having listened to him almost every week for so many years, it felt, at times, that he was right there, telling me his story; that I was listening to him, rather than reading him.

* * *

There is no doubting that Curt Leviant is a talented writer, that he has a wicked sense of humour and a heightened sense of observation and awareness. Katz or Cats; Or, How Jesus Became My Rival in Love (Dzanc Books, 2018) is his most recent of many novels and fans will not be disappointed.

A book editor, John, and a writer, Katz, meet on the subway. On their commutes into New York, Katz shares what is ostensibly his brother’s love story, though it may be Katz’s. Part of the novel’s plot revolves around just how true, or fictional, is the story of Katz’s brother, who also goes just by his surname, Katz.

As the story goes, Katz (or Katz) meets a woman on a train. Maria is supposedly a devout Christian, but she has no trouble permitting a stranger to put his arm around her on first meeting, nor having sex pretty soon thereafter with said stranger, Katz, who she thinks might be married. Their relationship – and the novel – comprises much sex, a lot of talking about sex and many discussions about religion – Jesus, specifically, and Maria’s recurring feelings of guilt for not being what she thinks a good Christian should be.

As Katz relates the tale to John, the editor interjects every once in awhile to question apparent contradictions or errors in the telling. Some aspects – Katz’s marital status, for instance – remain unclear, and purposefully so.

Ironically, perhaps, given that the premise of the novel is a writer telling a story to an editor, Katz or Cats would have benefited from some tighter editing. More than one topic recurs and some points are made multiple times. While Katz’s wit and intelligence provide much to think about, I didn’t find him to be a sympathetic character, so “listening” to him became difficult. And, while I’m not a huge fan of political correctness, I found his treatment of Maria to be condescending and rude at times, and some of his quips to be on the edge of disrespectful towards other cultures. Though Katz refers to Maria more than once as smart, her waffling and some of her responses to Katz – and his reactions to her – don’t really support that notion.

Overall, while provocative in many ways, I found Katz or Cats to read like a book from another era. Many male writers, from Seneca to Henrik Ibsen to Thomas Mann to Leviant himself, come up in conversations in the novel, reinforcing my feeling that this book would be most appreciated by older, male readers. But I could be wrong. When I shared my views with Leviant – who regularly writes for the Jewish Independent’s holiday issues (see page 34 of this issue, for instance) – he shared that a similar novel of his, translated into French, got great reviews from young women critics.

* * *

Ever since reading No One Dies in the Garden of Syn in 2016, I have been waiting for the second book of local writer Michael Seidelman’s trilogy featuring teenage heroine Syn. And, late last year, my wait was over.

Everyone Dies in the Garden of Syn (Chewed Pencil Press, 2018) starts with a violent prologue that both heralds what’s to come and starts to explain the “Creepers” – weird-looking creatures that seem to be combinations of two people or a person and an animal or insect – we met in the first novel.

In the introductory pages of Everyone Dies, Seidelman, in addition to moving the story along, reminds readers of what has come before. The action in this book centres around Syn’s need to rescue her sister, who has been kidnapped by Cole, a “boy” who befriended and then betrayed Syn – or, from his point of view, was befriended and betrayed by Syn.

Still missing as Everyone Dies starts are Syn’s parents, who disappeared when she was 5. Because of Syn’s actions in the first book, the garden, which once had healing powers – “no one dies” – has lost them, so now “everyone dies,” or can die, in the garden. Therefore, the situation is that much more dangerous now for Syn, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. Whereas she didn’t have to worry about her health in the first novel, it becomes another thing she has to battle in the second.

And there is many a battle in Everyone Dies, and lots of running and chasing. There were a few times I lost track of which universe (there are multiple) we were in, and, sometimes, who was fighting whom, but the action moves along and the tension builds. There’s a wonderfully satisfying twist at the end. And so begins the wait for Book 3.

To read more about Seidelman’s first Syn novel, visit jewishindependent.ca/first-book-of-trilogy-now-out.

* * *

“When my 13-year-old son devoured Bulfinch’s Mythology after reading Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson, I realized we need an exciting, thought-provoking series based on Jewish history, something that will send our kids reaching for a Torah, a Talmud or a Book of the Apocrypha,” wrote Emily Singer to the Jewish Independent in an email about her new book, Gilgul I: Rededication (Hadassa Word Press, 2018).

Singer, who lives in Israel, is a writer and a high school teacher. When she and her family lived here, she taught at Vancouver Talmud Torah. She has written several articles for the Jewish Independent so, when she contacted the paper about Gilgul, I happily agreed to review it.

Not surprisingly, knowing Singer’s skill as a writer, Gilgul is a compelling and radical take on the Chanukah story. While all the book’s hero David wanted to do was to play the game skyros with his friends, the game takes on a deadly seriousness for the 15-year-old when King Antiochus sacks the Temple and starts a war against the Jews.

David must be smart, brave, strong and compassionate to stay alive and save his family and his people. He must figure out who to trust, and the fact that it’s not always clear who the good guys and bad guys are adds tension and meaning to the novel. Even with the help of his equally heroic sister Leya, some unexpected courageous allies and a little magic, David has his work cut out for him. Gilgul will leave readers thinking anew about Chanukah, the rededication of the Second Temple, the Maccabees, the miracle of oil, and more.

Learn from a cooking master

I don’t do it often, but I like cooking. Actually, I cook almost every day, but rarely cook with a capital C. My mother taught me the basics, and I appreciate not only good food, but the company that generally goes with it. When a close friend took a cooking class and shared some of the science behind what makes an excellent meal versus a mediocre one, I was fascinated.

In looking for more in-depth information than is normally in a cookbook, I came across the bestseller and multiple-award-winner Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin NosratSamin Nosrat, which was published by Simon & Schuster in 2017. The timing of my discovery was not coincidental. Nosrat’s Netflix series by the same name had recently premièred, in October 2018.

I knew there was a small Jewish connection to the book – author and food expert Michael Pollan had written the foreword. But then, the same friend who inspired my interest in the technical aspects of cooking told me she thought the illustrator might be Jewish. And, she was right! Wendy MacNaughton – whose clients include the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Bon Appetit, Gastronomica and many others, including Simon & Schuster – is Jewish. (With a name like Ramsay, I should have looked into it further right away; next time, I will.) With this added information, I could easily justify asking for a review copy from the publisher, and did.

Salt Fat Acid Heat is not a cookbook that you just pop open, pick a recipe and make it, though you could do that. There are plenty of recipes for salads, pasta, fish, chicken, meat, sweets and more. Shaved carrot salad with ginger and lime, garlicky green beans, beer-battered fish (which also contains vodka, apparently), and fresh ginger and molasses cake are top of my list to try. There are a couple hundred pages of recipes, plus some suggested menus, chefs and authors to look for online or in books, a four-page bibliography, an index and an illustrated list of kitchen and pantry essentials.

In this latter part of the cookbook, there is also a Cooking Lessons section based on the enormous amount of information Nosrat imparts in the first 200 pages about salt, fat, acid and heat. So, for example, to put what you learned about seasoning from within (salt), make spicy brined turkey breast; about emulsions (fat), pasta Alfredo; about layering acid, balsamic vinaigrette; and about preserving tenderness (heat), some scrambled eggs. Other lessons focus on timing, knife skills and improvising with leftovers.

What makes this cookbook a must-have for foodies and cooks of any level, is not only the detail into which Nosrat goes about the four elements that make for good cooking, but that, in discussing the details, she communicates and almost transfers her love of and excitement about food and cooking to the reader. It’s hard to read this book and not be tempted to head to the store to buy the umpteen types of salt that exist (who knew?) or a selection of olive oils to taste, to the market for the freshest of fruits and vegetables, or to the butcher for the best cuts of meat.

Nosrat is all about the experience of cooking – taste and taste again, and don’t be afraid to experiment. As Pollan writes in the foreword, “Even though it contains plenty of excellent recipes, this is a book concerned foremost with principles…. Master these principles, [Nosrat] promises, and you will be able to cook delicious food of any kind, in any tradition, whether a salad dressing or braise or a galette.”

illustration - Salt Fat Acid Heat caesar salad made by Samin Nosrat, illustrated by Wendy MacNaughton — A Caesar salad, as made by Samin Nosrat and illustrated by Wendy MacNaughton in Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat.

The full-colour illustrations are critical to what makes Salt Fat Acid Heat such an incredible resource and enjoyable read. From drawings of things that don’t lend themselves easily to depiction, such as grains of salt, a chemical reaction and saffron, to making tables, charts, Venn diagrams, frying instructions, etc., more fun and easy to understand, MacNaughton helps Nosrat explain the art and science of cooking.

The size and weight of Salt Fat Acid Heat is daunting, until you open it. As Nosrat writes about how to use the book, “Pay attention to the techniques, the science and stories, but don’t worry too much about committing it all to memory. Come back again later to revisit the concepts that are relevant to you.” But, most importantly, she emphasizes, “Don’t forget to enjoy the pleasures, both small and large, implicit to cooking and eating with people you love!”

Making change her business

Elisa Birnbaum, centre, with Laura Zumdahl of Bright Endeavors, left, and Maria Kim of Cara Chicago. (photo from Elisa Birnbaum)

Toronto-based Elisa Birnbaum, editor-in-chief of SEE Change magazine, aims to inspire and give hope in many ways. Her book In the Business of Change: How Social Entrepreneurs are Disrupting Business (New Society Publishers, 2018) is but one of those ways.

“I’m a lawyer by training, but was always a writer on the side, enjoying writing and storytelling,” said Birnbaum, who was born and raised in Montreal in an Orthodox Jewish family. “I decided to try writing out for a little bit and to go back to law after. That was 15 years ago. I never went back to it.

“I was writing a lot about the nonprofit and charitable sector in Canada, as well as in the U.S., and I was also writing a lot about business, a strong interest of mine, too. I noticed how there was a melding of the two – how a lot of challenges in the nonprofit and charitable sector … how they could be helped through business and through business savvy…. So, when I saw what social enterprise was all about and how it was using business to solve social challenges, I realized the importance of that. I became really intrigued and interested. It was an area that, I thought, ‘Hey, this is something I really want to explore further.’”

Birnbaum started pitching stories about social enterprises to any editor who would listen. While some of her work went out via mainstream media, Birnbaum felt more was needed, so she co-founded SEE Change, which is devoted to telling the stories of social and environmental enterprises.

“I thought they symbolized a new way at looking at business,” she told the Independent. “I really felt this was the future, with how we work with business and how communities can tackle social challenges through business, and these types of savvy-ness and skills.”

After years of publishing the magazine, Birnbaum wanted to put together a book of such stories, both to delve more deeply into the phenomenon and, hopefully, to inspire and teach readers how to take on the task of starting a social enterprise.

“A lot of times, I’d get some young people or even older people who were interested in social entrepreneurship themselves, and they’d like advice and tips, and were constantly looking for more information from anyone who’d done it before,” she said. “So, I thought, I could also provide lessons learned, tips, advice and resources … so, a bit of storytelling, as well as a resource for those who are starting up or looking to start their own.”

As far as the response to the book so far, Birnbaum said she has been asked by schools and organizations to speak about the topic. “There were people who had never heard about it before and are now really inspired by the storytelling, which is great,” she said. “There are other people…. I was at a couple of universities recently, and some students there said they picked up the book and were now interested in starting their own social enterprise.”

According to Birnbaum, a very broad definition of a social enterprise is a business, whether nonprofit or for-profit, that has a social or environmental mission at its core, as opposed to a business that has profitability and sustainability at its core. The unique aspect of social entrepreneurship, she said, is that it approaches business in a new way.

In her book, Birnbaum makes a point of highlighting a large array of social enterprises from around the world, including a few in British Columbia. For example, Saul Brown’s Saul Good Gift Co. (itsaulgood.com) creates gift boxes filled with locally made artisan food that people can give their loved ones across Canada, and Reena Lazar’s Willow (willoweol.com) helps with end-of-life planning.

photo - Fresh Roots offers students experiential learning opportunities. — Fresh Roots offers students experiential learning opportunities. *(photo from Fresh Roots)*

Marc Schutzbank, director of Fresh Roots (freshroots.ca), grew up in the United States and moved to Vancouver to finish his education at the University of British Columbia 10 years ago on a Fulbright scholarship, looking at the economic viability of urban farming. This line of study led him to an organization called Plant to Plate, in Pittsburgh, Penn., where he attended University of Pittsburgh.

“As part of my research, I was looking at urban farms in Vancouver – if they were growing, how much food they grow, who they’re sharing it with,” Schutzbank told the Independent. “I have a finance degree, so I was looking at if they were making any money. As I was doing that, there were a couple of people who were doing work in the social space. So the goal wasn’t to grow and sell food; the goal was to share it or to reduce barriers to employment. And so, as I was getting to know them, Fresh Roots was moving from backyards into school grounds.”

One particular backyard caught Schutzbank’s attention. He wanted to know how much food was being grown in such a small space. He discovered, to his amazement, that this one backyard could feed three families. As they expanded to eight backyards, they could feed 35 families.

One of those backyards was adjacent to an inner-city elementary school with a rundown garden plot. The school invited Fresh Roots to develop the plot. As they did, the students, teachers and parents became increasingly interested. The teachers began using the garden as part of their curriculum, as a place to build learning capacity.

“It turns out that, when kids are outside growing food, their academic confidence increases,” said Schutzbank. “They are able to find some success, and this is often in places with kids that are having a hard time finding success inside the classroom [in straight rows]…. Learning like that doesn’t work for everyone.”

photo - Marc Schutzbank, director of Fresh Roots — Marc Schutzbank, director of Fresh Roots. *(photo from Fresh Roots)*

Another benefit of this was that bullying decreased at the school, as kids had a positive physical outlet. As well, Schutzbank found that, as the saying goes, “If you grow it, you eat it.”

Other schools picked up on what was happening and asked Fresh Roots to do the same at their schools. Fresh Roots is now at four high schools and one elementary school.

Fresh Roots also started a salad bar program for students – twice a week, all of the students get to eat the produce from the garden.

“In Canada, we are the only G7 nation that doesn’t have a federal meal program,” explained Schutzbank. “It’s a bit crazy that Canada doesn’t have that. All those kids without lunches are hungry, regardless of how much food is at home. It’s really critical for learning, to have food…. So, at Fresh Roots, our vision is good food for all – so everybody has access to healthy land, food and community.”

In addition to the food they grow, Fresh Roots supports and encourages teachers to have classes outside in the garden. “They need to touch, taste and feel,” said Schutzbank of the students. “Those are really critical parts of our senses and a really important way of learning.”

As well, Fresh Roots provides employment – especially in the summer – for youth who are struggling.

Schutzbank said you can’t grow food without eating and sharing it, so Fresh Roots’ philosophy is “around sharing all the food back through the programs and everything we are doing.”

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.

Love starts with the self

Most of us are familiar with the concepts of “inherent worth” and “unconditional love.” But many fewer of us actually live by these precepts. Anne Andrew would like to help change that fact. She does this in her work, as well as in her new book, What They Don’t Teach in Prenatal Class: The Key to Raising Trouble-Free Kids and Teens, the launch of which takes place April 11, 2 p.m., at the Isaac Waldman Library at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver.

In the introduction, Andrew shares, “My experience as a worried parent of a once-troubled teenager (now a well-functioning adult) and my wish to help other parents avoid the sleepless nights, debilitating fear, helplessness and despair, led me to write this book. Our family’s ordeal lasted more than six years and, during that time, we learned strategies that not only helped us survive but actually allowed us to thrive…. At the same time, I was working as a school principal and became aware of the mental health crisis that was starting to take hold in younger and younger students.” As examples, she notes that 77% of children report having been bullied at school and 80% of 10-year-old girls wish they were thinner.

Andrew was a school principal at Temple Sholom for 20 years. “It’s likely,” she writes, “that one or more of your children will face some kind of difficulty, whether it’s an eating disorder, bullying, drug addiction, depression or other mental health issue, and it is almost impossible to predict whose child that might be. You can’t always see it coming – we certainly didn’t!”

Based on what she was learning from her family’s therapist, Andrew “concluded that there is an absolute and fundamental concept that underpins healthy human life.” That concept – inherent worth – is the subject of the first section of What They Don’t Teach in Prenatal Class. Part 2 focuses on unconditional love, explaining “why it is so difficult for us to accept and own our inherent worth, then explain[ing] how this can be done and become part of your ‘way of being.’” The third part of the book discusses parenting priorities, “kindness versus grades,” and “teaches how to parent out of love – not fear.”

While targeted to parents, What They Don’t Teach in Prenatal Class is a valuable guide for anyone who has negative opinions about themselves, which, to hazard a guess, is the vast majority of us.

“Part of the reason that I named my book the way I did is that it would be ideal if parents did some of the self-work ahead of having children,” Andrew told the Independent. “That way, they’d be better prepared to face the challenges of parenting and they would have a deeper understanding of how their children pick up negative beliefs right from the beginning. They’d have a bit more time and space to think clearly about the bigger picture in terms of purpose and priorities before the baby arrives. Imagine if prenatal classes included a few sessions on this topic!”

One of the tools Andrew presents in her book is the Choose Again Six-Step Process, which was developed by Diederik Wolsak, founder and program director of Choose Again Attitudinal Healing Centre and author of Choose Again: Six Steps to Freedom. Wolsak wrote the foreword of What They Don’t Teach in Prenatal Class. In it, he notes that Andrew – who is a Choose Again facilitator – “has written a manual which draws directly from her own heroic and victorious battle with depression and her transformation of some crippling core beliefs. But, more to the point, it tells the story of two people, parents, coming to terms with what they needed to heal to become real parents. Real parents teach by demonstration. Real parents are transparent and not afraid of what they’ll encounter when they begin their own journey to removing all barriers to love.”

By healing a negative belief about ourselves, we can change our behaviour. “By following our familiar feelings, we can retrieve early childhood memories in which we can discover the genesis of our beliefs and we can begin to transform them,” writes Andrew. “You have to be in the feeling for it to work – it is a process that has to be felt, not an intellectual exercise.” In brief, when you’re upset, for example, acknowledge that you’re upset; take responsibility for the feeling – it is not your child’s fault, but rather “a negative belief that you made up in early childhood has been triggered”; focus on the feeling and identify it; remember the feeling and try to determine when you first ever felt it; once you have that memory, contemplate how you judged yourself in that moment and how you thought others judged you; and, lastly, try “to fix your mistaken belief by a process of forgiveness that replaces your mistaken belief with the truth of you – that you are inherently worthy, whole and complete.”

If loving ourselves isn’t hard enough, parenting out of love, and not fear, is as much or more of a challenge. Not blaming your children for your anger, not punishing them for acting out, etc., would seem to require infinite patience and constant self-awareness.

“If people read my book and are feeling overwhelmed, then I would say do one thing, and that is to have a gratitude practice,” said Andrew. “I have a section in the book on exactly how to do that and I know that it’ll make a huge difference. Begin with one thing and then perhaps add another.

“Awareness is half the battle, so simply being aware that young children are developing negative beliefs about themselves will be helpful in the ways you respond to your child’s behaviour. I’ve presented the concept of inherent worth as the antidote to all of these beliefs, so I have actually simplified parenting into one challenge – how to get across to our children that they are inherently worthy beings. They don’t have to establish their own worth by getting good grades or winning competitions. I’ve suggested several techniques, so parents just need to adopt the ones that will work for their family.

“Many of the things that I suggest are simple, such as remembering to smile at your children more often – put a smiley face sticker on your phone, on the fridge or on the bathroom mirror to remind you. Mindfulness can be practised at the dinner table or getting ready for bed by helping children focus on their senses in the here and now.

“Parenting is a marathon, not a sprint,” she continued, “and it is OK to take awhile to get into the stride, stumble and get back up. Parents tend to judge themselves rather harshly (we all do!) and that’s not helpful. Be gentle with yourself and know that it is impossible to make a mistake – we make healing opportunities for ourselves and our children!”

Andrew invites “parents to use the day-to-day parenting upsets as portals to self-healing so that parenting becomes a journey into self-awareness. This in turn benefits the kids enormously. When parents heal their own negative beliefs, they won’t worry about being judged by others, they won’t be drawn into competitiveness and will not need to over-program their children, so that makes life and parenting less stressful and more fun for the whole family.”

Andrew is a parenting coach, and she presents workshops in the United States, Canada and Europe. She said parents take what they can from her recommendations.

“Parents who have taken my workshops, on which my book is based, report that they have more patience, greater understanding of their children’s behaviour and their own, and the ability to communicate more effectively with their children as well,” she said. “I have been told that the methods are transformational and that was certainly my experience. One parent (Roanna Glickman) told me that she dived headfirst into self-healing using the Choose Again Six-Step Process and she has transformed her life and her kids are thriving as a result. She said, ‘It may seem like more work initially but, when you take away the power struggle, it’s way less work in the long run.’”

Andrew shared feedback from another parent, Pam Roy, who said, “Parenting isn’t about trying to do it right but about learning along the way, being authentic with your kids when we don’t get it right; making yourself better helps you be more present and aware with and for your kids.” While acknowledging that self-work is time-consuming and difficult, Roy said it is crucial and, if Andrew’s suggestions “feel overwhelming or time-consuming, that should trigger that there’s work to be done. Change aversion is there but, when these fears come up, it’s the more reason they should be looked at.”

One of the more surprising pieces of advice, perhaps, is to be careful with praise. “How many of us do what we do to win approval from our bosses, peers, spouse, other family members and even our children?” writes Andrew. “When that approval is not forthcoming we beat ourselves up wondering what we did wrong or reminding ourselves that once again we failed.”

As to how to reduce our dependency on external validations of our worth, Andrew told the Independent, “Firstly, I suggest you gradually phase out praise – it tends to be a habit so takes awhile to correct. Notice when you automatically use praise and then follow it up with a question that indicates your sincere interest in whatever it is that was praised. Praise-dependency tends to undermine the concept of inherent worth – it encourages kids to look outside themselves for their worth.

“As far as knowing how to handle praise and criticism, knowing one’s inherent worth is the way to handle praise and criticism. Neither praise nor criticism has an impact on one’s inherent worth, though it may have an impact on self-esteem. Criticism says more about the person doing the criticizing than it does about the one being criticized. Children can be taught to just say ‘thank you’ to anyone who offers them criticism (or praise for that matter). The criticism can be taken for what it is – a neutral fact to be examined or ignored – not an emotionally charged thing.”

If you can’t make the April 11 launch, What They Don’t Teach in Prenatal Class is available on Amazon, and Andrew is currently putting her workshops online so that parents can access them more easily. She said they should be available in May or June at anneandrew.com.