Month: November 2014
Next gen of theatre artists
From Nov. 12-15, Rumble Theatre’s Tremors presents three different plays – Trainspotting by Harry Gibson, The 4th Graders Present an Unnamed Love-Suicide by Sean Graney and This is War by Hannah Moscovitch. They will take place simultaneously in different parts of the Russian Hall. After each night’s performances, the entertainment will continue, with an after-party to which everyone is invited.
Part of Rumble Theatre’s mission is to foster “meaningful interactions between emerging and established artists,” and Tremors does just that. From start to finish, each of the plays is mounted by a group of relative newcomers to the professional theatre world. Knowing Rumble Theatre either directly or indirectly through colleagues, both Andrew Cohen and Naomi Vogt leapt at the opportunity to be involved when the call for artists went out.
“I have been interested in music composition and sound design for a long time,” said Cohen. “When I watch – or hear – a show, the moments I can connect to most are the ones where the sound is used to mirror the action onstage. I’m excited to have started exploring and establishing myself as a composer and designer in addition to performing.”
Cohen will be in charge of sound design for Trainspotting. “I submitted to Stephen Drover, artistic director of Rumble Theatre not knowing which plays were being mounted,” he said. “When we all submitted, we were asked which types of shows we were interested in working on and why. They paired all the designers and directors with their respective shows based on similar theatrical esthetics and tastes.”
Rumble’s mandate to mentor newcomers means that “all Tremors artists are assigned mentors, who are helping us to navigate this challenging material,” said Vogt, who was a student ambassador for the organization in her final year of theatre school.
“I promoted Rumble Theatre’s work, especially their phenomenal show Penelope, and co-produced a 48-hour play-building experiment called The Crockpot, which featured one representative from Vancouver’s theatre training facilities: UBC, Studio 58, Douglas, Capilano, Trinity Western and SFU. The goal of the project was to inspire students at these schools to connect with each other. There’s a tendency among theatre students to work only with their peers, even after graduation. It’s important to maintain those contacts from school, but it’s also important to expand into the larger community of Vancouver artists.”
Vogt will be acting in The 4th Graders, which “is about a class of fourth-grade students who honor their classmate Johnny with a play he wrote, following his suicide,” she explained. “The play details Johnny’s version of the series of events that led to his suicide. I play Rachel, an unpopular 10-year-old who is bullied for being overweight. Rachel and Johnny were ‘boyfriend/girlfriend,’ but Rachel ends the relationship because she believes she’s not deserving of Johnny’s love. The 4th Graders Present an Unnamed Love-Suicide is dark, but it’s so hilarious, too. It explores serious themes of love, betrayal and revenge, but through the lens of a 9-year-old, which I hope resonates with audience members of all ages.
Her past experience should help in her portrayal.
“I started performing in elementary school,” she explained, “when I was given special permission to dramatize Shel Silverstein poems during ‘reading hour’ with a friend. We weren’t popular girls, but our classmates thought our skits were funny – plus, we got out of reading hour! We kept going, eventually developing a sketch series of Oprah Winfrey Show parodies, which we’d perform almost daily to our Grade 4 classmates. I, an overgrown poofy-haired 8-year-old, played Oprah. My friend Allison, a tiny bespectacled thing, played our various idols: Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson, Shania Twain and others. We were a hit.”
It was then that Vogt knew she wanted to be an actor. “It offered some respect and acknowledgment I otherwise didn’t receive in the social arena,” she said. “I knew it was a job grown-ups had, so I thought, ‘Perfect, got that whole what-do-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up business sorted. I’m going to take acting classes, hang up some Destiny’s Child posters and things are going to fall into place for me.’ Obviously, a career in the arts is different than my fourth-grade mind dreamed it would be. I’ve only just transitioned into the professional world, and things are difficult sometimes, but my grade school dream is still alive!”
Flourishing, actually. Vogt just completed the bachelor of fine arts acting program at the University of British Columbia, where she won the Evelyn Harden Award. “It’s an award that the UBC theatre faculty gives to a graduating theatre student and, happily, it accompanies a cheque,” she explained. “It’s made available annually through the generosity of Dr. Evelyn Harden. I was so grateful to be the recipient among my class and it helped me make it through my final year.”
Vogt also expressed gratitude for her connection to the Jewish community. “Like theatre,” she said, “my affiliation with Judaism gave me a cultural anchor. In the rocky seas of adolescence, I knew I was a Jewish theatre nerd and, whenever I felt lame, ostracized or unusual, I could feel confident about those two things. It’s still a big part of my life, and so it features pretty largely in my improv and sketch comedy. I often find myself muttering broken Hebrew prayers or referencing Jewish holidays or practices onstage.”
Describing herself as a “‘character’ type within a pool of ingénues,” Vogt said she “often played one of the following roles: old women, very old women, and men. And, I honestly wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m unusual, so I get to play interesting people. For example, in my final show at UBC, I had the fantastic opportunity to play the murderous king Pere Ubu in an all-female version of Alfred Jarry’s masterpiece Ubu Roi, and I couldn’t have asked for a weirder, bigger, more joyful undertaking.”
Cohen, who has been featured in the Jewish Independent on more than one occasion, is also engaged in several interesting and meaningful undertakings. He was in the JI just a few months ago, when he was interviewed about his involvement as part of the faculty of Gotta Sing! Gotta Dance!, which celebrated its 20th anniversary this past summer.
Over the last couple of years, Cohen said he has spent most of his time out of Vancouver, performing in plays and musicals in Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto and Halifax.
“I spent several months traveling around the Americas to work with the Broadway organization Artists Striving to End Poverty. They commissioned me to direct and musically arrange an international music video featuring some of the students from their schools around the world, and some of their celebrity teachers (like cast members from Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, HBO’s Looking, Wicked’s Kristin Chenoweth and others).
“Most recently, I have been working on re-imagining and rearranging the Joni Mitchell canon for a new show co-created with my beautiful, talented fiancé Anna Kuman. Our show, Circle Game, for the Untitled Theatre Company, was developed as part of the inaugural residency with Capilano University. Anna and I are excited to have been granted another development residence, this time with a professional theatre company in the city. We are also very excited to have New York and Stratford director Robert McQueen helm our next workshop.”
Cohen is part of the tech team for Firehall Arts Centre’s presentation of Urinetown, which runs until Nov. 29. This month, he also “will be workshopping a new musical with Axis Theatre that tours around Western Canada in the new year. Following that will be the next development phase of my show Circle Game…. And then, next summer, I will be playing Judas in the Arts Club Theatre’s production of Godspell. After that, I’ve booked the biggest, most exciting gig of my life: marrying the incredible Anna Kuman!”
As for Vogt, she said about her future plans, “It’s scary to be released out of the safety of theatre school, but it’s exciting to work in the professional community, too. I’m teaching with the Vancouver Youth Theatre right now, which is especially fun because I took their classes as a child. I’m also experimenting with physical theatre and puppetry and, right now, I’m taking a clowning class with the remarkable Gina Bastone. Traveling is a big part of my immediate plans, too – I’m hoping to go to Israel in the spring. But, until then, feel free to hire me!”
Tickets for Tremors ($15 for each play) can be purchased via rumble.org. Since the plays take place simultaneously, it is only possible to see one play per night.
Zeruya Shalev opens Jewish Book Fest
Zeruya Shalev (photo by Naomi Tokatly)
In The Remains of Love, her latest novel to be translated into English, Zeruya Shalev once again explores (and crosses) intimate emotional boundaries. In this novel, however, she also overtly explores territory that she has actively resisted – Israel, where she was born and still lives.
“In my previous works, I avoided relating to the Israeli reality in a straightforward way,” Shalev told the Independent in an email interview. “The readers could have sensed it only indirectly – through the reckless pace, the intensity and perhaps even the pessimism. In this book, however, I felt an urge to open more windows to the Israeli reality – such as the history of the kibbutz and the burning issues of human rights. Each book has its own needs. Many issues that did not fit right in the previous books with the previous protagonists found themselves fitting perfectly into this one and its characters; this is because the Israeli reality affects them in a deeper and a more profound manner. And yet, still I am wrestling with the dominance of this reality, and try not to let it take over my books – it’s enough that it controls my life.”
Shalev included a winking emoticon after this last comment, indicating that the remark should be taken with a grain of salt, or at least not as seriously as it reads. She has an engaging manner and a sense of humor, which comes through in her writing (amid the serious, emotional and provocative material) and especially in interviews (there are several available on YouTube). In addition to her talent as a writer – her novels are critically acclaimed and have garnered various awards – Shalev is a thoughtful, friendly and relaxed interviewee. She is a great choice to launch this year’s Cherie Smith JCCGV Jewish Book Festival on Nov. 22.
The Remains of Love (Bloomsbury, 2013) centres around a dying woman, Hemda Horovitz, and her two adult children, who each have families, foibles and problems of their own. Her favorite, Avner, is a human rights lawyer; he is questioning everything about his life, whether he has made a dent in the inequality and injustice in the world, as well as his relationship with his wife and sons. Hemda’s daughter, Dina, has devoted herself to her own daughter, Nitzan – giving her the love she never received from Hemda – but, like most teenagers, Nitzan is pulling away, so Dina looks to adopting a child to fill the void, even though her husband and daughter are against it.
The focus on three protagonists required a change in style for Shalev.
“In my previous novels, I concentrated on one protagonist, and followed her stream of consciousness in the first person, which creates immediate intimacy,” she explained. “The first person traps the readers in the inner world of the character, and even when he or she depicts other characters, they often seem like a projection of his or her own qualities. In this book, I wandered between three minds, three streams of consciousness, and the third person enables me much space and flexibility. At first, I was afraid that the third person might hurt the intimacy of the voice, but in retrospect it seems (or at least I hope) it didn’t. The first person is completely monogamous, and the third person gives you more freedom, which I and my protagonists needed for this book.”
The literal translation of the novel’s title is “the shards of life.” In the French version – and perhaps in other languages, too – chayyim is translated as “life.” However, Philip Simpson, who does a skilled job of translating the book’s content, style and emotion, chooses the word “love.”
“The French title of the book is more loyal to the original title in Hebrew (The Remains of Life) than the English one,” acknowledged Shalev. “Yet my English publisher (in the U.K. and U.S.A.) turned to me and explained that this name does not possess enough beauty and lyric in English; I therefore agreed to change it. We tried together to find a new title that would fit the themes in the book, and also be of poetic value, and this is how we got to this name. It is indeed interesting to realize how easily one can substitute the word ‘life’ for the word ‘love.’ All three protagonists of this book are indeed longing for love, all are experiencing it as a drug-of-life, each in their own unique way. Life without love seems to them tasteless, and they are all willing to go a long way to find it; not only in the footsteps of romantic love, but the love for a child, a brother, for life itself.”
Shalev’s Vancouver visit is part of a tour that begins in Houston and which also stops in Detroit, New York and Chicago.
“Unlike the dozens of tours I have done in Europe, I haven’t had many professional visits in the U.S. and Canada,” she said. “I am very much looking forward, especially to seeing Vancouver, which I heard is amazingly beautiful. As someone who has lived her entire life in a warm and desert land, I admire the cold weather, the mountains and lakes.”
Hopefully, she also likes rain.
***
The Sol & Shirley Kort Author Series will feature Zeruya Shalev in conversation with the Globe’s Marsha Lederman on Nov. 22, 7:30 p.m., in the Rothstein Theatre. Tickets ($20) are available from ticketpeak.com/jccgv or the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, in person or by calling 604-257-5111. For the full Cherie Smith JCCGV Jewish Book Festival lineup, visit jewishbookfestival.ca.
Preparing for her next role
In Late Company, Kerry Sandomirsky and Michael Kopsa are a couple who has lost a son to bullying. (photo by David Cooper)
“One year after a tragedy, two couples sit down to dinner. Far from finding the closure they seek, the dinner strips bare their good intentions to reveal layers of parental, sexual and political hypocrisy.”
So begins the promotional material for the award-winning play Late Company, being presented by Touchstone Theatre later this month. It continues, “Loosely based on the true story of the son of a Tory politician who killed himself after being extensively bullied, Late Company imagines what a restorative justice dinner held a year later might have looked like between the parents of a dead gay son, his chief tormentor and that boy’s parents.”
Kerry Sandomirsky takes on the role of the grieving mother. She spoke with the Jewish Independent about the part – and other topics – via email.
JI: The subject matter – and small cast – of Late Company combine to make what seems like a very heavy, intense role. How do you prepare for such roles in general and this one in particular, especially as a mother yourself?
KS: I put my attention on the things that are important to the character, and the world starts to inform you via synchronicity. I was riding on a bus to Kerrisdale and I saw an ad above me for the Josh Platzer Society. It’s for teen suicide prevention and awareness. I contacted them and I’m now communicating with a mother who lost her son. I am also using their recommended reading list for research.
At the same time, my character is a sculptor so I’m reading a biography of Barbara Hepworth.
Earlier this year, I did a similar maternal role in Clybourne Park for the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton. When it comes to intense parts, your nervous system doesn’t know that the grief on stage isn’t real, so there’s a cost. Your adrenal system gets depleted. Being a mom, you have to guard against the play contaminating your life.
I got through Clybourne Park by exercising every day and not drinking any wine. Maybe for this one I’ll have to do the opposite.
JI: The last time the JI spoke with you was in 2011, before The Philanderer. At that time, you were returning to the stage after a two-plus-year hiatus to recover from a head injury. In what ways did that period of being away from theatre change your work/life?
KS: I became a teacher at Studio 58, I accepted an offer to direct, and I decided to take more holidays! I also gave myself permission to be a writer. I turned down playing Cleopatra for Bard on the Beach and instead attended SFU Writers Studio to work with Ivan E. Coyote. After that, I was chosen to go to the Banff Playwrights Colony to work on my one-woman play called Wobble.
JI: Your directorial debut (… didn’t see that coming) was a Pick of the Fringe this year. What were some of the highlights and challenges of directing? Can you see yourself doing more directing?
KS: It was a delight to direct one of my favorite people on the planet, Beverley Elliott, and we had Bill Costin doing our music. So, it was a privilege being in the same room with that much talent for almost a month. I’d definitely do it again. I loved not having to learn all those lines.
JI: When I met you at a recent Museum of Vancouver event, you mentioned having just filmed with Denys Arcand. Is there anything about that you can share?
KS: When you work with someone that gifted, there’s no fear on the set. There’s no ego. There’s just creative collaboration. Denys Arcand and the director Adad Hannah both welcomed input from their actors. Denys is quick to laugh. He was a joy to be around.
JI: What are some of the projects on which you’re currently working?
KS: I want to finish writing Wobble. And, of course, doing another new Canadian play is always fulfilling. I dream of collaborating with Crystal Pite. I’m not a dancer, but I did a workshop with her anyway. I was a troll among the whippets. And I’m hoping to work with Jovanni Sy, the new artistic director of Gateway Theatre. I met him at the Playwrights Colony. He’s a great addition to our Vancouver theatre community.
JI: In what part of the process from idea to stage is Wobble?
KS: Katrina Dunn, the director of Late Company, came to Banff and helped me workshop it. We’ve got a solid first draft. I value her intelligence, her feminism and her compassion. As the artistic director of Touchstone Theatre, she champions new Canadian work. The playwright for Late Company, Jordan Tannahill, just got nominated for a Governor General’s Award, but Katrina chose do a play by him long before that. Her instincts are superb. This will be our fifth production together. It’s a treat to be directed by her.
***
Late Company is at the Cultch, Vancity Culture Lab, 1895 Venables St., from Nov. 21-30, 8 p.m. (Tuesdays to Sundays), plus Nov. 22, 29 and 30, 2 p.m. There is a two-for-one preview Nov. 20, 8 p.m. Tickets ($27/$22) are available from the Cultch, 604-251-1363 or tickets.thecultch.com.
Bigger, better Broken Sex Doll
Co-creator Andy Thompson directs the sci-fi musical that is being remounted at the Cultch’s York Theatre Nov. 12-22. (photo from the Virutal Stage)
Broken Sex Doll is back. A hit at the Cultch in 2013, it ventured out to Halifax for the 2014 Magnetic North Festival, and returns to Vancouver Nov. 12-22, where it will play at the Cultch’s York Theatre as part of a national tour. The production will then head to the Yukon for four shows, returning to the Lower Mainland for a run at Coquitlam’s Evergreen Cultural Centre (Dec. 16-20).
Produced by the Virtual Stage, the sci-fi musical is the creation of Jewish community members Andy Thompson (director, book, lyrics) and Anton Lipovetsky (composer). The new production is being billed as “bigger and better.”
“We have a new set. A new lighting design. New costumes. Re-tooled songs. Some new performers. And the script has been tinkered with a little bit,” the award-winning director and writer Thompson told the Independent. “Refining a show is not something you always get to do, so the process feels somewhat luxurious. Rolling up our sleeves together and chiseling out details on a show like this is a lot of fun. Just today we were refining choreography and songs to a level of detail rarely explored in the rehearsal process. Often in the past I have found myself relieved just to get a show on its feet, but where we are currently at with Broken Sex Doll is altogether different. And installing it at the gorgeous York Theatre has been such an honor and delight.”
About the challenges and benefits of remounting a production, Thompson said, “This has been a wonderful opportunity to take another look at the show and make refinements, with the experience and knowledge gleaned from previous incarnations of what worked and what could be improved upon. The challenges vary from the artistic to the technical. My aim with this production is to raise the bar as high as I possibly can and produce as close to a Broadway-calibre musical as possible. Making the show tourable has also been a significant challenge.”
Broken Sex Doll comes with a content warning, and the evening performances are for audiences 19 and older. But is it as risqué as the title makes it sound?
“I think that depends on your perspective,” said Thompson. “It could be ‘too much’ for some and ‘not enough’ for others. For example, I chose not to include any nudity in excess of a male bum or two. Female nudity was off the table. I knew anything more than what we’re doing could cause discomfort within some audience members, ‘taking them out’ of the experience of the story. It’s a fine line that I’m walking. In the world of the show, social morality as we know it has more or less collapsed. And, while that’s been freeing to me a playwright to explore, I know that there are certain lines that, when crossed, are counterproductive. Pushing the boundaries in the rehearsal process was a hoot, to say the least. There’s a lot of simulated sex in the show. And, if done ‘tastefully’ on stage, sex can be entertaining. And even hilarious.”
The 2013 incarnation of Broken Sex Doll garnered seven Jessie Richardson Theatre Award nominations, including outstanding production and outstanding direction for Thompson, who is also an award-winning actor, filmmaker and teacher.
Born and raised in Chillwack, the Studio 58 graduate is founder of the Virtual Stage. Another of his sci-fi (and Jessie-nominated) creations is The Zombie Syndrome, “in which audience members with smartphones are endowed as elite agents on a mission to save the world from a deadly zombie plague.” The Virtual Stage-produced annual event, which began in 2012, generated a 2013 sequel called The Zombie Syndrome: On Death Island.
Broken Sex Doll opens at York Theatre, 639 Commercial Dr., on Nov. 12, 8 p.m. It runs Nov. 13-16, 18-22, 8 p.m.; and Nov. 15, 16, 22, 2 p.m. All 8 p.m. performances are 19+ only. There are Q&A sessions after the Nov. 13, 16 (2 p.m.) and 18 shows. Tickets (starting at $19) are available from 604-251-1363 or tickets.thecultch.com.
Dedicated to the community
Dvori Balshine has served the Vancouver Jewish community, in one capacity or another, for 45 years. She is retiring in November from her latest post – director of development at Louis Brier Jewish Aged Foundation – and she talked to the Independent about her life and work.
“We came to Vancouver from Israel in 1969,” she said. As an educator who studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, she found a job right away. She taught Hebrew and Jewish history until she fell into fundraising, almost by accident.
“I was hired by the JCC as a cultural director around 1980,” she recalled. “I wanted to start an art gallery and a Jewish authors festival, wanted to do events, but there was never enough money. So, I met with the community members and asked for their support. Our biggest fundraiser was held at the Oakridge movie theatre. They had a movie theatre at the time. It was the opening night of Chorus Line, and it was unbelievably successful.”
With the funds raised by this and similar events on behalf of the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, Balshine was at the root of the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery and one of the founders, together with Cherie Smith, of the JCCGV Jewish Book Festival. When Hebrew University asked her, as one of its alumni, to head their Western Canada division, she agreed. For 17 years, she served as the executive director in Western Canada.
“I raised lots of money for them, sent many students to study abroad, organized other specific projects. But then I thought: I should work for my own community.” In 2003, she came to the Louis Brier Jewish Aged Foundation.
In the 12 years she has worked at the foundation, she has led many campaigns, and established endowment funds and awards. As well, more than 600 art pieces were acquired as donations from local Jewish artists. These works hang on the walls of Louis Brier Home and Hospital and of the Weinberg Residence, making the rooms and corridors more like those of a home, less institutional. A bus and a piano, a dental clinic and a garden sculpture, multiple renovations around the home and the Gallery of Donors Wall – they all owe their existence to Balshine and her crew, to their continuous efforts to improve the quality of life of the residents. She was also active in community outreach programs, including, but not limited to, numerous musical events and lecture series, book launches and octogenarians’ celebrations.
“My dream was to leave the organization with $10 million, and we are at $8.5 million,” she wrote in her reflections of her most important activities at Louis Brier. “It is not that we didn’t raise it, we raised more, however, the demand from the home and Weinberg annually has been so great that we have only been able to invest and grow to this amount.”
She sounded modest, as if raising almost a million a year is a trifle, but for anyone else, it would be a major accomplishment, even the achievement of a lifetime.
“I believe in the mission of the organization I work for,” she said. “I do it with all my heart, my mind and my might. Of course, there are multiple challenges. One of them is that there are many Jewish organizations in B.C., and everybody needs a piece of the pie. The need is great, but there are not many industries here.”
She also encountered another challenge. “I found that it’s easier to raise money for the young, for schools and universities, than for the elderly. How do I deal with this? With a smile and an explanation. We organize events and introduce potential donors to the organization. We honor our donors.”
Her conviction that everyone should share his/her wealth comes from her family background. Both her father and grandmother were involved in their local communities on various levels, and Balshine has continued the tradition. “Some people in the community are doing extremely well. They have a responsibility to share. I learned that at home.”
Her approach to finding new benefactors is personal. “I meet with everyone I’m going to ask for donations. If I don’t know them, I look for someone who can introduce us. We have coffee together and talk. I try to share with everyone the importance of Louis Brier for our community. People give to people, not organizations. Of course, you need people skills to do this kind of work. You need to be kind, to smile, to have charm. You have to feel it, to be willing to give from yourself; otherwise, you can’t do a good job.”
With such a personal fundraising strategy, she knows many members of the Jewish community in Vancouver. “I’ll tell you an anecdote,” she said with a smile. “I love opera. Recently, I took my granddaughter, who is 12, to the opera Carmen at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. I introduced her to my friends. When we came home, her parents asked her how she liked it. She said that, of course, the music was great and the show. She also said, ‘There were like 3,000 people in the audience, and my grandma knows half of them.’”
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at olgagodim@gmail.com.
Fresh, solemn significance
For a great number of Canadians, particularly those too young to remember the Second World War, Remembrance Day is not the day of intimate commemoration it was for previous generations. Canadian engagement in Afghanistan, however, has once again bestowed on this solemn occasion more immediacy. That said, most young Canadians who file into school auditoriums for the recitation of “In Flanders Fields” and a moment of silence understandably may not experience the same emotional reaction as their parents or grandparents who participated in or lost loved ones in the world wars.
This Nov. 11 will probably have poignancy beyond the routine, though, because of the tragic events of recent days. Our country is mourning Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent, who was murdered last month in Quebec, and Corporal Nathan Cirillo, who was shot at the National War Memorial in Ottawa two days later.
The murder of Cirillo was immediately followed by a dramatic shootout at the heart of our democracy, the Parliament Buildings, in which the assassin and thankfully no one else was killed.
The symbolism of the latter shootings is unambiguous. A killer – maybe deranged, maybe driven by ideology, maybe a bit of both – kills a military official standing guard at the icon of Canada’s military sacrifices, then heads directly to the legislature of our country, apparently intending further destruction.
Reaction has varied intensely. American 24-hour news outlets treated the occasion with typical spectacle. Canadian media have been credited with exhibiting characteristic Canadian moderation. Canadians have not, evidence so far suggests, gone hog-wild in demanding the swapping of human rights for physical security. A typically Canadian assessment will be made about whether elected officials should have greater protection, but there has been minimal hysteria about an imminent invasion by terrorists.
These incidents, of course, raised the inevitable fears and allegations. Both crimes were perpetrated by men who were newly observant Muslims. Yet, there is minimal evidence that either was in any way connected to a larger Islamist network or that religious fanaticism was a greater driver than grave psychological or emotional troubles.
Still, there was reaction in the unlikeliest of places. In Cold Lake, Alta., a mosque – talk about a little mosque on the prairie – was a hate-crime target with, among other things, “Go home” spray-painted on its exterior. In what was the perfect Canadian response, locals showed up to clean off the graffiti and festoon the place with signs, including one with the message “You ARE home.”
There may be a place for hate-crimes legislation and certainly there are laws against vandalism, but the greatest reaction of all is individual members of a community coming together to undo – literally and figuratively – the hatred purveyed by a minority of bigots.
As we prepare to mark Remembrance Day Tuesday, members of our community also gather Sunday night to mark the 76th anniversary of Kristallnacht. This date marks the horrible moment when the incremental threats of the Nazi regime moved from words to deeds, and the intimidations of successive antisemitic laws moved toward the grisly realities of the Final Solution.
Kristallnacht also holds particularly fresh import in a world where Jewish shops and people this year have been subjected to attack in Europe and elsewhere. Both of these solemn days call on us to consider events of the past and to be vigilant in the present. Lest we forget.
Teaching self-defence
Jonathan Fader, left, and his business partner Borhan Jiang show a class at Urban Tactics Krav Maga how to disarm an attacker who has a knife. (photo by Albert Law)
When Jonathan Fader copied the Jewish Independent on an open letter that he posted online in mid-August, Operation Protective Edge was winding down. Noting the sometimes violent antisemitism that it had evoked in places around the world – including in some protests that took place in Canada – he stressed the need for members of the Jewish community to know self-defence. Since then, there have been two terrorist attacks on Canadian soil.
In the letter, he wrote, “I am asking you to please take it seriously and find your local krav maga gym and start learning to protect yourself. If there is none near by, at the very least find the most comparable style, just learn something!”
Intrigued, the Jewish Independent visited the Richmond location of Urban Tactics Krav Maga, Inc., in September. Fader and his business partner, Borhan Jiang, who has been featured in the Independent on more than one occasion, also have a Burnaby site.
Raised in a somewhat observant household, Fader, 27, said he nonetheless “didn’t really identify with being a Jew.” He describes himself as secular, and doesn’t “believe in religion but, of course, if the world is going to call me a Jew … I might as well accept it, and I’m a proud to represent the culture, but I’ll do it realistically…. I support Israel and what it does because, realistically, that’s just the way it is, but I have criticisms like anyone else.”
From 2009-2011, Fader lived in Israel. He went there for the purpose of joining the Israel Defence Forces, and he served in the 424th infantry battalion in the Givati regiment.
“When I came back, I literally did nothing,” he said. He had some savings and, “I was just living with my parents, living off of [my savings] for like five months. I did nothing.”
He spoke about some of the difficulties soldiers have in returning to civilian life. In his opinion, the “reason that they’re so slow to deal with PTSD and depression in Israel is because it’s less apparent, as everyone does the army and, when you go home, people understand, and you have people to talk to. So, the rates are much lower, but there … [are] still suicides and still depression…. But, when you come back here,” he said, referring to Canada, “you don’t have the support of your family or your friends because nobody understands what it’s like,” even if PTSD is more recognized.
He acknowledged that, as a result of the work of veterans here, “more PTSD and depression is being dealt with now and in the North American armies at least.” Once an “invisible group of people,” he said soldiers have become more vocal. If you look at the Canadian army, they now are starting to put psychiatrists actively in duty, he said.
For these and other reasons, Fader is studying psychology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University College. “I find that psychology really helps me understand everything, from marketing to trends to people, just everything,” he said, attributing the effectiveness of krav maga as a system of self-defence to the fact that “it’s working off of real psychology, action-reaction rate, fight or flight.”
He noted about Urban Tactics’ clients, “Interesting thing about that is, when we first started, we figured it was going be all young guys … but that wasn’t the case.… For the first year, it was predominantly males age 30 to 50 with families who wanted to protect the family.”
In general, Canadians don’t understand “what self-defence is and when aggression is appropriate, when violence is appropriate,” said Fader. Noting that women tend to be more vulnerable, he said, to defend yourself successfully, “you need to be able to hit hard and fast, and really be willing to damage the person who is attacking.”
People here have the idea that you should never hit back and that you can talk yourself out of every situation, he said. And, he agrees, to a point: the first step for self-defence is to avoid the conflict completely, to not put yourself in a position where you might end up being in danger. However, if you do end up in trouble, you need to be able to assess whether talk will be enough because, “if you think you’re in danger, you need to attack first … because [with] action versus reaction, reaction is always slower…. [In] proper self-defence, it is absolutely OK to strike first.”
He gave the example of a person walking through an alley at night and being attacked. First, he noted, the choice to walk down the alley was probably not a good one, “and you have to take some of the blame now because that’s a grand scheme self-defence: Why are you there? If you go there thinking nothing is going to happen, that’s ridiculous.” But, now that you’re in trouble, he said, if you have the chance to run, “it’s OK to run, it’s OK to avoid the situation.” If you can’t run, then you have to act first if possible, “because if you wait, you could be knocked out … [so] kick him in the groin, go for his eyes … push, run.”
A good instructor, said Fader, will drill it into your head to avoid a situation, then teach you some basic techniques. But still, all the technique in the world won’t help you if “you’re not willing to hit that guy in the groin, go for his eyes, go for his throat,” he said.
Krav maga isn’t a fitness class. “I’m not teaching cardio kickboxing,” said Fader, “but the thing is that you need to be in some physical capability in order to legitimately defend yourself against a violent attack…. You have to be able to move correctly. Some people who are … limited in what they can do but they mentally are willing to hit hard, hit fast, will be OK, reasonably, if they’re up against a trained attacker…. We don’t teach fitness but you will get in shape … but I don’t care if you lose five pounds – I want you to know that you can defend yourself.”
The fact that both he and Jiang have trained in Israel sets Urban Tactics apart from other places that offer krav maga, said Fader. “The fact that we understand both cultures – North American and Israeli – is what truly makes us different.” While most martial arts will teach you techniques that will help you stay upright during a conflict, if you do fall to the ground, and if your opponent has a weapon or an accomplice, “going to the ground is the worst possible thing you can do, even if you’re a Brazilian jiu jitsu black belt.… We teach ground stuff, but it’s about everything you can do to get up.”
In the end, said Fader, the techniques he teaches focus on reality, how people react in a physically threatening situation. “How do you need to deal with it, what’s the strategy? It’s a constant assessment. We don’t just do a move and stop [in our instruction]. We always make sure, Are your hands still up? Are you paying attention? Are you looking around arbitrarily or are you actually actively scanning?” Proper training, he said, will teach you how to continually assess your situation, as every second counts.
Fader acknowledged that he may lose in a boxing match or a karate bout that only allows certain types of hits, but “in a street fight, I’m going to beat this guy because I’m playing by no rules. I do whatever I have to do.”
For more information about self-defence courses and Urban Tactics, visit urbantacticscanada.com.
Fragmented childhood
In a recently published memoir, A Childhood on the Move: Memoirs of a Child Survivor of the Holocaust, René Goldman, professor emeritus of Chinese history at the University of British Columbia, pieces together a fragmented and tragic childhood and adolescence.
Having migrated to Luxembourg from Poland, Goldman’s parents then fled the advance of the Nazis into the Benelux countries. The family made their way through occupied France hoping to sail from a Mediterranean port to South America. While their passage was interrupted, the family at least found themselves in France’s “free zone,” the southern area governed by the German-puppet Vichy regime, but not directly administered by the Nazis. While granted a period of comparative normalcy – unlike, Goldman notes, Jews in the north like Anne Frank and her family – eventually there was a roundup.
Goldman was awakened by his mother and told that police were demanding they go to the train station. Why his father was not with them at that time Goldman does not know. Nor does he know why he was spared the fate of his mother.
“The entire station was a scene of bedlam, with men, women and children being pulled, shoved and hurled into the train,” writes Goldman. “Just as the commissar was about to throw me into the train as well, two gendarmes in khaki uniforms appeared in the nick of time to stop him. Without a word he let go of me…. That was the last time I saw my Mama.”
An aunt arranged for Goldman to be hidden in a rural village, which would become the first of countless temporary shelters for him. In an excruciating series of hasty moves, Goldman was transferred from the protection of one adult or institution to another. In some instances, the adults and his fellow children were amiable, in others far less so. Despite the instability and constant uprooting, he usually managed to attain some education in almost every one of his hiding places. At a Catholic institution, he and other Jewish children were assigned new identities and warned never to let anyone see their private parts, “since in France only Jews were circumcised.”
When finally the allies reached the village where Goldman was hidden, and he reconnected with his aunt, she told him that his father had joined the Free French forces and would return after the war. It’s not clear if she believed this. “Alas, even as Paris was about to be liberated, [Klaus] Barbie [the Nazi known as the ‘Butcher of Lyon’] hurriedly filled up one last train with victims destined for the death camps, a train which the Resistance vainly sought to derail, or otherwise prevent from reaching Germany,” writes Goldman. “Decades later I learned that my beloved Papa was among them.”
Though now liberated, things did not, of course, return to normal for Goldman. The winter of 1944-45 was a harsh one and food was scarce. Meanwhile, the war continued and the allies suffered setbacks in the Battle of the Bulge. “That unanticipated delay caused the Allies heavy losses, while thousands more victims, among them my father, perished in the Nazi death camps,” he writes.
Moreover, Goldman’s surviving aunt and uncle in France, with three children of their own, found they could not care for him. They sent him to a colony run by a Zionist organization, where he received a Zionist education, including a bit of Hebrew, to prepare the young people for aliyah. When the war finally ended, the children at the colony waited for news of their parents. “Daily I hung around the little railway station after school hours, sometimes alone, sometimes with others, scrutinizing the passengers who came off the afternoon train from Grenoble in the vain hope that Papa might turn up among them,” he writes.
The Jewish community in Grenoble hosted a photographic exhibition of the Shoah. “I felt my head spinning with shock and disbelief as I stared at the photos of emaciated, skeletal looking ‘déportés’ in striped uniforms; of heaps of corpses stacked like cord wood; and of the gas chambers and crematoria, in which millions were burnt to ashes.”
Goldman was entrusted to the Commission Centrale de l’Enfance (CCE), a product of the underground groups that had hidden Jewish children and that was now attempting to reunite them with surviving relatives or adopt them if they were orphaned. At the CCE homes, the children were indoctrinated with communist ideals. Some did not take to them, but Goldman emphatically did. He was enraptured with the idea of the socialist experiment taking place in Poland, the land of his parents’ ancestry. He opted against joining his maternal aunt and uncle in migrating to Canada, instead moving to Poland, where his huge extended family on both sides, save one paternal uncle, had all been killed in the Shoah.
He worked at the Polish national radio station, reading news and commentary and translating material for broadcast to France and Belgium, while struggling to master the notoriously complex Polish language. Disenchantment with communism began when he was chosen to participate in a summer program for boys at a beautiful resort town at the southern end of Poland in the Karkonosze mountains. The program was primarily aimed at the children of Polish émigrés in the West. While Goldman was excited to speak French again with some of the campers, the “counselors” were warned not to let on that they understood the languages the youngsters spoke. The director of the colony demanded of the boys who knew French to translate into Polish the letters the children were writing home to ensure the news from the old country met the standards of propaganda. Goldman refused to be a spy, however, and the other French-speakers followed suit. The protest was effective, and the boys could again enjoy the camaraderie of their guests.
Goldman was also aware of the antisemitic purges in Czechoslovakia and Moscow at the time, in which Jewish party activists were convicted as “agents of American imperialism and Zionism.”
In 1953, a delegation visited Goldman’s school, inviting students to apply to study abroad, primarily in the Soviet Union. Being an excellent student, he applied and was accepted to a program to study in China, where he would spend five years, during which time his enchantment with communism would come to an end. He was there during the period when Mao Zedong declared that China would “let 100 flowers bloom, let 100 schools of thought contend.” This was a trap, luring people into expressing their true beliefs and then dragging them into “struggle meetings” in which they were denounced, beaten, humiliated and forced to incriminate others. Then, in 1958 began the Great Leap Forward, the collectivization and forced industrialization of rural Chinese society, which resulted in a famine that claimed between 30 and 40 million lives.
Abandoning China, Poland and communism, Goldman received a scholarship to Columbia University, and reconnected with what was left of his family, in Canada, and eventually spent a long career as a professor of Chinese history at UBC. “The wonderful port city of Vancouver became the end destination of a life of wandering from country to country,” Goldman writes.
While his life on the move finally ended, he would never find solace. It would take decades for Goldman to piece together what he could of his parents’ fates. In 1965, he met a man in whose arms his father had died during a death march from Auschwitz in 1945. He never found any witnesses to his mother’s death, but he found a record of the convoy she had been on to Auschwitz-Birkenau: “Of the 407 women who arrived at Birkanau on that train, only 147 were registered and had a number tattooed on their forearm; the others were sent directly to the gas chambers,” he writes. “I can only assume that my mother, being small and frail, was among the latter, unless she died because of the atrocious conditions in which the doomed passengers of that train traveled. I never learned for certain what happened to her; there will never be closure for me.”
Pat Johnson is a Vancouver writer and principal in PRsuasiveMedia.com.
Marking Shabbat together
The Shabbat Project brought hundreds out to bake challah, celebrate Shabbat and dance over three nights, Oct. 23-25. (photo by Alan Katowitz)
Oct. 23 saw more than 400 people make Vancouver history by participating in its first community-wide challah bake. The event served as the springboard for the Shabbat Project (also known as the Shabbos Project), an initiative spearheaded last year by South Africa’s chief rabbi, Dr. Warren Goldstein, in an attempt to unite his community through the practice of keeping one Shabbat together.
It’s a disarmingly simple concept. By experiencing the magic of Shabbat just once, we can rejuvenate family and community life, restore Jewish pride and identity, and build Jewish unity across the world. The international event this year exceeded all expectations, uniting Jews in more than 461 cities in 65 countries.
Taking place over the Shabbat weekend of Oct. 24-25, the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver served as the venue for the local celebrations. The inaugural challah bake yielded several hundred beautifully braided challot. And hundreds celebrated Shabbat, many of them for the fist time. People set up tents and invited others to join them for meals and/or the whole Shabbat. Different organizations facilitated community meals and programs throughout.
“Once I had lit the candles, I felt an amazing wave of peace,” said participant Barbara Weinberg. “Although at first I did miss that cellphone, we started playing board games and actually it was rather nice to be off the grid. In fact, after Havdalah, I felt reluctant to turn everything on! My daughter particularly enjoyed it, as she said that she liked that we spent so much time doing things together.”
The closing event – a Havdalah concert – brought a capacity crowd to the JCCGV auditorium for a night of music, dance and Jewish celebration. Moshe Hecht and his band, from New York, kept the energy and excitement going way past the official end time. A perfect end to an amazing Shabbat.