Books

Novels miss the mark slightly

I was very much looking forward to two recent novels. Both are love stories, but unconventional ones. I enjoyed them, and read them cover to cover – generally, I allow myself to stop reading, watching or listening to whatever it is I’m not enjoying, so that I wanted to know how the stories ended is a compliment to the writers. But I was disappointed in the novels, ultimately. In both instances, I felt a little robbed of emotional impact.

Perhaps, given their protagonists, I shouldn’t have been surprised that the cerebral aspects of the books would outweigh, even quash, the heart-rending effects. Morningside Heights by Joshua Henkin (Pantheon Books, 2021) is about an uber-accomplished, hyper-intelligent professor who is struck by early-onset Alzheimer’s. Never Anyone But You by Rupert Thomson (Other Press, 2020) is about two real-life cultural icons who were in the same social circles as people the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Salvador Dalí.

Love faces adversity

Within the first 20 pages of Morningside Heights, I didn’t particularly like either Prof. Spence Robin or his wife, Pru. He is an all-star academic, winning awards and grants of all sorts; he has ambition and has achieved some power in his world, and carries himself as such. He is Jewish but changed his name early in life, “to escape the Lower East Side.” He is Pru’s teacher, though only six years her senior, and downplays her concerns of being seen on campus as just his girlfriend, not as a person in her own right. And it is only after he semi-proposes that he tells her he has a sister with brain damage, who he visits rarely, and that he’d been married before and has an estranged son from that marriage.

For her part, Pru lets Spence get away with all these things. Worse, she abandons her own beliefs and dreams, basically, to be with him. For example, she keeps kosher before she meets him and in their early days together, but lets that go by the wayside. She has her own promising career that she gives up because her own areas of interest overlap with his award-winning expertise. He lets her become his shadow. He lets her main purpose become supporting him, while not reciprocating or appreciating that support at all, it seems.

So, it’s hard to empathize with the individual characters when their lives are completely upturned by Spence’s Alzheimer’s, which begins to affect him in his late 50s. That said, one doesn’t wish ill on anyone. The challenges both Spence and Pru face are severe, and Henkin brilliantly communicates the difficulties on both sides. Spence’s confusions and his not being able to understand fully the state he’s in are as heart-wrenching as his strong will and refusal to step down from work or admit his frailties are frustrating. Pru’s sadness at the loss of her partner and the heavy responsibilities of caring for him are palpable.

Perhaps the weight of these feelings and circumstances is part of what inspired Henkin to give – in my opinion – too much ink to Spence’s troubled son. Spence and Pru’s daughter Sarah doesn’t figure as prominently, but a lot of time is spent on Arlo and, in some respects, Arlo allows readers to get to know more about Spence. But those story threads interrupted, for me, the potential intensity of the Spence-Pru storyline, which, I have to admit, was both a relief and a letdown. I wasn’t surprised that Henkin has personal experience with dementia. In an online interview with the publication Shelf Awareness, he shares, “Although much of Morningside Heights is invented, it is, in many ways, my most autobiographical novel to date. My father, like Spence, was a professor at Columbia who developed Alzheimer’s, though my father developed it much later in life than Spence did. In writing about the ways Pru lost Spence, I was re-experiencing my mother’s loss, and my brothers’ and my loss.”

The rawness of that real pain is tempered in the novel, perhaps out of personal necessity. And perhaps most readers will appreciate that emotional distance, but I was hoping for a more intimate portrayal.

Not-so secret love

Never Anyone But You also lacks intimacy, even though it is about Suzanne Malherbe and Lucie Schwob, who fall in love and become both personal and professional partners. Thomson writes about the real-life French artists in a somewhat didactic and distanced way. He has done all his research but never fully inhabits or gives full life to his characters, who must have been quite passionate and committed people to have accomplished what they did under the circumstances in which they did it.

The women knew each other from childhood but end up becoming stepsisters when Lucie’s father (who was Jewish) connects with and eventually marries Suzanne’s mother (who was Catholic). Suzanne is immediately captivated by Lucie when they meet more formally; Suzanne is almost 17 years old and Lucie a couple years older than that. Never Anyone But You is told from the perspective of Suzanne.

Early on, the two decide to collaborate – Lucie’s words and Suzanne’s drawings. Lucie transforms herself into Claude Cahun before Suzanne reinvents herself as Marcel Moore. But the new persona cannot heal Claude’s bouts of depression and, throughout her life, she struggled to stay alive.

Claude and Marcel were unofficially (because they weren’t men) part of the Surrealist scene in 1920s Paris but their artistic (notably, photographic) success was tempered by the Second World War. They leave Paris in the late 1930s and take refuge in Jersey, where they use their talents to unsettle and educate the Nazi soldiers who occupied the island from 1940. It was their hope that their leaflets would demoralize the soldiers, and even cause some of them to desert. Marcel was fluent in German, so they could make the subversive material appear as if it were coming from one of the soldiers. Eventually, the two would be discovered and arrested. Though they would suffer imprisonment, they survived the war.

The bravery of Claude and Marcel is remarkable, as is their dedication to each other, though Claude is depicted as being unlikeable at times, between her mental health issues and her being more fluid with her sexuality than Marcel, ie. she had other relationships. Nonetheless, for Marcel, there was never anyone but Claude, though it is difficult to see why there was such devotion and loyalty on her side, and Thomson’s novel doesn’t answer that question. Ultimately, the two were together for more than 40 years, until Claude’s death in 1954, so there was, I guess, really never anyone but Marcel for Claude, either.

Exploring her family’s past

Afterlife is Isa Milman’s first work of nonfiction. (photo by Shea Lowry)

Midway through Isa Milman’s Afterlight, which came out this week, the author cites Reb Nachman of Breslov, who said, “The whole world is a very narrow bridge.” In Victoria-based Milman’s new work, we encounter bridges of various sorts: those that serve as a crucial lifeline to the survival of the denizens of cities, particularly at a time of war, and the bridges that bring together people from different continents in the pursuit of understanding an unconscionably horrific time in Eastern Europe.

And then there are the bridges that link us poignantly to our past – to those we know through words and photos but have never met. In Afterlight, one such bridge connects Milman to her mother’s twin sister, her aunt Basia, who perished in the Holocaust, and who, like Milman, wrote poetry. (Milman is a recipient of the Canadian Jewish Book Award for poetry.)

Milman’s journey began in 2013, when, following her mother’s death, she sought to find Basia’s poems from the 1930s. The book alternates between the present and the past (the war years), as Milman tries to uncover a layered tale. She travels to Europe where, at times, her quest for information leads to dead ends and, at other times, she finds details in unlikely places – a photograph in Amsterdam, for example.

At one stage, Milman finds poetry written in a Polish publication from the 1930s. She writes, “Reading the children’s poems, I felt a terrible nostalgia rise up – a dangerous nostalgia. Even now it hurts too much, this intense longing for a conversation with Basia, for a meeting, a recognition that we’ve lived on the same planet, come from the same earth, share blood and bone. We share a love of poetry, but I shall never know her, not even as smudged ink on a page.”

At one point in her exploration, Milman pens a poem to her aunt. “How many tiny flowers make one lilac sprig? / How many stars in the night sky have names? / How many yet to be seen? They disappear with morning sun too soon but in darkness or in light tucked in their beds they remain,” the poem reads.

Basia’s story is but one piece of the book. Afterlight also traces the journey of Milman’s parents and her other surviving aunts through the Holocaust and examines questions about the trauma, displacement and identity caused by the Holocaust to succeeding generations.

“I’d lived my life in a black hole of absence, of never having the experience of grandparents, of feeling rooted and at home with extended family. And this was not because of a tsunami, an earthquake, forest fire or plague. It was because of tribal hatred,” Milman writes.

As well, she explores the issue of reconciling the Poland that Jews thought of as their home with rampant antisemitism and the brutality of the war years. “Why couldn’t I choose how to think about Poland, even if it meant going against most everything I’d learned?” Milman asks. “Why couldn’t I revise my notion and accept that Poland is a place that I can love as well as despise and fear? Why must it be either/or? Was it possible to live in the uncomfortable in-between, where both realities coexist?”

Afterlight is Milman’s first work of nonfiction. At first, Milman, whose collections of poetry include Prairie Kaddish, Between the Doorposts and Something Small to Carry Home, was reluctant to write a nonfiction account of the Holocaust. However, recent surges in antisemitism around the world led her to change her mind.

“The lessons of the Holocaust need to be taught, and not just by citing facts and reportage,” she said. “Telling stories about real people and their experiences is the most effective way of reaching and teaching people about how evil can happen, and how we must fight our worst human inclinations and speak out against hatred and inhumanity.”

A big part of her decision to write a memoir was realizing that her family’s story did not match a more common Holocaust narrative. Hers is a lesser-told account of Jews from eastern Poland, some murdered in what’s known as “the Holocaust of Bullets” and others, like her parents, who survived because of deportation by the Soviets to the Gulag.

“I loved entering the world of creative nonfiction,” she said. “Using my imagination to create scenes where I clearly was not present enabled me to inhabit the places and people I needed to describe. Everything became more real as I entered into the minds of my characters, who happened to be my parents and close family.”

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

Tackling the hatred head on

When white supremacists converged on Charlottesville, Va., four years ago chanting “Jews will not replace us,” it was the first encounter most of us had had with the conspiracy theory known as “the Great Replacement.”

In the pretzel logic of racists, immigration and multiculturalism are products of the Jewish imagination, with Jews perpetrating, through behind-the-curtains jiggery-pokery, what the tiny number of actual Jews in the world cannot do demographically: replace Aryan culture with alien races and cultures. The absurdity of the “theory” makes a lot more sense as one delves deeper into the trends and characteristics of antisemitism. Three wildly different but related books show that the projection of all that is wrong in society onto an empty vessel that happens to be Jewish recurs repeatedly. As ludicrous as the Great Replacement is, it dovetails magnificently with thousands of years of anti-Jewish prejudice and propaganda.

In Jews Don’t Count: How Identity Politics Failed One Particular Identity (TLS Books, 2021), author David Baddiel explores how the treatment of Jews is the exception to effectively everything today’s progressives espouse.

“It is a progressive article of faith – much heightened during the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 – that those who do not experience racism need to listen, to learn, to accept and not challenge when others speak about their experiences,” he writes. “Except, it seems, when Jews do. Non-Jews, including progressive non-Jews, are still very happy to tell Jews whether or not the utterance about them was in fact racist.”

Baddiel discusses how racism and antisemitism are disentwined to disadvantage Jews, placing antisemitism lower on a “hierarchy of racisms” than other forms.

“Jews are stereotyped, by the racists, in all the same ways as the other minorities are – as lying, thieving, dirty, vile, stinking – but also as moneyed, privileged, powerful and secretly in control of the world,” he says. “And, if you believe, even a little bit, that Jews are moneyed, privileged, powerful and secretly in control of the world … well, you can’t put them into the sacred circle of the oppressed. Some might even say they belong in the damned circle of the oppressors.”

Baddiel confronts the canard that Jews can’t be victims of racism because they represent a religion, not a race – an audacious defining of an entire people by others who do not belong to the group, itself an example of something progressives would deign to do with no group other than Jews. By pushing antisemitism down the victimization scale, perpetrators can then accuse people who call out antisemitism as diminishing the experiences of minorities with legitimate claims to oppression.

When Baddiel called out one prominent antisemite, saying he had rarely heard so blatant a statement from someone with so large an audience, the perpetrator replied: “’Cos everyone was scared, that’s why.”

By alleging that a cabal of powerful Jews is policing the language of critics, the perpetrator, Baddiel writes, “isn’t a racist, he’s a hero, finally standing up and saying the things that need to be said even though it will bring down the wrath of this all-powerful Jewstablishment on his head.”

Similarly, when an article in the New York Times seemed like an attempt to rehabilitate the notorious antisemite Louis Farrakhan, the author replied to a critic who mooted the negative impact this could have on Jews: “Somehow, among the million concerns, you believe that yours are supposed to rise to the top.… That is called privilege.”

A recurring theme is that, unlike other minorities, Jews are not “innocent victims.” Baddiel (and the other authors mentioned here) do not explicitly say it, but it is understood that, for antisemites, Jews are not victims because, whatever the calamity, they bring it on themselves.

Another recent book, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby (Free Press, 2021), picks up on some of Baddiel’s themes.

Tishby is an Israeli-American actor with a strong Zionist lineage. Her grandmother was a founder of the first kibbutz in Israel. Her grandfather was Israel’s first ambassador to West African countries and served on the Israeli delegation to the United Nations. Her great-grandfather was the founder of Israel’s ministry of industry and trade. Tishby served in the Israel Defence Forces entertainment troops, which she describes as, basically, “a nightly USO [United Service Organizations] tour.” She starred in an Israeli prime time soap opera – Ramat Aviv Gimmel, a sort of Israeli Melrose Place – then made the move to Hollywood.

Her book is aimed at people of her demographic – young, hip, leftist (though presumably non-Jewish) readers – and she presents, through biography and history, a tidy Zionist narrative that hits the bases. She does what pro-Israel writers rarely do: she uses emotion and personal stories, rather than dogged reliance on facts, chronology and empiricism. This is not to diminish the fact-based foundation of the book, but her first-person narrative connects the reader to the land and people of Israel in a way that cold facts do not.

Tishby provides a simple but thorough overview of regional history and the development of Israel, as well as the parallel history of the Palestinian and Arab peoples in the area. She dissects the claims of the BDS movement one by one, debunking the prevailing leftist narrative in the West. She pillories the obsession of the United Nations with anything Israeli and rebuts allegations of colonialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, unequal warfare and occupation quite effectively.

She recounts how, in the years after the Second World War, there were roughly 11 million refugees worldwide, 700,000 of whom were Palestinian.

“The 10,300,000 non-Palestinian refugees were funneled into UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for refugees, created in 1951), the UN agency dedicated to resettling and integrating refugees and/or stateless peoples,” she writes. The Palestinians got their own unique refugee agency: the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

“While UNHCR is constantly working on getting the global number of refugees down, with UNRWA the numbers go up, up, up,” Tishby writes. “After the 1948 war, there were approximately 700,000 displaced people. Now UNRWA has 5.6 million ‘refugees’ registered in their books. How is that possible?”

Even Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank are counted as refugees by UNRWA, she notes, asking: “Can you be a refugee from Palestine when you currently live in … Palestine?”

Near the end of the book, Tishby throws some questions at the reader: “How would you handle a wannabe Sharia state 30 miles from your house? How should Israel retaliate when Hamas fires thousands of rockets into southern Israeli towns? Why haven’t the Palestinians agreed to make a final peace deal? Will the PA unite with Hamas and, if so, will Hamas denounce violence, like, ever? Why is Israel singled out? What about other countries that actually do systematically abuse human rights? Why aren’t activists focused on their freedoms of religion, speech, and assembly, which Israel grants all her citizens? Where are the boycott movements of neighbouring countries that literally kill people for their beliefs, desire for freedoms and democracy, or sexual orientation?”

Tishby’s Israel is an engaging, entertaining read and an ideal primer for newbies to the subject. For those more immersed academically or through lived experience with this topic, there is little new information, but it is largely an enjoyable read although, in an effort to be hip and approachable, she routinely employs gratuitous profanities, which might grate on some readers.

Far from these two volumes on the scale of page-turning readability is the monumental tome Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition by David Nirenberg (W.W. Norton & Co., 2013). Published eight years ago, it had somehow escaped my eye and, when I did get my hands on it, it sat for some time on my pile. Cracking the spine was daunting because the thesis is dark and unnerving.

Nirenberg undermines the received wisdom that antisemitism is characteristic of ideological extremes in Western civilization. Instead, he depicts “anti-Judaism” as absolutely central and foundational to the very identity of Western civilization. (He differentiates “antisemitism,” which is discrimination against Jews, and “anti-Judaism,” which is perhaps a more pernicious, guileful thing, attributing “Judaism” and “Jewishness” to anything undesirable, whether the object is Jewish or not.) Applying Nirenberg’s thesis to Charlottesville is a simple way of understanding it. In the eye of the racists, immigration and multiculturalism are bad, ergo, by definition, they are “Jewish,” whether actual Jews have any hand in them or not.

Nirenberg provides a sadly compendious recital of civilizations for whom “Jews,” “Jewishness” and “Judaism” were used as a prism through (and against) which non-Jews defined their own identities.

“Why did so many diverse cultures – even many cultures with no Jews living among them – think so much about Judaism? What work did thinking about Judaism do for them in their efforts to make sense of their world?” he asks.

In Christianity, Jews are viewed as “materialist” and earthly, which is juxtaposed with Christians’ self-image as being concerned with the spiritual and the divine. In a theology where things terrestrial are equated with all things evil, the corollary is predictable.

Nirenberg quotes Jean-Paul Sartre, who said: “if the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.” The subtext of Nirenberg’s book, one could say, is that both things are true: the Jew does exist and the antisemite invented him. There are, in effect, two different “Jews”: real Jews and the image antisemites have created and refined for millennia.

It is this latter imaginary “Jew” that has been used not only to torment generations of actual Jews, but also to contrive the self-identities of civilizations. Nirenberg includes both Christianity and Islam under the rubric of Western civilization when he writes: “anti-Judaism should not be understood as some archaic or irrational closet in the vast edifices of Western thought. It was rather one of the basic tools with which that edifice was constructed.”

Since Christianity and Islam were both founded as supercessionary religions to Judaism, juxtaposing that theological parentage with an antipathy to the descendants of the parent religion creates a cognitive dissonance that Nirenberg describes as the “truth of Jewish scripture and the falsity of the Jews.”

Somehow, adherents of both religions have intrepidly managed to accommodate the dissonance.

“The simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of Judaism became for Islam – as it had been for Christianity – a structuring principle of the world, one through which Islamic truth was explored, discovered and articulated,” he writes. Jews were “both necessary and noxious, prophetic and pernicious.”

The religious bigotry permeates Western civilization, not just its religion, he argues. Nirenberg discusses how Marx employed typical Christian perceptions of Jews as materialistic to fit his atheistic ideology. He also analyzes how it influenced the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. For example, while the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the great document of the French Revolution, does not mention Jews or Judaism, “it was famously presented and represented to the people – in a painting and in print – as two new tablets of law, replacing those handed Moses on Mount Sinai.” Never mind Christianity and Islam, when it came time for what was probably the most progressive, liberal society yet in modern history to define itself, the revolutionaries took Jewish imagery and firmly demarcated themselves as “not that.”

What is striking when immersing oneself in volumes about antisemitism is the stark certainty of today’s “critics of Israel” that they are untainted with antisemitic bias. They apparently have given little, if any, thought or effort to learn the history of antisemitism and its myriad permutations.

While Nirenberg speaks very little about Israel, he packs a powerful punch when, after hundreds of dense pages excruciatingly dissecting how civilizations for thousands of years have understood their identities and their most significant beliefs in direct opposition to Judaism, he declares: “We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of ‘Israel.’”

Coincidence? It doesn’t seem so to those have studied the history and malleability of anti-Jewish ideas.

Teaching community’s kids

Congregation Beth Israel, children in costume, 1965. (photo from JMABC L.09778)

image - The Scribe book cover — The 2020/21 education-themed issue of The Scribe will be launched on Aug. 26.

The launch of the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia’s latest edition of The Scribe will be held virtually on Aug. 26, at 7 p.m. This year’s book features stories, photos and some almost-forgotten details about Jewish education in British Columbia. Join the Zoom to hear from local leaders in Jewish education both past and present who will give context to this significant subject.

Anne Andrew, past principal of Temple Sholom Hebrew School, and Emily Greenberg, current head of school at Vancouver Talmud Torah, will lead the discussion. Andrew will focus on her long involvement with the Jewish education scene in Vancouver and Greenberg will share her perspectives on where Jewish education is headed. Considering the impact teachers, educational institutions and curricula have on the continuity and cohesion of a community, both this panel discussion and this issue of The Scribe speak to important issues.

photo - Story time, conducted by Gamliel Aharon, Beth Hamidrash B’nai Jacob, 1976 — Story time, conducted by Gamliel Aharon, Beth Hamidrash B’nai Jacob, 1976. *(photo from JMABC L.00155)*

The 2020/21 Scribe features information from the community archives about Jewish education around the province, spanning some 100 years. In addition, there are oral history excerpts from dozens of community members about various programs that have been offered over those years. Even in the very early days of the Jewish community in British Columbia, no matter where Jews settled in the province, there were all kinds of arrangements for the transmission of Jewish knowledge, culture and identity.

Zoom attendees will hear about iconic educators who instilled a love of Judaism and community spirit. Those who attended Jewish school here will take a trip down memory lane, being reintroduced to teachers from their past.

For more information or to register for the free online book launch event or to get your own copy of The Scribe, visit jewishmuseum.ca/publications/the-scribe or call the museum office at 604-257-5199.

– Courtesy Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia

More than a guide for work

Vancouver-based consultant Zena Simces’ You Can Make a Difference: A Guide to Being a Great Consultant(Tellwell Talent, 2020) is an informative, concise and useful primer for anyone considering this career path – or, really, anyone who works with diverse individuals or groups.

Zena Simces shares lessons from her experiences in You Can Make a Difference: A Guide to Being a Great Consultant.

Based on knowledge gleaned from 30-plus years of experience working with a wide range of clients, as well as other research, You Can Make a Difference is what its title says, a guide to being an effective consultant. But it also is kind of a guide for how to be a good person and interact well with others. As Simces notes in the chapter on “Upholding Ethical Standards”: “My parents (who were in the grocery business) shaped me as a person and as a consultant. Their motto was to treat people the way I want to be treated.”

Perhaps now, in the context of ethics and family, I should mention that Simces is a longtime family friend. While I don’t think that this fact has influenced my opinions, it is interesting that, more than once in her book – starting with the first chapter – Simces discusses the need for consultants to be aware of things like unconscious bias and to try and mitigate their impacts.

“Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is important,” she writes. “We all struggle with self-awareness, but effective consultants recognize their biases and how to address them. They are natural self-starters and strive for excellence in all that they do, so they are aware of their blind spots and work to improve in areas they are weak.”

The book is full of practical advice like this – not earth-shattering insights but valuable information, collected into one easy-to-read volume of about 100 pages.

You Can Make a Difference is divided into two main parts. The first section takes readers through how to become a consultant, including consideration of whether that’s really the right career path for them. The second section highlights the main skills needed to do the job well. The four-page selected bibliography offers a start for readers who want to dive into the topic more deeply.

The two-and-a-half-page foreword begins with an example from Simces’ career – an instance when things did not go as planned, at least initially.

“While I have learned much from my successes, ‘failures’ like this one offer me the opportunity to learn and grow, which is essential,” she writes. “Being a successful consultant does not only involve substantive knowledge and technical skills, but also ‘soft skills,’ such as relationship-building, listening, communication and leadership. This combination allows a consultant to more efficiently and thoroughly achieve his or her clients’ goals.”

As she notes, these abilities, in reality, are “too important to be called ‘soft’ skills and have become the essence of what is required to be a great consultant. In fact, the Business Council of Canada’s Skills Survey (2018), which is based on responses from 95 of Canada’s largest companies, lists soft skills such as collaboration, communication, problem-solving, analytical capabilities and resiliency as top priorities for entry-level hires. Companies also valued these soft skills for mid-level employees.”

This is another example of why Simces’ book also would be of interest to people who aren’t necessarily wanting to become a consultant. And that she starts her book with sharing how she learned from a misstep illustrates another of her points that would be beneficial to anyone, not just consultants – that it’s OK to “show some vulnerability. In fact, it takes courage to show vulnerability, and it takes strength to redirect to find a better solution. This can contribute to greater confidence between you and your client.” Or any relationship.

Unlike other books of this kind, Simces doesn’t give multiple examples or long stories to help drive home or explain a point. She gives one – and short ones at that – and moves on, which I appreciated. She trusts readers’ intelligence and doesn’t fill pages with unnecessary or ego-inflating narratives. Each chapter ends with a summary of the ideas therein and, in the second section, each chapter also includes a list of key tips covered. While this may seem like overkill, I found it helpful, especially when wanting to quickly find the details about something I only semi-recalled reading. I could see the tips or summaries making the book an accessible reference tool to have on your shelf or computer desktop long after having read it.

Whether or not You Can Make a Difference translates into your being able to make a difference in the world as a consultant, I can’t say, but it gives anyone considering this career path a solid framework for trying to do so. And its lessons and observations are applicable beyond the work setting. We could all use a gentle reminder on how to build trust in relationships, to have the courage to admit what we don’t know, to be flexible and open to change, and other such life, never mind consulting, skills.

Heavy summer reads

I recently read two works of fiction by former Winnipeggers. I mention that because, when I think of Winnipeg, where I grew up, I think of the Prairies, I think of wide open spaces. Yet both of these novels portray the bleaker side of life, with characters who can’t get beyond their limitations.

Having read and enjoyed Sidura Ludwig’s first novel some 15 years ago – Holding My Breath (Key Porter Books, 2007) – I looked forward to You Are Not What We Expected (House of Anansi Press Inc., 2020). Set in the Toronto suburb of Thornhill – a heavily Jewish neighbourhood – where Ludwig now lives, the loosely linked stories about the Levine family are wonderfully written, which is not surprising. But they are dark and, at times, brutal. Ludwig’s economical use of language can feel almost like a literal knife in the side or a punch in the gut, when a story switches from a relatively light moment – there is humour in these tales – to a tragic one.

Ludwig is a skilled observer of human nature and she creates characters in You Are Not What We Expectedwith whom readers will both empathize and even root for, but also get frustrated with. The first chapter jumps right in and sets the tone with senior citizen Isaac, back from Los Angeles to help his sister out. His fist-waving, shouting and no-spoiler-here reaction to a school’s placing of the Israeli flag below Canada’s on their flagpole is both hilarious, valiant and pathetic. His vitriolic and stubborn behaviours will cause him more than one trouble.

Other characters in the book are similarly limited – as we all are – by their own personal issues, the action or inaction of others, and simple twists of fate. You Are Not What We Expected is well worth reading but maybe not on vacation.

Michael Tregebov’s The Renter: A Novel (New Star Books, 2021) is similarly well-written and also not a light holiday read, which is what I was kind of expecting. Tregebov, who now lives near Barcelona, takes a nostalgic look at Winnipeg Beach, but certainly not the cottage life that I experienced in the area as a kid.

The back cover promises romance in the summer of 1968; rich girl, poor boy, the stuff of rom-coms. But the poor boy in question is a cynical (with good reason) drug dealer who pretty much desires and courts the rich girl because of her wealth, not because he truly likes her at all.

I know there is a lot to appreciate in The Renter and there are many people who would love it – for example, Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin, who, on the book’s cover, calls it “Absolutely brilliant!” – but I can’t honestly count myself among them.

Pride trumps bigotry

Writer Ben M. Freeman (PR photo)

Antisemitism is not a Jewish problem, writes Ben M. Freeman in his new book Jewish Pride. “It is a non-Jewish problem that has an impact upon Jews.”

Freeman is a young Scottish Jew whose book projects some of the lessons of his coming out as a gay man onto the experiences of Jews dealing with the internalizing of others’ expectations and prejudices. He speaks of “passing,” of how a member of some minority groups can identify as a member of the majority.

“There are those who describe the ability of some LGBTQ+ people and some Jews to pass as a ‘privilege,’” he writes. “However, from my experience, this is a specific form of oppression itself.”

Freeman insists that the book is not about antisemitism, but rather its opposite: Jewish pride. But, perhaps by necessity, antisemitism plays a big role.

“Our journey is not about fighting antisemitism. That is the non-Jewish world’s journey,” he writes. “The Jewish journey is one of self-discovery, self-acceptance and self-love – in the name of collective pride.”

In the same way that antisemites have gone some distance to characterize who and what Jews are, anti-Zionists have stolen the word Zionism and redefined it to their perverse definitions, he suggests.

Above all, the fact that so many of the perpetrators of antisemitism are unfamiliar with its history is precisely the reason people can exhibit antisemitism while claiming – often haughtily – to be free of it.

“Due to a lack of education about both the conflict and Jewish history, most people are not armed with the knowledge to understand the connection between anti-Zionist rhetoric and historical antisemitism,” he argues. For example, the recurring libel that Israelis harvest organs from unsuspecting victims is a modern variation on the ancient blood libel – but people ignorant of that catastrophic history do not see their complicity as they perpetuate outlandish allegations. Likewise, the depiction of Israel as a unique embodiment of evil in the world mirrors the ancient projection on Jewish people of society’s fears and false narratives of evildoing.

He discusses how the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Antisemitism has led to a whole new wave of arguments around what is and is not anti-Jewish bigotry.

The British sociologist David Hirsh created the “Livingstone Formulation,” named after the former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. It encapsulates the pretzel logic in which expressions of concern about antisemitism are met with a refusal to engage and a counter-accusation that the charge of antisemitism is made up as a conspiracy to silence legitimate criticism of Israel, as a “weaponization of antisemitism for political ends.”

This was in clear view during the spate of overt antisemitism that engulfed the Labour Party in the U.K. under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Concerns about rampant Jew-baiting and unconcealed antisemitism were, Freeman writes, routinely dismissed as a “smear campaign against Jeremy.” It was, in short, bullies crying that they are being bullied.

Freeman points out the core problem for Jews in the evolving interpretations of hierarchical discrimination.

“There is a view of racism that suggests it is prejudice plus power, which implies that only those in positions of power over others can be racist,” he writes. “This definition leads to the notion that most forms of racism and prejudice are ‘punching down’ and that only marginalized groups with less or no power are being oppressed. While this experience is true for certain communities, this specific definition of racism, combined with exaggerated antisemitic perceptions of Jewish power and privilege, can be particularly dangerous for Jews. It thus lends to the erasure of the Jewish experience and of antisemitism as a legitimate form of prejudice. It can also allow those on the left – and some marginalized groups – to actively target us as representatives of elite power structures.”

Freeman’s core message is that Jews, like LGBTQ+ people, need to overcome the negative programming with which they are bombarded by the larger world.

“Jewish people have been in a dysfunctional relationship with the non-Jewish world for over 2,000 years,” he writes. “To be accepted, we have tried, over and over again, to change who we are.… In our thousands of years of history, has this sacrifice ever worked? No…. This cycle has to stop. The way to stop this abusive, destructive and exhausting cycle is to turn to ourselves for that acceptance and love.”

One might have hoped that a book on this subject would glance at the remarkable reversal of homophobia in most parts of the Western world in recent years, how that progress was achieved and how the lessons from that experience might be repurposed to fight antisemitism. But that, perhaps, is a future tome for Freeman or someone else to undertake.

Memoir, tribute, history

Actor Tovah Feldshuh talks about her new book, Lilyville, on April 15, in an event held in partnership with the JCC Jewish Book Festival. (PR photo)

The long-awaited Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival closing night event – Tovah Feldshuh talking about her new book, Lilyville: Mother, Daughter, and Other Roles I’ve Played – finally takes place on April 15.

The event was postponed to piggyback on the Book Festival of the Marcus JCC of Atlanta and JCC National Literary Consortium In Your Living Room Live series. It will feature Feldshuh in conversation with CNN correspondent Holly Firfer, and promises to be an entertaining evening with many laughs and lots of good advice, if Lilyville is any indication.

Feldshuh’s first book is a unique memoir in that it is framed in terms of her relationship with her mother – the longest and most important of Feldshuh’s roles having been the one she didn’t audition for, being the daughter of Lillian (Lily) Kaplan Feldshuh. The memoir is structured as a theatre piece, starting with the Program Note and ending with Exit Music, with three acts, many scenes and more in between.

Strong women characters, from the fictional Yentl (from the mind of Sholem Aleichem) to the very real U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, dominate Feldshuh’s career. She has performed in theatre, film and television, winning numerous awards and nominations for the excellence of her work. She also has been recognized for her charity work. And, it seems, through it all, family has been a priority.

In Lilyville, Feldshuh writes about her upbringing, how and why she became an actor, some of the people and incidents that have influenced her, her marriage (to a lawyer, like her beloved father was, and which she considered becoming at one point) and being a mother herself. Given her successes, readers may be surprised at the professional challenges she has overcome along the way, including being told outright by a director that she’d never make a good actress, she should become an accountant. But the biggest obstacle for her was coming to understand that her mother, who seemed cold and shy throughout Feldshuh’s (and her older brother’s) upbringing, loved them. While hypercritical and emotionally closed throughout their growing-up years, their mother was always there for them. It was only after their father died that their mother – who had been raised to be what was considered a good woman back then, ie. a woman who dedicated herself to her husband and kids, her own aspirations be damned – blossomed.

In an interview with the Detroit Jewish Book Fair, Feldshuh said about writing Lilyville that she “felt compelled to tell her [mother’s] story and mine and how the two of us had a lifelong journey toward each other. In essence, I dig down into the primal relationship between parent and child, with the specifics between mother and daughter.”

Luckily for the women, they had the time to repair and build their relationship, as Feldshuh’s mother lived to 103. Through that century-plus, Lily Kaplan Feldshuh, who was born before women were given the vote in the United States, witnessed countless social, cultural and technological changes, and Lilyville is partly a history of women’s rights in that country.

General admission to Feldshuh’s book talk is free. Admittance to the pre-event meet-and-greet portion of the event comes when, in addition to registering, you purchase the book; the $36US includes shipping and you will receive a copy with a signed bookplate. Visit jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival.

Life-changing impact

Sandy Shefrin Rabin’s debut novel is a far-reaching account of Jewish life in a small town in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Targeted to young adult readers, Prairie Sonata may focus on 11-year-old Mira’s friendship with her school (and violin) teacher, a Holocaust survivor, but it touches upon countless issues, from dealing with trauma, to preserving a language and a culture (Yiddish), to understanding different musical forms, to interfaith dating, to society’s views of mental illness, to learning about the impacts of physical disease (polio).

Set in the fictional town of Ambrosia, Man., an adult Mira reflects back on the impact that one of her teachers – Ari Bergman, called Chaver B by his students – had on her.

Chaver B is introduced to his Peretz School Yiddish class by the principal, who only shares, “Chaver Bergman has been living in Europe and just came over to Canada two weeks ago.” But Mira sees his vulnerability right away, the “melancholy about him,” and senses “that this was a man who needed kindness.”

Invited to Friday night dinner by Mira’s mother, Chaver B spots Mira’s violin and offers to teach her. He becomes a friend to the whole family – Mira’s parents and younger brother – but especially to Mira.

The novel is structured in three parts, like a sonata. As Chaver B explains to Mira, a sonata is comprised of an exposition, in which its themes are declared; a development, where the themes are explored and expanded; and a recapitulation, where the themes are repeated, leading to a resolution. In some cases, a coda is added, “to provide a sense of closure.”

Overall, Prairie Sonata is an intriguing novel, and even older readers will enjoy it, especially those who attended a Peretz School or who grew up in the era of the book. At times, when a character is explaining something, it sounds a bit like a Wikipedia entry, but the writing is strong overall and readers will relate to and empathize with the characters. In addition to all of the questions Mira raises throughout, there is a discussion and study guide at the end, with 17 thoughtful exercises for a school group or book club.

Tale of transformation

Near the beginning of her acting career more than 50 years ago, Beth Kaplan wanted to improve the world through art. “I believe in the theatre as a tool for social change,” she told the director of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art when she arrived for a one-year program. “I’d like to touch people’s lives as a force for good.” His reaction? “Well,” he said, standing up. “I do hope you have a fruitful year. Best of luck.”

Kaplan writes about her journey from acting to writing, from youth to adulthood, from insecurities to self-acceptance, and more, in her memoir Loose Woman: My Odyssey from Lost to Found. Local JI readers may recall her name, as she was a part of the Vancouver theatre scene in the 1970s. But a 1979 trip that included a visit to France to see her best friend, who had moved there, changed Kaplan’s life.

Through her friend’s husband, Kaplan ended up for a spell living and working in a L’Arche community, which brings people with and without intellectual disabilities together. Initially uncomfortable there, the experience and the slower pace allowed her to learn about herself, and to not treat life as a performance. From her time at L’Arche, she sees how, “in one way or another, we are all handicapped.”

In telling her story, Kaplan seems to rely mainly on thoughts she committed to her diaries over the years. She’s kept one ever since her first, which was a gift when she was 9 years old. Some of the terms she uses, like handicapped, hearken back to that time, and it’s a choice Kaplan makes, “to be true to the time, hoping that readers understand that what is offensive now was not so then.” Indeed, through some of the language and the stories of her objectively wild life during the 1970s, Kaplan highlights the advances that have been made in areas like women’s rights and inclusion.

Loose Woman is an interesting book, even though Kaplan is not a completely likeable heroine, despite it being her own story. Some readers might chafe at her harsh judgments (even when she is the target) and her self-acknowledged mix of confidence (some might say arrogance) and insecurity. But others might revel in her tales of debauchery and her resolute openness.