Books

Kalla’s toxic new thriller

“I see how it looks…. Just another teen suicide. Or maybe an accidental OD. Another addict who fooled his parents. No…! I know my Owen…. Never, never, never….”

This is the reaction of Owen’s mother – who happens to be a U.S. senator – to her son’s death in Daniel Kalla’s latest thriller Fit to Die (Simon & Schuster Canada). L.A. detective Cari Garcia initially writes off the reaction as a mother ignorant of her child’s drug use, and bristles against the political pressure to determine the young track star’s cause of death. When she learns he died from ingesting a capsule that contained 2,4-Dinitrophenol, or DNP – used as a fertilizer, pesticide or explosive, but also abused by people to lose weight – she becomes more motivated to solve the mystery, in part because of a tragedy in her own past.

Meanwhile, here in Vancouver, toxicologist Dr. Julie Rees is dealing with a mysterious increase in deaths among bodybuilders, finding out that DNP is the cause. Then, a famous pop star and social media influencer dies in her penthouse, showing the same symptoms. And the co-owner of a wellness centre with locations in Los Angeles and Vancouver dies of a similar overdose. All the cases are connected and the L.A. and Vancouver police and medical personnel have to work together to find out who’s behind the influx of DNP on the market.

Like all of Kalla’s books, Fit To Die is an intriguing read, suspensefully written. While I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I have his other thrillers – it was somewhat repetitive and the main characters’ backstories didn’t ring as true to me – I still wanted to know whodunnit. I also value having learned about the real-life issue of toxic diet pills and gaining some insight into body dysmorphia and eating disorders. I trust Kalla’s facts, as he is not only a writer, but an emergency room physician and a University of British Columbia clinical associate professor. He was kind enough to answer some questions via email.

JI: There are some Jewish-sounding surnames in the novel. In what ways does your being Jewish enter into your novel writing?

DK: Well, in this case the Hertzberg-Davis Centre is the real forensic lab for the LAPD. So that made it easy. I couldn’t remove the Jewish influence in my writing even if wanted to, which, obviously, I don’t. I’ve written a historical trilogy, The Far Side of the Sky, that is explicitly a Jewish story. In thrillers like Fit to Die, I don’t consciously think about my background or religion, but there is no doubt it influences the writing.

JI: Do you name characters after friends, or sometimes offer naming opportunities for charity auctions or the like?

DK: Haha. I learned early in my writing career to never name a character after a friend. It only ends badly. I’ve never auctioned off a character name for charity, but I would love to. It can be agony finding the right character name. Why not outsource it?

JI: This is your 10th thriller. How has your writing style and/or process evolved since your first one?

DK: I hope I’ve learned from some of my past mistakes. Paradoxically, it gets easier and harder. Easier in the sense that I’m more confident in my voice and the nuts and bolts of my storytelling. Harder in that I’m more critical of my writing and fear becoming derivative in my stories. But the one thing that keeps me going is my enthusiasm for telling a new story. I think I’m more passionate than ever.

JI: From the several thrillers of yours that I’ve read, your topic choices are timely and coincide with current events. The medical side, you’ve got covered. But what are some of your sources for other aspects? In this book, for example, how the dark web works and even the pop culture aspects, including language, like “partizzle”?

DK: I obviously have a huge advantage with respect to the medical background, but that’s only a part of it. As you point out, this story – about a (real) and deadly diet pill that is marketed online to the most vulnerable and amplified by toxic social media – took some intense research. I had to learn all about body dysmorphia and immerse myself in the TikTok culture, which explains some of the Zoomer slang one of the character uses, like “partizzle.” I was lucky to have a local VPD superintendent help guide me through the logistics of what an investigation into this kind of complex online conspiracy would look like.

JI: Where do you find time to write?

DK: For me, it’s never about the time. I’m lucky to work in the ER, which is shift work, but I think I could find time no matter what my day job was. For me, it’s all about momentum and inspiration. When I have those, I find the time. When I don’t, free time doesn’t help.

JI: What part of your soul does writing feed?

DK: Not to sound overly melodramatic, but it kind of feeds my core. Medicine does, as well, but in a very different sense. I find purpose as a doctor, but I find my passion as a writer. I can imagine retiring one day from medicine, but I can’t imagine not writing.

JI: Can you speak about the process of getting a book from idea to publication?

DK: The challenge of transforming the kernel of an idea into a publishable novel always seems insurmountable from the outset – this book particularly. I wanted to build a compelling mystery and resurrect some characters from a past novel (The Last High) and introduce new ones, all while tackling a highly sensitive yet vitally relevant topic: how the toxic diet culture and social media prey on the most vulnerable. I like to think I met the challenge, but, of course, that’s for each reader to decide.

Habonim role pivotal

A recently retired rabbi who was born and raised in Vancouver is offering an insider’s look at life as a congregational leader.

Rabbi Allan Tuffs, who now lives part-time in south Florida and in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, has published A Rabbi’s Journey: Roads Traveled Lessons Learned – Stories from an Unconventional Rabbi’s Career. The 54 bite-sized chapters (coincidentally, he notes, the same number as parshas in the Torah) range from touching and hilarious to insightful and tragic.

Tuffs was born in Vancouver – he’s 10 days older than the state of Israel – and his home life was tough. His mom had a mental illness and his largely absent father had alcoholism. He and his sister would end up in the foster system.

The bookish, thoughtful Allan devoured everything he could read about Israel (among other topics) and, when he was invited to join the Labour-Zionist youth group Habonim, his life changed and everything else is as result of that connection.

“Habonim was kind of like a family to me, it really was,” he told the Independent in a telephone interview from North Carolina. “The people were warm and inviting and I was looking for my place in the Jewish community.”

Being the product of an intermarriage – “My father was not Jewish, my mother was,” he said – made the young Allan feel like an outsider.

“Intermarriage was still somewhat rare in those days,” he said. “I did not have a real religious background. I guess I was spiritual. I was very proud of my Jewish heritage and Habonim was very Jewish, very Israel-oriented, and it had a deep sense of purpose. It was kibbutz-oriented and there was this idea that the Jewish people had a role in the world, to repair the world, so to speak. That appealed to my youthful idealism.

“We had meetings almost weekly,” he added. “Here we were, these young kids.… I don’t really know if we understood what we were talking about, but we studied some of the great early socialist Zionist thinkers.”

In addition to their interest in Israel, social justice causes closer to home also drove the Habonimniks’ activism.

“We were pretty uniformly against the war in Vietnam,” he said. “We were quite disturbed by the racial injustices happening in the United States and also we were involved in fighting for Indigenous peoples’ rights in Canada. There was this sense that we are going to make the world a better place because we are Jews, because we have this ideology, because we are cognizant of the whole history of being a minority, being persecuted.”

In 1969, Tuffs headed to Israel and lived for two years at Kibbutz Menara, almost flush against the Lebanese border (and, coincidentally, now part of Vancouver’s partnership region in Israel). It was during the War of Attrition and the reality of the conflict was intense. Concentric rows of barbed wire were interspersed with landmines and German shepherd dogs patrolled the perimeter of the kibbutz.

While socialism, not Judaism, was the religion of the kibbutzniks, Tuffs notes in his book that a fortuitous meeting in Jerusalem changed the young man’s path again. Working in the holy city to earn a plane ticket home, he encountered an Orthodox rabbi from Seattle, with whom he began studying Budokan karate and Talmud. Among other things, the mix of eastern and western influences would follow Tuffs through his life. He integrates contemplative and meditative practices into his Judaism and practises yoga.

Returning to North America – and Habonim – Tuffs worked as a counselor at the movement’s camps in Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.-adjacent Maryland. While in the D.C. suburbs, he started teaching Hebrew at a Conservative synagogue. He was hired for his language skills but the gaping holes in his Jewish knowledge – he never had a bar mitzvah – led his employer to suggest taking a few courses at Baltimore Hebrew College. This was the beginning of “a lifelong love of Jewish learning,” he writes.

Now in his mid-20s, he still wasn’t sure what to do.

“I was scholarly, but I would never be a scholar – too solitary,” he writes. “I was interested in psychology, but the thought of listening to people’s problems five days a week gave me a headache. I’m something of a ‘ham’ but would never be an actor. I’m a do-gooder – hardly a way to make a living.… What profession would allow me to do a little of all these things?”

Turns out the rabbinate fit quite nicely for 40 years. While a child of intermarriage with no early Jewish education might not seem a top candidate for the clergy, fate intervened again. Tuffs’ Hebrew language skills got him a job running a Conservative synagogue youth group in Maryland on the understanding that he would become shomer Shabbat and keep kosher. The job, in fact, put him under the wing of the rabbi and gave him more experience.

“This opportunity amounted to a rabbinic internship,” he writes.

Tuffs spent two years learning the ropes of the rabbinate. He began leading Shabbat services at a local nursing home. In 1977, he entered Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, spending the first year on the Jerusalem campus and four more at the institute’s New York centre.

He experienced “imposter syndrome,” partly because he had only one Jewish parent. But, he concluded, “with such a high frequency of intermarriage these days, who better than a rabbi of mixed parentage to welcome others like himself or herself into the Jewish fold? Suddenly, my rabbinate had renewed significance and purpose.”

In his book, Tuffs reflects the tumultuous and historic times he has lived through. After receiving his ordination, his first convention of the Reform movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis, in 1983, saw the historic decision to recognize patrilineal descent.

Over the next 40 years, as he shares, he navigated synagogue politics – some comedic, some sad, including a corrupt sisterhood president and an authoritarian, bullying board president. He discusses his decision to officiate at same-sex weddings, his activism on behalf of persecuted Christians in the Middle East, and his congregation’s support of orphans in Haiti.

The tragic collapse of a condominium building in Surfside, Fla., in 2021, hit Tuffs close to home. A young couple whose marriage he had presided at just weeks earlier were killed in the disaster.

The hurricane that devastated parts of Florida and other states in 2005 ravaged his temple. The silver lining was that Tuffs was able to be part of a rebuilding project that made the sanctuary more welcoming, removing the elevated bimah that instilled “an air of un-approachability” for the rabbi and cantor.

Perhaps because he came to the Reform rabbinate with some Conservative movement experience, Tuffs considers himself on the traditional side of Reform. He wears a kippa and dons a tallit when praying, something that was unusual in some American Reform congregations when he started out.

“I embraced the growing trend in the movement toward reintegrating older, discarded ritual practices into religious life,” he writes. “At the same time, I was sold on the Reform idea of personal autonomy in matters of ritual practice.”

He would serve at congregations in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania before spending 25 years at Temple Beth El, in Hollywood, Fla., from which he retired a year ago.

Fate almost brought Tuffs back to Canada before he ever made it to Florida. Desperate to escape the Wisconsin winters, he was invited to consider a position at a synagogue in Ottawa. His mind was made up for him when a congregant enthusiastically offered: “Rabbi, you’ll be able to skate to work on the Rideau Canal four months a year.”

In addition to all else, Tuffs obtained a doctorate in ministry, for which he wrote a dissertation about masculine spirituality, which was published as a book. He was a rabbinic fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem for five years and studied at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality.

Reflecting back on his life, Tuffs can’t recall precisely where or how he first connected with Habonim. Everything that came after, though, can be traced back to that early Vancouver connection.

Tuffs’ book is available in ebook format on Amazon, though it is currently not available to order in Canada as a hardcopy.

Educating differently

Ada Glustein’s passion for learning and teaching shines through in her self-published memoir Being Different. (photo from Ada Glustein)

Duke’s father would beat him. Tien, a refugee from Cambodia, had witnessed unimaginable violence. Louise was in and out of foster care because her father had drug addictions and her mom was emotionally unstable.

These are just a few of the countless children Ada Glustein encountered in her time as a teacher. Many of her young charges – she taught kindergarten mostly – faced harsh conditions at home and adult-sized problems. She shares her and their experiences with kindness and compassion in her memoir Being Different: From Friday Night Candles to Compassionate Classroom, which she self-published last year. She dedicates the book to her “parents, grandparents and ancestors whose struggles and strengths brought them to Canada, where at last they found their place to call home.” She also writes, “To my children and grandchildren, whose journeys bring the hope for a future of respect, social justice and belonging for all.”

While Glustein was born and raised in Ottawa, her Jewish Orthodox grandparents and parents came from Russia, from an area that became Ukraine. Part 1 of Being Different – Where I Am From: Stories of Home and Community – is about Glustein’s family and her early years. “Though my parents considered themselves to be modern,” she writes, “to me they seemed to live in a world caught between the old and the new.”

From her perspective, her father believed she asked too many questions and her mother fretted too much over her safety. But they came from a different time and place, more traditional and more dangerous. “My family comes from a place where the grass is greener somewhere else. Any place that is not Eastern Europe, not within the Pale of Settlement. Any place to leave behind the pogroms and the poverty, the losses of children who died in childbirth or wasted away from consumption. I do understand the silence,” she writes.

“But I also understand the richness of life’s difficult experiences and their inevitability. To allow those experiences to touch me, even to hurt me, helps me to live a full human life, to live with the reality of how things are.”

Part 1 of Being Different is about Glustein’s efforts to understand her place and who she is within her family. Part 2 – Where Do I Belong? Lessons at School – takes that exploration of identity and differentness into the broader world, where Glustein has to confront Christmas plays, lecherous older men, peer dynamics and a mix of teachers with different approaches, among other life lessons. In Part 3 – Becoming a Teacher: Finding My Way Home – we see how Glustein translates what she has learned into being an educator. And, honestly, if only every teacher could be like Glustein – not because she is perfect, but because she cares, and is continually learning.

Glustein graduated from Ottawa Teachers’ College, completed her bachelor of education at the University of British Columbia and her master of arts at Simon Fraser University. She taught for many years – in Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver – and also became a faculty associate and sessional instructor at SFU, where she taught teachers. After she retired, she became a member of two writing groups and has had several of her works published. Being Different won a silver medal for Canada-West Region, non-fiction, in this year’s Independent Publisher Book (“IPPY”) Awards, and deservedly so.

Being Different is charming and heartbreakingly honest, written in short, crisp chapters, giving it a sense of immediacy. It is a call for all of us to be more patient with one another, to keep an open mind and to understand the impact our actions have on other people, especially children. In her openness about her own imperfections and missteps, Glustein is also asking us to be kind to ourselves. A more accepting and inclusive world begins with us, after all.

Being Different will be engaging to any reader – it will foster many a childhood memory – but should be a must-read for anyone interested in becoming an educator. It is available on Amazon.

A hippie homesteader in B.C.

“When I came to Galena Bay, I had been afraid of many things,” writes Ellen Schwartz in Galena Bay Odyssey: Reflections on a Hippie Homesteader (Heritage House Publishing Company, 2023). “Of the physical work I would have to do. Of trying new things I have never done before, like gardening and building and raising animals. Of living in isolation. One by one, I had attempted these things, and I had survived. I had even mastered some of them. Those fears had fallen away.”

This paragraph comes as Schwartz is atop a hill, “too scared to move,” and her skis start sliding. She survives the “ungraceful and disastrous” run, even pushes through a second one. But she can’t keep her vow to never to do that again because, in the 1970s, she lived in such a far-flung place that skiing was a necessary mode of transportation, not just a leisure activity.

It is easy to see why Schwartz chose to write a memoir about this period of her life. Born into a middle-class family – her father an internist-turned-cardiologist, her mother a teacher before becoming a stay-at-home mom to Schwartz, her younger sister and brother – and raised in New Jersey, Schwartz went to university in Chicago. There, she did all you might expect a young person with the new freedom of being on their own to do. And then some, as it was the late 1960s. She writes openly about her experiences with drugs and having sex for the first time: “I figured Ned was The One. I imagined that we’d go through our four years [at school] together and eventually marry.” That didn’t happen. Nor did Schwartz go on to lead the conventional life she imagined for herself at the time.

Instead, she went to join a close friend at a farming commune in Pennsylvania, the members of which ultimately wanted to move to British Columbia. Not intending to stay longer than summer break, Schwartz fell in love with one of the commune’s founders and, well, ended up in British Columbia with Bill, who would become her husband. The group didn’t last long, but the Schwartzes are still together, though no longer in Galena Bay, which is in the West Kootenays. They now live in Burnaby.

The young urban-raised couple faced many challenges homesteading, and Schwartz has many stories of taking on the unknown, whether it be camping along the route across the continent to British Columbia, building their own cabin (including chopping down their own trees), growing their own food, raising a child in a remote area (their second would be born in Vancouver), etc., etc. Not to mention finding work that would sustain them physically (keep them housed, clothed and fed), if not spiritually. She shares the details of her hippie days matter-of-factly, with humour and with the perspective of reflection. For example, after recounting her parents’ muted reaction to her and Bill’s homemade home, she offers potential reasons for their lack of enthusiasm.

Schwartz’s unique history encapsulates the overarching idealism of many in her generation. Her grandparents were “impoverished Jewish immigrants who had fled the hardships and pogroms of Lithuania and Poland” to give their kids a better life in the United States, so their grandchildren also were well set up for material success. The grandchildren – Schwartz and her peers – had an idea but no real understanding of the sacrifices that had been made to achieve the comfortable lifestyle they rejected, because of the racial and social inequality they saw around them, the environmental degradation and the war in Vietnam.

“Bill and I, part of the first wave of baby boomers, were in the privileged position of having enough education, enough wealth and enough leisure to be able to criticize our parents’ lifestyle,” she writes late in the memoir. “We were well-off enough to be able to turn our backs on materialism. We were prosperous enough to indulge in idealism and, idealistically, to define an entire new set of values. (At the time, I didn’t appreciate the irony.)”

But her desire to make the world a better place was – and is – genuine and remains a guiding force. Schwartz, who was a teacher for many years, began her subsequent career writing educational material. We find out in her memoir that the first fiction story she sold was released in 1980. She is now a celebrated children’s author, with almost 20 books to her credit directed towards younger readers, ranging from picture books to novels for teens to a couple of non-fiction publications. She is also a freelance writer and editor.

Galena Bay Odyssey is a wonderful glimpse into an integral part of Schwartz’s life. It also offers insight into North American hippie culture and the strength and ingenuity required to live in an out-of-the-way place like Galena Bay. That the “action” takes place in British Columbia will make the memoir of even more interest to local readers.

For new generation

The marvelous children’s stories in Ilse Weber’s Mendel Rosenbusch: Tales for Jewish Children (illustrated by P. John Burden) are fascinating in their own right, as is translator Hans Fisher’s discovery of this book. He and his wife, Ruth, have brought Weber’s book, first published in 1929, from the original German to English.

Let’s get to stories first; then we’ll talk about how this book was discovered.

Ilse Herlinger Weber was born 1903 in Witkowitz, now in Czechia, and, after a period of time in Theresienstadt with her husband and son, was deported to and murdered in Auschwitz in October 1944. She was a Czech poet and writer who, like Kafka, wrote in German, and is best known for Mendel Rosenbusch: Tales for Jewish Children.

The title character is an older man (pictured with a white beard and wearing a black yarmulke) who gets a coin that enables him to become invisible whenever he wishes, and he uses this gift to help his neighbours anonymously. Mendel plays a beneficent role in most of the stories, including magically arranging that a stubborn father permits his son to marry the girl of his choice, and is beloved by all the children in Weber’s stories.

One of my favourites – perhaps because he reminds me of a combination of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, with a blend of some of the rascals in Sholem Aleichem’s stories – is “Uri, the Rascal.” Uri is a lad who always gets into trouble, always plays pranks. But, when a poor, sickly boy, the son of a needy widow, becomes his seatmate in school, Uri does his best to help and defend him, and even comes up with an idea on Purim to help the mother and son.

Another charming tale is “Simcha, the Liar,” about a boy who cannot stop telling fibs – until, one day, he suffers a punishment (purple patches on his face) for his uninterrupted stream of untruths. But, here again, Mendel Rosenbusch comes to the rescue and Simcha never tells another lie again.

These are typical of the heart-warming, ethically pointed stories in this book. Now to its (re)discovery.

When Hans Fisher, who taught at Rutgers University in New Jersey for many years, visited Santiago, Chile, for his mother-law’s funeral, he discovered in her vast library a book of children’s stories in German that he had read as a child in Germany 60 years earlier, before immigrating to the United States to escape the Nazi slaughter of Jews. Like Proust’s biscuit, which brings a flood of memories to the author as he remembers the past, so with Fisher. Seeing this old, torn book brought back memories of wonderful, gentle stories that, in Fisher’s words, “transported me to my own boyhood in Breslau.”

It is with love and devotion and the translators’ writerly skills that Ruth and Hans Fisher have restored these wonderful tales and made them accessible to a new generation of readers.

Curt Leviant also recently made a literary discovery of his own. He found a neglected novel by the famous Yiddish humourist Sholem Aleichem, Moshkeleh the Thief, which he translated into English: for a review, see jewishindependent.ca/a-rediscovered-novella. Leviant’s 12th novel, Me, Mo, Mu, Ma & Mod; Or Which Will It Be, Me and Mazal or Gila and Me?, was published in 2021.

This year’s book award winners

The fourth edition of the Western Canada Jewish Book Awards, presented by the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, culminated in a May 24 event at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver at which the winners in six categories – fiction, non-fiction, memoir/biography, children and youth, poetry, and Holocaust writing – were announced.

Winning the Nancy Richler Memorial Prize for fiction was Simon Choa-Johnston for House of Daughters, a stand-alone sequel to The House of Wives. Based on the author’s family, this multi-generational family saga opens when Emanuel Belilios, a wealthy Jewish opium oligarch, suddenly leaves Hong Kong, and his junior-wife, Pearl, blames Semah, the senior-wife. Pearl kicks Semah out of the mansion where the polyamorous trio had lived and shuns everyone, including her daughter. This is a story of passions and regrets, wealth and survival, set in Eurasian Hong Kong’s high society.

In the non-fiction category, the Pinsky Givon Family Prize went to Alan Twigg, editor of Gidal: The Unusual Friendship of Yosef Wosk and Tim Gidal, a selection of letters between Israeli Tim Gidal, a pioneer in photojournalism, and Vancouver scholar and art collector Yosef Wosk. In the late 1920s, with his handheld Leica, Gidal was able to travel in interwar Europe, capturing rare images of Polish Jews prior to the Holocaust. Wosk first encountered Gidal’s work in a magazine in 1991 – the photo “Night of the Kabbalist” captivated him. Wosk was determined to meet the photographer and eventually did. The two became close and the letters – selected by Twigg from hundreds the friends exchanged over two decades – both memorialize Gidal as an artist, scholar, historian of photography and “hero among the Jewish people,” and also capture the essence of Gidal and Wosk’s friendship.

The Cindy Roadburg Memorial Prize for memoir/biography was given to Marsha Lederman for Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed. In it, Lederman delves into her parents’ Holocaust stories in the wake of her own divorce, investigating how trauma migrates through generations. At the age of 5, Lederman asked her mother why she didn’t have any grandparents, and her mother told her the truth: the Holocaust. Decades later, her parents having died and now a mother herself, Lederman began to wonder how much history had shaped her life and started her journey into the past, to tell her family’s stories of loss and resilience.

Boy from Buchenwald by Robbie Waisman (with Susan McClelland) took the Diamond Foundation Prize for children and youth writing. In 1945, Robbie Waisman, then Romek Wajsman, had just been liberated from Buchenwald, a concentration camp where more than 60,000 people were killed. He was starving, tortured and had no idea if his family was alive. Along with 472 other boys, these teens were dubbed “the Buchenwald Boys.” They were angry at the world for their abuse, and turned to violence: stealing, fighting and struggling for power. Few thought they would ever be able to lead functional lives again, but everything changed for Romek and the other boys when Albert Einstein and Rabbi Herschel Schacter brought them to a home for rehabilitation.

The Betty Averbach Foundation Prize for poetry went to Tom Wayman’s Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back: Poems for a Dark Time, which explores the question of how to live in a natural landscape that offers beauty while being consumed by industry, and in an economy that offers material benefits while denying dignity, meaning and a voice to many in order to satisfy the outsized appetites of a few. A cri de coeur from a poet who has long celebrated the voices of working people, the collection also grapples with why “anyone, in this era so profoundly lacking in grace, might want to make poems – or any kind of art.”

Rounding out the awards was the Kahn Family Foundation Prize for Holocaust writing, which was given to But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust by Charlotte Schallié (editor) and illustrators Miriam Libicki, Barbara Yelin and Gilad Seliktar. But I Live is a co-creation of the novelists and four Holocaust survivors: David Schaffer, brothers Nico and Rolf Kamp, and Emmie Arbel. Schaffer and his family survived in Romania due to their refusal to obey Nazi collaborators; in the Netherlands, the Kamps were hidden by the Dutch resistance in 13 different places; and, through the story of Arbel, who survived Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, we see the lifelong trauma inflicted by the Holocaust. The book includes historical essays, a postscript from the artists and words of the survivors.

Each category in the 2023 Western Canada Jewish Book Awards was assessed by five jurors, in different configurations, from the following professionals: Linda Bonder, a retired librarian; Susanna Egan, professor emeritus of literature in English from the University of British Columbia; Dave Margoshes, who writes fiction and poetry on a farm west of Saskatoon; Norman Ravvin, a writer, teacher and critic living in Montreal; Rhea Tregebov, an author of fiction, poetry and children’s picture books, and a retired professor in the UBC Creative Writing Program; Elisabeth Kushner, a librarian and writer living in Vancouver; Karen Corrin, former head librarian of the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library at the JCC; Nicole Nozick, former executive director of the Vancouver Writers Fest and former director of the JCC Jewish Book Festival; and Anita Brown, who is working with the Waldman Library.

Daniella Givon, chair of the awards committee, introduced the May 24 event, sharing a bit about the awards and thanking all the sponsors and participants for the high calibre and diversity of the submissions. The winning authors then said a few words, and Dana Camil Hewitt, director of the JCC Jewish Book Festival, closed the proceedings with more thank yous, and an invitation for everyone to purchase and enjoy the books.

– Courtesy Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival

Yiddish alive and well

Yiddish has the odds stacked against it – the vast majority of its speakers were murdered in the Holocaust, its use was repressed in the postwar Soviet Union, Israel favoured Hebrew over it, and it faced the challenges that any immigrant language faces in a new country, including in Canada. Yet, Yiddish lives on, and can continue to do so, and even flourish, contends Rebecca Margolis, director and Pratt Foundation Chair of Jewish Civilization at Monash University, in Australia.

Margolis, who is originally from Canada, will be in Vancouver to launch her new book, Yiddish Lives On: Strategies of Language Transmission, at the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture on May 23, 7:15 p.m. Introducing Margolis will be the Vancouver Jewish Folk Choir with the song “Yomervokhets,” a Yiddish translation of “Jabberwocky” by Raphael Finkel, set to music by the choir’s conductor, David Millard.

The event is particularly special, as Margolis uses the Vancouver Jewish Folk Choir – in which I’ve sung for more years than I can recall – as one of many examples of a “created language space.” Such spaces are “sites that are deliberately created to support the continuity of a language that is not commonly a mother tongue or widely spoken,” she writes.

The small section that features the choir cites the work of local Yiddish scholar and translator Faith Jones, who is a member of the choir as well, and the book references a paper that she and I wrote together in tandem with the 2019 online exhibit marking the choir’s 40th anniversary. I have to say it was an exciting surprise to find a paper I co-wrote quoted, but it’s a quote from Faith’s 1999 thesis on the Yiddish library of the Peretz Centre (the choir’s home, too) that helped me clarify some of what draws me to Yiddish. In commenting on the intersections between Yiddish, politics and identity, Faith wrote that “what these strands have in common is the belief in the power of human beings to alter the course of history. In left political life, in feminist theory, in the movement for lesbian and gay equality, in the political culture of secular humanism, it is not the past which is romanticized, but the future. Yiddish does not offer the path to the past as much as to a collective future which is linked with the past: a better future, but better because of human endeavour.”

It is this human aspect – the intention we can possess – that runs through all of Margolis’s examples of the ways in which people, specifically Canadians, have kept Yiddish alive. She conceptualizes her book “as a series of expanding rings of engagement with the language and culture.” Each chapter focuses on a ring, while acknowledging the rings are interconnected: families (1950s to today), youth theatre groups (1960s to 1970s), literature (1970s to 1980s), singing (1990s to 2000s) and new media/technology (2000 to today).

Margolis explains that Yiddish exists in two communities: the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox), who speak Yiddish in their everyday lives, and the secular, people “for whom continued engagement with the language has taken place despite maintaining linguistic acculturation.” Margolis’s book is mostly about the latter group, but she does discuss the Haredim quite a bit and, to a much lesser extent, the experience of preserving Scottish Gaelic, which, she says, “is undergoing revitalization in Canada and abroad,” and Indigenous languages.

Yiddish Lives On is an academic book, but easy to read, and there are common threads that recur, so that, if you don’t quite understand a concept on first encounter, you will when it is used in a subsequent context. In addition to discussing scholarly texts, Margolis talks about Yiddish writers – in Canada between 1950 and 2020, more than 200 books were published in Yiddish! – and analyzes movies and shows like the web series YidLife Crisis, which was created by and stars Eli Batalion and Jamie Elman, two Montreal secular Jews who speak Yiddish, using “provocative comedic dialogue,” Margolis notes, “to address contemporary issues around Jewish identity.”

Margolis doesn’t expect that Yiddish will ever return to regular, everyday use by non-Haredim, however, she convincingly argues that “a language lives by being used” and that the many spaces that have intentionally been created for Yiddish – “from raising children as native speakers to a virtual Yiddishverse” – bode well for the language’s continuity.

To attend the book’s launch and the mini-concert that precedes it, register at peretz-centre.org.

Community artists highlighted

Guest speaker Marsha Lederman addresses the crowd at the launch of the 40th issue of The Scribe on April 19. (photo from JMABC)

Last month, the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia (JMABC) released its 40th issue of The Scribe, the organization’s mostly annual publication that chronicles various aspects of Jewish life in the province. This latest issue features 30 members of the local Jewish visual arts circle: painters, sculptors, mixed media artists, illustrators, textile artists, art educators, art consultants, an art curator and a gallery owner.

The official launch of the publication at VanDusen Botanical Garden’s Floral Hall on April 19 incorporated a silent auction of works donated by many of the artists highlighted in the issue. The items ranged from original paintings and sculptures to art books, sets of cards, and an art consultation.

The festive atmosphere buzzed, as people talked and laughed and greeted their friends. After the mixing and mingling, several speakers addressed the crowd. JMABC past president Carol Herbert acted as emcee, introducing current president Daniella Givon, the issue’s managing editor Carol Crenna and the keynote presenter, Marsha Lederman, who is Western arts correspondent for the Globe and Mail.

Givon gave an overview of the history of the JMABC, calling it the “community storage of history and memory.” She also talked about The Scribe and how it has evolved since its first issue.

Lederman’s address included a video presentation, as she concentrated on the theme of what makes Jewish artists Jewish, how their Jewish identity informs their art. The artists’ Jewishness is much more than the tragedy of the Holocaust, she said. There is a place in Jewish art for humour and family, for traditions and ecology. Lederman didn’t mention every artist featured but she mentioned as many as she could, given the time constraints, and her delivery was laced with admiration for the artists’ love of life, their creativity and their courage.

Crenna, who was hired specifically to lead this issue of The Scribe, talked about her excitement when she received the offer. “I’m not Jewish,” she said, “but so many Jewish people affected my life. I worked in businesses owned by Jews. I ate at Jewish restaurants. I wore clothing designed by Jewish designers.” She spoke about the stories in the magazine, which inspired her. She also said a few words about the visual aspect – the multiple colourful illustrations that made the publication an artistic creation of its own. And she introduced her graphic designer, Sonia Bishop.

“The Jewish artists in this magazine, and the ones we didn’t include – they are all fearless,” Crenna said. “They reinvent themselves again and again.… Their creativity has no limits.”

The magazine itself is a glossy, large format publication. Each of the 30 features inside is based on an interview with an artist, plus several colour illustrations of that artist’s works.

In her email interview with the Independent, Crenna said, “I was hired to complete this issue last June. Before, [Jewish Independent] publisher Cynthia Ramsay edited a number of previous issues on a volunteer basis, but this was the first time that the JMABC hired an editor to create one of its publications. The job was advertised, and I was hired due to my experience and the vision I had for The Scribe.”

Crenna has been a journalist for 39 years, including nine years as a columnist for the Vancouver Sun. “I have been an editor of nine magazines varying in subject matter. I have been the managing editor of the national visual art magazine Art Avenue for the Federation of Canadian Artists for seven years. I am also an artist. It was my wish to create a visually beautiful, more contemporary and more reader-friendly version of The Scribe…. I was very inspired by the incredible stories I read in the previous issues.”

She also said she wanted to make the magazine more accessible to a wider audience, not just Jews, and ruminated about the selection process – how the editorial team chose 30 artists from the much larger artistic community. Every issue, the team must narrow its subjects down to fit the constraints of a finite publication.

“An artist subcommittee was formed in the year prior to the beginning of work on this issue, before I was hired,” said Crenna. “This committee compiled a list of approximately 70 established B.C. artists or those that are emerging…. All are professionals. All have sold their works and have had exhibitions. To reduce the numbers, since 30 is the average number of individuals featured in every issue of The Scribe, it was decided that photographers would be excluded. They will have their own issue.… Some artists opted out, as well. Also, it was decided that the publication should include others within the artistic community…. Therefore, art consultants, a curator, an art educator and a gallery owner were also included in the visual arts issue. After much consideration, only living artists were included, since there are no archival interviews with those who are deceased.”

Crenna explained how the interview process worked. All of the participants were interviewed for this issue in 2022, she said. “These interviews – either on Zoom or in-person – were conducted by JMABC volunteers within the offices, where recording equipment is of high quality, so the future generations would be able to listen to them. The interviewers included Helen Aqua, Carol Herbert, Brynn Gillies, Perry Seidelman, Daniella Givon, Pam Wolfman and Bill Gruenthal. The 30 interviews lasted from one hour to two-and-a-half hours and were from 6,000 to 19,000 words. Afterwards, JMABC interns transcribed the recordings. Then I edited the information and wrote the features, which were then approved by the interviewees.”

Crenna organized with each artist to send her six high-resolution images of their artwork – in different styles/themes for variety – and headshots of them working on their art.

To purchase an issue of The Scribe or find out more about the JMABC, visit jewishmuseum.ca.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

Mental health concerns

Smartphones, even if you hug them, won’t hug back. It’s not revelatory, but an effective allegory to understand what’s missing with screen interactions.

Though screens replaced direct, in-person human interactions during the pandemic, by necessity, it only worsened a problem that still exists: the less real the contact, the worse the depression and loneliness.

Toronto author Dr. H. David Burstein draws this correlation in his first book, Smart Phones Don’t Give Hugs: A Guide Out of Loneliness (Talk+Tell, 2022). The book takes an in-depth look at loneliness and depression, its modern causes and how it might be alleviated.

“Humans are social creatures who have a need to connect and cooperate with others, with the purpose of being part of something bigger than themselves,” said Burstein. “We want to be needed and to know we are loved.”

More than two years of gathering socially via a screen have led people to lose the ability to really connect with one another in an organic off-the-web way, he said.

“Maybe we are so enchanted by the social aspect of technology that we have forgotten what it was like to shake hands or bump fists, as opposed to like, comment and subscribe. We have forgotten how to foster lasting human connections,” he said. This, he believes, has contributed to the general worsening of people’s mental health.

A Statistics Canada survey on mental health over the course of the pandemic, which was released in September 2021, found that one in four Canadians reported depression, up over the previous year from one in five. Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) showed in surveys last year that loneliness and depression spiked during the pandemic and continue to be a growing problem.

In addition to his own findings, Burstein corrals some of the wisdom available from various Jewish sources, including Dennis Prager, author of The Rational Bible; Rabbi David Wolpe of Temple Sinai in Los Angeles; Abraham Isaac Kook, former chief rabbi of Israel; Rabbi Noah Weinberg, Aish HaTorah founder; and Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, who died only recently, on April 27.

One of Burstein’s tips is to pay attention to the signs your body is giving you.

“Just like when we’re thirsty, we drink; when we’re hungry, we eat; our emotions are not to be ignored. If we’re lonely, we need to be with people,” he said.

But an obstacle for many people is understanding that there’s a problem.

“It is difficult for people to admit being lonely because they think it means that they feel like a loser,” he said. “But I have also learned that when we are challenged, there are three ways we can react. One is to confront, second to retreat, third to ignore. My tendency had been to respond instinctively with the last two, but this time I decided to lean into the subject. It is a heavy subject requiring a lot of self-reflection, so I had to pace myself. I wrote the book for my own clarity, and to help others as well.”

Included in those “others” are his three teenage children. He is increasingly worried about their well-being, given the amount of time they spend on screens. Though quick to point out that there are benefits to screen time, moderation is key, said Burstein, and the quality of consumption is important, too.

Through the process of writing, Burstein became more aware of what, in his own life, needed work.

“I take my personal relationships more seriously,” he said. “I still worry about what tech is doing to us.”

Jonathan Wasserlauf is a freelance writer, and a political science major and law student based in Montreal.

Rabbi launches book at BI

Rabbi Paul Plotkin returns to Congregation Beth Israel for the Canadian launch of his new book, Wisdom Grows in My Garden. (photo from AIA Publishing)

In part to fill his need to nurture – his kids off to college and his congregation less reliant on him – Rabbi Paul Plotkin took up gardening. Not only has he produced some of the most expensive tomatoes, taking into account all the capital that goes into every one that makes it into a salad or sandwich, but he has produced a new book: Wisdom Grows in My Garden (AIA Publishing). And he will launch that book in Canada on May 10, 7:30 p.m., at Beth Israel Synagogue, where he began his rabbinical career.

“I started in the summer of 1976 as Rabbi [Wilfred] Solomon’s first assistant, and he left for Israel after breaking his Yom Kippur fast on the way to the airport, and the 26-year-old ‘kid’ took over. Rabbi [Marvin] Hier was away from the Schara Tzedeck for most of the year preparing to build what was to become the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, so I was thrust into the position of often being the Vancouver non-Reform senior rabbi. It was quite a ride. It was a good thing I didn’t know what I couldn’t do, or I would have been paralyzed with fear. Instead, I jumped in and went to work.”

While BI was his first pulpit, Plotkin said, “I had been a youth director of my home synagogue while in college and in New York while at the seminary. I learned a lot about programming and leadership from those jobs and translated it into heading a synagogue.”

He admitted that the experience “was not without mistakes but what I couldn’t entirely appreciate was the menschlichkeit of my members. They appreciated my enthusiasm, my passion and my sincerity and pardoned most of my excesses and faults. It was a truly Canadian thing. I know now how special it was because my other two congregations in Florida were a lot different. Years later, I would share privately that my ‘worst critics’ in Vancouver treated me better than my good friends in Florida. By being thrown into the fire and succeeding – succeeding was a low bar, if the shul was still standing when Rabbi Solomon returned, I would have been praised – I learned of the potential people had for change, of their desire for knowledge, and that I could actually help transform people into greater commitment to mitzvot and the Jewish people.”

Plotkin was born and raised in Toronto, but has lived in South Florida for more than four decades. He is rabbi emeritus of Temple Beth Am and served on the Rabbinical Assembly’s committee on Jewish law and standards for some 20 years. He is the founding chair of its kashrut subcommittee and also is in charge of kashrut for Ben’s Kosher restaurant chain. He loves food and cooking. And Canada still holds a special place for him – he and his wife own a townhouse in Whistler, “primarily as a new summer cottage for after retirement,” he said. “We will be there for four months this summer.”

An avid writer, publishing articles in various newspapers and magazines, Plotkin has a blog on medium.com. He published a book some 20 years ago – The Lord Is My Shepherd, Why Do I Still Want?: Ancient Wisdom for the Modern Soul (Eakin Press) – but waited until retirement to write his second.

“First, in those days, I had to triage my time and creative mental energy. I also needed more age and seasoning for all of the pieces to melt together. Pirkei Avot teaches us to see wisdom in the elderly. Great red wine isn’t great in its first year. It takes years to develop nuance and subtlety. Creation of the book was no different.”

The idea came to him in a dream, he said.

“Unfortunately, I was still in my active work years, with an 1,100-family congregation. Finding time to breathe was hard, let alone write a book, so I made it a priority in retirement. Over the years after the dream, new ideas would come to me in the garden and I would jot them down and throw them into a file with the dream material.”

In describing the book, Plotkin said, “Technically, it is a narrative memoir, because it is my story and told entirely from my perspective, but it is not in its heart a memoir. It revolves around the garden, but you won’t improve your tomato growing by reading the book. It is, in essence, a life lesson book (indeed, there are 25 life lessons in the book) that will help guide you to a better life. It is filled with humour and stories, two tools that featured prominently in 40 years of sermons. It will offer the reader some important guides to navigating a better life. I like to tell Jewishly knowledgeable audiences that the garden was my ‘Torah,’ my book is the Midrash.”

Plotkin said “gardening is a wonderful emotional and humbling pastime” and cited a recent article that “extolled its value as an alternative choice for exercising.”

“If you haven’t got time,” he said, “try a few herbs in a pot on the windowsill. If you have a black thumb, grow zucchini. In northern climates, everyone grows so many, they start to call friends they don’t have to offer them some. If you read the book, the irony of this last statement will become clear.”

Of the feedback he has received so far – from readers in his own demographic, as well as that of his mid-40s son, from Jews and non-Jews, from observant people and atheists – Plotkin said, “much to my shock, they all liked it and, yet, like a Rorschach test, they all found messages in my lessons that reflected their needs or interests. There is something in this book for everyone.”

Chapter 1 of Wisdom Grows in My Garden takes place at Beth Israel, said Plotkin. “I hope many readers and especially those who may remember me from their bar/bat mitzvahs and weddings that I officiated at will come out to the evening and say hello,” he said.