Books – Page 16

Horn co-launches book fest

Dara Horn and David Baddiel open the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival on Feb. 6. (photos from JBF)

Early in her new book, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, Dara Horn reflects on a controversy at the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam, where an employee who wore a kippa to work was told by his employers to hide it under a baseball cap because it might interfere with the museum’s “independent position.”

“The museum finally relented after deliberating for four months, which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding,” writes Horn.

The snappy summation is typical of the author’s approach: biting wit in the face of affronts of various dreadfulness. And the affronts pile up, supporting the incendiary thesis of the title.

Horn discusses the world’s interest in Anne Frank’s story, including the insistence on repeating the line from her diary, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” Leaving aside the fact that Frank wrote these words before she experienced how truly evil at heart some people can be, Horn writes, the line provides a “gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity).”

Horn, who is part of the Feb. 6 launch event for the 2022 Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, is a novelist with a PhD in Yiddish and Hebrew comparative literatures. Her take on contemporary antisemitism is suffused with her understanding of how Western audiences expect “coherence” and often an uplifting ending to the stories in our literature or other entertainment.

“Holocaust novels that have sold millions of copies both in the United States and overseas in recent years are all ‘uplifting,’ even when they include the odd dead kid,” she writes. “The Tattooist of Auschwitz, a recent international mega-bestseller touted for its ‘true story,’ manages to present an Auschwitz that involves a heartwarming romance. Sarah’s Key, The Book Thief, The Boy in [the] Striped Pyjamas, and many other bestsellers, some of which have even become required reading in schools, all involved non-Jewish rescuers who risk or sacrifice their own lives to save hapless Jews, thus inspiring us all.”

These uplifting stories, she points out, make up a large chunk of Holocaust-related literature, yet illustrate phenomena that were almost nonexistent during the Holocaust: non-Jews risking their lives to save Jews.

“Statistically speaking, this was not the experience of almost any Jews who endured the Holocaust,” she writes. “But for literature in non-Jewish languages, that grim reality is both inconvenient and irrelevant.”

She summarizes: “Dead Jews are supposed to teach us about the beauty of the world and the wonders of redemption – otherwise, what was the point of killing them in the first place?”

On the subject of non-Jewish rescuers, Horn goes into an extensive exploration of the life of Varian Fry, an American man who worked for the Emergency Rescue Committee, a group of American intellectuals that, beginning in 1940, distributed emergency American visas to endangered European artists and thinkers. What they envisioned rescuing was not so much the individuals themselves, but the very concept of European civilization, which they correctly believed to be in mortal danger from the Nazis. But, rescuing a culture’s greatest artists, writers and thinkers and sequestering them to safety in America, Horn posits, is itself “a sort of eugenics.”

For someone with an explicit distaste for disproportionate attention to rescue stories, Horn devotes a significant chunk in the middle of the book to what amounts to a biography of Fry. As the reader starts wondering how this fits into the larger thesis, Horn points out how the veneration of the more universal European culture for which Fry and his colleagues risked their lives was not extended to the particular Jewish culture that was the expressed target of the Nazis.

“Fry tried to save the culture of Europe, and for that he should be remembered and praised,” Horn writes. “But no one tried to save the culture of Hasidism, for example, with its devotion to ordinary, everyday holiness – or Misnagdim, the opposing religious movement within traditional Eastern European Judaism, whose energy in the years before the war was channeled into the rigourous study of musar, or ethics. Entire academies devoted to the Musar Movement were destroyed, their books burned out of the world, their teachers and leaders and scholars murdered – all the things that everyone feared would happen to the vaunted culture of Europe. No rescue committee was convened on behalf of the many people who devoted their lives and careers to … the actual study of righteousness. For them, there were no Varian Frys.”

Horn notes that, in the 1990s, there was a burgeoning of Holocaust museums and exhibitions all over the United States, including the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

“The idea was that people would come to these museums and learn what the world had done to the Jews, where hatred can lead. They would then stop hating Jews.

“It wasn’t a ridiculous idea, but it seems to have been proven wrong. A generation later, antisemitism is once again the next big thing, and it is hard to go to these museums today without feeling that something profound has shifted.”

She suggests that the lesson some people take from these exhibitions is the opposite of what was intended. The idea of the museums is that everyone should learn the depths to which humanity could skin sink, she writes.

“But this has come to mean that anything short of the Holocaust is, well, not the Holocaust. The bar is rather high.”

Therefore, when people are shot in a synagogue in Pittsburgh or San Diego, this is “not the Holocaust” and, presumably, nothing to get too concerned about in the greater scheme of Jewish victimization. Harassing Jewish college students is not the Holocaust. Lobbing missiles at sleeping children in Israeli cities is not the Holocaust. Even hounding ancient Jewish communities out of entire countries and seizing their assets is not the Holocaust. Horn does not mention Martin Niemöller, but she seems to be suggesting that, if “they” are coming for “the Jews,” most people will not speak up until it reaches something akin to the Holocaust, which we may have unwittingly recast not as the endpoint of hatred and antisemitism but as the stick by which the world measures threats to Jewish people.

An antisemitic attack in Jersey City, N.J., provides Horn with insights into how mainstream audiences try to make sense of antisemitic violence.

New Jersey’s flagship newspaper, the Star-Ledger, noted that “the attack that killed two Orthodox Jews, an Ecuadorian immigrant and a Jersey City police detective has highlighted racial tension that had been simmering ever since ultra-Orthodox Jews began moving to a lower-income community.”

Horn points out a few of the factual and logical inconsistencies in the media’s coverage, including that the assailants had never lived in Jersey City, so they weren’t reacting to any state of tension there. Moreover, the community that was attacked was accused of “gentrifying” a “minority” neighbourhood.

“This was remarkable, given that the tiny Hasidic community in question, highly visible members of the world’s most consistently persecuted minority, in fact came to Jersey City, fleeing gentrification, after being priced out of long-established Hasidic communities in Brooklyn,” she writes.

The book concludes rather unexpectedly, not with recipes for solving the contemporary crisis or explicit calls to action, but rather with reflections of her experience with Daf Yomi, the page-a-day, seven-and-a-half-year journey through the Babylonian Talmud. She provides a lovely and succinct explanation of Rabbinic Judaism.

“Until the year 70 CE, Judaism had been centred at the ancient temple in Jerusalem, where worship was mediated through priests offering sacrifices,” writes Horn. “After the Romans destroyed this temple and exiled the people, there was no particular reason for this religion, or even simply this people, to survive in any form. But on the eve of this temple’s destruction, one sage, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, had himself smuggled out of the besieged city of Jerusalem in a coffin, after which he convinced the Roman general Vespasian to allow him to open an academy for Torah scholars in a small town far from Jerusalem. Both Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai and Judaism faked their own deaths in order to survive this cataclysm. The small cadre of scholars in that small town reinvented this religion by turning it into a virtual-reality system, replacing temple rituals with equally ritualized blessings and prayers, study of Torah, and elaborately regulated interpersonal ethics. The sages frantically arguing about when and how to recite which prayers are survivors and descendants of survivors, remnants of a destroyed world. They are anxious about remembering every last detail of that lost connection to God, like mourners obsessing over the tiniest memories of a beloved they have lost. One might expect that this memory would eventually fade, that people would ‘move on.’ Instead the opposite happens. Once the process of memory becomes important, the details do not fade but rather accrue – because the memory itself becomes a living thing, enriched by every subsequent generation that brings new meaning to it.”

Without batting readers over the head, Horn seems to be advocating what Jews have always done – finding meaning, comfort and guidance by interrogating ideas and arguing across centuries with the greatest minds of the tradition. She may be, as she says, “part of a ridiculously small minority that nonetheless played a behemoth role in other people’s imaginations,” but her Daf Yomi practice reminds her that she is far from alone.

“I turn the page and return, carried by fellow readers living and dead, all turning the pages with me,” she concludes.

Horn will be joined at the virtual festival opening Feb. 6, 1 p.m., by David Baddiel, whose book Jews Don’t Count shares themes and emotions with Horn’s. Baddiel’s book, like others in this (sadly) flourishing genre, was reviewed in these pages recently (jewishindependent.ca/ tackling-the-hatred-head-on). They will be in conversation with Marsha Lederman, Western arts correspondent for the Globe and Mail.

For the full book festival schedule, visit jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival.

Beauty amid harshness

Rachel Rose, left, and Ami Sands Brodoff take part in the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival on Feb. 8.

None of us knows what lies ahead. We might think we do, but a lack of awareness one moment can have tragic impacts, mental or physical illness can overtake us, and our actions and reactions can hurt ourselves and others, whether harm is intended or not. Control is a fiction. And two recently published short story collections that will be featured at the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival on Feb. 8 explore that fact with tales that should make most of us feel grateful for the relative boringness of our lives.

Poet Rachel Rose’s debut novel, The Octopus Has Three Hearts, presents a series of unconventional characters in life-challenging situations difficult to imagine oneself in and yet portraying familiar emotions. The characters in Ami Sands Brodoff’s The Sleep of Apples will be easier for many readers to recognize in themselves, but they are also a diverse group of people for whom living is more of a task than a pleasure. In both collections, instances of uncomplicated joy, love and connection are rare. Nevertheless, they leave one feeling melancholically appreciative of the incomparable value of life, and acutely mindful of its fragile nature.

Rose’s stories are explicitly linked by the animals with whom her people interact, from dogs to rats to pigs to parrots and others, including, of course, an octopus. The title story centres around a polyamorous relationship, the narrator husband, his wife (who is a biologist at an aquarium) and one of his wife’s partners trying to find an octopus who’s escaped their tank under the biologist’s watch. The animal’s attributes – intelligence, fluidity, ambiguity, etc. – have obvious symbolic meaning not only within this particular chapter but the collection as a whole; similarly with the other animals that figure into Rose’s narratives.

The Octopus Has Three Hearts was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and Rose is no stranger to awards and recognition for her writing. She is the poet laureate emerita of Vancouver for good reason. She writes with succinct and oft-times detailed brutality, with touches of dark humour, and with much insight into humanity. Elements of her characters – whether they be ex-cons, cheating spouses, or people who just made a terrible mistake – are within all of us to some degree and our world would probably be a better place if we confronted these aspects of ourselves, instead of burying them or pretending they don’t exist.

Similar themes appear in The Sleep of Apples, a more overtly Jewish compilation. Rather than animals linking the chapters, the people are related or connected in some way to one another. Miri’s Bubbe Zelda dies in the first story and, right away, loss, guilt, love, identity, tradition – throughout the book, no matter the characters’ gender, sexuality, age, upbringing, relationship and friendship choices, career path, they must deal with these and other basic elements of existence. Death is always present. But so, too, is the will to live, to forgive, and to care for oneself and for others.

It is interesting to think of the creative process and how people come up with stories that are out of the ordinary yet resonate. Some of the language and situations in these short stories will shock and discomfort readers. Many of the characters will not resemble people most of us regularly encounter. But, ideally, if we’re willing, they will open our minds in a way that will help us navigate the real world more thoughtfully and with more compassion.

The Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival is online only this year. For the full lineup of authors, visit jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival.

Classical pianist & educator

Robert Silverman is one of the musicians featured in Under the Radar, by David Eisenstadt. (photo from Robert Silverman)

***

photo - David Eisenstadt — David Eisenstadt *(photo from tcgpr)*

Under the Radar: 30 Notable Canadian Jewish Musicians, which I wrote with Alan L. Simons (editor), takes an historical approach, covering musicians of most genres and genders, some alive and others having passed on, all skilled, but excelling somewhat out of sight. This is the first in a three-part series of excerpts from the book, which was released last November, and is available in paperback and as an ebook from amazon.ca. The excerpts feature performers with B.C. roots: Robert Silverman, Ben Mink and Mike Kobluk.

***

Robert Herschel Silverman is one of Canada’s premier pianists. He was born in Montreal, Que., on May 25, 1938, to Jewish parents from the Ukraine and Romania. Globe and Mail reporter Marsha Lederman wrote, “when he was just 4, after seeing how he was drawn to classical music programs on the radio, he was signed up (by his parents) for piano lessons. By his second lesson, Silverman could identify notes by ear. He could read sheet music before he could read words. But even as he continued with his lessons through high school and university, he never considered a career in piano.”

At 6, Silverman played his first recital. His debut at 14 was with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. At 23, he planned to become an engineer but decided to be a classical pianist. Lederman reported Silverman saying, “It was really, really late. It’s not the way to do it.”

He earned undergrad arts and music degrees in the 1960s from Sir George Williams (now Concordia) University. He studied with Dorothy Morton (the daughter of Silverman’s childhood piano teacher) at McGill University, and with Cecile Genhart at the Eastman School of Music, Rochester, N.Y. He also earned a Canada Council grant to enrol at the Vienna Academy of Music.

Silverman won the top piano prize at the Jeunesses Musicales Canada national competition, playing twice at Expo ’67. His Allied Arts piano competition success earned a recital debut in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall in 1970. He made his New York Lincoln Centre debut before he turned 40, in 1978, where the New York Timesdescribed him as “a polished and thoroughly finished technician and an extremely articulate [virtuoso].”

Silverman performed with global and Canadian orchestras conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, Neeme Jarvi, Kiril Kondrashin, Zdenek Macal, Seiji Ozawa and Gerard Schwarz.

In his 30s, he was an artist-in-residence at Nazareth College in Rochester, N.Y.; he also taught at the University of California in Santa Barbara from 1969 to 1970, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 1970-73. He moved to Vancouver to join the University of British Columbia as professor of music (piano) in 1973. He was the director of UBC’s music school 1991-95, retiring as professor emeritus of music in 2003. Celebrating his 30-year tenure, Silverman received an honorary doctorate in 2004.

Working with Adrienne Cohen, the former music program director at Toronto’s Koffler Centre of the Arts, Silverman, in 2002, was the artist-in-residence.

“My relationship was informal with no written contract. I received an honorarium for seasonal concerts. I appreciated the opportunity to maintain a visible presence in Toronto’s music life and to help Adrienne enhance and enlarge classical music’s role. Although I’m not observant from a religious standpoint, I am keenly aware of my Jewish heritage and pleased to be affiliated with Koffler, whose programs were attuned to the Jewish community in its traditional sense,” he said.

“I grew up when many North American Jewish luminaries were visible – Horowitz, Rubinstein, Bernstein, Reiner, Heifetz, Menuhin and the up-and-comers, Fleisher, Graffman and Rabin. My musicality was shaped by their warm manner of phrasing and attention to tonal beauty, qualities I hold dear and continue to strive towards.”

He returned to Montreal in 2008 to initiate the Dorothy Morton Visiting Artist series at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music, performing there on its 10th anniversary. He and his wife also endowed a biannual Robert and Ellen Silverman Piano Concerto Competition.

His discography numbers 30-plus CDs and 12 LPs. He received an Order of Canada in 2013.

As a Vancouver-based retiree and a Steinway artist, Silverman devotes himself full-time to recordings and concerts and is heard often on the CBC and Radio-Canada networks.

Wolf & lamb find peace

In her new book, Rabbi Dr. Laura Duhan Kaplan explores lessons for humans from the animal world.

Good things come in small packages. A thin volume by Vancouver rabbi, philosopher and academic Laura Duhan Kaplan packs ancient and modern wisdom into a delightful parcel.

Duhan Kaplan is director of inter-religious studies and professor of Jewish studies at Vancouver School of Theology, professor emerita of philosophy at University of North Carolina at Charlotte and rabbi emerita of Vancouver’s Or Shalom Synagogue. Her book Mouth of the Donkey: Re-imagining Biblical Animals was released this year. To her resumé, you might add a sort of Dr. Doolittle role, as she returns frequently to her ability to “talk” to the animals.

“I did a little research into communication,” she writes. “Observe a creature’s form of life, discern its form of communication.… I didn’t look specifically for sound, gesture or expressions of feeling. Instead, I just watched animals interact. And, bit by bit, I began to learn their languages. Since then, I’ve conversed with cats by looking at things and then back at the cat. I’ve given information to wasps and hornets by making gestures. Spoken to crows with vocal clicks and clacks arranged in sentences. (Since I have a limited crow vocabulary, it’s a string of nonsense words, but they give me credit for trying.) And, oddest of all, I’ve befriended flies through telepathy. After all, sight, sound, thought and movement are all wavelengths on which communication happens. Different creatures favour different wavelengths. A good neighbour pays attention and meets others halfway.”

(Disclosure: In the book’s acknowledgements, Duhan Kaplan notes that I critiqued some of the earliest iterations of a couple of chapters.)

In the book, Duhan Kaplan explains that she uses four kabbalistic levels of analysis: peshat, plain literal meaning; derash, exposition of recurring ethical themes; remez, hints to allegorical meanings; and sod, secret allusions to God’s true nature.

She considers both the depictions of humans as sheep in God’s “flock,” and the intertwining of the lives of the ancient Israelites with their own flocks – “Take your sheep and cattle and go!” God tells the Israelites in Exodus.

She contemplates the multiple times where the ancient literature depicts a donkey as a spiritual guide. She weaves in personal stories, such as visit to a donkey refuge here in British Columbia.

“Equines communicate well through touch. So, with my hand scratching his neck, we had a wordless conversation.” This segues into the Bible’s “most famous donkey,” that of Balaam, whose interaction with an angel sends Balaam on, so to speak, a different path.

Biblical writers, both Jewish and Christian, she writes, associate donkeys with “hope, divine guidance and messianic time.”

The blurry line between humans and other animals is a recurring theme, as is the transfiguration of one sort of creature into another. In the Book of Numbers, when Moses sends 12 scouts to tour the land of Canaan, they come back with stories of wonder and terror. Vineyards produce clusters of grapes so large that two people are needed to carry them but the farmers are gigantic – “Next to them, we feel like grasshoppers.” But, as the story unfolds, a short 40 years later, the Canaanites come to see the Israelites not as grasshoppers but as a powerful plague of locusts: “They will lick up everything around us!” declares the king.

Isaiah’s oracle about the wolf and the lamb living in peace is seen by many as a fable of human coexistence. Lambs, on the other hand, can represent defeated nations. But Duhan Kaplan flips power dynamics, noting that, in Isaiah’s oracle, the lambs control the land and exhibit a model for coexistence: “The lambs are peaceful; they govern without a policy of revenge. Graciously and with mercy, they allow the wolves to sojourn as guests.”

The book takes a surprising turn to the immediate present with a discussion of Indigenous-settler peace and friendship treaties and how they may apply to the reconciliation process our country is currently undergoing.

“The treaties are an expression, I might say, of people committed to an ethic like the one Isaiah describes,” writes Duhan Kaplan. “Like the wolf and the lamb, they resist conquest and revenge. They welcome one another as fellow residents. Like the lion and the ox, who share a food source, they rise to the opportunity for peace. And, like the bear and the cow, they understand that the relationship must be renewed in every generation.”

Living well with dying

Lap of Honour: A No Fear Guide to Living Well with Dying by Jewish community member Gaby Eirew and Dr. Pippa Hawley is not a new book – it was self-published in 2019 – but its subject matter is timeless. And, after almost two years of the pandemic, many of us have perhaps contemplated the fragility of our existence more than we otherwise would have. While the book talks about what we can do to live well with dying once we are diagnosed with a terminal illness, it’s probably better to read it before that happens, if we have the opportunity, as we’ll have other things to contend with at that point.

Being prepared for something generally reduces our anxiety about that something, no matter what it is – even death.

“When you have been diagnosed with an illness (or someone close to you has) you enter a rather unusual time,” write Eirew and Hawley. “Life’s finishing line might be drawing nearer, but you are still very much alive. This is a time of huge opportunity for warmth, connection and honesty. There are unknowns and inevitably there will be fears, yet once you have a sense of what to expect, fears can be much more manageable, and the personal growth often described by people in this situation can be maximized. There may be difficult conversations ahead, but if these are tackled with honesty and kindness, they can be uplifting.”

Eirew is a counselor and educator, and she created the Recordmenow app, which they recommend in the book as a way to leave messages for your loved ones – you record answers to questions that were derived from interviews of 100 people under the age of 16 who had lost a parent; questions the kids wished their parent had answered for them.

Hawley, a clinical professor and division head at the University of British Columbia, is a pioneer in palliative care, having founded several programs and models of care. She was the founder, for example, of the Bucket List Festival, which was a workshop for people facing end-of-life issues to meet others who were going through similar experiences and has been adapted to other scenarios.

The title of the book comes from the “finishing line” metaphor: “Some runners stop at the finish line. Others take their time, grab a flag, cheer with the crowd and feel the love back. They do a lap of honour, recognizing everything that brought them to this moment, all the events in their life and all the people who are key to them.”

The book has 16 chapters, some written by Hawley, some by Eirew. They touch upon numerous subjects, starting with the process of being diagnosed and receiving a prognosis, or a “best guess as to what will happen to an average person with your condition.” Despite its inherent uncertainty, you might want this prediction because it gives you an idea of what you might want to prioritize.

There are chapters on facing the unknown; on how to tell other people, including children, that you’re ill; on deciding on home, hospital or hospice care; on caring for the person caring for you; on health insurance and the costs that you might face; on celebrating your life; on accessing support services and groups; and more. In the chapter on what you should take into account if you decide to take that trip of a lifetime, to travel with an illness, Hawley highlights “a recurring theme in this book: let people help you.”

While the bulk of the work will still be up to you to do, Lap of Honour discusses almost everything, it seems, that you – and those who love you – will be feeling if you find yourself in this position. And it offers ways for you to “live your life to the very end … in the way that feels right for you.”

For more information, visit lapofhonourbook.com.

Book festival is shaping up

The 37th annual Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival takes place Feb. 6-10 at both the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver and online, with authors joining from across Canada, the United States, Israel, Australia and Great Britain.

“We look forward to welcoming our live audiences to the joyful experience of a shared literary event,” said festival director Dana Camil Hewitt. “The Jewish Book Festival strives to reflect and showcase recent literature that revels in the lively and pivotal ideas stemming from the modern world and, in the process, expose our city and community to meaningful and captivating conversations about the written word in every shape and form.

“And, while the nucleus of our festival is Jewish-themed, our speakers, events and audience happily represent a diversity of experiences and cultures that defy narrow categorization. We are attuned to timely and universal themes and we thrive on the interdisciplinary, always inviting visual arts and performance art into our events.”

Opening the festival are American novelist and journalist Dara Horn, with her book People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, and British comedian and writer David Baddiel, with his book Jews Don’t Count. On the closing night, Daniel Sokatch, an expert who understands both sides of the Israeli-Palestianian conflict, will present his book Can We Talk About Israel? A Guide for the Curious, Confused and Conflicted.

Winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for fiction Gary Barwin joins the festival with Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, together with U.S. author Jai Chakrabarti, who brings A Play for the End of the World.

Short stories will be celebrated in an event with Vancouver’s Rachel Rose and her collection The Octopus Has Three Hearts, long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, together with Montreal’s Ami Sands Brodoff presenting her intricately linked stories in The Sleep of Apples. From Toronto, novelist and cultural critic Hal Niedzviecki discusses his latest novel, The Lost Expert.

Stories of artists in the Second World War era are presented by two U.S. writers: Meg Waite Clayton (The Postmistress of Paris) and painter/writer Michaela Carter (Leonora in the Morning Light). History also has an important place in the work of Leah Garrett, who presents X-Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War II (who were the inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), and Menachem Kaiser, whose Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for non-fiction.

The annual Book Clubs event features Australian author Heather Morris, with her novel Three Sisters, the last in the Tattooist of Auschwitz trilogy.

Among the B.C. authors represented are Isa Milman, with her memoir Afterlight: In Search of Poetry, History and Home, and Rachel Mines, with her translation of Jonah Rosenfeld’s The Rivals and Other Stories. An epilogue event (i.e. after the festival run) moderated by Yosef Wosk features Robert Krell and his memoir Sounds from Silence and Alan Twigg’s Out Of Hiding: Holocaust Literature of British Columbia.

Regular updates can be found at jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival, where the digital program guide will be available after Dec. 28.

– Courtesy JCC Jewish Book Festival

Kalla’s latest great read

There’s something comforting about reading a thriller writer whose novels you’ve enjoyed in the past. You know exactly what to expect, and yet the pages almost turn themselves. Given, however, that we’ve been living through a real pandemic for almost two years now, it might feel “too close to home” to pick up a Daniel Kalla – who writes about mysterious diseases that run rampant, plagues that resurface, surging deaths from opioids and other such things – but, somehow, he makes it fun rather than depressing. His latest, Lost Immunity (Simon & Schuster), is a great read.

It helps that Kalla is a real medical doctor. An emergency room physician here in Vancouver, he knows that of which he speaks and can relate complicated information without sounding didactic. And there’s always what to explain in his books. In Lost Immunity, the lessons are particularly relevant, about how a bacteria spreads, the challenges of contact tracing and containment, the benefits and side effects of vaccines, the concept of herd immunity, etc., etc. But he does all this while being completely entertaining. Readers of Lost Immunity will have an idea of what Dr. Bonnie Henry and her team have been going through these last many months – minus (I hope) the human killer element.

Lost Immunity features a smart and likeable protagonist in Lisa Dyer, Seattle’s new chief public health officer. In a community health forum about a law mandating immunization for middle-school girls and boys with the latest HPV vaccine, Dyer takes on the doubters – members of “the ‘vaccine hesitancy’ community” – calmly and compassionately, with science always as her guide. Within this community are her own sister and father, so she’s had much practice.

As exhausting and frustrating as the forum is, Dyer’s job gets more challenging even before the Q&A is over – “her phone buzzes on the lectern. She can’t help but glance down at the health advisory from her office that pops up on the screen. ‘Four dead from meningitis. All attended the same local Bible camp.’”

The campers are children and teenagers, and the death rate rises quickly. (I admit to having skimmed the parts about dying kids, as they added a little too much realism for me.) Dyer and her colleagues must try to contain the outbreak – of the same strain of bacteria that caused 35 deaths in short order in Iceland six months earlier, and for which an American pharmaceutical firm is doing final-phase trials on a promising vaccine. Dyer pressures the company into releasing the vaccine early – as the mortality rate in Iceland was 46% – and goes ahead with a vaccination campaign. At first, it seems to be working, but then some severe and fatal apparent side effects bring everything to a halt. But is it really the vaccine that’s responsible? Even if you can probably guess the answer, Dyer’s journey to get there is full of twists, as well as fascinating exchanges on all aspects of the vaccination issue.

For a review of Daniel Kalla’s We All Fall Down, visit jewishindependent.ca/could-the-plague-come-back.

Can Syn save garden?

After a three-year wait, local writer Michael Seidelman’s Garden of Syn trilogy comes to a fast-paced, satisfying conclusion.

We first met our protagonist, Synthia Wade, in No One Dies in the Garden of Syn, which was released in 2016. (All of the books are published by Chewed Pencil Press.) A teenager when we encounter her, she is being parented by her aunt, as her parents went missing when she was 5 years old. In Book 1, due to circumstances beyond her control, Syn falls into another universe – one in which she can breathe easily, her cystic fibrosis nonexistent. But all is not healthy in the garden, as this other place is called, and Syn must rise to many challenges and challengers to set things right.

There are multiple universes in this trilogy, each with their own Syn, and, in at least one of them, Syn has a sister, Beth. The second book, Everyone Dies in the Garden of Syn, which came out in 2018, focuses on Syn’s efforts to rescue Beth, who has been kidnapped. Unfortunately, because of Syn’s actions, the healing powers of the garden disappear, hence, the name of this part of the story. Syn must take particular care, given her CF.

Many people die in the second book. So, at the beginning of the third book, feeling responsible and guilty for the tragedies, Syn doesn’t want to return to the garden. However, a determined friend-turned-enemy forces Syn to finish what she started. In the conclusion to the series, Too Young to Die in the Garden of Syn, Syn must fight to save the garden and its inhabitants, at the risk of her own life.

The plot that runs through the trilogy is complex. Characters thought dead turn out not to be, characters that seem like allies turn out not to be and vice versa, and, given the multiverses, there are numerous versions of key personnel. As well, the story tackles many ethical issues, mainly involving medical research and experimentation. The novels also illustrate that who the hero of a story is depends on who’s telling the story – the bad guys in Seidelman’s fictional worlds don’t think they’re in the wrong; in fact, they have good reason to feel aggrieved and betrayed.

The action doesn’t lose momentum in this third book and Syn and her allies must race and jump around universes, fight and think for their lives – and the lives of many others. Though I was both hoping and fearing Seidelman would wrap things up more darkly, I think he made the right choice for his young adult audience.

Too Young to Die in the Garden of Syn was worth the wait.

For articles on the previous books in the series, including an interview with Michael Seidelman, visit jewishindependent.ca/first-book-of-trilogy-now-out and jewishindependent.ca/persistence-a-common-theme.

Poems and photos meld

For anyone who has thought about publishing their own story, poems, photos, artwork – really, anything they have created – The Gate and Other Poems on a Life’s Journey (FriesenPress) should be an inspiration to just do it already.

This book of poetry by Winnipeggers Doug Jordan, with editing and photography by my cousin Sidney Shapira, is a wonderful example of what we are capable of creating when we stop thinking about maybe doing something and act. It also affirms the benefits that can be reaped by working with someone on an endeavour, not only for encouragement but for holding ourselves accountable to whatever vision we may have, and bringing it out of our heads and into being.

In Shapira’s introduction, he acknowledges that Jordan’s target audience for this collection is his family, friends – in particular, friends who had also lived on the Shilo army base, near Brandon, Man., as kids – and former students. While this is probably the audience who will most revel in this publication, there are poems that will speak to everyone, about love, work, grief and other universal themes. They date from 1965 through to 2021.

Shapira has thoughtfully chosen photos of his that would complement various poems – all in black-and-white, to match the sombre mood of Jordan’s writings. The collection doesn’t leave readers in a sombre mood, however, perhaps because of the rhyming, which may not suit everyone’s tastes. Jordan explains his choice in a note at the end of the book:

“I enjoy poetry that rhymes and has rhythm,” he writes. “It is easier to read. Most poets prefer a form of free verse and their message is completely lost to many of their readers as they try to uncomplicate the poet’s words. This is when, as a teacher, we often hear ‘I hate poetry.’ No wonder. They can’t understand it, and don’t get me going on Shakespeare and others of that ilk.

“I say, if you are a poet and have a message or a story to tell, try do so in its most understandable terms.”

But don’t confuse rhythmic with simplistic. As Shapira notes, “Doug’s poems never meet his own standards after one draft; for example, ‘The Streets of Copenhagen’ took 10 years to achieve ‘finished’ status.”

The Gate truly represents a journey – one to which all of us can relate.

Reflections of her childhood – an excerpt from The Singing Forest

Say hello to Leah, the daughter of a man who disappears when she is a baby and a mother who dies in a car crash when she is 6 years old. She is placed in the care of her Jewish aunt during the week, and her three eccentric Jarvis uncles on the weekends – Rudy, Gus and Malcolm. This excerpt is a flashback – she is now a junior lawyer, working on the deportation of a war criminal, and Nate is a fellow junior in the firm.

***

You have no idea where he is? said the social worker. I don’t believe it for a minute, said her tone.

No idea, said Rudy. I’m sure he would be here if he knew.

In fact, he was not at all sure of this. The youngest brother, the father – witty and weak and self-absorbed. And a man who was afraid, desperately afraid of – what? Of being ordinary. Of leading a rye-and-ginger life. Chasing anything that might save him from this, like a distracted dog. A fugitive from the everyday, the commonplace, always searching for a way out.

He’ll turn up soon, said Rudy.

He is far from sure of this either.

The aunt was the formal placement – the mother’s half-sister, 19 years older than her, almost another generation. But a woman whose kidneys were starting to fail, scarred organs slowly breaking down.

I can’t handle her full-time, she said miserably, exhausted by the disease.

The social worker knew enough – too much – about the foster home system to send the child into its labyrinths. So this arrangement would have to work – the aunt during the week, the uncles on the weekend. She did what could be done, the things that were possible. A session on child-rearing, simple advice, checklists on clothing, food, sleeping. The child was the only one who read the lists, though, or tried to – her small finger tracing out the letters she knew until the papers were stained and dog-eared. Hoping that somewhere in there were the clues she needed, the answers to what had happened, how her life had jackknifed so wildly. But she also passed along anything she understood to Gus.

A taciturn man, something that suited them both. He used words sparingly, as if he had only a limited supply, and was storing them for some future use. Instead, he preferred silence, or a range of silences: dusty silences, steep silences, warm silences.

A clam, said the social worker to her supervisor. But soon he became used to the child winding around his legs, and developed a clumsy affection for her. Not a man who was a good bet in other ways, though – someone with serial bankruptcies, an instinct for failure.

Raised by your uncles? Nate says in the same tone someone might say: raised by wolves? His voice is dark, slightly hoarse. He is intrigued by this odd household, intrigued as only someone with two card-carrying parents can be.

I raised her, says her aunt. They looked after her.

Anna Rubin. Puffy-faced, her skin floury, her dark eyes circled with shadows. Persistent in her own way, determined that the girl would know something of this other life, that she would have some sense of its latitudes and longitudes.

No such thing as half-Jewish. Don’t let me hear you say that. If your mother is Jewish, you’re Jewish. Halachah. Those are the rules.

Those are the rules, echoed the girl, curled under the woman’s arm.

But her aunt had more to say, much more. A personal mission, built around tzimmes and the ten plagues.

The plague of locusts. The plague of frogs. The plague of water turning into blood.

The girl held up a hand, raising her small fingers.

Only three, she said.

She was a literal child.

A selection of the best, said her aunt.

Behind the scenes, though, her kidneys were silently abandoning their functions, the toxins in her system slowly building. Soon – too soon – it was the uncles during the week, the aunt on the weekend.

Not even a Jewish disease, said her aunt disgustedly, her skin yellow.

No need to tell that social worker, she added.

What do you do when you’re there? Malcolm said once, not so much interested in the girl as the aunt, any possibilities for money.

The child hesitated.

We eat brisket, she said after a minute, the only thing that came into her mind. She had no words for this briny, tender woman, for her kitchen, her houseplants, vines running along mantels, trailing down shelves. For the moth orchids everywhere – windowsills, bookcases – leaning over pots, their grey air roots twisting around them.

Malcolm looked at her uncomprehendingly. The idea that the girl was half-Jewish, the idea of Jewishness itself was so foreign, so baffling to him – to all three of them – that they ignored it. They had an unspoken agreement to treat it as if it were an awkward genetic problem, something that was better left unmentioned. And after awhile, she understood that she was not to talk to them about it, that this was something she had – she was – with her aunt.

Is it only for girls? she said to her, early on. Being Jewish?

Who told you that? Full of men. Look at Moses. Look at Einstein. Look at Marvin next door.

Marvin – thinning hair, mild, someone who yawns a lot. Ida’s husband, content to drift in her slipstream. Neighbours.

She’s not the brightest, but she has a good heart. And he shovels my walk in the winter.

And Moses? Einstein? Other neighbours?

Big shots, said her aunt.

That night: Men can be Jewish, too, she said to Gus, putting her to bed.

He said nothing in an agreeable way.

Look at Moses. Look at Marvin.

More nothing.

She sighed, the world-weary sigh of a six-year-old.

Those are the rules.

* * *

Half-Jewish. This is unsound genetically as well, she discovers later in biology classes, not a matter of chromosomal halves. Instead, she has a mix of genetic variations, extending in all directions. If some of them mark her as a carrier of Tay-Sachs disease, Bloom syndrome and an inability to drink milk, one non-Jewish parent will make no difference. This is a mess of a genome.

* * *

A week after the motion. Nate is sitting on the arm of one of her office chairs, cracking pumpkin seeds in his teeth. Lime, chili, salt – I roasted them myself.

You’re distracting me, she says, although the truth is that she was already distracted. The stay motion has been stalking her thoughts, intruding everywhere. She is waiting for the decision, although this is a wholly pointless exercise – it could be issued tomorrow, next week, or even next month, especially if the judge decides to write extensive reasons, not at all improbable. Still, she feels suspended in the web of this case, in part because she is still possessed by the idea that if they lose, it will be her fault.

Unlikely, says Nate. Although not impossible.

Or that she will be blamed anyway, whether it is her fault or not.

Not quite so unlikely, Nate admits. Give me your hand.

She stretches out her palm, and he leans over and shakes some pumpkin seeds into it.

She studies them absently, and then puts them in her mouth.

For more information, visit judithmccormack.com.