Books – Page 38

Quirky fiction meets history

Two quirky books. Both historically based, both written with humor, both dark and light. But there the similarities end.

The quiet and quirky Fever at Dawn by Péter Gárdos is based on letters his parents sent to each other immediately following the Holocaust, as they recovered from their physical ailments in Sweden. The raucous and quirky Two-Gun & Sun by June Hutton takes its inspiration from Morris “Two-Gun” Cohen and Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who actually did know each other, and Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West, to tell the story of a young woman who heads to a northern B.C. mining town in 1922 to revitalize her uncle’s newspaper, which he left her in his will.

Fever at Dawn (House of Anansi Press, 2016) begins with a note from Gárdos about the letters his parents – Miklós and Lili – sent to each other from September 1945 to February 1946. Until his father died, Gárdos had no idea of their existence, though his mother had told him, “Your father swept me off my feet with his letters.”

The main quirky thing about this story (there are others) is that Miklós tried to sweep no fewer than 117 women off their feet with his letters. Told by his doctor that he would not survive his tuberculosis, Miklós defiantly decides he wants to get married. He inquires for the names and addresses of all the women survivors being treated in Sweden, and sends all of them the exact same letter. He determines pretty quickly that Lili is “the one,” though 18 women respond.

The secondary characters are well-conceived and play important parts in Miklós and Lili’s developing relationship. It is a beautiful and uplifting story – love and hope from hatred and tragedy. It brings up many issues, in Lili’s wanting to renounce her faith and in how the survivors are treated, for example. The translation into English from Hungarian by Elizabeth Szász is a bit awkward in parts, but otherwise does justice to the work. And some of the awkwardness might be due to the fact that Gárdos, who is a filmmaker and theatre director, originally envisioned the story as a film – which was released last year – but also wrote it as a novel.

Two-Gun & Sun (Caitlin Press Inc., 2015) might also make a good film. It brings to mind Joss Whedon’s Firefly, mixing science fiction (specifically steampunk) with opera’s larger-than-life and often unbelievable drama with history. It’s a very stylized novel, which, more than other books, means that it will be loved by some readers, and not so much by others.

While loosely historical, it does strongly evoke the era and how hard it must have been to survive back then, especially in a remote town, especially if you were a minority, and very especially if you were a woman. The central character, Lila Sinclair, arrives in Black Mountain from Nelson, given by her uncle’s death a more adventuresome, “manly” economic opportunity than marriage, teaching or prostitution, which seem to have been women’s main choices at the time.

Some of the more fascinating aspects of this novel are the daily-life moments, what people ate, how they earned a living, the excitement a traveling troupe generated, the dangers posed by a lack of law. Anyone in the publishing industry will also appreciate Lila’s struggle to get the printing press up and running, and how newspapers once operated. As well, while her relationship with Vincent, a Chinese printer, runs a predictable course, it offers a chance for Hutton to address the racism of the day.

Two-Gun & Sun is a unique twist on the traditional western and, while the ending wasn’t quite satisfactory for this reader, its originality and oddness were entertaining and energizing.

Some of the magic of Israel

In writing Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) with Steven Cook, Michael Solomonov hopes to share with other cooks “some of the magic” found in Israel.

Israeli-born Solomonov grew up from the age of 2 to 15 in Pittsburgh, then the family returned to Israel. After awhile, when his Bulgarian father and American mother divorced, he returned to the United States, eventually learning to be a chef, graduating from culinary school in 2001. He returned to Israel, where his brother had grown up and was on leave from the army; sadly, his brother was killed soon after, and Solomonov once again left the country.

Returning to Pittsburgh, Solomonov met Cook and, in 2005, became chef of their first restaurant, Marigold Kitchen. In 2008, Solomonov and Cook opened the restaurant Zahav in Philadelphia. They also co-own restaurants Percy Street Barbeque, Federal Donuts, Dizengoff and Abe Fisher, all in Philadelphia. In 2011, Solomonov was awarded the James Beard Award for best chef mid-Atlantic.

After the death of his brother, as he and Cook worked together at Marigold Kitchen, Solomonov writes, “I began to see cooking as a powerful way to honor David’s memory. I could expose people to a side of Israel that had nothing to do with politics and didn’t ever make the evening papers.”

This was the inspiration for Zahav, which opened in May 2008, as well as the cookbook Zahav, whose style is unique.

The nine chapters include one on tahini, which has 34 recipes, including seared chicken livers with caramelized onion tahini and tahini shortbread cookies. There are 20 salad recipes, showing that vegetables are everything, including Israeli pickles and spicy fennel salad. There is a chapter on smaller dishes, with recipes for items like fried cauliflower with herbed labneh. The soup chapter has 16 recipes from around the world, such as celery root soup. The next chapter – “Grandmother’s Borekas, Tradition Was My Teacher” – has 20 recipes, such as fried leek patties. “Live Fire, As Close to Magic as I’ll Come” has 16 recipes, like Bulgarian kebabs and pomegranate-glazed salmon, including mujadara. Then there’s the chapter called “Ben-Gurion’s Rice,” with 11 different recipes. “Mesibah, It’s Party Time” has seven recipes, such as whole fish in grape leaves, and “Milk & Honey is a Glimpse of the Divine” has 17 recipes, including konafi and carrot basboosa.

After an introductory essay in each chapter, there are the recipes, and each is also introduced, with casual (and fun-to-read) remarks and easy-to-follow instructions. There are also sidebars with fascinating information about such things as sumac, date molasses, freekah and rose water.

There is no doubt that this book has “a world of Israeli cooking,” and the recipes below reflect that idea.

CHICKPEA BRITTLE
makes three cups

2 cups cooked or canned chickpeas, rinsed
1 tbsp canola oil
3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
3 tbsp butter
3 tbsp heavy cream

Preheat the oven to 350˚F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.

Toss the chickpeas with the oil, transfer to another baking sheet, and roast until crisp, 25 to 30 minutes.

Combine the brown sugar, butter and cream in a saucepan over medium heat. Cook, stirring, until the mixture darkens in color slightly and large, lava-like bubbles cover the surface, about 10 minutes. Add the chickpeas and stir to combine.

Working quickly and using a rubber spatula, spread the mixture out in an even layer on the prepared baking sheet. Let cool to room temperature. Break into two-inch pieces to serve. The brittle will keep a week in a sealed container.

ROASTED OKRA
serves six

6 cups small whole okra
5 tbsp olive oil
1/3 cup basic tomato sauce
1 tbsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp grated dried lime
1/2 tsp kosher salt
handful cilantro leaves, chopped

Preheat the oven to 400˚F. Toss the okra with two tablespoons olive oil and arrange on a baking sheet. Bake until the okra turns brown, about 25 minutes. Transfer to a bowl and toss the okra with the remaining three tablespoons of olive oil and the tomato sauce, lemon juice, dried lime and salt. Top with the cilantro. Serve hot or chilled.

GLUTEN-FREE CHOCOLATE ALMOND SITUATION

8 tbsp (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
big pinch salt
2 scant cups chopped dark chocolate (at least 60% cacao), melted and cooled slightly
4 large eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 cup almond flour

Preheat the oven to 375˚F, with a rack in the middle. Oil a nine-inch round or square cake pan. Line the bottom with a round of parchment paper, and oil the parchment.

Combine the butter, sugar and salt in a mixer or other bowl. Beat on medium high until pale and fluffy, about two minutes. Add melted chocolate and mix just until combined. Scrape down the sides and mix for another few seconds. With the mixer on low speed, add eggs, one at a time, beating until each one is incorporated before adding the next. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, then add almond flour. Mix on low until just incorporated, about 10 seconds.

Pour batter into prepared pan and smooth top with spatula. Bake until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean, about 25 minutes. Let cool in pan for 10 minutes before turning out onto a rack to cool completely.

Sybil Kaplan is a journalist, foreign correspondent, lecturer, food writer and book reviewer who lives in Jerusalem. She also does the restaurant features for janglo.net and leads walks in English in Jerusalem’s market.

Her mother’s 100 favorites

In my collection of cookbooks is The Complete International Jewish Cookbook by Evelyn Rose. For more than 30 years, she was food editor of the London Jewish Chronicle. When I received the press release that 100 Best Jewish Recipes (Interlink Books, 2016) by Rose with Judi Rose was being published, I was sure it would be as lovely as the earlier one and was saddened to learn that Evelyn Rose was no longer living – she died in 2003.

Judi Rose had quite a task when she began working on this book, as she narrowed down the thousands of recipes from her mother’s career into the ones their family loved best. She ultimately decided on 100 of her mother’s best-loved recipes – “some of her personal favorites, as well as those of her fans.”

Judi Rose is a food writer, consultant and culinary expert. She and her mother cooked together for more than 30 years and wrote two cookbooks together. The recipes she has chosen epitomize her mother’s principles of “incorporating thinking on health and nutrition, and using new technology to save time and effort.”

“My mother passionately believed that each dish must have ta’am – that extra something that makes it taste special and worth the effort for busy people to put on their table,” writes Rose.

There are 128 recipes in this new cookbook, enhanced by 38 color photographs. After a foreword, an introduction and an essay on festivals and food, the chapters are listed: small plates (10 recipes), soups (13 recipes), poultry (12 recipes), meat (16 recipes), fish (11 recipes), vegetables and side dishes (23 recipes), bread-bakes and desserts (21 recipes) and basics (22 recipes). A final essay is on adapting recipes for the kosher kitchen.

One thing missing from the recipes is whether they are meat, dairy or pareve. Other than that, each recipe has how many servings, how long it will keep in the refrigerator (a clever inclusion not generally listed with recipes), how long it can be frozen and a little introductory note.

Styles include Middle Eastern and Sephardi, and the places from where the recipes come include Austria, Lithuania, Syria, Russia, France, Hungary, Germany, Spain, Turkey, Persia, Morocco, China, Italy, Greece, Holland, Britain, Israel, Sicily, Egypt, Indonesia, Armenia and Denmark. As the publisher notes, these are traditional and contemporary recipes, for family meals and special occasions, for both novices and experienced cooks.

Here are a few of the traditional, classic recipes.

CHICKEN LIVER PATÉ

3 eggs
1 finely chopped onion
1 crushed garlic clove
4 tbsp soft margarine or rendered chicken fat
5-10 grinds sea salt
12 oz ready-koshered chicken livers
15 grinds of black pepper
1 good pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
warm French bread, crackers or sliced challah

Hard boil eggs for 10 minutes, drain, return to pan, cover with cold water and leave to cool.

Fry the onion and garlic gently in the margarine or fat until very soft and a rich brown. As the onion cooks, sprinkle it with sea salt.

Peel the eggs and cut in half. Put one aside.

Put the onion and garlic with cooking juices into a food processor, process until smooth. Add two eggs, livers, pepper and nutmeg. Process until smooth. Taste and add more seasoning if necessary.

Turn mixture into a terrine or oval gratin dish or divide between individual ramekins. Cover with plastic wrap and chill overnight. Refrigerate extra egg.

One hour before serving, remove paté from refrigerator to return to room temperature. Pass the remaining egg through a food mill or sieve to decorate the top of the paté.

Serves six as an appetizer, eight to 10 as a spread. Keeps five days in the fridge and freezes for one month.

TRADITIONAL CHICKEN SOUP

1 whole or half chicken with wings and giblets
7 1/2 cups water
2 tsp salt
1 pinch white pepper
2 halved, peeled carrots
leaves and top 2 inches of 2 celery ribs
1 sprig parsley
1 very ripe tomato

Put bird and pieces in a large pot with water, salt and pepper. Cover and bring to a boil. Remove foam with a large metal spoon.

Peel and halve onion and carrots, and add to pot with celery, parsley and tomato. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover and continue to simmer three hours until chicken feels very tender when a leg is prodded.

Strain soup, reserving giblets and carrots in a separate container. Cover and refrigerate soup. Next day, remove congealed fat and return soup to the pot.

Cube giblets and carrots. Add to soup. Serve with matzah balls or noodles.

Serves four to six. Keeps three days in the refrigerator and three months in the freezer.

TRADITIONAL KICHELS

1 cup cake flour
1 to 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3 tsp baking powder
2 large eggs
2/3 cup superfine sugar
1/2 cup sunflower or other flavorless oil
zest of 1 orange
1 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350˚F and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Mix flours and baking powder. In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs until thick then gradually whisk in the sugar, followed by the oil, orange zest and vanilla.

Stir in enough of the flour to make a rollable, nonsticky dough. Knead until smooth then roll onto a floured board until a half-inch thick.

Sprinkle the dough with sugar, roll lightly to press it in. Cut into shapes with cookie cutters and arrange on prepared trays, leaving room for cookies to spread. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until pale gold in color. Leave on wire racks to cool.

Makes about 50. Will stay fresh two weeks in an airtight container and freezes for three months.

Living with prostate cancer

Sima Elizabeth Shefrin’s new book, Embroidered Cancer Comic, will be launched on Sept. 15 at the Roundhouse.

Cancer is a word often whispered. Sex is certainly not spoken of in polite company. Yet Sima Elizabeth Shefrin tackles both topics in her new book, Embroidered Cancer Comic (Singing Dragon, 2016), which receives its Vancouver launch on Sept. 15 at Roundhouse Community Centre.

The comic begins with Shefrin’s husband, Bob Bossin, coming home from the doctor with a diagnosis of high cholesterol. “Oh, he also said my PSA was up,” Bossin tells Shefrin. After some understandable delays, Bossin gets the needed biopsy. While the couple are enjoying a funny movie together, the call from the doctor comes: prostate cancer.

In a mere 30 pages, with text and illustrations by Shefrin, Embroidered Cancer Comic shows Bossin’s uncertainty over treatment options, his efforts to learn more about the cancer, the emotional stress on him and Shefrin, as well as the effects of the cancer and its treatments on the couple’s sex life.

“The strain of the prostate cancer journey on relationships cannot be overstated, yet patients and their partners are left to figure this out for themselves,” writes Dr. Peter Black of Vancouver Prostate Centre – Bossin’s surgeon – in a brief commentary at the end of the comic, where both Shefrin and Bossin also share more of their story.

Helping others was one of Shefrin’s goals.

“I’m hoping the book will help couples in this situation be able to communicate,” she told the Independent.

Already, it’s had an impact.

“I thought it had potential for being a major project, especially after I got the publishing contract,” said Shefrin. “But then, of course, you don’t leave that in the hands of the gods. Singing Dragon has been very good for getting publicity in Britain, in both the comic and the medical worlds. In Canada, I’ve done most of it myself.

“I believe that this book can do real good in the world,” she said, sharing that a man in Quebec had written her “about what a difference it had made to both him and his wife.”

She said, “That’s what I’m hoping to do. I believe in the comic, so I’m willing to do whatever pushing I need to, to get it out into the world.”

Shefrin is a noted fabric artist, her website name – stitchingforsocialchange.ca – perfectly describing the nature of her work.

“I have often used my art to work through life events and to create awareness and conversation about taboo or contentious subjects,” she writes at the end of the comic book. “But nothing has made me feel as vulnerable as the creation of this comic. At the same time, it has helped me realize that, when you’re there, cancer becomes a part of daily life, like buying groceries or washing dishes.”

It took Shefrin three years to sew the embroidered line drawings, which were then photographed for the book. When asked if she ever thought of creating the images in a more expedient way, Shefrin said, “Fabric is my medium. The books I illustrated are mostly paper collage, but even when I work in paper, I think like a fabric artist. I did drawings first and then embroidered them, and I always liked the embroidered result better than the original drawing.”

The book “started out as a piece of art,” she said. “I thought I might self-publish or maybe simply photocopy a kind of catalogue for a show. But, one day, I came across the Graphic Medicine site and realized that there was a whole world out there of people making comics about medical issues. I’d had no idea.

“So, I started looking at the site regularly as well as at their Facebook page. Occasionally, there would be postings for people looking for comic strips on this and that and, if it was vaguely relevant, I’d send out my work. I do this a lot and often it comes to nothing. But, a couple of months later, I got an email from Jessica Kingsley saying they might be interested in publishing my work. It took me about an hour to figure out who they were and how they found me. They published it through their imprint, Singing Dragon. After that, the focus shifted and became about creating the comic, a story with a beginning, middle and end, instead of an art series. Now that it’s in print, I’m back to creating the quilts for the art series.”

The book has received many very positive reviews, including one in the U.K. medical journal The Lancet – and, according to the book’s Facebook page, it earned “a lovely personal note from Judi Dench,” who is mentioned in the comic. Specifically, when Shefrin asks her husband, “Who really excites you?” his answer is Dench.

The most touching review of the book comes from Bossin. “And because you live with cancer, whoever you live with lives with it, too, as Elizabeth’s comic shows so tenderly,” he writes. “For me, there is no one I would rather live with cancer with. No one.”

Those curious about what Dame Judi said and other stories behind the comic’s creation can ask Shefrin and Bossin at the Sept. 15 launch, which starts at 7 p.m. The quilted original illustrations are on display at the Roundhouse’s Window Gallery until Oct. 30.

Uniquely B.C. baseball story

Ellen Schwartz (photo from Ellen Schwartz)

Historical fiction is a great way to learn about the past and, while aimed at younger readers, many an adult will enjoy and learn from Ellen Schwartz’s Heart of a Champion (Tundra Books).

For Schwartz, a TV documentary led to her novel about the fictional Sakamoto family, set in the very real time when Japanese Canadians were interned during the Second World War. It was in watching this documentary that Schwartz first found out about the Asahi baseball team.

In the author’s note, she explains that asahi means “morning sun.” The team was established in 1914, winning their first title in 1919, the Vancouver International League championship. They won the Pacific Northwest League championships every year from 1937 through 1941.

After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and declared war on Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, writes Schwartz, “In Canada, Japanese Canadians were branded ‘enemy aliens’ and quickly lost their rights. The government, fearing that they would be loyal to Japan and would share war secrets with the enemy, took away their fishing boats, cars, radios and cameras. The Japanese were subject to a dusk-to-dawn curfew.

“In the spring of 1942, the Canadian government began to remove Japanese Canadians from the west coast of British Columbia. Men between the ages of 18 and 45 were sent to road camps in the Interior to build roads. Women, children and older people were sent to internment camps, many in abandoned mining or logging ‘ghost towns.’ Small, primitive shacks were hastily built to house them. The people lost their homes, businesses and possessions, never to get them back.”

In her research for the novel, Schwartz told the Independent, “I learned so much. In addition to the Asahis, I delved into the history of the Japanese-Canadian community in Vancouver and then in the internment camps. I hadn’t realized how established and prosperous the Japanese-Canadian community was in the pre-World War II years. Although there was a lot of discrimination – for example, Japanese Canadians didn’t have the vote, they were paid less than Caucasians for the same work and they often suffered racial slurs – these were middle-class families who were integrated into Canadian society. That’s why it was such a shock when they were uprooted and sent to internment camps in the Interior.

“I had heard about the internment camps but I didn’t realize how awful they were until I went to the Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre in New Denver [on Slocan Lake in the Kootenay region] as part of my research. When I stepped inside the original 1942 shack that is preserved there, I was shocked at how primitive and barren it was. In that moment, the second half of the book came to me, as I experienced what it must have felt like for Kenny and his family.”

In the novel, 10-year-old Kenny (Kenji in Japanese) aspires to be an Asahi like his older brother, star player Mickey (Mitsuo). However, Kenny has been diagnosed with a heart condition, which means he has to practise secretly, so as to not worry his parents. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, dreams of baseball are replaced with the nightmare of having to register as an enemy alien, of being subjected to a curfew, of having his father’s business closed, of his father being sent to a work camp and of being evacuated to an internment camp, only allowed to bring minimal belongings. In Kenny’s case, he, his mother, older brother and younger sister (Sally) are sent to New Denver, where Kenny and his mother manage to find the strength to inspire others in the camp to hope – and play baseball again.

The Sakamotos’ neighbors, and dear friends, are the Bernsteins, who have two daughters, Susana and Brigitte (aka Gittie). This allows Schwartz to draw parallels between the treatment of Jews in Europe leading to the Holocaust and Japanese in Canada during the war.

“I wanted to point out that the treatment of Japanese Canadians, although obviously not nearly as lethal or horrific, was comparable to that of Jews in Europe,” explained Schwartz. “In both cases, a minority was being persecuted simply because of their religion or nationality. Giving Kenny a Jewish best friend would make both characters sympathetic about this issue.

“The other reason I made Susana Kenny’s best friend is that, because of his heart defect, he would not have been able to keep up with other boys and might have had a girl as a best friend. Initially, Susana was a minor character, but I really liked her – she had chutzpah – so I gave her a bigger role in the story. It’s her courage and loyalty that give Kenny the impetus to find his own.”

Schwartz herself didn’t have a particularly religious childhood. “My mother was religious; my father wasn’t. We went to High Holiday services and that was about it,” she said. “But we lived with my grandparents when I was little, and my grandfather was observant and I adored him, so I grew up with a real fondness for Jewishness. I loved the family seders with everyone together and my grandfather chanting the Haggadah. I feel Jewish inside even though I’m not observant now.

“When I’m thinking of characters, I don’t set out to make them Jewish, but sometimes they emerge that way. Even if a character isn’t identified as Jewish, I know that that character is, and that gives the character an inner richness for me. For example, my first novel series was about a girl named Starshine Shapiro. I never mentioned that Starshine’s family was Jewish, but in my mind they were, and some of the humor in the books had a definite Jewish flavor.”

Schwartz hasn’t always been a writer.

“After I stopped teaching elementary school in the late ’70s, I started writing educational stories. That was my first foray into writing,” said Schwartz, who grew up in New Jersey and moved to Canada in 1972 with her husband, Bill. “I wrote stories for kids about energy conservation and the environment, which were important to me. I suppose I started with educational writing because I was comfortable ‘talking’ to and teaching kids. I sold the first educational story to the government of B.C. and the second one to the National Film Board. Then I decided to try to write a regular story, and that became my first book, Dusty.”

Schwartz teaches creative writing at Douglas College and she also works as a corporate and technical writer and editor, she said. “My husband and I own a small communications company called Polestar Communications. We do all kinds of writing and editing for public agencies and companies – reports, brochures, articles, educational material, technical material, web writing, etc. We also do marketing and organize events. That’s how I spend most of my writing time.

“I also write magazine articles, mainly for the Costco Connection, the magazine of the Costco corporation,” she added. “The editor usually assigns me stories about books and authors, which, of course, I love. I have interviewed and written about some great authors, including Ann-Marie MacDonald, Richard Wagamese, Linden MacIntyre and Alice Munro.”

On her website, Schwartz notes that she hasn’t even always wanted to be a writer.

“Dancing is my favorite thing,” she said, “and I often tell kids that if God tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘You can be a professional dancer tomorrow if you give up writing,’ I wouldn’t hesitate for a minute. I take a jazz class once a week and love it.”

While her career path may have changed a few times, Schwartz said the process of getting an idea to publication hasn’t changed much since she published her first book more than 30 years ago.

“Essentially, it’s the same,” she said. “I get an idea, mull it over for awhile, make notes and then plunge in. Many drafts later, I send it to a publisher and hope for the best. Once a manuscript is accepted, I work with an editor (I love working with editors) and do another rewrite. Then the book goes into production, which I have very little to do with other than approving the cover. (I have no artistic talent – my abilities extend to stick figures – and don’t illustrate or do any book design.)

“Of course, now I can submit work electronically, and it’s a lot easier to bounce ideas back and forth with my publishers before I send them the story,” she continued. “And I do a lot of research on the internet rather than in the library, though, for most stories, I still read many print articles and books for background information.”

And she does more than that.

Linda Kawamoto Reid, research archivist at Nikkei National Museum in Burnaby, writes in the foreword of Heart of a Champion that Schwartz “thoroughly researched the times by talking extensively with members of the Japanese-Canadian community. She met Kaye Kaminishi, our last Asahi baseball player, who was a rookie in 1941, and sought out the facts by conducting interviews, reading books and watching films. The story has surprising elements of reality, from the food eaten to the description of events following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.”

Japanese Canadians were not allowed to return to the coast until 1949 and it wasn’t until 1988 that the Government of Canada formally apologized for the treatment of Japanese Canadians during the war. As for the Asahis, the team was inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 2003 and into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame in 2005; in 2008, the team was designated an Event of National Historical Significance.

So, is the country in which we’re now living less, more or similarly susceptible to the factors that allowed the refusal of Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust and the internment of the Japanese, as but two extreme examples of the racism of those decades?

“Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I think we’re less susceptible to that kind of racism and exclusion in Canada,” said Schwartz. “The recent acceptance of the Syrian refugees is a heartwarming example. When my kids were in school in Burnaby in the ’90s, there were kids of every color and nationality in their classes and no one thought anything of it. We can’t ever take tolerance for granted, but I think that Canada in 2016 is a pretty welcoming place.”

Ellen Schwartz will be at Word Vancouver on Sept. 25, at the Vancouver International Writers’ Festival Oct. 18-23 and at the Calgary Jewish Book Festival Dec. 4-11.

Can murder become extinct?

The Mercy Journals is a new novel by Claudia Casper, author of The Reconstruction and The Continuation of Love by Other Means. In it, she creates a compelling post-climate change West Coast, where nations no longer exist. Her hero, Allen Levy Quincy, lives in Seattle, now called Canton #3, Administrative Department of Cascadia, and the novel consists of the journals he writes in a desperate attempt to evade suicidal urges, brought on by post-traumatic stress disorder. In this layered, hopeful post-apocalyptic novel, Casper looks at the future through the story of Cain and Abel. In fact, one of the early titles for the novel was The Last Murder, as a bracket to the story of that first murder.

Jewish Independent: The novel takes place in the (near) future in a climate-changed world. Is it a dystopian novel, science fiction or eco-fiction? How would you describe it?

Claudia Casper: Genre-bending fiction was being written well before the advent of ebooks, Amazon and the internet’s stretching of the forms of fiction, but I would say there are a number of writers who pay less mind to the dictates of genre and simply go wherever the story takes them. One example would be The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. [Michael] Chabon combines detective noir with fantasy or alternative history to create a miraculous new, possibly one-of-a-kind thing.

Science fiction readers have proven a generous and open-minded community and seem to have embraced the new raft of novels whose driving force is the environment and climate change. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake trilogy, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Hilary St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven – all are “literary” (I use the air quotes not to comment on these novels’ literariness, but because “literary fiction” is an over-precious, stifling term for a genre) novels written in the future, with only Atwood using some of the classic tropes of science fiction. This kind of writing, trying to find a place in the speed-of-light marketing world, calls itself variously eco-fiction, cli-fi, post-apocalyptic, dystopian, speculative fiction, each sub-genre carrying its own nuance. I would place The Mercy Journals in all these categories except dystopian, as the government imagined in 2047 is actually pretty good.

JI: While the book does not explicitly make reference to Judaism, there are parallels between the story of Allen Quincy and Leo (Quincy’s brother) and the biblical tale of Cain and Abel.

CC: I read the story of Cain and Abel closely, using the Jewish Publication Society of America translation, and studied the midrash on the text. The language is so rich and layered, from “Am I my brother’s keeper?” to “You shall be more cursed than the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.” The story in the Torah is short but its power resonates throughout our literature and our culture.

In The Mercy Journals, I sewed in references to Cain and Abel throughout the text. At one point, when Leo, the long-lost, nihilistic brother of my main character, Allen Quincy, returns, Allen says wryly, “I suppose that means I have to keep you?” The earth drinking blood, also an image I use at least twice. The final scene, which I cannot give away, reenacts Cain going out to the field.

What I wanted to do in this novel was bookend the Cain and Abel story with a metaphorical last murder, as opposed to the first murder, to write the murder of Cain by Abel, a closing of the circle. Of course, I could not believably write about a time when humans completely stop murdering each other, but I do carry the narrative of our species to a possible turning point, where we turn away from murder and its practise becomes truly taboo and despised in every context.

JI: When Quincy, a soldier, is ordered by his superiors to do something against his own moral code, he obeys, though reluctantly, and with some subversive evasions. Although genetics and environment affect who we may become, Judaism teaches us that we have free will and can choose to do right or wrong. Quincy suffers from PTSD partly because of the unresolvable internal conflict following those orders causes in him. What influenced you to make your main character an individual suffering from PTSD? How do we reconcile liking him with the fact that he is complicit in two of humanity’s worst sins?

CC: After the genocide in Rwanda and post-9/11, I felt deeply uneasy at the rhetoric used by the media and by politicians, in which it was implied that only “those” people, “those” cultures – read Africa, Cambodia, Germany, the Arabs – commit atrocities. First Nations people must have read those articles with a deep sense of irony. Because the lens through which I look at the world is always informed by evolution, I believe that genocidal behavior, for example, is a part of our species. It has been documented in chimpanzees and any behavior that exists both in living primates and ourselves is behavior that was very likely present in our ancestors.

There’s a kind of implied self-righteousness and superiority in that kind of distancing rhetoric that seeks to separate us from the behavior of the “bad” cultures. I felt very deeply that, if we are to have any hope of truly limiting atrocities within our species, we have to accept that they are part of who we are. Part of the reason The Mercy Journals was set in the future in the first place was because I wanted to write about a genocide that hadn’t happened yet, and that happened in North America, that was committed by “our” culture, “our” team.

Allen Quincy is a good man, a decent man, even though he’s haunted by the sins – and he counts them as sins – he has committed in the past. His brother Leo, the Cain figure, also is pushed towards sin, and there is even a scene where Leo literally crouches at Allen’s door and Allen writes wryly in his journal, “Salvation comes in many forms.” The novel really is about whether Allen Quincy, standing in for our species, has the possibility of moving forward, of living a life with his dark legacy.

JI: Quincy carved a covenant on a rock, which seems a very Jewish thing to do. After Cain murdered Abel, God said to him: “… your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the earth.” As the word used for blood is plural, does this mean that what cries out is not only Abel’s blood but all of his descendants that will never be born? Was that what Quincy was saying about murder when he said the murder of one is the murder of all? How does a person atone for murder?

CC: Yes, Rashi says that the plural here indicates also the extinguishment of all Abel’s descendants with his murder. Because The Mercy Journals is about the future of our species, compressed in the suspenseful tale of a West Coast, post-apocalyptic, post-climate change tale, I take it one step further. The murder of Abel, the murder of anyone, is expanding the place of murder in our species, is further entrenching its place in our repertoire. Thus, the murder of one is the murder of all. Thinking about climate change shows us again how deeply connected we all are, that we can never really escape each other, we have to find a way to deal with one another, and murder is always a failure. There is no possible atonement for murder in my mind, it is irrevocable, yet still, short of suicide, one must find a way forward. Who is without sin? And whose life exists without the legacy of murder at its very root? God’s punishment of Cain seems to acknowledge this.

JI: Quincy’s brother Leo was jealous of Quincy as was Cain of Abel. Why did God reject Cain’s offering? Why did Leo’s parents reject him?

CC: Without being an expert in midrash, I believe one of the main interpretations these days is that Abel, as a shepherd and a man who did not gather possessions, represents a nomadic, hunter-gatherer existence, while Cain, as a farmer who cultivated the fields and, therefore, had property, represents an agrarian one. God’s preference for Abel’s offering can be understood to be preferring nomadic values over agrarian ones, or the old ways over the new.

That being said, if we interpret God in this story as in a parental role, the choosing of favorites is always destabilizing to family unity, creating deep wounds and lasting resentments. From an evolutionary perspective – so, viewing our behavior with the understanding it arose in a pre-birth control context – such favoritism can result in a life and death situation for an individual. We are living in a time of relative wealth, but it wasn’t long ago when a family could easily have eight or nine children and be faced with drought or famine. The favored child would thus be the one who received a little more food, a little more medicine, the one who would be picked, even if unconsciously, to be prioritized to survive. Studies of mothering behavior in human evolution bear this scenario out.

When I reread the story of Cain and Abel eight years ago as I was beginning this novel, I felt sympathy for Cain, and felt that God was shirking responsibility a bit. Why can’t God see Cain’s pain? Surely telling the less-favored child to not worry about the advantages their sibling is getting and take their own good behavior as its own reward, doesn’t pass muster in a family. Why doesn’t God see Cain murder Abel? Why doesn’t God punish Cain with death? Why does God decide, when Cain cries out that he will surely be killed by strangers if he’s banished, to put his divine mark on him to protect him from death? Is there an implicit acceptance of the fact of murder in this story? And, if so, I wanted to imagine forward to a time when God would find murder utterly unacceptable, as taboo as incest, for example. In our society, murder is still seen as inevitable between human beings in certain circumstances; in wartime, it’s accepted. What would the world be like if humans were starting to evolve past murder, past genocide? Those seeds are at the core of The Mercy Journals.

Barbara Buchanan, QC, is a Vancouver lawyer who provides practice advice to other lawyers. She and Claudia Casper are longtime friends who are in the same book club. Buchanan recently attended the Los Angeles launch of The Mercy Journals with Casper, who was introduced by actress Jamie Lee Curtis, a big fan of the book.

New award on literary scene

A new Canadian literary prize was announced recently – the Joan Betty Stuchner Oy Vey! Funniest Children’s Book Award.

photo - Joan Betty Stuchner’s friends have created a children’s book award in her memory — Joan Betty Stuchner’s friends have created a children’s book award in her memory. *(photo by Tom Kavadias)*

“With this award, we honor Joan Betty Stuchner’s life-affirming humor and encourage other children’s writers to laugh it up on the page the way she did,” reads the award website. The $1,000 prize will be given out once every two years to a Canadian author and/or illustrator who creates the most hilarious book for readers ages 12 and under.

“We feel that Joan would have loved this prize that supports authors who make children laugh,” said Cindy Heinrichs, one of the award committee members, in an interview with the Independent. “The name of the award is probably the longest and funniest book award name in literary history. Joan would love it. She would laugh at it, if she were alive. I can almost hear her laughing.”

Stuchner, one of the funniest authors of children’s books in Canada, passed away unexpectedly in 2014. She was only 67 years old.

“I met Joan in 2006,” Heinrichs recalled. “I edited one of her books, Honey Cake, for Tradewind. I was a young editor then, and Joan was very supportive. She had a knack for making everyone she met feel like they were her friend.

“We did become friends. Later, when she was already sick, I helped her with the final edits for her two latest books, Bagels the Brave and Bagels on Board [both illustrated by Dave Whamond]. I wasn’t working for her publisher then, I did it as a friend, because she was too ill to do it alone. It gave her a great deal of pleasure to complete these books and a great deal of satisfaction to know that they would find their way into the world. Both books were published posthumously by Orca Books.”

Heinrichs remembered how shocked all Stuchner’s friends were by her passing. “Joan was a wonderful friend, warm and generous. She loved children. She loved books. She was a little lady with a big personality and a great sense of humor.”

Born in England, Stuchner moved to Canada when she was 18. After graduating from the University of British Columbia, she worked as a library assistant, taught part-time, acted in community theatre and performed as a storyteller.

“My life is full of books … and my house is like a mini library – despite the fact that I moved in 2009 and had to give away many of my books. Not an easy thing to do,” Stuchner herself wrote in her bio.

She always liked to write, particularly for children. Her stories and poetry were published in children’s magazines before her first book, Peanut Butter Waltz, illustrated by Diana Durrand, came out in 1990.

“She wanted to write full-time,” said Heinrichs. “At 64, she retired to make that dream come true. Sadly, she died only three years later.”

After the funeral, several of Stuchner’s friends, including Heinrichs, got together to reminisce and to talk about Stuchner’s literary legacy, her funny and heartwarming children’s books.

“We realized that there was no prize in Canada for humorous children’s books. We thought, Joan would love such a prize, we should found one.”

They did. And, in honor their departed friend, they named the prize after her. The members of the award committee include Heinrichs, fellow writers Caroline Adderson and Silvana Goldemberg, and artist/ illustrator Kathryn Shoemaker.

“We all met through CWILL BC – Children’s Writers and Illustrators Society of B.C.,” Heinrichs said. “When we started with the prize, we didn’t know what to do. Everything was a first for all of us, and everything was done by volunteers. There are no administrative fees. No paid staff. We asked people to help – to make a logo, to make a website, to help with fundraising, to donate books – and everyone jumped in. Orca and Tradewind donated books to raise the funds for the prize. Shar Levine is helping us with fundraising, too. She has so many amazing ideas, even though she is not a member of the committee.”

Submissions for the inaugural prize, which will be awarded in 2017, already have started pouring in, from publishers and writers organizations across Canada, although the committee decided not to accept submissions from self-published writers, at least for now. Heinrichs explained that decision: “While there are wonderful examples of self-published books for children, many self-published books are in need of a thorough editorial process. Most book prizes don’t accept them at this time, but that may change. Our prize is brand new and we are learning. We expect it will grow as we do.”

To learn more, visit joanbettystuchneraward.org.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at olgagodim@gmail.com.

Storytelling overtaken by facts

Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sholem Aleichem gave us delightful fables about the shtetl, the overcrowded villages of Eastern Europe, with endearing characters that contended with abysmal poverty, deadly pogroms and false messiahs. However, life in the shtetl was not always so dreary.

In a new book that effectively undermines the archetypical shtetls of our imagination, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern in The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe (Princeton University Press) redraws the image of the shtetl. A professor of Jewish studies at Northwestern University and author of several books, Petrovsky-Shtern documents a brief period in history, from the late 17th century to the mid-18th century, when life was not so bad in those towns of our ancestors in eastern Poland and Ukraine.

book cover - The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe Petrovsky-Shtern looks closely at three provinces with 44 shtetls in Eastern Europe. Relying mostly on documents that were previously overlooked, he discovers that many of the shtetls at that time were neither poor nor especially pious. On the contrary, they were thriving communities with stable economies built around popular market fairs. Some shtetls had trading firms that rivaled those found in large cities. Some had fancy restaurants and a rich cultural life.

Although Jewish businessmen were prominent, the Jews were a minority in many of the towns. Jews and Christians lived and worked together.

As might be expected in any neighborhood, the Jewish community also had its share of characters of questionable integrity. Petrovsky-Shtern goes through historic court records that reveal stories of bribes, counterfeiting, smuggling, informants and collusion of Jewish businessmen with crooked clerks. Even the rabbinical leadership comes under his microscope.

Jews came to Eastern Europe with the Greek colonizers more than 2,000 years ago but the Jewish presence in the region was minimal until Polish nobility encouraged Jewish migration from Western Europe.

The Jews were invited to run country fairs and sell liquor, two activities that provided significant tax revenues to the Polish authorities. The Jewish businessmen brought new “Western” approaches to trade. They put stores and stalls under one roof, and sold exotic merchandise from distant lands. They opened inns offering a place to drink and a bed. They injected a cosmopolitan slice of urban life into rural agricultural areas. They expanded trade, bringing prosperity to the region.

By 1840, however, the golden era had started to fade. The Russian monarchy, which had ruled the region with benign neglect since the partition of Poland in the late 1700s, began asserting its authority. Discriminatory laws against Jews contributed to the decline of the shtetl, as authorities shifted economic and political power to larger urban centres. Once-vibrant communities turned into depressed outposts of the Russian Empire, the shtetl of popular Yiddish literature. They struggled to survive in their diminished state, until the Nazi regime wiped them out.

A fascinating and often ignored aspect of the shtetl described by Petrovsky-Shtern is the relationship of the shtetl Jews with the Holy Land.

In the late 18th century, about 500 Jews from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth went to Palestine to build a religious utopian community. Followers of Rabbi Eliyahu ben Zalman, the Mitnagdim idealists, were convinced that resettlement would pave the way for the Messiah. The rabbi, also known as the Vilna Gaon, had predicted the Messiah would arrive in 1840, coinciding with the year 5600 in the Jewish calendar.

Not to be undone, followers of the Ba’al Shem Tov, the rival Chassidic sect, made aliyah in even greater numbers, settling in Safed, Tiberias, Hebron and Jerusalem. By 1800, the Jewish population of Palestine had expanded to 6,000, accounting for roughly two percent of the population.

Petrovsky-Shtern recounts the impact of this aliyah on those who remained behind in the shtetl. In some respects, reverberations of the migration continue to be felt almost 200 years later.

The pioneers in Palestine faced unimaginable challenges: poverty, illnesses, natural disasters, famine and discriminatory Ottoman Empire laws. In order to survive, the Jews of Palestine developed a sophisticated network of rabbinic fundraisers who went from shtetl to shtetl, giving sermons, selling books and sparking the imagination with stories about the Holy Land, including tales about inscriptions on the tombs of the prophets.

The rabbinic messengers assured shtetl Jews that supporting Jews in the Holy Land was comparable to fulfilling the commandment of settling in the Holy Land themselves. The rabbis, who kept meticulous records, told donors that prayers were chanted on their behalf at the Cave of Machpelah, the gravesite of Abraham, Isaac,

Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah.

The authorities tried to stop the flow of funds to Palestine. They suspected that the Jews, who they blamed for the death of Jesus, were sending money to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. They believed that the fundraising was reinforcing Jewish separateness, undermining assimilation, increasing fanaticism and possibly hindering Jews’ ability to pay local taxes.

Also, as the years passed, raising funds for the Jews in Palestine was viewed as aiding an enemy of the state. By the 1800s, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been partitioned and territory that included many of the shtetls became part of the Russian Empire, which had hostile relations with the Ottoman rulers.

Yet, Jewish communities still managed to raise money, especially in the years from 1810 to 1830. Aiding the Jews of Palestine became one of the highest priorities for Eastern Europe’s Jews, comparable only to the commandment of ransoming prisoners, Petrovsky-Shtern says.

The communal leadership of dozens of shtetls in the provinces of Volhynia and Podolia imposed a tax to help establish a synagogue in Jerusalem and maintain Chassidic groups. Charity boxes were on many dining tables and store counters. As well, sacks of earth from the Holy Land and ritual objects produced by the Jews of Palestine found their way into everyday life of the shtetl. Unpublished manuscripts by Holy Land rabbis and mystics were much sought-after reading, passing from hand-to-hand in the shtetl.

In a tale that echoes across two centuries, Petrovsky-Shtern recounts the role of the legendary charity boxes that are now found in many Jewish homes in North America. He writes that Jewish women in the shtetl of Kremenets, and possibly surrounding towns, turned the “commandment” to help the Jews of Palestine into an intrinsic part of the blessings over candles before Shabbat: right before the blessing, they put some money aside in a wooden charity box or tin mug to support the Holy Land communities.

By the time of the devastating earthquake in Safed in 1837, whatever hurt Palestine was felt just as strongly in the shtetls of Eastern Europe. The relationship between the shtetl and the Jews of Palestine appears to have many similarities with contemporary links between Israel and the Diaspora.

Petrovsky-Shtern provides a wealth of information about many different aspects of daily life, woven between lively vignettes to illustrate the comfortable standard of living enjoyed by many shtetls before their precipitous disintegration.

Unfortunately, the book is too easy to put down. Petrovsky-Shtern’s encyclopedic descriptions of the shtetl provide solid background for an academic understanding of the shtetl, but the pace is uneven. Interesting stories, such as the account of the relationship to the Holy Land, are interspersed with lengthy reports of dry historical records.

As Petrovsky-Shtern wanders back and forth across the years and jumps from shtetl to shtetl, the locations and dates turn into boring lengthy lists of trivia. Despite the endless string of names of real people, the reader does not come to know anyone in the shtetl. The facts may be on Petrovsky-Shtern’s side, but Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sholem Aleichem tell much more memorable stories.

Robert Matas, a Vancouver-based writer, is a former journalist with the Globe and Mail. This review was originally published on the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library website and is reprinted here with permission. To reserve this book or any other, call 604-257-5181 or email library@jccgv.bc.ca. To view the catalogue, visit jccgv.com and click on Isaac Waldman library.

Living Jewishly in isolation

It was a life-changing day for Sei Mang Khong Sai, a 35-year-old man from Sazal, India. Inside the mud and bamboo hut on stilts with him were community leaders, his family and guests. They chanted tribal prayers to the beat of a lap drummer.

In this village, hours away from any major city, they were preparing for the barhote, the bris. Sei Mang was about to enter the covenant. In an area of warfare, poverty and drug-running, he was seeking Judaism’s deeper connection to a peaceable life.

Before the ceremony was complete, however, he was to be given his Jewish name. The honor was spontaneously given to visiting stranger Bryan Schwartz, from Oakland, Calif. The first thing that came into Schwartz’s head was Menashe, and so Menashe it was.

A kippah was placed on Menashe’s head, the hut’s doors were thrown open and the assembled outside were informed of the new name, to cheers of “siman tov!” and “mazal tov!”

As the history is told, seven Jewish couples were shipwrecked off the Konkan coast in India, south of Bombay, some 2,000 years ago, the progenitors of today’s Bnei Israel of India’s Maharashtra province.

“It was a pretty astonishing moment for me that brought home both the commonality, the amount that we share even in the most diverse corners of the world, and also how different some Jewish lives are from the one that I have,” said Schwartz, a civil rights attorney.

Sei Mang’s story and many others – from Schwartz’s travels to 30 countries and more than 100 villages – are chronicled in Schwartz’s recent book, Scattered Among the Nations: Photographs and Stories of the World’s Most Isolated Jewish Communities, which he put together with Jay Saul and Sandy Carter.

Scattered Among the Nations is the culmination of a 15-year journey that began in 1999 when Schwartz was a law student and was planning a spring break trip to North Africa. He stumbled upon a listing for Jews in the index of his Lonely Planet guidebook, including historical descriptions of the island of Djerba in the Mediterranean off the coast of Tunisia. Jews there claim not only to have in their possession the oldest Torah, but a past extending directly to ancestors fleeing the destruction of the Second Temple. It is believed that some high priests – kohanim – found refuge on the island, bringing with them one of the gates of the Temple, which they later buried. Legend has it, a synagogue, which still stands today, was built overtop the burial site. Schwartz learned there were 15 synagogues on the island.

“I’m reading all of this and I’m just blown away that there is this place that is so fascinating, and a story that is so colorful and beautiful, and that I have never heard of it,” he told the Independent. “I decided there must be places like this all around the world that I could visit and, as a writer and photographer, capture some of it and share it with other Jewish people.”

Prior to embarking on this ambitious quest, he contacted some communities by fax and mail and connected with global Jewish outreach centre Kulanu, which has ties to Jews in far-off corners. He also researched the “lost” communities, reading Hillel Halkin’s book on the Bnei Menashe, Across the Sabbath River, and Tudor Parfitt’s The Lost Tribes of Israel and Journey to the Vanished City, about the Lemba tribe of southern Africa, who maintain Jewish practices and share kohanic DNA. He took special note of the 1999 documentary film by Simcha Jacobovici, Quest for the Lost Tribes of Israel.

“Some of these communities exist in places so geographically and culturally distant from other Jews that they must struggle daily to maintain the religion of their ancestors,” he said.

Scattered Among the Nations contains more than 500 color photographs. Over the course of two years, Schwartz’s articles and talks have gained attention globally in the media, learning institutions, houses of worship and Jewish museums.

“I wanted to show the full diversity of the Jewish world,” he said. In Sefwi Wiawso, Ghana, for example, Jews don’t know how they got there – perhaps an ancient Israelite exile or Ethiopian Jewish traders. But what’s certain is that the community of 200, who call themselves the House of Israel, is dedicated to living a Jewish life.

“They embrace Judaism with such love. They have this tiny Torah that somebody delivered to the community,” said Schwartz. “And then, to return home and to see in my synagogue the wall of Torahs in the ark … Torahs draped in silver and velvet, and realize how very fortunate we are to have the kind of resources that we have.”

An “extraordinary part of the journey,” said Schwartz, was showing up, not knowing a single soul, “and just by virtue of this Jewish faith that was shared, that I would be treated like a long lost cousin and brought in, and I could stay with a family for Shabbat or for a whole week or for several weeks, and nothing be asked of me at all, other than to join them.”

In fact, he said, even members of economically disadvantaged communities offered him the best room in the house in which to stay, three meals a day and touring.

In Ghana, for instance, he stayed in Joseph Arma’s house – one of the wealthier community members – where only one room had electricity. The home had an outhouse.

Arma’s nephew was staying with them, but Arma kept referring to him as his son. Confused, Schwartz asked for clarification. It was explained that the tradition is that people who have kinship with one another can be called son – and that its what this American visitor would soon be called, as well. “That’s how it is here in Africa,” he was told.

“This is how I was treated in a lot of communities, like I was the son of the community and as much a part of the family as anyone else,” he said.

Meanwhile, more than 100 people of the Shona Jewish community convene each Shabbat morning at their synagogue outside Rusape, Zimbabwe. It is there they sing original Afro-Jewish melodies, gospel-style, in Hebrew, Shona and English.

The Ebo Jews in Nigeria, on the other hand, consist of several thousand members.

In each locale, their practices are recognizably Jewish, though continued observance of said practices often requires outside assistance.

The Inca Jews in Peru, as they identify themselves, have struggled to maintain the traditions.

“They don’t have teachers, they don’t have clergy, they don’t have books and the resources to buy kosher foods that they want for holidays,” Schwartz said. They are by necessity vegetarian, he explained – not by choice, but due to the fact that kosher meat is unavailable.

This is one of the many reasons that it wasn’t enough for Schwartz to simply publish his book and hope that these communities would be able to continue practising Judaism despite their lack of resources. Instead, he has also launched Scattered Among the Nations, Inc., a nonprofit organization that is designed, among other things, to assist isolated Jewish communities in gaining the recognition and resources to meet their needs. The organization, for example, has helped the Inca Jews buy kosher meat for Pesach and the High Holidays.

A number of communities – including the Inca Jews – don’t have kosher Torahs and, at one point, the community in northeastern India had to use a toy Torah, the kind bar mitzvah kids are given, said Schwartz. After reading an article about this situation, septuagenarian Chicagoan Sam Pfeffer stepped up to the plate, offering to purchase a Torah. But it’s not as though the scroll could be mailed or couriered. To avoid the reams of red tape, the only route was to deliver it personally. And so it was that this community, for the first time in perhaps several hundred years, leined from a fresh, new Torah.

“Nothing in the world could have meant more to them,” said Schwartz. “In northeastern India, you know, there is just not enough hope. Economically there, life is a struggle and to get to Shabbat really is a salvation every week.”

Whole communities – including the Bnei Menashe and Inca Jews – have expressed a strong desire to make aliyah in order to live fuller Jewish lives. But they haven’t necessarily been met with the warmest of receptions.

“It felt to me like an injustice that this [Inca] community has been actively and deliberately practising Judaism for decades, and really struggle to gain attention from the outside Jewish world. They’re fighting to get the attention of the [rabbinical authorities], to practise and make aliyah,” said Schwartz. “That was a fight that felt like … social justice that I engage in my law practice as well. Some of what I have seen … has felt like discrimination to me, and I think it’s something we need to confront and address.”

After some of the first members of the Inca community made aliyah, an Israeli newspaper wrote editorials suggesting that these Peruvians were just the pawns of an Orthodox establishment trying to use them in the war against the Palestinians, recalled Schwartz. “Which, to me, is an incredibly … bigoted way to look at a group of people, to suggest they were sort of evil-minded, or did not have their own free will to exercise their own passionate conserving of Judaism.

“In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. The community actually struggled for a long time to gain any recognition for their own very devoted Jewish practice … to the point where they were photocopying pages of the Chumash and sticking it to parchment, to make it a ‘Torah.’ It’s hard for most of us to imagine.”

The Bnei Menashe of Myanmar (Burma) and India only recently gained official recognition as a “lost tribe” from religious authorities.

“It was so fundamental to their identity that they were part of a lost tribe,” said Schwartz, puzzled at the inconsistencies. Why, he wondered, when so many Soviet Jews “were welcomed with open arms in Israel, despite so few devoted in their Jewish practice,” do Bnei Menashe, in contrast, “not have the same reception? I think that’s something that we need to continue to confront as a community.”

It seems that clashes with so-called mainstream Jewish life have become the rule, rather than the exception. In the 1980s and 1990s, for example, Jews in Mexico and Portugal emerged from centuries of isolation, “coming out” for the first time since the Spanish Inquisition, as Schwartz explained. “Now that they no longer are forced to hide their Jewish practice, that they’re not as isolated as they once were, while it is a blessing, it also causes challenges.”

Reconnecting to the Jewish world meant newfound (to them) rabbinical insight that often conflicted with their own traditions, he explained. Portuguese prayers would make way for Hebrew prayers; kashrut meant a whole other list of laws and strictures. The Jewish community in Portugal had been, for hundreds of years, developing secret (to us) Jewish practices, including a Shavuot they referred to as Ascension Wednesday, a gathering in the field to celebrate.

“It was a struggle in the community as to what extent to embrace modern Jewish practice, or to keep going with their … practices that they’ve had for centuries,” said Schwartz. “Suddenly, you’ve come face to face with the entire Jewish world and realized that the way you’re practising is not entirely consistent with the way the other communities are practising and you have to make decisions.”

Schwartz couldn’t help but be affected by the faith of these communities, in light of what would often be harsh circumstances.

“In visiting these communities,” he said, “I realized the struggle that some people have to get to survive every week, and how meaningful it is to really live the whole week, to arrive at Shabbat. It is just inspiring. It made me realize the gift that it is to be Jewish, and it makes me want to pray every day, and be grateful every day, in a way that I certainly wasn’t before.”

Dave Gordon is a Toronto-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in more than a hundred publications around the world. He is the managing editor of landmarkreport.com.

First book of trilogy now out

Michael Seidelman is donating 10% of novel profits this month to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. (photo from Michael Seidelman)

May is Cystic Fibrosis Awareness Month, so author Michael Seidelman will be donating 10% of the profits from this month’s book sales to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to help find a cure.

The connection? The heroine of his Garden of Syn young adult series suffers from CF.

“When I was 10 years old, I watched a TV movie called Alex: The Life of a Child, the true story of an 8-year-old girl who died from CF. Seeing that a child could lose her life so young had a profound impact on me then and continues to do so all these years later,” he explained.

Having his protagonist suffer from CF “could potentially raise awareness about the devastating illness,” he said. “I learned a lot about CF while researching for the book and I’m sure anyone who reads it will as well.”

But, while an integral part of her character and of the plot, CF does not define Syn, though it does offer her challenges most people do not have to face, and has made her more responsible and mature than her years. But so have several other factors.

The first book of the trilogy – No One Dies in the Garden of Syn, which was released last month – introduces us to Syn. Right away, we find out that her parents went missing when she was 5 years old and her aunt has looked after her ever since. In addition to dealing with her illness, Syn has regular teenage problems with friendships, boyfriends and school, and exhibits that brand of cynicism so often found in kids of that age.

“Syn,” she notes. “Short for Synthia. I don’t know why my parents spelled my name with an ‘S’ but if I could ask them anything, that would be my last question. Aunt Ruth tells me it’s likely because I was special and deserving of a unique spelling. I highly doubt that’s it.”

Syn is a formidable and likable hero for whom readers will root. And the constant action will keep readers turning the pages. Along her accidental journey, she must face situations and enemies that are potentially more threatening than her illness.

“Young adult novels are usually geared towards an audience of 12 years and up,” said Seidelman when asked whether he was concerned with how young readers might react. “While it does contain some dark themes, I think kids in that age group are familiar with the topics that are explored. I also think that this book is more appropriate for younger readers than many other books in the young adult category. I probably wouldn’t recommend the Hunger Games or Twilight for a 12-year-old reader. While No One Dies in the Garden of Syn may be a bit scary towards the book’s climax, any kid who is comfortable reading the Harry Potter series should be more than fine reading this.”

His own creative journey was sparked by books he read as a kid.

“My favorite stories growing up were about secrets worlds, like Alice in Wonderland and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Since I was in high school, I had wanted to write my own book about a secret world. It took me many years before I came up with the right story – one that is inspired by the tales of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum and C.S. Lewis, but at the same time is very different and geared towards an older audience.

“The ideas that triggered the story I ended up telling came to me when I immersed myself in nature and let the ideas flow. I jotted down notes for a few months and made many changes to the story and characters before I sat down in April of 2014 and plotted out each chapter in detail. That took about a month and then it took another four months to write the novel. But that was only the beginning, as there were many rewrites and edits that followed.”

No One Dies in the Garden of Syn is Seidelman’s first published novel. But, as much as he enjoyed writing it, he said, it was not an easy task.

“The rewriting and editing process probably took six times the effort that writing the initial manuscript did, if not more,” he said. “Every single word is immensely important, as are continuity and proper tenses. But, for the second book in the Garden of Syn series, which I am currently working on, I think that part of the process will be smoother. Having now done this once, I now know what works and what doesn’t.

“For anyone wishing to self-publish a book,” he advised, “I cannot emphasize enough the importance of paying for a professional editor. You also need a professional-looking cover that will stand out as people really do judge a book by its cover. Having it professionally formatted for the physical copy and ebook readers is also important. With over 3,000 books published every single day, you need to do everything in your power to make yours the best it can possibly be.

“And then, when it is published, your journey has just begun. You need to use every avenue available to let people know about your book and encourage them to read it. The internet offers many wonderful tools to help do this but you really need to put in the time to market it. As I write my second book, at least 25% of my time goes to marketing the first one.”

The next book in the trilogy will be out next year, and the conclusion in 2018. The first novel is available in paperback and as an ebook from online sellers, including via michaelseidelman.com.