Books – Page 8

Celebrating two new years

It would be fun to be a fly on the wall at Vancouver Talmud Torah on Feb. 14 as Richard Ho reads from his book Two New Years, illustrated by Lynn Scurfield, and discusses it with the children. Being that the story is based on his own life experience, he will likely be quite animated (pun intended) and his enthusiasm, combined with Scurfield’s bright, colourful and joyful art, will no doubt hold their attention.

Ho has several kids books to his credit and, according to his website, more on the way. Two New Years highlights the differences and similarities between Rosh Hashanah and the Lunar New Year, both of which he celebrates.

The book notes the differences first: Rosh Hashanah takes place in the fall, is based on the Jewish calendar and began in the Middle East, and the Lunar New Year generally falls in spring, is based on the Chinese calendar and began in East Asia. “They represent different peoples with different histories, cultures and traditions,” he writes. “But in many ways they are also alike.” The many similarities include that each holiday is a chance to “try on new beginnings,” to “bring family home” and “remember the ancestors who live in our hearts,” to eat “foods that symbolize togetherness and the heartfelt sharing of good wishes,” among several other things.

In the author’s note, Ho shares that he converted to Judaism as an adult and that “the blending of two cultures was a conscious choice” for him. These days, he revels in experiencing both new years through the eyes of his children. “The best part?” he asks. “They’re not alone! All over the world, families with mixed backgrounds are blurring the barriers between cultures and customs. With the guidance of parents, grandparents and extended family on all sides, many children are weaving an increasingly diverse tapestry of celebration.”

The book features an eight-page illustrated glossary that’s as interesting to read as the story: it explains what a lunisolar calendar is, and some of both holidays’ rituals and symbols. It is followed by questions that readers can use to facilitate a discussion with others about their own traditions.

Ho’s presentation at VTT is part of the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival (jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival).

Pinsky pens family memoir

In his ambiguously titled book Ordinary, Extraordinary: My Father’s Life, Vancouver lawyer and community leader Bernard Pinsky shares the biography of Rubin Pinsky. As the pages turn, the reader realizes that ordinariness and extraordinariness really do describe the tale of a life that veers from historically monumental to surprisingly, and gratefully, commonplace.

At 1 p.m., Jan. 28, Pinsky will officially launch the book, in honour of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, at a prologue event to the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival. He will present in conversation with Marsha Lederman.

Pinsky’s book is based on videotaped testimonies that his father, Rubin, gave in 1983 and 1990 to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (which is co-presenting the Jan. 28 event), as well as family memories and what is clearly intensive research.

Rubin was born (probably) in 1924, about 100 kilometres north of Pinsk in what is now Belarus but was then Poland. Pinsky sets the stage beautifully, evoking shtetl life, where the smallest of the children slept atop the bakery oven in the tiny home after his father, Baruch, had baked challah and cakes during the day to eke out a meagre living.

After the German occupation, the Nazis quickly identified the men in the Jewish community who had leadership qualities and said they were needed for an important mission in a nearby area. They were marched just out of earshot and mass murdered. In a later selection, Baruch, his wife Henya and 10-year-old Rachel were marched off and never seen again.

Rubin and his sister Chasia were deemed useful for forced labour and spared the executions. Older brother Herzl had earlier been conscripted into the Red Army.

Every survivor narrative includes a series of unimaginable interventions, coincidences and happenstances, often made possible by acts of incredible daring by the survivor. Through a series of audacious escapades – they weighed off what appeared to be likelihood of certain death with the faint hope of survival – Rubin, Chasia and a few others escaped a selection process and fled to the forest. They lived off berries, roots, tree bark and what small game they could capture. In one instance, Rubin slew a timber wolf in a competition for the same rabbit.

The group connected with a diffuse but apparently well-organized network of Jewish and other partisan fighters. Despite the challenges of mere survival, Rubin and Chasia participated in anti-Nazi actions that included cutting telephone lines, destroying railway tracks and undermining the establishment of Nazi garrisons.

Typhus swept through the Jews in the forest. In the winter of 1943/44, Rubin was delirious with fever and expected to die. In one of the terrible choices people were forced to make in such situations, the partisan cadre decided to leave him behind to save the group. Chasia refused to go. The two siblings hid in a ditch and, to the best of her ability, she nursed him back to comparative health.

Each of these unlikely survival stories makes one wonder how many similar stories did not have the relatively happy ending Rubin’s did, how many survivor testimonies or second generation narratives were never written because the fever did not break, or the hero did not take a risk on a faint hope, or any of a million chance escapes or saving miracles did not occur in time.

In July 1944, the forest in which Rubin and Chasia had hid, fought and barely survived was liberated by the Soviet army. Concentration and death camps were repurposed into displaced persons camps after the war and Rubin and Chasia were in Bergen-Belsen. Chasia left and searched for three weeks, eventually finding Herzl and bringing him with her to Bergen-Belsen, where the three surviving members of the family were reunited.

Zionists tried to recruit them to go to Palestine, but Rubin knew that would be a continuation of the conflict, uncertainty and fighting he wanted to put behind him.

“Rubin therefore made up his mind,” writes Pinsky. “He needed a skill or trade in demand in America. He and Herzl made a pact. They would study together, each in a different trade, and go together to the New World. They would help each other and never be separated again.”

The story of how Rubin and Herzl (in the New World, he would be known as Harry) were able to migrate to Canada is another example of chutzpah – an hilarious drama of subterfuge – that has to be read to be believed. Chasia, whose marriage in the DP camp did not last, joined them soon after.

Rubin married Jenny Moser in 1951 and they would have three children: the author, Bernard, his older sister Helen and younger brother Max – all now mainstays of the Vancouver Jewish community. Rubin’s life in Canada was that of a hardscrabble entrepreneur – and not without its seemingly miraculous near-misses and fortunate endings.

As an appendix, Pinsky shares writings from a 2012 family roots trip back to Gzetl, where a dedicated teacher is keeping alive the memory of Gzetl’s Jews.

Pinsky’s memoir is indeed a story both extraordinary and ordinary, of what human resilience can summon in a world turned upside-down – and how the strength developed in unimaginable adversity can carry a survivor through challenges when life becomes, in comparison, ordinary.

Register for the event at jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival/events.

What is life’s purpose?

In her graphic memoir, Artificial: A Love Story, Amy Kurzweil tackles many existential questions, framed around her father’s quest to resurrect his father using artificial intelligence. Kurzweil participates in the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival Feb. 12.

The purpose of life, of art, what it means to be human, to love and be loved, the value of relationships, our mortality. In a very personal story, cartoonist and writer Amy Kurzweil explores not just universal questions but the biggest of questions in her new book, Artificial: A Love Story.

Kurzweil participates in the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival Feb. 12 in two separate sessions: one about the choice of the comic form to tell a story, the other titled Art & Artificial Intelligence.

In Artificial, readers are invited into another part of Kurzweil’s world. Her debut graphic memoir, Flying Couch, was also family-focused, centring around her maternal grandmother’s story. As she writes on her website, “At 13 years old, Bubbe (as I call her) escaped the Warsaw Ghetto alone, by disguising herself as a gentile. My mother taught me: our memories and our families shape who we become. What does it mean to be part of a family, and how does each generation bear the imprint of the past, its traumas and its gifts? Flying Couch is my answer to these questions, the documentation of my quest for identity and understanding.”

image - Artificial: A Love Story, by Amy Kurzweil, page 21 — Artificial: A Love Story, by Amy Kurzweil, page 21.

Kurzweil continues to grapple with these questions in Artificial, this time from the paternal side. Her father, Ray, an inventor and futurist, is building an AI tool that will allow him, basically, to resurrect his father, who died of a heart attack in 1970, at the age of 57. Ray has saved letters, articles, music and other material relating to his father, Frederic, a pianist and conductor, who fled Austria in 1938, a month before Kristallnacht, to the United States, saved by a chance encounter. Amy is helping her father sort through boxes upon boxes of material and computerize the information. She even chats with “her grandfather,” as the AI program is being developed.

“My father taught me … that, someday, robots would be made of memory,” writes Kurzweil. Of course, the creation of a Fredbot has functional, ethical, emotional and other challenges, and Kurzweil – in words and images – presents them with sensitivity, intelligence and creativity. Each page of Artificial is attention-grabbing and the level of detail on some pages is remarkable. Kurzweil meticulously re-creates correspondence, typed and handwritten, newspaper articles and other documents, emails and texts, but she also captures, for example, the doubt on her father’s face during a conversation and the concern she has for her partner when he’s undergoing some medical tests. Readers learn about the people asking the questions, not just the questions themselves.

As for the answers? There are multiple ones. Of her father’s project, his quest to conquer mortality using technology, Kurzweil writes that her father’s definition of infinity is, “Computers become so small and dense that they become intelligence itself. Humans who do not grow up or grow old and seal our stories. Our stories wake up and keep writing themselves. This future sounds like liberation from the sadness of a story’s end. But it also sounds terrifying.”

That Kurzweil isn’t completely convinced of the merits of her father’s project, even though she loves him dearly and is helping him try and accomplish it, makes Artificial a satisfyingly complex and relatable story. It is a love story on many levels, and one well worth reading.

The Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival runs Feb. 10-15. For the program guide and to purchase event tickets, visit jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival.

Canadian Jews’ first years

Pierre Anctil, left, and Richard Menkis with a copy of their new book, In a “Land of Hope”: Documents on the Canadian Jewish Experience, 1627-1923. (photo by Pat Johnson)

The first Jew known to have set foot in what is now Canada was Esther Brandeau, who arrived in Quebec City in 1738. Jews were forbidden from migrating to New France, but the young woman’s religion was not the only thing she was concealing. She was also dressed as a boy.

Interrogated by authorities on arrival, Brandeau was the subject of high-level consultations before she was sent back to France the following year.

Although they are certain there were Jews in the land that would become Canada before 1738, professors Richard Menkis and Pierre Anctil say Brandeau’s case is the first documented proof of a Jewish presence here.

The historians shared Brandeau’s story at a book launch in Vancouver Nov. 21, following the annual general meeting of the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia. Menkis, an associate professor in the departments of history, and classical, Near Eastern and religious studies at the University of British Columbia, and Anctil, a University of Ottawa history professor, co-edited In a “Land of Hope”: Documents on the Canadian Jewish Experience, 1627-1923.

The book spans three centuries through the lens of more than 150 documents, many of them never before published.

Menkis emphasized the efforts made to provide geographical diversity in the volume.

“If we want to appreciate the Canadian Jewish experience, we’ve got to move beyond – believe it or not – the borders of Quebec and Ontario,” he told the audience at Temple Sholom. “We have offered texts that represent the experiences from west to east. We offer an excerpt from the minute book of Congregation Emanu-El, in Victoria, recording a debate on whether to include the Freemasons in a cornerstone-naming ceremony. We have documents from the other ocean, from a controversy in Halifax, where the local SPCA argued that kosher slaughtering was cruel and that the local shochet (kosher slaughterer) was accordingly charged.”

Anctil, who is francophone, emphasized the uniqueness of the Jewish experience in Quebec and noted that shared interest between Catholics and Jews led to one of the first legislative acts of Jewish emancipation in pre-Confederation Canada. In 1832, the legislature of Lower Canada (later Quebec) passed a statute making British subjects who are Jewish equal under the law to all other British subjects in the jurisdiction.

“It’s a foundational document,” said Anctil. “It’s the first time that Canada and most British colonies allowed Jews to have political and civil rights.”

The motivation may have had less to do with Jewish rights – there were only about 150 Jews in colonial Canada at the time – than self-interest among French Catholics.

“They were Catholics living in a Protestant world and they knew that, if the Jews had more rights, the Catholics also had more rights,” Anctil said.

The Quebec education law of 1903 had lasting impacts on the province, especially for Jews and their place in the “distinct society.”

“The Quebec government decided that Jews would be considered Protestants for the purpose of education,” said Anctil, “and [Jews] were all sent to the Protestant school board of Montreal and did not receive a Catholic or French education, which proved problematic in the decades ahead.”

Brandeau, the young Jewish woman who tried to masquerade as a non-Jewish boy, was only the first documented case of Jews coming up hard against Canada’s explicitly or implicitly racist immigration laws. The theme runs through the 400-page book.

Canadian immigration policies reflected the agricultural dominance of the Canadian economy into the 20th century and, since most European Jewish migrants were not farmers, this was an inherent, if not unwelcome from the perspective of immigration officials, bar to many Jews.

The editors address Jewish farmers in the book – those who had experience in the Old Country as well as those who, successfully or less so, took to the land after migration – but prioritize the economic experiences of Jews in peddling, retail and the garment industry.

The preference for immigrants with farming backgrounds was an implicitly, possibly even unintentionally, anti-Jewish component of Canada’s immigration approach. Other examples were less subtle. It was not so much that legislation said Jews were not permitted to migrate, but that unwritten rules, “administrative refinements” or policies that were open to interpretation could be used to block Jews from entering the country.

There had been rumours of a deliberate anti-Jewish immigration policy, and Menkis said their research found evidence that instructions had been sent to immigration officials in Europe that Jews were to be considered undesirable applicants.

In 1923, an order-in-council was passed by the federal cabinet, which said that only farmers, farmworkers and domestic women servants would be allowed to immigrate to Canada, effectively closing the door to Jews and many other communities from the Balkans and Eastern Europe.

Anctil and Menkis pointed out that Jews were far from the only group excluded under Canada’s immigration policies.

“Asians and Africans – out completely,” said Anctil. “Almost nobody got in. In 1923, we have the Chinese Immigration Act, which made it extremely difficult for financial reasons for Chinese people to migrate to Canada. So, we had a really racist immigration policy until the ’60s, ’70s. Not just Jews.”

Many of the documents included in the book were translated into English by the editors, from the original French, Yiddish or Hebrew.

“It’s very important to work in four languages,” Anctil said. “English, French, Yiddish and Hebrew – there is no way of doing Canadian Jewish history if you leave one out. All these four languages are represented in the book and serve an essential purpose of allowing the full flavour of this story to be told.”

The pair’s decade of research for In a “Land of Hope” uncovered some unexpected treasures.

“Usually, we hear of social welfare from the minute books of established members of the community and their organizations,” said Menkis. “I was reading one of these minute books on one occasion in Toronto when a piece of paper dropped out.”

It was a desperate appeal from a woman seeking help from a Jewish women’s aid organization, specifically asking for chickens for the Passover seder.

“Please let me know if you’re going to send me the Paisez [Pesach] order and if you’re going to send me what you promised me,” read the handwritten letter. “I hope that you’re going to be kindly for my sick husband and my six little children because I just leave it to you and you should help because there is nobody to help accept [sic] you. I hope you won’t forget us and send us an answer right away. Because I could not tell you very much & That is the first time in my life that I should ask for help. But everything can happen in a lifetime. Yours […] Mrs. Green.”

The book closes in 1923 because that was a turning point in Canadian Jewish history and in the larger story of Canadian immigration. As a result of an economic depression following the First World War, nativist sentiments led to what was an effective end to large-scale immigration into Canada, itself a response to a parallel development south of the border.

“One of the reasons it happened in Canada was that they knew the Americans were closing down [open immigration] and they didn’t want to get all those Jews that the Americans weren’t accepting,” said Menkis.

A second volume of the work, picking up from 1924, is due to be released in 2026. Anctil said the unique experiences of Jews in Quebec will be even more pronounced in that book.

“The Jews living in Quebec faced a different situation than Jews living elsewhere,” he said. “The majority of [Canadian] Jews were in Quebec until the ’60s and it’s not only the French and Catholic issue, it’s the issue that the school system was separated between Catholics and Protestants and Jews could not find a place easily in the public school system.”

Bias against Jews also has a different strain in each of Canada’s official linguistic communities, Anctil added.

“Antisemitism among the French is not the same as among the British,” he said. “The logic’s not the same and the results are not the same. Often, when you read histories of Canadian Jewry, you have the impression antisemitism is all the same, whoever is antisemitic. It’s not true. [There are a] number of subtleties and complexities in that.”

In a “Land of Hope” was released by the Champlain Society, a publisher of scholarly Canadian books. This is the first book the society has published about a community that is not French or English in its 115-year history.

“I hope at least I’ve convinced you of the value of the book, without being crassly commercial,” Menkis said at the end of the presentation, adding: “Although, I do want to say that In a ‘Land of Hope’ would make a great Hanukkah gift.”

A 1930s immigration story

Author Norman Ravvin’s grandparents, Yehuda Yoseph and Chaya Dina Eisenstein, around the time of their engagement, in 1928. (photo from Who Gets In: An Immigration Story)

Relentless perseverance, continual pressure on select politicians and some key allies are what helped Norman Ravvin’s maternal grandfather, Yehuda Yoseph Eisenstein, finally bring his wife and two children to Canada from Poland in 1935, five years after he immigrated here. In a decade generalized as a time of “none is too many” with regards to Canada’s immigration policy towards Jews, Ravvin’s grandfather managed to get his family into the country.

In his new book, Who Gets In: An Immigration Story (University of Regina Press), Ravvin combines his novel-writing skills with his academic expertise to create an engaging memoir about his grandfather’s first years in Canada, one that is firmly situated in the larger context of what was happening at the national level at the time. An extensively researched book – with 10-and-a-half pages of sources – Ravvin’s style will make readers feel like they’ve come to know him a bit, as he allows his personality to be seen in the telling, though what is documented fact and what is conjecture or opinion is clear.

“My approach is to make nothing up. The story rides its own hard-to-believe rails,” says Ravvin on his webpage. “I present its narrative creatively, so readers relate to it on a personal level. Events and personalities from nearly a century ago remain fresh, telling and relevant to contemporary North American life.”

Ravvin does allow his imagination some space. He doesn’t know, for example, the exact reasons his grandfather left Poland, but he can surmise that rising antisemitism was one of them. Whether it was because his grandfather objected physically and publicly to a slur and became a marked man, or whether a rock was thrown into the family’s sukkah, Yehuda Yoseph Eisenstein’s response, writes Ravvin, “was to say ‘I can’t live with these people anymore.’ Or, as he would have said in Yiddish, ‘Ich ken mit zei mer nisht lebn.’ It’s good to hear some of these things in the language in which they took place. In this incident, the spoken words evoke the moment of decision with clarity and purpose.”

Eisenstein had three siblings who had already left Poland, with his younger brother Israel (Izzy) having settled in Vancouver. It was this brother who offered Eisenstein sponsorship and, while Canada was a much less welcoming place by 1930, “a single man could obtain a visa with a brother’s sponsorship.” The problem was Eisenstein had been married in 1928, without a civil licence, as he was already planning on leaving and knew that he would need to appear single to get into Canada. The illegality of the marriage and the misrepresentation of his marital status on his immigration application would cause Eisenstein much tsuris (distress) in getting his wife, Chaya Dina, and their children, Berel and Henna, to Canada as well.

Who Gets In is divided into two parts. The first is about Eisenstein finding his place in the country; the second is about his efforts to bring his family over. Ravvin wants to “paint a detailed picture of the time and place, with careful attention to Western Canada,” where his grandfather went, and he does this by talking about such things as the content of school history books in the 1920s, Canada’s immigration numbers and the country’s changing demographics, the implications of government forms that asked immigrants to declare their “Nationality” and “Race or People,” how census data were being interpreted and used, the popularity of eugenics in Canada and beyond, the impacts of the Depression, and so much more.

Ravvin uses history not only to provide context for his grandfather’s experiences but also brings it into the present. Assimilability was a key consideration in assessing immigrants’ suitability in Eisenstein’s day and continues to be – current NDP leader Jagmeet Singh “was approached while campaigning and told that he should remove his turban to look more Canadian,” notes Ravvin.

Ravvin spends quite a lot of ink discussing various perceptions of what a Canadian should like and contemplating how his grandfather would have been considered. The cover of Who Gets In features a photo that was part of a newspaper article in 1910. The three men “appear as cutouts in a group of twelve ‘Types’ of ‘New-Comers’ from ‘Photographs Taken at Quebec and Halifax.’” From left to right, they are described as “Pure Russian, Jew, German.” As the landing form stripped Ravvin’s grandfather of his nationality – someone crossed out the typed letters “PO” and wrote in by hand “Hebrew” – so too is the Jew in this photograph stripped of his, observes Ravvin.

In setting the scene for Part 2 of the book – the bureaucratic fight his grandfather must undertake – Ravvin discusses the Indigenous peoples that inhabited the Prairies where his grandfather ended up. Eisenstein first went to Vancouver, where he hoped to stay and work as a shoichet (kosher butcher), but he was apparently seen as competition by Rev. N.M. Pastinsky, “who happened to be on the board of the Pacific Division of the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society (JIAS) and thus someone with whom one might not want to tangle.”

Eisenstein backtracked to Saskatchewan, living first in the farming town of Dysart and then in Hirsch. Ravvin talks about what Jewish life in rural Canada was like and some of the impacts that European settlement had on the Cree, Saulteaux and Assiniboine.

Ravvin starts the book with the story of the Komagata Maru – the chartered ship from India, full of immigrant hopefuls, mostly Sikhs, that was not allowed to land on the coast of British Columbia in 1914 and was instead forced to return to India, with disastrous results. He returns to the incident at the end of Part 1 to point out that one of the central (negative) figures in his grandfather’s life was A.L. Jolliffe, “who began his civil career in 1913 as an immigration agent in Vancouver,” playing a role in the handling of the Komagata Maru.

“By the 1930s,” writes Ravvin, “Jolliffe had ascended to the position of commissioner for the Department of Immigration in Ottawa. He is the closest thing to a bête noire in my grandfather’s story. If the much better-known doorkeeper, F.C. Blair, played any role in my grandfather’s struggle, he left no trace in any of the documents beyond a shared penchant for the use of pompous and hectoring language that appears in letters in my grandfather’s file.”

Jolliffe denies more than once Eisenstein’s applications for permission to bring his wife and children to Canada – in one instance, while expressly not recommending deportation, Jolliffe suggests that, if Eisenstein wants to be reunited with his family, he should return to Poland. Ultimately, Eisenstein is successful only because he has allies such as A.J. Paull, executive director of the JIAS, and Lillian Freiman who, married to influential merchant A.J. Freiman, had “remarkable access to the leaders of early-twentieth-century Canada.” She also did many amazing good works, including managing “Ottawa’s response to the flu epidemic in 1918 almost single-handedly.” Ravvin also positively differentiates the federal government, as led by R.B. Bennett, prime minister from 1930 to 1935, from that which succeeded it, the “none is too many” government led by William Lyon Mackenzie King as prime minister.

Eisenstein finally achieves his goal through an order-in-council – a decision made by the Privy Council, the prime minister’s cabinet – that “asserted its right to ‘waive’ determinations of an earlier order in which strict immigration regulations were brought into effect. This reflected an ability – understood to exist by those in the know – of the minister to ‘issue a permit in writing to authorize a person to enter Canada without being subject to the provisions’ of the Immigration Act, without interfering with the status of those provisions.”

The Eisenstein family was one of the lucky ones.

Galilee goes free, or the tetragrammaton only knows why a poem in Adeena Karasick’s Aerotomania: The Book of Lumenations is dedicated to me

According to the Babylonian Talmud (Eruvin 53b), the Hebrew-speakers of ancient Judea were so precise in their speech that they would never describe a cloak they were trying to sell as merely green, but would tell you instead that it was the colour of newly sprouted beet greens trailing along the ground. Galileans, on the other hand, were less punctilious:

“What do you mean when you say that Galileans are not careful in speaking? It is taught: There was a Galilean who used to go about [the marketplace] asking, ‘Who has amar? Who has amar?’ They said to him, ‘Stupid Galilean, do you mean khamor [donkey] to ride or khamar [wine] to drink? Amar [wool] to wear or imar [a lamb] to slaughter?’ And don’t forget the woman who wanted to say to her friend, ‘to-i de-okhlikh khalovo, come, I’ll give you some milk,’ only to have it come out as ‘tokhlikh lovya, may you be eaten by a lioness?’”

Where the ancient Galileans seem to have had no choice but to sound like themselves, Adeena Karasick has elaborated, over 14 volumes of poetry, a sort of deliberate neo-Galileanism that sometimes bridges, sometimes leaps and, on occasion, just fills the talmudic chasm between utterance and meaning in a way guaranteed to drive any artificial intelligence program out of its simulated mind. As she says in the poem “Talmudy Blues II” that is dedicated to me in her new collection, Aerotomania: The Book of Lumenations (Lavender Ink): “… sometimes the letters rule over her / and sometimes she rules over the letters / cleaving to the light of infinite possibility.” (p.31)

Is Karasick cleaving to the light as she rules over the letters? Or do the letters ruling her do the cleaving? Have her consonants been endowed with the naissances latentes of Rimbaud’s “Voyelles”? Or, less goyishly, is Karasick turning Galilean imprecision into an aesthetic approach rooted in the modalities of elementary-level reading instruction – reading silently and reading aloud, the absorption and subsequent re-citation of a written text – as enacted in the traditional East European Hebrew school known as kheyder?

The basic level of instruction had three phases:

1. Alef-beys, literally, alphabet, in which students learn to recognize the consonants that make up the Hebrew alphabet, along with the sundry diacritical marks that take the place of alphabetic vowels. There are 11 of the latter, representing five vowel sounds.

2. Halb-traf leyenen, reading half syllables. Each diacritic is run, as it were, through all 22 of the consonants. So, for example, syllables formed with the vowel komets would be learned by reciting, “Komets alef, o; komets beys, bo; komets giml, go” … and so on, to the end of the alphabet, when the student would go on to the next vowel: “Pasekh alef, a; pasekh beys, ba; pasekh giml, ga.”

3. Gants-traf leyenen, reading whole syllables, i.e., combining the individual letters or syllabograms into words.

Karasick’s traffic is with the last two, the kheyder basics supplemented by the graphemically focused mysticism of Sefer Yetsira and Abraham Abulafia as refracted through a contemporary sensibility and range of reference: “The letter is matter which moves matter … these words are closer than they appear.” (p.31)

We see halb-traf in full flight in, say, the coda to “Eicha,” the long poem with which Lumenations opens: “In the eros of aching ethos / The caesura screams – / Through cirque’elatory sequiturs, resistances” and continues: “Here, her / in mired err / whose scar is clear // Hear her/here/whose heir / wears err’s // shared prayer / where // care is rare….” (pp.26-27)

All you have to do is imagine a phrase like “hear her/here/” in unvocalized Hebrew, רה רה רה, and then read it as “hair hare hoar,” to realize that Karasick’s poetry, like the airplane she anatomizes in Aerotomania, constitutes “a hybridized syncretic space between cultures and idioms / where that interlingual complexity doesn’t close down but builds dialogue” (p.83), a dialogue rooted in, but quickly soaring beyond, quotidian phonemic reality.

There is an upward thrust to the book, from the dust and cracked earth of “Eicha,” the recasting of the biblical Lamentations (eicha means how, as in, “How sits the city solitary”), through the rising rabbinic commentary of “Talmudy Blues II,” a romp through ways of thought – words, that is – that now stand in place of the things destroyed: Jerusalem and the Temple (known in Hebrew as the Holy House).

An excursus on the idea of house follows, then “Checking In II,” i.e., checking into the Aerotomania flight by stowing readers’ cultural baggage for the duration of their stay on the plane. Having shaken off our dust (Isaiah 52:2), we emerge from the fog of our associations. Our lumen is come (Isaiah 60:1); we rise through the ether to embrace The Shining.

As the dedicatee of “Talmudy Blues II,” it behooves me to say something about the poem. A continuation of “Here Today Gone Gemara” from Karasick’s 2018 collection Checking In (Talonbooks), “Talmudy Blues II” consists in large part of elaborations of dialogue (and dialect) culled from our ongoing conversations about the ways in which the Talmud is reflected and refracted in Yiddish. “Carpe verbum,” reads the epigraph to “Here Today” – pluck that word like it’s a Sabbath chicken, clear away the excrescences and bite into the thing itself, ever mindful that the Hebrew davar means both word and thing, utterance and entity; my honeyed words solidified into raw material, ore for Adeena’s gold, one davar turned into another. But, as it says in the Talmud (Megillah 15), “Whoever credits a davar to the person who said it brings redemption to the world.”

Amen. Thou hast conquered, O neo-Galilean.

Michael Wex is author of three books on Yiddish, including Born to Kvetch. His songs have been recorded by such bands as the Klezmatics, and he has translated The Threepenny Opera from German into Yiddish. His one-person shows include Sex in Yiddish, Wie Gott in Paris and Gut Yontef, Yoko. I Just Wanna Jewify: The Yiddish Revenge on Wagner was recently revived (on Zoom) by the Ashkenaz Festival. His most recent major project, Baym Kabaret Yitesh, a recreation of a 1938 Warsaw Yiddish cabaret, was the surprise hit of Ashkenaz 2022 in Toronto. Bas Sheve, the long-lost Yiddish opera restored by Wex and composer Joshua Horowitz, was the not-so-surprising hit of the same festival. This book review was originally published in New Explorations: Studies in Culture & Communication, Vol. 3, no. 2 (2023).

Openings in wake of COVID

Inscribing what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas might call espace vital (the space we can survive), Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings (2023) is an exploration of openings in a (never quite) post-COVID world. Written by poet, performer and cultural theorist Adeena Karasick and visualized by designer/author and vis lit creator Warren Lehrer, both the title poem and “Touching in the Wake of the Virus” track the trepidations and celebrations of openings read through socioeconomic, geographic and bodily space.

Both poems explore a range of intralingual etymologies laced with post-consumerist and erotic language, theoretical discourse, philosophical and kabbalistic aphorisms. They foreground language and book-space as organisms of hope – highlighting the concept of opening and touching as an ever-swirling palimpsest of spectral voices, textures, whispers and codes transported through passion, politics and pleasure as we negotiate loss and light.

In this first collaborative book, Lehrer choreographs Karasick’s words on the stage of the page through typographic compositions that give form to the emotional, metaphorical, historical and sonic underpinnings of the texts. Together, the writing and visuals engage the reader to become an active participant in the experience/performance of the work. The book also comes with a soundtrack recording (via QR code) of Karasick reading the poems with music composed and performed by Grammy award-winning composer and trumpet player, Sir Frank London.

Produced in a smyth-sewn, three-colour foil stamped, three-piece hardcover binding, printed on acid-free paper, Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings bridges the gap between art book and trade publication that will speak to lovers of poetry, philosophy, art, design, new media, performance, and anyone trying to navigate opening and touching in the wake of pandemics and other mass maladies.

Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings can be purchased from most online booksellers.

– Courtesy Lavender Ink

Mysteries to be solved

The past can consume you if you let it. And reality isn’t as easy to discern as you might think. Two recently published thrillers from Simon & Schuster share these themes in common, but their authors address them in completely different ways.

Anna Porter’s Gull Island takes readers on an unsettling, at-times gory, modern-day journey through the protagonist’s thoughts and memories as she visits alone her family’s isolated island cottage and a ferocious storm hits, unmooring her boat and rendering her cellphone ineffective. Roberta Rich’s The Jazz Club Spy begins with a brutal pogrom in 1920 Ukraine and then jumps to 1939 Manhattan, where the protagonist, now a young woman, sees in passing one of the Cossacks who rampaged her village – as she starts looking for him to exact her revenge, she is enlisted by the US government to help find him for them, as he is a possible conspirator in an assassination plot.

Neither genre – psychological thriller or espionage novel – is the type of fiction I’d generally pick up, but I enjoyed both. They provided an escape, I learned a few things, I wanted to know how they would end.

While The Jazz Club Spy started off gritty and harsh, by the second chapter it read more like a young adult novel. Given the state of the world at the moment, I didn’t find that necessarily a negative thing. I rooted for Giddy Brodsky, who survived that traumatic pogrom and was now helping her family pay the rent and feed themselves, her dad having left for reasons we eventually find out.

As a cigarette girl in a club, Giddy uses her natural sleuthing skills – looking through customers’ pockets, listening to conversations for clues, etc. – to help her friend Hattie’s clairvoyant act. After Giddy sees the Cossack on a tram, but loses him in the crowd, she puts those skills to personal use, and then uses them to help the government. This happens after she asks a club regular who works in the immigration department for assistance, and he shares with her that the Cossack is an “undesirable” and could she help the government track him down.

Giddy is not only a competent detective but an aspiring entrepreneur, who creates her own makeups and lotions. The money she earns from spying goes to help her set up her own beauty store. But, to achieve success, she must first complete her mission, one that is complicated by love and the dangerous situations she must place herself in to root out the Cossack and try to prevent the assassination and a potential global political crisis.

The Jazz Club Spy is all about external threats and heroic acts. There is no doubt about Giddy’s strength, purpose and whether she’s a good person. Gull Island, on the other hand, is all about internal threats and acts that cause harm (even if that isn’t the intent). Jude’s a great unknown, even to herself, and she gets progressively more disoriented as the storm hits the island and she struggles to get the water pump working, hurts herself in various accidents, and drinks we’re not quite sure how much alcohol while she’s there.

Jude has come to the island at her mother’s request. Jude’s father has gone missing and a copy of his will is apparently at the cottage. She is also there for personal reasons, to rummage about, to figure something out, to look through old photographs; there are many of her sister, not so many of her. Jude has grown up in a dysfunctional family and the cottage was not generally a happy place. As the storms intensify – the rain and wind outside, the memories barraging Jude and the physical cuts and bruises she receives along the way, dealing with broken glass, wild animals and things not so clear – the tension ratchets up. When the sun returns and Jude surveys the damage left behind, a key piece of the mystery is understood.

Porter isn’t afraid to explore dark places, and she masterfully leads readers through Jude’s turmoil. I found it noteworthy that the book Jude finds at the cottage to read is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. “I had abandoned it years ago because I didn’t want to feel as insignificant as the author had made me feel,” thinks Jude. “But tonight, being alone in the cottage, with something digging under the bedroom window, feeling insignificant would be useful.” Spoiler alert: by the end of the novel, she is set to finish the book.

Perfect gifts for holiday

In 2019, NASA astronaut and scientist Jessica Meir was part of the first all-woman spacewalk. According to : Jewish Women who Rocked the World, she “celebrated Hanukkah in space by wearing festive holiday socks and sending a Happy Hanukkah message to earth on social media.”

This is just one of the many “Fun Fact[s] to Mench’n” in this enlightening book written by the mother-daughter team of Rachelle Burk and Alana Barouch, and illustrated by Arielle Trenk. She’s a Mensch! is one of two books the JI received from Seattle’s Intergalactic Afikoman to review. The other is the perfect antidote to the “girl math” phenomenon popularized on social media, though hopefully kids under 9 aren’t engaging with that. Counting on Naamah: A Mathematical Tale on Noah’s Ark by writer Erica Lyons and illustrator Mary Reaves Uhles imagines Noah’s wife as being a genius in math and engineering.

Using the basics of the Noah story, Counting on Naamah offers a midrash of sorts. “A midrash is a tale that begins with a story from the Torah. Then it fills in the missing pieces to imagine the rest,” explain Lyons and Reaves Uhles at the back of the book. “The story of Noah leaves a lot to the imagination. What was it actually like to live on that ark? How did they take care of all those animals? And who was the generally unnamed ‘Mrs. Noah’? Counting on Naamah tries to answer these questions.”

The story begins when Naamah is a child, and uses her talents to help each of her three brothers – with market transactions, estimated herd transport times and archery angles. She has her own projects, as well, drafting plans for a desert sand scooter, for example.

When she meets and falls in love with Noah, the two become “impossible to divide,” but Naamah retains her agency and is a crucial help in building the ark, housing and feeding the animals, and more. And Noah knows just what to do to thank her.

Counting on Naamah is a charming story, creatively and colourfully illustrated. As is She’s a Mensch!, which is a nonfiction work that highlights 20 women who “rock!”

“Jewish women ‘round the world have talent, strength and smarts,” the book starts. “They shine like stars in every field from science to the arts.

“Jewish women through the ages have helped shape history. These mensches are authors and activists, athletes and adventurers, and everything in between.”

Indeed, the women featured range from writer Emma Lazarus in 1883 to Meir, in 2019. They include familiar – Golda Meir, Barbra Streisand, Ruth Bader Ginsburg – and less familiar names, like Marthe Cohn, who was a spy for France during the Second World War; Vera Rubin, who provided proof of dark matter in the 1970s; Nalini Nadkarni, who performed the first survey of rainforest treetops in 1981; and Judit Polgár, who became a chess grandmaster at age 15, in 1991. There’s a list of 18 honourable mentions.

Each entry in She’s a Mensch! has something different: unique drawings that connect the mensch to their chosen pursuit, a four-line poem and a short blurb about the mensch, often a fun fact, and always a mensch-related question to ponder, such as, How can you help others? (Henrietta Szold) What kinds of stories can you tell? (Judy Blume) and What great adventures do you dream of going on? (Cheryl and Nikki Bart)

Both of these books would make great Hanukkah gifts for kids of any gender. As would this year’s Hanukkah addition to Intergalactic Afikoman publisher Brianna Caplan Sayres’ and illustrator Christian Slade’s Diggers series, which has more than 10 books, and counting.

Where Do Diggers Celebrate Hanukkah? (published by Penguin Random House) would be a happy addition to a kid’s Diggers collection, or a fun introduction to the series. For the diggers, cranes, mixers, armoured trucks, tankers, dump trucks and food trucks, we’re asked to wonder what each does for an aspect of the holiday. For example, “Does Mom dig up the ancient jar that held the precious oil?” And the cranes, “Do they decorate their construction site with ‘Happy Hanukkah’ all around?” After a day of serving meals outside, do food trucks “serve sufganiyot and other food that’s fried?” Inquiring minds will want to know.

Double book launch

Join writer Marina Sonkina in celebrating the release of her two new books: Ukrainian Portraits: Diaries from the Border and Rupture and Other Stories. About Ukrainian Portraits, she writes: “At the end of March of 2022, I traveled to the Ukrainian-Polish border to volunteer at a refugee evacuation centre. Much as I tried to prepare myself psychologically, what I encountered face-to-face didn’t fit any of my expectations: I saw a disaster on a massive scale. I went to volunteer as someone who speaks Russian, Ukrainian and other languages; someone who had been a refugee herself.

I soon realized that what the Ukrainian refugees needed most (apart from practical advice) was to talk about their experiences. They needed to be heard.”

The double book launch takes place Sunday, Dec. 10, 1:30 p.m., in the Aceman Seniors Lounge at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver. Nibbles and light refreshments will be provided.

– Courtesy Marina Sonkina