Arts & Culture – Page 89

Meet new or favourite writers

The Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival starts this Saturday night (Feb. 9) with Joshua Cohen, author of Moving Kings and ATTENTION: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. It continues for five literary-filled days at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, and here’s a sampling of books you might want to add to your reading list, and authors you might like to meet.

Set in 1920, in the fictional shtetl of Golikhovke during the Russian civil war, Judgment, by David Bergelson (1884-1952), is a melancholic novel about humanity in a time of uncertainty, where different political factions are warring, each under their own ultimately meaningless banner; neighbours cannot trust one another, let alone strangers; and justice is meted out randomly by a cruel, indifferent force.

Stationed in an also fictitious abandoned monastery called Kamino-Balke, near Golikhovke, the sickly Bolshevik Filipov is in control of the area along the Ukraine-Poland border. There are smugglers who travel across the border for commercial reasons and Socialist Revolutionaries who travel across it in preparation for an uprising against the Bolsheviks. Jews and non-Jews live together in relative tolerance but political loyalties, ethnic ties and differing ideas of morality ensure a constant tension. All live in fear of being captured by one of Filipov’s agents, as guilt of a crime does not need to be proven for a person to be beaten, imprisoned and/or shot.

What makes this novel beautiful is Bergelson’s prose. Imaginative metaphors: “Large, invisible hands merrily picked up whole heaps of snow and just as merrily released them.” Animated objects: “… the coat lay there bent over, dejected, as if it had made a long, pointless, idiotic journey” and “The cannons’ muzzles – black, fat and eyeless – stared longingly in the direction of the forests around Moshne….” Humour: “Stone fences suited the inhabitants of Yanovo, for all of them were as stubborn as their stone fences: stone upon stone.” And empathy, in this case, for the undercover agent Yokhelzon, whose “eyes (which inspected everything, people said) had already taken in the horror of death – they winked joyfully, so that the horror would not show afterward.”

As should be obvious, Harriet Murav and Sasha Senderovich have done a masterful job of translating Judgment from Yiddish to English. They also provide a fascinating introduction to the novel, its historical context, the author and his other works (Bergelson was executed in 1952, on Stalin’s orders), the book’s title, form, themes and use of language.

Senderovich will be at the book festival on Feb. 10, 3:30 p.m.

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Michèle Smolkin’s novel Silence, je tombe is a witty, philosophical novel that explores how people can become isolated from one another, including themselves. Told from the perspectives of a few protagonists, readers will likely relate to many of the feelings expressed.

The novel starts with a pregnant Tania, as she, her husband Paul and their toddler Margot are making the drive to their new home in “Manhattan, Kansas, The Little Apple,” from Vancouver. Tania’s disenchantment is obvious and she expresses her anger towards her husband – who, as a professor of philosophy, couldn’t find a job elsewhere – with vicious (and very funny) sarcasm, mostly in her thoughts, but aloud, as well. She had imagined a different life for herself – living in New York, the Big Apple, for one thing; and certainly not in the Bible Belt. As a Francophone Jew, she anticipates that fitting in might be a problem.

As the book progresses, we get to know Tania, Paul and a disturbed man named Kevin, plus a couple of other minor but important characters. Through them, we contemplate love, what attracts people to one another and what forces them apart, what happiness is, what actions might be unforgivable, how our childhoods influence our adulthoods, and, of course, the inadequacy of words for certain situations, and understanding why, sometimes, silence is the only possible response.

Smolkin’s talk – the book festival’s first-ever French-language event – will take place Feb. 10, 5 p.m. (Note: Festival program shows incorrect time.)

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A River Could Be a Tree is, thankfully, not the memoir of a person who goes from believing fanatically in one religion to being swept away as unquestioningly into another, though it might seem like it would be, given some aspects of the press material. “How does a woman who grew up in rural Indiana in a fundamentalist Christian cult end up a practising Jew in New York?” asks part of the blurb on the book flap. Well, for starters, Angela Himsel seems to always have been an inquisitive person, and never an avid follower of Herbert Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God. She was an obedient child, but is still struggling with understanding how her parents believed so much in the church doctrine that they didn’t give her sister the care that might have prevented her death at a young age.

A River Could Be a Tree is a measured, often humourous, always intelligent memoir. Himsel starts with a prologue that gives readers a very large hint as to what led her to ultimately convert to Judaism: she and her boyfriend Selig were, “just once … careless about birth control.”

But the journey to that point is long and more complicated, and Himsel takes readers through it with the benefit of hindsight, hard-won insights and a writing style that is serious, honest but unsentimental, and filled with initially unexpected levity. As but one example, a mere three paragraphs into Chapter 1, in which Himsel talks about her parents’ religious heritage, Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism, she writes about Martin Luther, that, at age 41, he “married a nun, a woman he had helped smuggle out of a convent in a herring barrel. While irrelevant to Luther’s religious beliefs, a nun in a herring barrel is always worth mentioning.”

And A River Could Be a Tree is well worth reading. Himsel will speak at the book festival on Feb. 11, 7:30 p.m.

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There is so much information in Why You Eat What You Eat: The Science Behind Our Relationship With Food by Rachel Herz. And a refreshing aspect of the book is that it’s not written from a dogmatic, all-knowing viewpoint. Herz acknowledges that sometimes studies come to different conclusions, sometimes scientific progress means that what was once thought true is disproven, and that different people will experience food, exercise and other things differently. Readers looking for certainty might be disappointed, but those wanting to learn will learn a lot. Who doesn’t want to know, for example, why tomato juice is one of the most popular drink orders on planes? Does sugar really help the medicine go down, so to speak, i.e. reduce the effects of pain? And why can buying ethically branded or organic products make us less charitable?

But Why You Eat What You Eat is more than an amalgamation of trivia. Herz has compiled a very readable and relatively comprehensive resource that will, as the title promises, help explain why we eat what we eat; how all of our senses – taste, smell, sight, touch and hearing – affect how we experience food. And knowing these things just might make us feel better about ourselves, and make choices that would serve us better.

Herz will be at the book festival on Feb. 13, 6 p.m.

World’s craze for sand

The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization by Vince Beiser is a finalist for the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing. The award is given to a “book that exemplifies literary excellence on the subject of the physical or biological sciences and communicates complex scientific concepts to a lay audience.”

At the core of PEN America is the ideal of freedom of speech, “recognizing the power of the word to transform the world.” For his entire career, Beiser has been trying to change the world with his writing and, with The World in a Grain, he educates readers about the phenomenal importance of sand in making thousands of things, from concrete to glass to fibre-optic cables, and how dependent on it we are. So valuable is sand that people steal it and even kill for it, and our unbridled use of it, in concrete in particular, might just kill the planet.

To bring these harsh realities to light, Beiser adeptly and engagingly – sometimes with humour – mixes empirical evidence, scientific explanations, interviews with people directly connected to or affected by sand mining, profiles of relevant historical figures and his own commentary, as well as some factoids, which he calls “Interludes.” He comes to the not-surprising-but-disheartening conclusion that there’s only one solution: “human beings have to start using less sand. For that matter, we have to start using less of everything.”

Beiser dedicates the book to his wife, Kaile, and their children, Adara and Isaiah. While they live in Los Angeles, he grew up here. The Jewish Independent interviewed him about his upbringing, his career and, of course, his book.

JI: Could you tell me where you were born, how you ended up in Vancouver, and how your parents’ involvement in social causes influenced your choice of profession?

VB: I’m from a venerable Vancouver family, though I wasn’t born there. My grandfather’s family – the Landos – came over from England around the turn of the 20th century, first to Prince Rupert and then to Vancouver, where they worked in the fur business, of all things. My mother [Roberta] and her siblings were all born and raised in Vancouver – mostly in the same house where she still lives! My brothers and I were all born in the U.S. (myself in New York City), where my father [Morton] was working. We moved to Vancouver when I was 10, and I grew up there until I took off to college in California. I come back just about every summer.

My parents were always very engaged with the world, and the idea of trying to make it a better place – my father as a mental health researcher, and my mother mainly through her work with all kinds of arts and cultural organizations. We did a lot of traveling as well, which really opened my eyes to just how lucky we were and how much less so are so many other people. Meanwhile, I also had an uncle, Vancouver native Barry Lando, who was a highly decorated producer at 60 Minutes, so I grew up watching his shows and hearing about his adventures all over the world. I never consciously thought that I wanted to have a job like that, but it certainly made an impression.

JI: What role does Jewish culture and/or Judaism play in your life and work?

VB: I’m proud to be a Jew, and that heritage has definitely had an impact on my professional life. Knowing our long and brutal history of oppression helped sharpen my desire to work for social justice, to do what I can to help right, or at least bring attention to, wrongs wherever I find them. I started my career in Jerusalem, covering the First Intifada as a freelancer for both Israeli and Palestinian publications. Later, I wound up working for an Israeli magazine, The Jerusalem Report, first in Eastern Europe covering the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and later as their New York correspondent. I’ve probably written more about Jews and Jewish issues than anything else except sand!

JI: What took you from Vancouver and how did you establish yourself in Los Angeles?

VB: I went to college at the University of California at Berkeley – I really wanted to get to the States, which I thought was a much more exciting place than then-sleepy little Vancouver. From there, I spent years traveling and working all over the world, first as a hitchhiking backpacker, and later as a freelance journalist (there’s often not a lot of difference between the two lifestyles). I spent several years in the Middle East and then Eastern Europe, then came back to the U.S., where I bounced around from New York to San Francisco to Las Vegas (that’s right, I lived in Las Vegas). I was living in San Francisco when I met a delightful young woman living in L.A. I was doing a lot of work in L.A. at the time, writing for the L.A. Times Magazine and other places, so had an excuse to visit her often and, well, 17 years later we’re married, with two kids and a mortgage and the whole package.

JI: In an interview you did with David Simon, you talk about journalism, fiction and film, and Simon comments that no one reads anymore. What are your thoughts on that, on the state of journalism and your decision to write a book?

VB: These are dark days for the business of journalism, of course, with local newspapers dying off en masse and money drying up for those that are left, thanks to the internet. Most of my career has been spent writing for magazines, and a terrifying number of the ones that I’ve written for over the years have disappeared or been reduced to emaciated shadows of their former selves – The Village Voice, Spin, Rolling Stone, US News & World Report, and on and depressingly on.

book cover - The World in a Grain — The World in a Grain can be purchased on Amazon and at other bookstores.

But, contrary to what everyone expected with the advent of the internet and the Twitterization of discourse, people do still read, at length and in numbers. There are plenty of long, deep articles published online that attract hordes of eyeballs – the trick no one has cracked yet is figuring out how to make money off of them. Oddly, the book industry is still doing relatively well; most people still seem to prefer physical, paper books to reading something of that length on a screen. So, moving from magazines into book writing is not only something I’ve always wanted to do – it’s also a tactical move aimed at keeping me solvent. I’m branching into movies and TV for the same reason. If you’re going to survive as a freelance journalist in the 21st century, you’ve got to tell your stories and get paid every which way you can.

JI: Can you describe how the topic of sand first came to you, why it piqued your interest and about the path to the book’s publication?

VB: I’m a full-time freelancer, so I’m always hustling for stories, which involves trawling through a lot of obscure publications. One day in early 2015, I stumbled across a story on a little environmental website from which I learned two things. One, sand is the most-consumed natural resource on earth after air and water; that alone made me sit up and take notice. Two, that there is so much demand for the stuff that we are inflicting tremendous environmental damage all over the world to get it, stripping bare riverbeds and beaches and, in some places, people are even being murdered over sand. Like most people, I had never even thought about sand as a commodity, let alone one so important people might be killed over it.

I thought this all sounded crazy but, with a little research, I found it was true. The violence, I discovered, is by far the worst in India. So, I convinced Wired magazine to send me to India, where I reported a feature on the murderous ‘sand mafias’ that bedevil that country. The piece came out in spring of 2015 and got a great response from readers. I knew by then there was much, much more to the story – a book’s worth, I figured. That summer, I spent a few days alone on a tiny property we own on Gabriola Island pounding out a book proposal. My agent in New York sold it almost right away to the folks at Penguin Random House, and I was off to the races.

JI: How would you describe your level of optimism about the future?

VB: Really depends on the day, or hour. But I’ve got kids growing up in this world, so I don’t have much choice but to hope for the best!

Girls funny, open and smart

Girls Gotta Eat co-hosts Rayna Greenberg, left, and Ashley Hesseltine have created careers they love. (photo from JFL NorthWest)

To say it’s a podcast about dating and relationships doesn’t begin to describe Girls Gotta Eat. Co-creators and co-hosts Rayna Greenberg and Ashley Hesseltine invite their guests to talk about pretty much anything, and pretty much as explicitly as they’d like. Recent topics include creating successful online businesses, avoiding toxic partners, managing depression, the health benefits of masturbation, and having sex with famous people – and that was on just one show.

Girls Gotta Eat celebrates its first anniversary this month, and Greenberg and Hesseltine will be in Vancouver for that milestone. The pair has two soldout performances at JFL NorthWest, which runs Feb. 14-23 (jflnorthwest.com). They were scheduled to do just one show initially, and the demand would have sold out a third, no doubt, and probably even a fourth. On Instagram, Girls Gotta Eat has garnered more than 69,900 followers in less than a year. (By the time you’re reading this article, that number will likely be more than 71,000, as the account gained 300-plus new followers in the space of two days last week.)

In addition to Girls Gotta Eat, Greenberg and Hesseltine each have other ventures on various platforms, including websites, Twitter and Facebook, but Instagram is where their celebrity status is most remarkable. At press time, Greenberg’s One Hungry Jew had more than 350,000 followers on Instagram; Hesseltine’s Bros Being Basic, more than 915,000, and her Fashion Dads, another 186,000. It is no wonder that a good chunk of time on the Girls Gotta Eat podcast is spent promoting advertisers’ products, mainly cosmetics and fashion. These women have worked hard to secure an enviable target market – their 30-something peers who have money to spend.

While Girls Gotta Eat generally focuses on one topic or guest, Greenberg and Hesseltine try to cover a range of topics and have different guests for the live version, as well as make the show an interactive experience for the audience.

“We typically try to have a guest that has already been on the podcast,” Greenberg told the Independent in a recent phone interview from Los Angeles, where she and Hesseltine were performing.

“It’s rare,” she said, “that we go to a new city and invite somebody we’ve never had on the show. Just because our audience is so invested in the show and they love it, it’s so exciting for them to be able to also see another person that was on the show.”

The weekly podcast now averages well over an hour. In its first several months, it was about 45 minutes, the approximate length of a commute to work, said Greenberg.

“As we had more and more guests, the show just became really fun. We want guests to feel like they can cover a range of topics and we don’t want to truncate the show, something that’s great,” she explained. “We don’t want to hold ourselves to 45 minutes if it’s great content, so it’s just gotten a little longer. There was no day where we woke up and said, let’s do an hour-and-a-half. So, it just depends on the guests; some episodes are going to be 45, some are going to be an hour-and-a-half, we’ll see when the guests come in.”

For Greenberg, the podcast was a huge departure from what she had been doing before.

“I’ve worked in restaurants, I went to culinary school and then I really worked in tech startups for a long time,” she said.

The Girls Gotta Eat podcast was Hesseltine’s idea initially.

“She is a comedian herself and she really wanted to do a show about dating and relationships, and wanted to find somebody that would be open and honest about their own lives and also could be funny,” said Greenberg. “She and I met on a press trip because we both have very large Instagram influencer accounts, and we just really hit it off. We had a great time with each other, we became friends over the course of a few months, and then she asked me if I’d be interested in doing this.”

As soon as the idea came up, said Greenberg, “I decided, and she decided with me, that it wasn’t going to be a hobby or a side project, this could be what we do. So, we focused on it as a business: we built a website, we had professional photos taken, we devised a way to market this. From Day 1, there was definitely a strategy of let’s make this a business, let’s expand it.”

Greenberg had already monetized her food blog, One Hungry Jew, by doing ads for brands. “For example, a company like American Express will come to me if they’re looking to attract a younger audience that has money and they’ll say, OK, we want to create a campaign that is designed to encourage people to use our AmEx Travel and they’ll give me an idea of what they’re looking for and, obviously, a budget, a price, and it can be something like, hey, we want to encourage people to sign locally, so go to a restaurant, take a photo of yourself at the restaurant, write a caption, and they pay me for something like that. It’s clearly an ad, it says ad. That’s how, personally, I make money through social media.”

One Hungry Jew started “as a silly hobby,” said Greenberg. “I would never purposely have named a business One Hungry Jew…. I’ve always enjoyed food, I’d always worked in food, and I was in the tech startup world and I didn’t have much of a creative outlet, so I started taking photos of food with my cellphone. It’s something I always spent money on anyways, it’s what I enjoyed, and I just put them on Instagram because I wanted somewhere to put the photos. It’s just as simple as that.

“There weren’t a lot of food blogs back then…. I was one of the earlier people that started posting continuously. I had really good content, and it was really ‘right place, right time.’ It was certainly a time in the world where marketing and PR were shifting heavily to social media…. And I started getting invited to all these places for free, for a free meal in exchange for a photo.”

Working at Amazon at the time, Greenberg said she was splitting her focus between her job and the social media account. “I was obviously doing a bad job of both of them and I had to make a decision, so I chose. I left my job two-and-a-half years ago to pursue this full time and I worked really hard. I reached out to every single PR and advertising agency in the United States. I introduced myself, I said this is what I do, this is what makes me unique, I’d love to find time to meet. So, just like the podcast, I tried to make it into a business as opposed to a silly hobby.”

While not religious, Greenberg said, “I am exactly who I am because I was brought up in a Jewish family, I was brought up in a big Jewish community. A lot of my social activities as a child revolved around that, so I had a really nice upbringing because I was brought up in this Jewish community.”

Though her parents divorced when she was 4 years old, she said, “I have an incredibly supportive family from both sides.”

She could always talk about sex with her parents, and said her mom is a psychologist, so “we’ve always explored my feelings.”

“My mom bought me a book about puberty when I was like 11,” said Greenberg. “She wanted me to understand my body and what was happening.”

Nonetheless, she admitted to being a little nervous when she and Hesseltine started the podcast, as the pair does talk openly about their sex lives.

“It was a real struggle and a real choice that I wrestled with, how much do I talk about myself and how open am I going to be? And we both, Ashley and I, made the decision that, if we’re going to put ourselves in a public light, then we have to be honest and open about things in our life, and we both really are. And I think that’s what makes our show really good, is that people really feel like they know us, they really feel like they understand our pitfalls and our successes.”

Over the course of the year, Greenberg and Hesseltine have interviewed a wide variety of people. “We’ve had the founder of Hinge, which is a dating app, on the show; we’ve had a sex therapist; we’ve had a psychotherapist; we’ve had matchmakers; we’ve had comedians, actors and artists and all these different people. And everybody brings such a different, unique view of their own life and other people’s lives, and I feel so lucky to have amassed this huge knowledge of dating and what other people go through,” said Greenberg.

The podcast, she said, has “helped me be more calm and not so emotional, not take everything personally all the time. It’s helped me to realize that people are people and they make mistakes…. And I think that lots of people are looking for love and, just because you’re not the person they fall in love with, it’s not insulting, it’s not personal.

“It’s helped me to relax a little bit and be happy with my own life and realize that I should do other things besides focus on dating, which is funny because I do a show about dating. But, the advice I always give girls is focus on your job, focus on hobbies and friends and family and all these other things that bring so much joy your life, and that can be really fulfilling. And love will come and dating will come. And, if you’re a more whole person, it allows you to let in love in a really beautiful way.”

From Hitler’s library

Library and Archives Canada recently acquired this 1944 book previously owned by Adolf Hitler. (photo from Library and Archives Canada)

Library and Archives Canada recently acquired a rare 1944 book previously owned by Adolf Hitler. The 137-page German-language report Statistik, Presse und Organisationen des Judentums in den Vereinigten Staaten und Kanada (Statistics, Media and Organizations of Jewry in the United States and Canada) was compiled by Heinz Kloss. The data contained within it provides details on population statistics in certain cities, as well as key organizations and presses of Canadian and American Jewish communities. The bookplate bears a stylized eagle, swastika, and the words “Ex Libris Adolf Hitler,” indicating it came from Hitler’s personal library.

Kloss, who visited the United States in 1936-1937, was a noted German linguist whose specializations included German speakers living in the United States. He was the head of the Publikationsstelle Stuttgart-Hamburg, which dealt with research on nationality issues, particularly in the United States, and this book was part of a confidential series and for official use only.

The work hints at the story of what might have happened in Canada had the Allies lost the Second World War. It also demonstrates that the Holocaust was not a purely European event, but rather an operation that was stopped before it reached North America. The book adds many insights worthy of reflection for Canada about the Second World War, and is an important tool to fight Holocaust denial.

“It is fundamental for a national institution like Library and Archives Canada – and other memory institutions around the world – to acquire, preserve and make available documents no matter how controversial or contentious they could be,” said Guy Berthiaume, librarian and archivist of Canada. “It allows us to educate and to advocate for the most complete historical record possible. The truth of history is woven from many sources, and it is only when history is presented in its entirety that it can support the free exchange of ideas that lies at the heart of a democratic society.”

This book by Kloss was likely brought to the United States as a war souvenir, as thousands were taken by American soldiers from the Nazi leader’s alpine retreat outside Berchtesgaden in the spring of 1945. The library acquired it from a reputable Judaica dealer who had obtained it as part of a collection owned by a Holocaust survivor, and it will be preserved in the Jacob M. Lowy Collection, where other important items related to Holocaust remembrance reside.

The acquisition of this book highlights the library’s mandate to acquire material that reflects the published record of Canada, as well as to preserve the memory of the Holocaust. It is also a way to let us reflect on what would have happened in Canada had the Second World War ended differently.

“This invaluable report offers a documented confirmation of the fears felt so acutely and expressed by so many Canadian Jews during the Second World War: that the Nazis would land on our shores and, with them, the annihilation of Jewish life here,” said Prof. Rebecca Margolis, department of modern languages and literatures and Vered Jewish Canadian Studies Program, University of Ottawa, and president, Association for Canadian Jewish Studies. “While these fears may seem unfounded given the geographic distance of Nazi Europe to Canada, this handbook offering detailed statistics of Jewish populations across North America underlines their nightmarish potential.”

Saved by Dutch Resistance

Janet Wees at a book signing for her novel When We Were Shadows, which she’ll be bringing to the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival on Feb. 10. (photo by Jack Cohen)

Ze’ev Bar was 5 years old in 1937, when his family fled Germany to the Netherlands, where they lived in safety for a few years. But, in 1940, as the Nazis extended their hold on Europe, the family had to go into hiding, managing to survive the Holocaust with the help of members of the Dutch Resistance.

Calgary-based educator and writer Janet Wees tells Bar’s story of survival in the book When We Were Shadows. She will present the novel for younger readers (ages 9-13) on Feb. 10, 10 a.m., at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver as part of the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, which runs Feb. 9-14. Wees and five other authors – Leo Burstyn, Miriam Clavir, Arnold Grossman, David Kirkpatrick and Helen Wilkes – will briefly introduce their works at the event A Literary Quickie.

“My reasons for writing this book were twofold,” Wees told the Independent. “One, to help relieve Ze’ev from having to repeat his story over and over to schoolchildren because it was so upsetting for him, yet he felt it needed to be told so they would know what happened during the Second World War in their country. Hopefully, having had the book translated into Dutch in Holland, that might be happening. I have had letters from mothers of children who are reading the book in Dutch for book reports.

“My other reason was to expose North American children to the plight of children during war, to the bravery of the people who helped save lives at risks to their own.”

Among the real-life members of the resistance featured in the novel are Opa Bakker, Tante Cor, and Edouard and Jacoba von Baumhauer, all of whom have been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. Wees said, “I made a promise to von Baumhauer’s son that I would honour the people who risked their lives helping to build the Hidden Village [near Vierhouten] and hide, assist and feed the people who were fleeing the Nazis.”

Wees visited the memorial site of the Hidden Village in 2005, and again in 2007. She interviewed Bar in Amsterdam in 2008.

“We spent three to four days in his dining room, talking, crying, laughing; I taped and wrote,” she said. “Once home, I poured it all out on computer and began to sort and edit and change, and watched it take shape. Of course, life interfered, and sometimes it was so intense, hearing his wavering voice on tape, that I would have to take a break. By 2011, it felt ready for an editor. After that, I submitted it, naively giving myself 12 rejections – apparently J.K. Rowling had 12 rejections before Harry Potter was accepted – before I reconsidered my direction.”

A change in direction did occur. In 2014, Wees was accepted into a mentorship program and, with that guidance, realized that the novel “needed a boy’s voice and an empathetic setting, where children could identify with the protagonist.”

Over some four months, Wees said, “I essentially rewrote the book using a different format and incorporating a boy’s voice. At the end, there was a reading and the book was so enthusiastically received that I knew I was on the right track.

“It felt like I had kind of lost perspective, as I was so close to the story and, even though I would have times of ‘Wow! Did I write that?’ seeing it through others’ eyes really gave me a boost. I began submitting again and, this time, the 11th publisher contacted was the one!”

The book was accepted by Second Story Press in 2017.

“I always wanted Second Story Press to be my publisher because of their Holocaust Remembrance Series for Young Readers. I read other books in that series and felt this was a good fit,” said Wees.

While When We Were Shadows is Wees’ first book, she has published articles in educational journals and in news magazines. In addition to other literary projects, she has written drafts for two children’s books, she said, “based on something I did growing up in Saskatchewan, and one based on my pen pal’s granddaughter’s activity with her Oma in Holland.”

The 60-something Wees first started writing her pen pal when she was 12 years old.

“My pen pal Henk had to find a pen pal in an English-speaking country for his English class in school. He put an ad for a pen pal in the Regina Leader-Post and I saw it and responded,” she explained. “He told me, on my first visit, as we were looking over all my letters he’d saved, that my letter was the funniest so he chose me as his pen pal.

“We wrote constantly but lost contact for a few years during which we both got married and started families. I reconnected, in 1972 or thereabouts, and, knowing how families in Europe usually stay in their family homes, I wrote to the old address. Lo and behold! There they were! After that, it was letters with Henk’s wife because she was better at that point with written English, but we telephoned and, upon the onset of computers, we emailed and then FaceTimed.

“I went to visit them for the first time in 1991, and have been back 10 times since…. On one of the trips where I stayed one month on the island (Terschelling), Hennie (Henk’s nickname) and Loes took me to see the memorial site of the Hidden Village and the urge to learn more about this site was palpable.

“Two years later,” said Wees, “we went again, and I sat for longer in the replica huts and tried to imagine what went on. It smelled like our dirt basement in Togo, Sask., and just thinking about living in that basement for 18 months gave me a bit of an idea of the sense of being confined; the smells, the dark, the cold. And I decided that I had to write a book, if not for my former students who were now in university, for their children. Sadly, Hennie passed away this past April without seeing the published book, but I used his name (with his permission) for one of my characters, so he lives on through the book. If not for him, this book may never have existed.”

In their first discussions about the novel, Wees said she and Bar had “talked about making it an ‘adventure’ of a boy during wartime.” The original title was Boy of the Forest. “But,” she said, “as I was writing, I realized this was not an ‘adventure’ as we perceive adventure, and he concurred, so I changed my title to Whatever It Takes. My publisher chose the final title, When We Were Shadows, and I love it because it personifies the whole concept of living in the shadows – unseen, and unable to see.”

In revising the original manuscript to be from a young boy’s perspective, she said her focus was on “the emotional being of Walter [Ze’ev changed his name as an adult] and how he perceived what was happening, being sheltered and wanting desperately to know and to do something, and about the selflessness of others. I wanted it to be about the people in his world, what was happening inside his head and heart, more than what was happening outside.”

Wees said the character of Walter took over “and his voice flowed through so eloquently and so quickly that there were many days I never budged from my computer for hours, missing lunch and working until dark. I ‘heard’ him in my head. I could ‘see’ what was happening. Until I actually was writing, I always thought that was bunk when I heard other authors say that their characters take them on their own journey. But now I know it happens.

“I also discovered that what I’d taught my students about editing, I had to follow as well, so I did most of my editing by reading the book aloud. I found errors that way in facts, such as tents not having zippers in the 1940s but pegs instead. I was able to find correct weather for dates in the letters by searching online.”

This diligence no doubt contributed to When We Were Shadows being nominated for the Forest of Reading Red Maple non-fiction award of the Ontario Library Association, which describes the award program’s aim as getting young readers (ages 12 to 13) to engage “in conversation around the books and … to use critical thinking while reading.” The awards will be presented in May.

In the writing of When We Were Shadows, Wees said, “I have become friends with von Baumhauer’s grandson and wife. While writing this book, I also found out that my grandmother lost sisters-in-law to the death camps and her brother was killed on the Russian front. Until then, I had no idea how our family was affected by the Holocaust, as I was unaware of family still living overseas. I am now in touch with the great-granddaughter of one of those women.”

For the full book festival schedule and tickets, visit jewishbookfestival.ca.

Friendship interrupted

The Princess Dolls by Ellen Schwartz, with illustrations by Mariko Ando, takes place in Vancouver in 1942. Esther and Michiko are best friends. They dream that one day they will be princesses together; in games, Esther is Princess Elizabeth and Michi is Princess Margaret. When they spy dolls fashioned after the real-life princesses in the toy store window, the girls dare to hope that they’ll each get their favourite for their birthday, something else they shared, both having been born on the same day.

However, when Esther gets her royal doll as a gift, but Michi doesn’t, the girls’ friendship is strained. Before they have a chance to patch it up, Michi and her family – ultimately along with more than 21,000 other Japanese-Canadians – are forced to leave the West Coast, losing their home, business and possessions. Michi ends up in Kaslo, B.C.

A story thread throughout The Princess Dolls is Esther’s family’s worry over family members in Europe, as the Nazis round up Jews and send them to transit camps, about which Esther’s parents and grandmother know little.

The Princess Dolls is kind of a companion novel to Schwartz’s Heart of a Champion, in which 10-year-old Kenny Sakamoto dreams of being as good at baseball as his older brother, who is the Asahi team’s star player. Also set in Vancouver in 1942, the Sakamoto family’s neighbours and good friends, the Bernsteins, are Jewish. As she told the Independent when that book was released, “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,” said 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.” (See jewishindependent.ca/uniquely-b-c-baseball-story.)

Schwartz will talk about The Princess Dolls on Feb. 10, 11 a.m., at Richmond Public Library, as well as at Vancouver Talmud Torah later that week as part of the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival. For the festival schedule and tickets, visit jewishbookfestival.ca.

Kindler in JFL’s lineup

Andy Kindler (photo ©Maljan)

Actor, writer and comedian Andy Kindler is one of several Jewish community members on the Just for Laughs NorthWest roster for Vancouver. He’ll host The Alternative Show at Yuk Yuk’s Feb. 21-23.

Kindler spoke with the Independent from Montreal, while on a shoot for the dark comedy feature film The Fiddling Horse, in which he co-stars as Barry Bitterman.

“I’m a bitter ex-jockey and it’s perfect for me,” said Kindler. “I’m five, five-and-a-half, so I almost look like an ex-jockey, I’m not too tall, and it’s just fun.”

Kindler has a ton of acting credits, including Bob’s Burgers, I’m Dying Up Here and Portlandia, as well as Everybody Loves Raymond, Maron and But I’m Chris Jericho! But standup came first, he said, “although I did acting in college and in summer camp – I played Elwood P. Dowd, the lead in Harvey, when I was 12. But, any acting that was filmed to be seen by others, that happened after standup. Standup, if you’re doing it right, is a good rehearsal for acting; it is just being yourself.”

Before standup, Kindler was a musician. It was his pursuit of a music career that took him to Los Angeles “many, many, many years ago,” but he “couldn’t make a living.”

“I was in my 20s,” he said. “I was very insecure, I kind of hated myself, like many kids that age, unless you have a tremendous amount of confidence. So, I just happened to stumble into standup comedy. A friend of mine – we were working at the same stereo store together – he said, you’re funny, let’s try it, so I actually was in a duo for a couple years and that was really a good way to start.”

Kindler played guitar. “I played classical violin when I was a kid, but I didn’t play very well … and I still took it for another 12 years, even hating it, because I had issues…. I started playing guitar in high school, which was the greatest. When I grew up, people wanted to be the Beatles. We didn’t want to be necessarily [comedian] Shecky Greene. Now I want to be Shecky Greene but, back then, all my heroes were musicians, except for Richard Pryor. But, I didn’t know much about comedy.”

While he learned to do comedy in Los Angeles, he said he wouldn’t recommend that people follow his example, “because it’s kind of a frightening thing. But I lived in L.A., so the only way I wouldn’t have been able to not start in L.A., I would have had to have moved out of town.

“I put my name in the hat, did all the open mic things, and that’s how I started and it just, I don’t want to say, took off, but I’ve been making a living since ’87.”

Despite his long career, Kindler has spoken in interviews about only recently becoming comfortable with doing standup.

“A lot of people, they see comedians and they say, how can you do it? Well, when you start comedy – unless you’re a person who really has no fear – you’re scared for a long time because you can be funny off-stage, but you still can’t do it under pressure or it’s not necessarily that you can produce it at anytime. That’s where the technique comes in,” he explained. “The technique basically for standup comes from doing it over and over and over again, until you either hate it or it becomes something you love. So, I felt like, after 10 years, oh, I’m really good at this but I wasn’t…. There are still nights I don’t feel comfortable, but it gets better.”

Kindler faces challenges that most comedians don’t: he has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder. When he was younger and just starting out, he said, “At that time, you didn’t hear a lot about OCD and so I thought I was losing my mind, because I never got help until a couple of years ago for it…. And when I was first starting comedy, it was like a whole year where I would say to myself onstage, I am holding the mic in my right hand, I am gesturing to the crowd with my left hand, I am walking two steps – I couldn’t get out of my head and I didn’t even know I was officially OCD.”

While knowing that he has OCD and ADHD hasn’t changed his act, which he describes as “so stream of consciousness,” it has helped him in other ways. “I feel better about myself now,” he said. “I’m more calm.” And he has learned ways of coping, he said, recommending the book Delivered from Distraction. “I don’t make any money on the sales of the book,” he said, “but they give you tools for dealing with OCD.”

Kindler has been to Vancouver often, including with JFL’s The Alternative Show.

“The Alternative Show started in Montreal at that festival,” explained Kindler, “and it started in the late ’90s when you actually needed to have a show called The Alternative Show. A lot of people probably don’t remember there was a big comedy boom, comedy got very generic and everybody was like, what’s the deal with this thing? It started to be very homogenized and so there was kind of a movement in L.A. and New York in the mid to late ’90s, or even earlier, for the core of alternative comedy. And now, the good news is, that comedy is better than it ever was, everybody is doing interesting things. So, I don’t really need to have a show because almost the whole festival you could call alternative, but one thing I do like to do is have people working on new stuff and hopefully taking chances, so it’s not like them doing their honed five minutes.”

Generally, Kindler brings five or six comedians onstage during the night. “It’s usually a combination of two things: other people in the festival and local people,” he said.

Kindler has been coming up to Canada in one form or another since the late 1980s. He worked Yuk Yuk’s in the west, he said. “So, I know a lot of the comedians and the comedians in Canada are hilarious. I think Canada has the best comedians per capita in the world. What I’m doing in my act, which is commenting culture, all Canadians do that naturally because you’re next to American culture, but you can comment on it and feel separate from it.”

Being Jewish is a large part of Kindler’s routine. While he sometimes thinks that, in his act, he’ll just do a few Jewish jokes and move on to other material, he said, “I just can’t stop it because I feel so Jewish. It’s so much a part of me. I used to make a joke about how Jewish people are funny even when they’re not trying to be funny. Like, when the Whitney Houston song ‘How Will I Know?’ came out, I was with this Jewish friend of mine, and she’s singing, ‘How will I know?’ and my friend yells at the radio, ‘You’ll know, Whitney, you’ll know. Believe me, you’ll know.’

“And this is just how all Jews are, even when they’re not trying to be funny. So, I feel very, very Jewish, but it also could be a member of any oppressed group that responds to being oppressed with humour and self-deprecation. I love to make fun of the fact that I’m Jewish.”

While he doesn’t have any topics that he won’t talk about in his act, Kindler does shy away from certain words and thinks about whether his material is unnecessarily offensive.

“I get very angry when comics say they never apologize, because everybody makes mistakes,” he said, giving the example of having used, early in his career, a joke that referenced the Holocaust. Two audience members approached him afterward, upset because they felt he was “gratuitously making fun of the Holocaust, and I decided that I wasn’t in that particular case, but also decided it’s important for comics to think about what they’re saying because, when you’re onstage, you can say something in the moment and then you have the right to not want to say it later. There’s no specific red lines, but I do think about why I’m doing the joke and whether it’s worth doing it and who’s the subject of the joke.”

Kindler said being a comic is a “kind of a miracle, or a magic thing” and “like a dream come true because I really, really, really love standup and a lot of people get sick of it after awhile. I just haven’t. That doesn’t mean I don’t get sick of it temporarily, but it’s still the thing I most love doing, it’s the thing I feel most natural about doing and it’s just I feel it is a dream come true.”

The Alternative Show is at Yuk Yuk’s Feb. 21, 10 p.m.; and Feb. 22 and 23, 11 p.m. For tickets and the full JFL NorthWest lineup, visit jflnorthwest.com.

Community show at Zack

“Open Doors” by Marcie Levitt-Cooper. (photo by Daniel Wajsman)

The group show Community Longing and Belonging, which opened Jan. 15 at the Zack Gallery, marks Jewish Disability Awareness and Inclusion Month (JDAIM).

“I heard about community art shows in celebration of JDAIM in other communities,” said Leamore Cohen, inclusion services coordinator at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, who was the driving force behind the local exhibit.

“I thought an unjuried exhibit would be a fabulous way to honour our community-wide commitment to remove barriers, to celebrate our community members’ creative capacities,” she said.

The main idea was to open up participation to everyone – professional artists and amateurs, people of different skill levels, abilities, perspectives, faiths and socioeconomic status.

“To make participation truly inclusive,” said Cohen, “we provided each artist with a 12-by-16 wood panel. We have also been taking direction from Kickstart Disability Arts and Culture and its artistic director, Yuri Arajs, as we wanted to ensure that this event is fully accessible.”

The JDAIM inclusion initiative and month of advocacy began throughout North America in 2009, explained Cohen. The idea for the art exhibit started to take form last spring, when Cohen approached Zack Gallery director Linda Lando.

“Linda was really receptive to the idea of the show.… Once I had the green light from her, the support and use of the gallery,” said Cohen, “I began to focus more on the theme.”

The theme of community and inclusion prompted her next steps. She reached out to many different organizations and communities and invited artists from all over the Lower Mainland to participate. The call for submissions went out in late September, and the response was remarkable. Fifty-two artists are included in the show.

“We have artists from Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond, North Vancouver, and even as far out as Cloverdale,” said Cohen. “I’ve had the good fortune to meet all these new and amazingly creative people, welcome them to our community centre, and make new friends along the way. It’s been a joy. It broke my heart that I had to turn many away because of the limited space in the gallery. I have artists who want to sign up for the next year. There is so much excitement and so much more to say on this issue.”

photo - “Embrace” by Evelyn Fichmann — “Embrace” by Evelyn Fichmann. *(photo by Daniel Wajsman)*

To frame this exhibit, Cohen posed two questions, which are being used in its promotional materials: “How do we make meaning of the concept of community, the real and the imagined spaces we inhabit? What does community longing look like and what are the possibilities for belonging in an ever-changing world?”

“This show was a challenge and an invitation to look at social problems creatively and critically,” Cohen told the Independent. “It was also an opportunity for artists living with diverse needs to exhibit their work in a professional venue and to receive exposure.

“I don’t think we are going to resolve the problems of longing and belonging, or longing for belonging, any time soon. I think we’ll always have people who are better situated and people whose social networks are more tenuous. We should just keep having the conversations and build up those connections. We create new platforms and new access points, new opportunities for people to engage and tell their stories, whatever they look like and from whatever lens, whether it be through mental health, sexual identity, ability or socioeconomic status. We all have a story to tell.”

Cohen shared one example of how the show’s theme relates to her own life.

“The ‘longing’ part of the theme resonates with a lot of people,” she said. “It resonates with me as well. It emerges from my own story of disconnection from the Jewish community during my youth and young adulthood. Fortunately, so, too, does the ‘belonging’ part of this show. The JCC is a wonderful place, a place for belonging.”

photo - “Veselye u Selu” by Daniel Malenica — “Veselye u Selu” by Daniel Malenica. (photo by Daniel Wajsman)

The theme allowed for a number of different approaches, and the skill of the various participating artists varies widely, but the utter diversity becomes its main attraction. Although the size and shape of the canvases – the wooden boards provided by the organizers – are universal, the content is anything but, and so is the media. Some pieces are oils, others acrylic; still others, mixed media. There are abstracts and figurative compositions. Some have narratives. Others evoke emotions. Some have Jewish connotations. Others don’t. Some artists participated solo, while others enrolled as a family group.

Marcie Levitt-Cooper represents one such family. Her painting “Open Doors” depicts a colony of colourful birdhouses. Every door of every birdhouse is open, creating a welcoming avian village, a festive metaphor that makes you smile. No birds appear in the image, but you can almost hear them sing. The artist’s three daughters – Rebecca Wosk, Teddie Wosk and Margaux Wosk – also exhibit in the show.

Another family of artists is mother Elizabeth Snigurowicz and son Matthew Tom Wing. “They regularly come to the Jewish Community Centre inclusion services Art Hive drop-in program, a low-barrier, free art program,” said Cohen.

Daniel Malenica doesn’t have a family in the show, but her charming, pastel-toned piece is a jubilation of the artist’s Croatian roots and her LGBTQ+ community. Two girls embrace each other in the painting, both wear Slavic costumes. The title, “Veselye u Selu,” is the English phonetic spelling of a phrase in the artist’s mother tongue, meaning “Celebration at the Village.”

In Evelyn Fichmann’s painting “Embrace,” the artist, a recent immigrant from Brazil, has incorporated words in English and Hebrew. “Encourage,” “include,” “educate,” “respect,” “engage” and “support” surround the image, all fitting descriptors of what we should strive to do in our communities.

Community Longing and Belonging runs until Jan 27.

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

Sharing their stories

Makeda Zook, left, and Sadie Epstein-Fine, editors of Spawning Generations. (photo from Demeter Press)

Sadie Epstein-Fine and Makeda Zook will be in Vancouver for the Jan. 17 launch of Spawning Generations: Rants and Reflections on Growing Up with LGBTQ+ Parents (Demeter Press, 2018), which they co-edited.

“It is really important to us that this book was written and edited by queerspawn. So often our stories are told for and on behalf of us by researchers, journalists and academics,” Epstein-Fine told the Independent. “Our intimate, personal family lives have been under the microscope for our entire lives, proving to the world that we turned out all right. By curating stories from our community, including our own stories, Makeda and I ensured that we were not, as we like to call it, airbrushing our stories, but that we were allowing our contributors to tell the nitty gritty, the details of their stories that they have never been able to tell.”

In the book’s introduction, Epstein-Fine and Zook explain that the term queerspawn to describe someone who has one or more LGBTQ+ parents was coined by Stefan Lynch, the first director of COLAGE, an American “network dedicated to connecting and supporting queerspawn,” which has one chapter in Canada (in Toronto).

“By giving a name to our identities and experiences, he laid the foundation for connecting and politicizing queerspawn; Lynch gave us a term to organize around,” they write, acknowledging that the term “is not without controversy. Although some people feel empowered by reclaiming both words (‘queer’ and ‘spawn’), others do not like the association with ‘spawn of the devil.’” Another term, “gayby,” also has its proponents and its critics, those who “find it infantilizing and only representative of people whose parents identify as gay,” note Epstein-Fine and Zook.

Ultimately, the editors chose to use queerspawn for the anthology because it is “unapologetic and bold.” As well, it is “the word most often used in Canada and the United States and, as such, it helps us find each other; it is a common word we can rally around. We often feel highly visible in straight communities and invisible in queer ones. The term ‘queerspawn’ creates a space for us, and helps us to feel strength in numbers and a sense of belonging at times when we feel all too visible. When we feel invisible, naming ourselves as queerspawn tells the queer community that we are still here, even if we have grown up.”

Epstein-Fine was born in Toronto in 1992 to two moms, in an activist home, “surrounded by 11 other women.” She carries on her family’s activist tradition and describes herself as a queer(spawn)-political theatre maker.

According to her bio, Zook “was born in Vancouver in 1986 to her two lesbian feminist moms. She was raised in a mixed-race family surrounded by anti-oppression politics and her OWLs (older, wiser lesbians).” She works in sexual health promotion for a feminist nongovernmental organization.

Epstein-Fine shared with the Independent how she and Zook came to be the editors of Spawning Generations.

“Demeter Press approached Makeda and I to edit the anthology because they saw a gap in their literature,” she explained. “They mostly publish books about motherhood, through a feminist lens, and they realized that, while they had a lot of literature about queer parenthood, they didn’t have anything from the children. This is a trend in the majority of queer parenting literature – we hear a lot from the parents, but rarely from the kids raised in queer households.

“Yes, it’s true, Makeda’s and my primary focus is not editing. Previous to editing this anthology we were both writers, which is how we got connected to this book. Our (queerspawn) community is small and disparate, there is not a plethora of options available. When Demeter first approached me with this project, I tried to think of folks who could do this project, and there was no obvious answer.

“Makeda and I learned to be editors in trial by fire,” she admitted. “We always say that we didn’t just grow alongside this project, but that this project grew us. After three years of working on this project, we now feel confident in our editing skills, which we didn’t feel previously.”

And the pair has done a commendable job in keeping the essays on point. The editing is such that each contributor maintains their own voice, which adds to the book’s readability and interest. Contributors range in age, from 9 years old, to teenagers, to 20-somethings and older queerspawn. And the writers come from all over the world, from as far away as London, England, and as close as Victoria; one was born in Vancouver but seems not to live here anymore. While all the contributors have being the child of one or more LGBTQ+ parents in common and have shared some similar experiences, each story is unique.

“There was a call for writers, which we spread as far as we could,” Epstein-Fine explained about how the essays for the anthology were chosen. She said they asked COLAGE and several organizations and people they know in Canada to publicize the call, which went out in the winter of 2015, with a due date of May 1 that year.

“We received 25 submissions and we took every single one,” she said. “We thought that each person had an interesting story to tell and we were committed to helping them tell their story the way they wanted it to be told. We initially thought that we wanted to be more selective and, if we had received more submissions, we would have been forced to be. However, the wonderful result of us taking everyone is that our book is not just filled with works from professional writers, but we have contributors with a range of experiences – from people who have never written a personal essay to professional writers. It gives a real scope of our community.”

The Spawning Generations book launch takes place Jan. 17, 7 p.m., at Massy Books, 229 East Georgia St., in Vancouver. For more information, visit facebook.com/spawninggenerations.

A Nazi who saved Jews

One of the apartment buildings at the HKP complex. (photo from Richard Freund)

Nearly three-quarters of a century after the Shoah ended, we are still learning about aspects of what happened. For example, the documentary The Good Nazi tells the little-known story of a Nazi from Vilna who tried to rescue more than 1,200 Jews. It airs on VisionTV Jan. 21, and again April 29.

In 2005, Dr. Michael Good sought out Prof. Richard Freund of the University of Hartford to tell him about Maj. Karl Plagge, a Nazi who oversaw a military vehicle repair complex that was used as cover for 1,257 Jews in Vilnius (Vilna). Good described how his father, mother and grandfather were saved within this complex, and later wrote about it at length in his 2006 book The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews (Fordham University Press).

While interesting to Freund, who works within a department known for its Holocaust studies, nothing further came of that meeting. That is, until 2015.

By then, Freund had directed six archeological projects in Israel and three in Europe on behalf of the university, including research at the extermination camp at Sobibor, Poland. In 2015, he was in Lithuania doing research on a Holocaust-era escape tunnel, adjacent to the Great Synagogue of Vilna. He and his team had brought with them specialized equipment that enabled non-invasive examination of the ground and walls, and they offered it to anyone wanting to do such research. The Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum came calling, and brought Freund to a site on the outskirts of Vilna, where he was told about Plagge.

photo - Nazi Maj. Karl Plagge oversaw a military vehicle repair complex that he used to try and save 1,257 Jews in Vilnius — Nazi Maj. Karl Plagge oversaw a military vehicle repair complex that he used to try and save 1,257 Jews in Vilnius. *(photo from Richard Freund)*

Of that moment, Freund told the Independent, “I’m sitting there and I say, ‘Karl Plagge? I know that name!’”

Freund connected with survivor Sidney Handler, who was 10 years old when he hid from the Nazis in the work camp. After the Nazis left in July 1944, Handler was forced to move dead bodies, and could point out decades later where 400 Jews were buried.

“We could have gone through the entire 20 acres and not located exactly where that was,” said Freund.

Using scanners, thermal cameras, radar and other methods, Freund’s team discovered and recorded the various hiding places, also called malinas. Under Plagge’s plan, Jews had built malinas in building crevices, behind the walls, to keep out of sight when Nazis came to “liquidate” the complex.

The garage (repair shop) was dubbed HKP. It was on Subocz Street and is likely the only Holocaust-related labour camp left completely intact. Until recently, people had been living in the two six-floor buildings, which comprised 216 apartments.

Freund reached out to filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici, telling him how important it was to document the site, the story, and reveal it to the world. Things were made all the more pressing when Freund and Jacobovici discovered that developers were going to demolish the site. Fortunately, before this happened, Jacobovici took a film and photographic crew to HKP, in January 2018.

The Turning of Plagge

In 1941, Karl Plagge was placed in command of the HKP 562, a unit responsible for repairs of military vehicles damaged on the eastern front. Plagge experienced something of a pang of conscience – he hadn’t signed on to genocide. He made the decision to leverage his position and use Jews as “slave labour” for HKP, pleading the case to his superiors that, if Jews didn’t work there, there would be no one to fix the vehicles.

Virtually none of the 1,200 Jews was knowledgeable in fixing cars; they were accountants, lawyers, hairdressers, academics, cooks and others. They all learned various HKP tasks on the job, and Plagge somehow convinced the Nazi SS that every single one of them was necessary for HKP.

Even though the entire charade was met with a barely tolerated wink and nod by Nazi brass, Plagge had a deep (and correct) hunch that their patience would eventually wear thin.

Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, announced, in the summer of 1943, that he wanted every Jew in Eastern Europe eliminated, irrespective of whether they were contributing to the war effort in a work camp. So, with Plagge’s approval, his workers carved out malinas in the walls of the buildings and in attic rafters.

As the Soviet Red Army approached the outer edge of Vilnius in June 1944, it was a sign that the Allies were nearing victory. In this context, on July 1, 1944, Plagge made an impromptu announcement in front of an SS commander and the Jewish workers, who gathered to listen. He explained that his unit was being transferred westbound and, though he requested his labourers be allowed to join, his superiors wouldn’t permit it. All of this was code for the Jewish prisoners to take cover. Roughly half of the workers – some 500 of them – hid away in malinas or ran from the camp, while others decided to stay.

photo - A monument placed recently at the complex to honour Karl Plagge and memorialize the Jews who were killed at HKP — A monument placed recently at the complex to honour Karl Plagge and memorialize the Jews who were killed at HKP. *(photo from Richard Freund)*

When Nazi troops took over the camp two days later, 500 Jewish workers appeared for roll call, and were killed. It took the Nazis three more days to comb the camp and the surrounding area for any survivors, eventually finding roughly 200 Jews, all of whom were shot.

When the Soviets finally took over Vilnius later that week, approximately 250 of HKP’s Jews in hiding emerged.

When the war was over, Plagge returned home to Darmstadt, Germany, where, for the next two years he lived quietly, until he was brought to court as a former Nazi. Somehow, word traveled to a displaced persons camp in Stuttgart, a three-hour drive away, where many survivors of HKP had ended up. In Plagge’s defence, the survivors sent a representative to testify to the court in the hopes the charges would be overturned.

The testimony resulted in a favourable judgment, and Plagge received the status of an exonerated person. In 2005, after evidence and survivor testimony, Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Centre posthumously bestowed the title Righteous Among the Nations on Plagge.

The Good Nazi was produced in Canada for VisionTV by Toronto-based Associated Producers. Jacobovici was writer and executive producer, Moses Znaimer executive producer, Bienstock producer and co-director, Yaron Niski co-director and Felix Golubev line producer/executive producer.

Dave Gordon is a Toronto-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in more than 100 publications around the world.

How RGB got her start in law

Marty Ginsburg (Armie Hammer) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones) arrive at court in On the Basis of Sex. (photo from Focus Features)

A news flash for members of the tribe who’ve been kvelling over a Jewish woman on the U.S. Supreme Court for fully a quarter of a century: Ruth Bader Ginsburg long ago matriculated beyond a symbol of ethnic achievement.

Last year’s hit documentary, RBG, noted that Justice Ginsburg is an enormously popular role model for women in their teens and 20s, and she has achieved pop culture celebrity to boot. The latest film – released recently in Canada and, as of press time, still playing in Metro Vancouver – is On the Basis of Sex, which applies the Hollywood treatment to Ginsburg’s beginnings as a smart but struggling lawyer and situates her smack in the mainstream. To coin a Lincolnesque testimonial, now she belongs to the masses.

Director Mimi Leder and screenwriter Daniel Stiepleman (who happens to be Ruth and Marty Ginsburg’s nephew) frame On the Basis of Sex as an underdog saga. And, like a lot of underdogs in Hollywood movies, our heroine has a superpower that she only discovers – and masters – on her journey.

The movie is effective, and ultimately inspiring, in a way that doesn’t remotely challenge viewers other than to ask them to follow clever legal strategies.

The film opens with Ginsburg’s first days at Harvard Law School, where her husband Marty is in his second year. Immediately and repeatedly, she (and the viewer) is reminded of her second-class status as a woman in a man’s world.

It takes awhile to reconcile the confident Justice Ginsburg of public record with the somewhat skittish character that British actress Felicity Jones creates. On the one hand, as a wife and a mother who – like every other aspiring woman professional of the time – never wears pants, Ginsburg is plainly a grownup. But she’s patronized by everyone from the law school’s WASPy dean (a villainous Sam Waterston) to her husband (a stalwart Armie Hammer), and she risks being seen as a rabble-rouser (it’s the late 1950s) simply by standing up for herself.

Although the film does not conceal or finesse the Ginsburgs’ Jewishness, it presents casual misogyny and the entrenched old boys’ network, not antisemitism, as the obstacles Ruth needs to navigate. Consequently, she has to devise ways – both direct and elliptical – to raise the consciousness of every ally, including her devoted husband, before she can even challenge potential adversaries. While Marty certainly recognizes his wife’s brilliance, he’s a product of his upbringing and the times.

On the Basis of Sex or, as it’s referred to at your favourite corned beef dispensary, “RBG: The Early Years,” devotes considerable screen time to the couple’s relationship and, for many viewers, that will serve as the emotional heart of the film. Others will derive more pleasure from Ginsburg finding her footing and her voice as a scholarly attorney.

As Stiepleman noted in an interview during a recent visit to San Francisco, “Coming out of law school, [Ginsburg] had three strikes against her: she was a woman, she was a mother and she was a Jew. Any one of those things alone, law firms had taken the risk. It was the three together that made her unhire-able in their eyes.”

Unable to find a job practising law, she takes a teaching position. Through a combination of determination, persistence and luck, she comes across a unique case that addresses the inequities of gender discrimination. The complainant, who looked after his mother but was denied the tax deduction for caregivers, is a man.

Earlier in the film, there’s a crucial chain of events when her husband is diagnosed with cancer. Ginsburg not only took care of him (and their small daughter), but got them both through law school. That experience as a caregiver gives her both the empathy and the understanding to identify with and persuade her would-be client, as well as to research and argue the case.

The lengthy courtroom scene that comprises the film’s last 20 minutes or so is genuinely effective and even emotional, despite the formulaic staging and the fact that we know Ginsburg will prevail. At the pivotal moment, we witness a character coming into her own, grasping her abilities and realizing her destiny. And with that, the underdog becomes a superhero.

On the Basis of Sex is rated PG-13 for some language and suggestive content.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.