Alice Shalvi, an Israeli professor and
educator, has played a leading role in progressive Jewish education for girls
and advancing the status of women in Israel. Her autobiography, Never a
Native (Halban Publishers, 2018), reads almost as a personal diary.
Otherwise, how could this 92-year-old recall the most minute details of her
life?
The youngest of two children, Shalvi was born
in Essen, Germany, to Benzion and Perl Margulies, religious Zionists who owned
a wholesale linen and housewares business. In 1933, soon after Hitler’s rise to
power in Germany, their home was searched, prompting her father’s move to
London, England. The rest of the family followed in May 1934.
In London, Shalvi’s father and brother imported
watches and jewelry. When the Blitz began, they temporarily moved to Aylesbury,
50 kilometres north of London.
In 1944, Shalvi studied English literature at
Cambridge University. In 1946, she was sent to the Zionist Congress in Basel as
a representative of British Jewish students and, in 1949, after completing a
degree in social work at the London School of Economics, she immigrated to
Israel, settling in Jerusalem. She became a faculty member in the English
department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and she earned her PhD there
in 1962.
In May 1950, Shalvi met Moshe Shelkowitz
(changed later to Shalvi), a recent immigrant from New York, whom she married
in October of that year. They had six children between 1952 and 1967; Moshe Shalvi
died in 2013.
The 25th issue of Nashim: A Journal of
Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues (fall 2003) was dedicated to Alice
Shalvi, “who made the dream of a journal devoted to Jewish women’s and gender
studies possible.” When the concept of Nashim was first presented to
her, the special issue notes that Shalvi greeted it not only with enthusiasm
but as an idea whose time had finally come – she and her friends, pioneers of
second-wave Jewish feminism, had raised it long before. “Subsequently, as rector
of the Schechter Institute (1997-2001), [Shalvi] added her voice to the
approval process for the issue’s first publication. She has remained on Nashim’s
editorial board ever since, contributing her wise and warm guidance on issues
of editorial and academic policy and herself serving as consulting editor for
our issue on Women, War and Peace.”
In an interview by Elana Maryules Sztokman for
the Lookstein Centre at Bar-Ilan University some years ago – after Shalvi had
been awarded the 2007 Israel Prize for life achievement – Shalvi commented: “I
felt that, through the work we had done on behalf of women, an enormous change
had occurred in the status of women, in the self-image of women, in the
self-assurance of women and, most importantly – because that’s what the prize
recognized – in the awareness of the importance and centrality of the subject
of the status of women in society at large.”
Shalvi spoke about the Pelech School for Girls
and the Israel Women’s Network. “The school has created a generation of young
modern Orthodox women who are changing that entire social system within modern
orthodoxy,” she said. “The other thing I’m proud of is the years at the
network, which saw the largest number of legislative changes and reforms in
women’s status because what I call the ‘alumnae’ of the network were so
prominent in the Knesset.”
In her autobiography, Shalvi emphasizes “that
it’s all about the home,” and acknowledges the impact her parents had on her.
“What I saw at home,” she writes, “was an open attitude, observance but
openness. My mother always used to set an extra place at the table on Shabbat
in case my father brought home a stranger from synagogue, as was the custom in
those days. And, in my family, I learned about tzedakah in the very best sense
– always a readiness to help others, not only from my father, who did it on a
both public and personal level, but also from my mother.
“The other thing I absorbed was Zionism. It was
a strongly Zionist household, and my father was very active in the religious
Zionist community. From very early on, I knew that I would come on aliyah one
day. I didn’t know when, but it was definitely there in the future.”
When asked to convey one message to the next
generation, Shalvi said, “Reach for the sky and don’t give up. Don’t ever give
up. Even if you know you’ll never attain what you’re reaching for, persist.
Keep at it. I like to quote Robert Browning’s ‘Andrea del Sarto’: ‘Aye, but a
man’s reach must exceed his grasp / Or what’s a heaven for.’ Keep on striving
because, even if you don’t attain that goal yourself, the chances are that, for
the next generation, it will be easier.”
Sybil Kaplan is a journalist, lecturer, book reviewer and
food writer in Jerusalem. She created and leads the weekly English-language
Shuk Walks in Machane Yehuda, she has compiled and edited nine kosher
cookbooks, and is the author of Witness to History: Ten Years as a Woman
Journalist in Israel.
Katherine Matlashewski plays Mopsy in
Metro Theatre’s musical panto King Arthur’s Court. (photo by
Tracy-Lynn Chernaske)
While Katherine Matlashewski has numerous
acting, singing and choreographing credits on her resumé, the musical panto King
Arthur’s Court, which opens tonight (Dec. 14) at Metro Theatre, will be her
first pantomime.
“Unlike a traditional play, there is a lot of
improv and audience participation,” she explained about a panto. “This can be a
challenge because, as an actor, you never know what is going to happen.”
But it’s also part of the fun. “In any show,”
she said, “everyone brings something unique to the table. In this wonderful
cast [of 28], there is such a wide range in age and skill level.”
In contrast, King Arthur’s Court marks
fellow Jewish community member Heather Webster’s third panto. Webster has been
stage-managing at Metro for about five years now, but her connection to Metro –
and pantos – goes further back.
“My first theatre experience came from my
grandmother, Shirley Rose,” Webster told the Independent. “She took me
to the Metro Theatre when I was 12 for my first panto. From there, I got into
working backstage and learning stage craft in high school at Kitsilano from
Julie Bond. In Grade 11, I began volunteering at the Metro Theatre, and have
been ever since.”
Webster, who used to work as an on-call tech
for the Rothstein Theatre at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver,
does stage-managing in her off-time. Her full-time job is with Purolator.
Matlashewski teaches at Arts Umbrella. “I love
having the opportunity to share my love of visual and performing arts,” she
said. “I believe it is so important for kids to have a creative outlet as part
of their education.”
In addition, Matlashewski owns a small
business, Sweetheart’s Baking, which can be found on Instagram and Facebook.
“Like theatre,” she said, “my passion for baking started at a young age. This
keeps me extremely busy when I am not in a show.”
At age 2, her mother enrolled her in her first
dance class at Arts Umbrella. “In the years to follow,” Matlashewski said, “I
continued my training in dance while also exploring theatre and visual arts. My
love of musical theatre began at a very young age. Since then, I have not
looked back. I feel extremely blessed to have had multiple opportunities to
train with so many professionals in the industry. I am grateful to have taken
part in programs such as the Arts Club’s Musical Theatre Intensive and the
Pre-Professional Musical Theatre Troupe at Arts Umbrella.”
Among Matlashewski’s teachers and colleagues in
the Jewish community have been Erika Babins, Perry Ehrlich and Wendy Bross
Stuart, to name only a few.
“As a result,” said Matlashewski, who comes
from a small family, “I have had many wonderful opportunities to connect with
others in the community, create a positive support network, and learn more
about my culture. I feel so blessed to be a part of such a warm and welcoming
community.”
Matlashewski has also worked with the director
of King Arthur’s Court before.
“Last year,” she said, “I worked with Chris
Adams (our director) on RCMT’s [Royal City Musical Theatre’s] concert
production of Into the Woods. He encouraged me to take part in this
production.”
Adams was most recently featured in the Independentfor directing and co-producing Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of FleetStreet (jewishindependent.ca/experience-sweeneys-revenge). While this isMatlashewski’s first show with Metro, this will be Adams’ seventh show andthird panto with the theatre.
“I remember sitting in the audience, as a
little kid, booing the demon and cheering the good fairy and then rushing to
the stage after the show, just to get autographs from the cast,” he recalls on
Metro’s website. “From that childhood time,” he says, “panto has kept a warm
place in my heart.”
King Arthur’s Court will feature a
demon and a fairy, too, along with a dragon and, of course, Arthur and the
Knights of the Round Table. Chivalry and chicanery will run aplenty, and the
audience will be encouraged to cheer and jeer.
Matlashewski plays Mopsy, the court jester. “My
role requires me to do lots of singing, dancing and goofing around onstage,”
she said. “I also talk directly to the audience at certain times.”
And, behind the scenes, Webster will be
managing the chaos. For her, she said, “The best part is when I get to hear the
kids talk to the actors during the meet-and-greets, and hearing their favourite
parts of the show.”
For more information about and tickets to KingArthur’s Court, visit metrotheatre.com/currentshow. It runs until Jan. 5.
Susan Mendelson, founder of the Lazy
Gourmet, shares a little about herself and her business at the launch of this
year’s The Scribe. (photo by Kenneth I. Swartz)
One of Vancouver’s most successful food
industry professionals shared her story recently, helping to launch this year’s
edition of The Scribe, the journal of the Jewish Museum and Archives of
British Columbia.
The topic of the 2018 issue is food, covering
restaurants and related sectors from the early days of the community up to destinations
that are still operating today. Susan Mendelson, best known around town as
founder of the Lazy Gourmet, brought her thespian side to the audience at the
Western Front Nov. 28, eliciting laughter as she guided the packed hall on a
tour through her remarkable career.
“My mother’s mother, Grandma Faye, was a large
influence in my life,” Mendelson said. An extraordinary baker and cook renowned
in her small Jewish community of Quebec City, Grandma Faye took it as a
challenge to keep a deep freezer filled with baking for when friends dropped by
or to be ready for a tea party.
As a child, Mendelson loved to cook and bake.
When the Six Day War broke out in Israel, in 1967, the family rallied to raise
funds to send to Israel. Young Susan planned a bake sale in their backyard. She
made all of her favourite squares and cookies and the neighbours snapped them
up. Mendelson’s mother only told her years later that the cost of the
ingredients was on par with what was raised that day. Thankfully, Mendelson told
the audience, that wasn’t a harbinger of things to come.
Mendelson came to Vancouver to study at the
University of British Columbia and gravitated to the theatre department. Her
theatre professor, Larry Lillo, became a close friend. He broke the news to Mendelson
that she would never be a great actress … though he really loved her
cheesecake.
After third year, Mendelson took a break from
school and worked in a group home for troubled teens. There, she met Deborah
Roitberg, with whom she made the food for the kids in the group home. An
instant friendship developed.
After traveling to Europe and Israel, Mendelson
thought she would return to school and pursue social work. Around that time,
Lillo had founded Tamahnous Theatre, an experimental ensemble that was becoming
the resident company at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. He hired Mendelson
as house manager, which allowed her to go to school during the day and work at
the Cultch, as the institution is familiarly known, at night. But the salary
didn’t cover her expenses, so she began to make cheesecake to sell at
intermission, later adding carrot cake and Nanaimo bars to her repertoire –
“when the curtain came down at intermission, the lobby was stormed by people
pushing in line to make sure that they got their piece of the cake.”
Anne Petrie of CBC radio’s afternoon show
called Mendelson, having heard about the cheesecake phenomenon, and asked her
to come on the program.
“I told her that I was putting myself through
university with the recipe, but that I would come onto her show to tell her
listeners how to make chocolate cheesecake, a recipe that my friend Miriam
Gropper had given me,” Mendelson said.
Her cheeky attitude was a hit with audiences,
and she was asked back. She returned for Valentine’s Day, talking about
aphrodisiacs. Soon she had a regular radio gig paying $25 per appearance.
Mendelson’s boss at the Cultch started asking
her to cater opening night parties. Wedding catering followed and then
Mendelson was given the responsibility of catering to all the performers at the
first iteration of the Vancouver Children’s Festival. She and Roitberg
discussed opening a take-out food business.
“Our concept was that people would bring in
their casserole dishes and platters and we would fill them with our food and
they would take them home and pretend that they had made them themselves,” she
said. “We would call ourselves the Lazy Gourmet, in honour of our customers who
wanted gourmet food but were too lazy to make it themselves.”
Over the years, Mendelson had shared scores of
recipes with radio listeners and some asked her to put them in book form. Mama
Never Cooked Like This sold out and went into reprints; it was picked up by
an American publisher.
To coincide with the publication of her second
book, which was written for children and titled Let me in the Kitchen,
the producer of the Children’s Festival, Chris Wootten, asked Mendelson to
produce her own show. The best part of that experience, Mendelson recalled, was
that a single dad in the audience brought his 7-year-old son and they bought
the cookbook and made recipes
from it. “Six years later, I met those two,”
she said. “And, seven years later, I married the dad and became stepmother to
the most wonderful young teen. I was so happy that Jack and Soleil had experienced
that show and that in some way we shared that amazing experience of my life.”
TV appearances followed and Mendelson was asked
to write a souvenir cookbook for Expo 86.
But the trajectory was not entirely positive.
After expanding the Lazy Gourmet from one store to three, the company began
losing money. They eventually abandoned two of the storefronts and Roitberg
left the business to raise a family.
Soon after the birth of daughter Mira,
Mendelson was invited to cater a new event that was coming to Vancouver: the
Molson Indy Vancouver.
“If you thought that the Children’s Festival
wore me out … you can’t even imagine what that event did to me physically,” she
said. “But, of course, I loved it and, by the last few years of the race, which
took place on Labour Day weekend – Jack will tell you that it was our
anniversary weekend that we didn’t celebrate for nine years – we were also
catering the Abbotsford Airshow, which took place two weeks beforehand and, two
weeks before that, we catered the Skins Game at Predator Ridge in the
Okanagan.”
In addition to hard work, Mendelson credits her
success to hiring people who she says are smarter and more talented than
herself. A couple of years ago, she gave shares in the company to two long-term
team members and moved into a part-time role. The company continues to expand,
including a lifecycle catering department. “We call it womb-to-tomb catering,”
she said, citing baby-namings, britot milah, b’nai mitzvah, weddings and
funerals, as well as personal events. More recently, Mendelson took on catering
the lunches at Vancouver Talmud Torah.
The Scribe launch also
included words from Cynthia Ramsay, editor and publisher of the Independent,
who has also, for the past nine years, edited The Scribe.
“When I started the job, the journal was a mix
of academic essays and community-related history,” Ramsay said. “But it soon
changed to become a means by which the museum could highlight its collection;
the oral histories, photographs and other artifacts that it houses on the
community’s behalf. We’ve done issues on the Jewish Western Bulletin,
the Jewish Independent’s predecessor; on the furniture industry; scrap
metal dealers; the clothing industry; on some of the community pioneers who are
buried in our cemeteries all around the province; and, this year, of course,
our issue is on the food and service industry.”
She credited museum staff Alysa Routtenberg,
Marcy Babins and Michael Schwartz, and the publications committee, which this
year included Routtenberg, Perry Seidelman, Gary Averbach, Debby Freiman, Fred
Swartz and Ronnie Tessler. The JI’s production manager, Josie Tonio
McCarthy, does the layout for the journals.
Seidelman, president of the JMABC, urged audience members not to
throw out photographs or documents. “Give them to us,” he said.
The theme of Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (Oxford University Press, 2018), the new book by eminent English historian Mary Fulbrook, is justice. Or, rather, injustice, as she exposes how ex-Nazi perpetrators, and bystanders to their murderous policies, have evaded (and continue to evade) due process and acknowledgment of moral responsibility for their (in)actions.
Every level of strategy open to these criminals and cowards is exposed in Reckonings. Fulbrook reveals all the political, psychological, pragmatic, legal (and illegal), scapegoating, self-serving, self-exculpatory, “we were victims too”-type excuses by which the morally corrupt and unconscionable avoid due process and personal liability.
Fulbrook rightly says, at the end of Reckonings, “there can be no answer to the questions of why and how cruelty on this scale was possible.” So, what, she asks, can the “honest” historian do? Her answer sums up the well-realized objective of this magisterial new book: “Historians can clarify patterns of involvement in and responsibility for Nazi persecution and explore the implications both for those who lived through it and those who came after.”
Nazi criminality is, of course, a hugely complex historical issue, but Fulbrook’s strategy is simple and direct: it is to “reconstruct the ways in which wider social and political developments intersected with individual lives” such that “large numbers of people were mobilized in service of a murderous cause.”
Reckonings is rich with such exploration of “individual lives,” both of persecutors and bystanders, and it rings also with the agonizing accounts of dozens of victims, among whom Fulbrook gives frequent and welcome voice to the rarely referenced persecuted sub-groups of homosexuals, and victims of Nazi euthanasia policies.
Fulbrook’s central focus is, however, justice: justice failed and justice delayed, delayed by silence, by endless rationalization, by foot-dragging, by the pollution of the legal system by former Nazis (described as “themselves swimming in a sea of guilt”) and, no less disturbing, by the pragmatics of (primarily American) Cold War strategists, anxious not to offend a potential ally against the Soviet Union.
Reckonings is unusual history in its welcome lack of “normal” arm’s-length objectivity: Fulbrook is uncompromisingly fierce in her condemnation of those who were responsible for this “maelstrom of murder.” Throughout the book, she remains directly and openly angry, and determined to “nail down” these murderous ignoramuses, just-following-orders immoralists and “I knew nothing” liars. One feels the heat of Fulbrook’s grit and determination: each page rings out with a loud, “they will not get away with this as long as I can help it.”
Reckonings is divided into three parts. Part One, the most “traditional” part of the book, explores the various sites of this “maelstrom of murder,” beginning with Auschwitz, but moving carefully beyond, to less and less better-known killing centres, especially in southern Poland – where there were many forgotten violent “microcosms of violence,” as she calls them.
Part Two is, as Fulbrook’s title suggests, the heart of the book: here, the focus shifts to the attempts to bring perpetrators (both men and women) to justice. She lays out the proceedings of the various major trials – Auschwitz, Sobibor, Belzec, Dachau, Hadamar, the Einsatzgruppen trial, etc., right up to the present – but also includes trials relating to perpetrators of euthanasia and other crimes. She outlines, in fascinating detail, the differences between the ways that East and West Germany approached bringing Nazis to justice: the former being famously more diligent than the latter, leading to a flood of ex-Nazis to the more “tolerant” West in the early years after the war. This flood included all the euthanasia personnel, who left their families behind in the GDR to escape justice. (The West accepted the “just following orders” defence; the East did not. About 400,000 people benefited from this and similar lax standards in the West.)
The third part, “Memories,” is about how survivors remember, and how Nazis forget. It combines a plangent exploration of the personal experiences of individuals living around the world who have survived persecution – most of whom have never received compensation or recognition – with accounts of how perpetrators and their minions managed (and still manage) to cover their tracks, and how this evasion affects their children and grandchildren.
The most memorable chapter of this final part is called “The Commemoration of Shame.” She notes here how the “shame” of the perpetrators is almost always buried in the sea of guilt-ridden commemoration throughout Germany, as is the pain of forced and slave labourers, the acknowledgement of which would still have legal (compensation) ramifications for German industry. Fulbrook also notes here that it wasn’t until 2014 that the first memorial appeared for the victims of Nazi euthanasia policies.
Reckonings ends in despair. “So few perpetrators brought to account; so little justice.”
Ian Kershaw has written that “the road to Auschwitz was built by hate but paved by indifference.” Fulbrook reveals that the road from Auschwitz is not a whit less hateful and, certainly, no less met by indifference.
Graham Forst, PhD, taught literature and philosophy at Capilano University until his retirement and now teaches in the continuing education department at Simon Fraser University. From 1975 to 2010, he co-chaired the symposium committee of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.
Yefim Bronfman performs Johannes Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra at the Orpheum Dec. 6 and 8. (photo from VSO)
“I don’t think it can be overstated, the significance of having an artist like Yefim Bronfman, like Yitzhak Perlman, who’s coming later in the season, as well. These are living legends in our field,” said Misha Aster, vice-president, artistic planning and production, at the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, in a phone interview with the Independent.
“It’s a testament to the city and to the orchestra that artists of this stature take the time to visit with us,” he said. “But it’s also an occasion for us to celebrate their presence here because it’s unusual – it’s a rare opportunity to hear artists of this calibre and of this experience perform works that are landmarks of the repertoire.”
On Dec. 6 and 8 at the Orpheum, Bronfman and the orchestra will perform Johannes Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2. The concert also features Richard Strauss’s Don Juan and Franz Liszt’s Les preludes.
Initial discussions for the December performances took place about two-and-a-half years ago. That’s a long time, said Aster, “but, for an artist of his calibre, that’s generally what’s required to get a date fixed in his calendar.”
While Bronfman is in tremendous demand, Aster said, “He loves Vancouver, which helps. Every visit he has made here in the past, he has reiterated his affection for the city, and for the orchestra.”
The upcoming concerts are not just a musical highlight of the VSO season, said Aster, “but one of the flagship statements of our season.”
He added, “The program he’s coming with, as well – the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2 – is considered one of the Everests of the repertoire. It’s not frequently performed. It’s a very large piece, a very demanding piece for the soloist and for the orchestra, as well; it has a major solo cello part.”
The choice of music for a program with a visiting artist is “a discussion,” said Aster. “It’s a dynamic process between soloist, conductor and orchestra. There’s a need for balance between those elements.”
Bronfman has performed the Brahms before. “The combination [of Bronfman] together with Jun Märkl, who is a much-beloved conductor here with the orchestra, made Brahms a possibility,” Aster said.
The other compositions in the December program – Strauss’s Don Juan and Liszt’s Les preludes – will be played by the orchestra on its own. “They all fit within a certain genre,” noted Aster of the works. “It’s not coincidental programming, by any means.”
Brahms and Liszt were contemporaries, he explained, “but at opposite poles of the spectrum when it came to musical development of the later 19th century and the debate over what was considered ‘program music,’ that was music meant to tell a story, that was reflective of a certain kind of dramatic narrative, as opposed to purely abstract music or symphonic music that had its roots in the more classical esthetic.”
The latter was Brahms’ approach, said Aster, whereas Liszt was a champion of “this new kind of programmatic approach to music.” And Strauss “was considered an heir to Liszt with respect to that, so both of those tone poems – Les preludes and Don Juan – are narrative works of program music, and they’re juxtaposed with this massive concerto by Brahms, which is Brahms’ reiteration of his musical principles.”
Misha Aster is vice-president, artistic planning and production, at the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. (photo from VSO)
Aster arrived in Vancouver for his position at the VSO in mid-August. Born in Hamilton, Ont., he had been in Berlin almost 13 years. Prior to that, he was in Austria for a couple of years.
Aster trained as a violinist at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, and studied political science, history and dramaturgy at McGill University, the London School of Economics and Harvard University. In his career, he’s been based in Europe largely, but he has always kept in touch with Canada, he said, as his grandmother is in Toronto and his parents divide their time between Ontario and a base in Europe. Aster’s wife, Kinneret Sieradzki, is Israeli and the couple has a 2-year-old daughter, Laila.
In Germany, Aster was working as an executive producer at Deutsche Grammophon, the recording label Universal Music, and he maintains a role at the Gustavo Dudamel Foundation, where he was director of programs. His move to Vancouver marks the first time he has lived in Canada since he was a teenager.
“It’s a major orchestra in this country,” Aster said about what attracted him to the job with the VSO. “It’s a very important cultural player, certainly in Western Canada, and I remember, even growing up in Toronto, having a sense that important things were happening in musical life in Vancouver and that the VSO was a formidable force in Canadian music.”
Recently, the whole organization has undergone a significant transition, with longtime musical director Bramwell Tovey retiring. “It was the ending of an era and the beginning of something new,” said Aster. “I hadn’t met Otto Tausk, the new music director, before we began the process of discussing the possibility of my joining the team here but I was immediately impressed by him, by the integrity of his musicianship, by his vision for the orchestra.”
Aster also had a sense, he said, of Tausk “being very European in outlook, in disposition, in artistic values, in his connections and contacts.” This was a world with which Aster had been familiar for a long time, so he felt that “it would be an interesting opportunity” and that he “could be a helpful fit in that sense,” of being originally from Canada and having roots here, “but also, in a professional sense, of being very familiar with the environment from which Maestro Tausk comes. That chemistry was really the key.” Adding to that was the organization’s “ambition with respect to an artistic agenda but also what the orchestra intends to mean for the community.”
The VSO is “an incredibly busy organization,” said Aster. “We produce 150 concerts a year, which is a lot, in relative terms, compared to many other orchestras in the country. And it has to do with the fact that the orchestra has always had the mandate to address itself to a range of different communities and a range of different musical tastes in the city. Unlike many other major orchestras in the country, we perform in 15 different venues around Greater Vancouver through the season in various configurations, based out of our home in the Orpheum, where we have our major subscription series.”
Part of Aster’s job is to ensure that it’s “not just a functional run-out that we do to North Van or to Surrey with a program, but that what we’re trying to program for those communities and for venues in those communities reflects a point of access for them into the world of music that we represent.”
Tickets for Bronfman’s performance at the Orpheum range from $16.25 to $125 and can be purchased from vancouversymphony.ca.
Almost half of Adeena Karasick’s latest volume of poetry, Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018), is comprised of whimsical Facebook status updates, most of which have deeper meaning on second and third thought. Together, they speak, as the book’s description notes, “to our seemingly insatiable desire for information, while acknowledging how fraught that information can be.”
“It was a totally compulsive exercise over four years, where literally everything I read or watched or where I went or what I heard was fodder for the text,” Karasick told the Independent about the faux updates’ origins. “And, I must admit, I threw away as many lines as I kept.
“Sometimes, it was just that I couldn’t get a song out of my head and then would just riff on it,” she said, giving as examples, “Ulysses is listening to Siren Song on Spotify”; “Gustave Klimt is listening to KISS”; and “Salvador Dali is doing the Time Warp. Again.”
Sometimes, she said, it was linguistically driven, such as, “E & G are saying F off” and “Bold italics are refusing to move into an upright position.” Or, “it was just pure, silly fun” to create updates like “William Wordsworth is wandering lonely on iCloud,” “Edvard Munch is watching Scream 3,” “Google is mapping the territory” and “Narcissus is using his selfie stick.”
“It was so obsessive,” said Karasick, “that even now that the book’s been published, my brain is so wired to creating those one-liners, I walk around the streets reading every sign and riff on them: ‘Thin Lizzy is watching her carbs,’ ‘Fatwa is doing a cleanse,’ ‘The Pre-Pesach Jew is clearing her cookies,’ ‘The Long, Long Sleeper is Woke.’”
Karasick’s sense of play is evident throughout Checking In. Even when describing heartbreak, confusion and other emotionally charged states, the joy she derives from words, from language and from constructing layers of meaning, is obvious.
“I think I’ve always had a really dark sense of humour,” she said, “and there’s something about taking that which is frightening or deeply disturbing and disempowering it – by not so much making fun of it, but ironically or parodically making it strange, decontextualizing it, hyberbolically defamiliarizing it.
“A lot of my work takes hard-hitting political issues, whether that be the Holocaust in Genrecide (Talonbooks, 1994) and superimposing it with the policing and massacring of language, or dealing with 9/11 in The House That Hijack Built (Talonbooks, 2004).… ‘There was a Big Building that Swallowed a Plane … How Insane to Swallow a Plane….’ A sense of jouissance (pleasure, play) really permeates all that I do. There’s nothing more exhilarating for me than playing inside language, finding unexpected liaisons, connections, sound clusters. It’s a type of erotics of the text that is for me very jewy; that jouissance, a jewy essence: all diasporic, nomadic, exilic, ex-static.
“I see this ‘play’ as operating with an ‘assimilationist’ brand of Jewish humour,” she explained, “not of bombastic neurosis, but one that threatens to unleash chaos, creates unsocialized anarchy, embodies unpredictability – impassioned, engaged, shticky, outrageous and earnest all at the same time – in a post-Woody Allen/Jon Stewart/ Sarah Silverman/Sandra Bernhardish kind of way. And, sometimes, it’s audacious, subversive, provocative and, in the true definition of ‘irony,’ explodes ontologically and cuts into the fabric of things; the smooth functioning of the quiet comfortability or the ‘homeyness’ of our world. That is the role of art.”
Adeena Karasick’s newest collection of poetry is Checking In. (photo by Safia Karasick Southey/talonbooks.com)
And one cannot separate Karasick’s art from her Jewish heritage – it’s “part of my DNA,” she said – and from her study of Jewish texts. With a PhD in kabbalah and deconstruction, it is not surprising that, in speaking about the concept of play, she pointed to 13th-century kabbalistic mystic Avraham Abulafia’s Science of the Combination of Letters, in which, she said, “we are instructed to play inside the language, using ancient practices of recombinatoric alchemy, gematriatic (numerological) substitution, combination, and, through lettristic ‘skips’ and ‘jumps’ slippage, meaning is infinitely re-circulated.
“According to kabbalistic thinking,” she said, “we are commanded to permute and combine the letters; focus on them and their configurations, permutations; combine consonants into a swift motion, which heats up your thinking and increases your joy and desire so much, that you don’t crave food or sleep and all other desires are annihilated. And nothing exists except the letters through which the world is being recreated, through a continual process of constructing and reconstructing borders, orders, laws, mirrors, screens, walls…. And, in accordance with the strictures of Abulafian play, to properly play is to travel inside the words within words, traces, affects, projections, sliding and slipping between the forces and intensities distributed through the texts’ syntactic economy. And this very play speaks both to how everything is infinitely interconnected – reverberant with our social, consumerist, communicative patterns – generating a contiguous infolding of meaning.”
She connected this type of play to “the actual conversation habits of Yiddish.”
“According to etymologist Michael Wex – in his Just Say Nu (Harper: New York, 2007) – Yiddish itself is inscribed in derailment, evasion, avoidance, where the norm is not to be ‘clear’ but to ‘seduce and lead astray,’ to say the reverse of whatever’s been said. For example, as we know, to say, ‘Hi, how are you,’ ‘Shalom aleichem,’ the answer is ‘Aleichem shalom.’ Answers are answered with a question, repetition, reversals, circumlocutions, interruptions, insertions (ptoo, ptoo, ptoo). Compliments are avoided in favour of their opposite. Or, like how you should never say what you mean because naming something (such as cancer, leprosy, pig) could bring it into existence.”
As for her own existence, Karasick said, “All my life, I’ve been fiercely drawn to all that seems enigmatic or paradoxical, and get great pleasure in connecting the unconnectable; drawing from different genres, lexicons or mediums and reveling in ways they inform each other in radical and innovative ways, inviting us to see the world anew.”
While she has spent years teaching philosophic and critical theory, and media and pop culture at various universities, as well as attending lectures on media ecology and ontology, she also watches “a lot of trashy TV,” she said. “I like classical jazz and MTV videos. I read [Louis] Zukofsky, [Slovoj] Zizek and Vogue magazine. And my favourite thing to do is to mash these language systems together into a kind of linguistic tzimmes; each flavour, taste, texture informing the other, expanding the palette.
“It’s especially exciting for me to break down that binary between high and low culture; draw from the music hall and the circus, erotics and spirituality; and play with ways all of this information erupts as a palimpsestic web of both sacred and secular echo-poetic referents.”
Karasick writes “on the road, on buses, trains, subways, boats; in motion,” she said. “I write best amid the bustle of life and, oddly, when I’m really busy is when I’m most inspired. I’m always hunting and gathering, drawing on the world around me. Though, I must say, when drenched in aching nostalgia, frustrated by contemporary politics or steeped in throbbing desire is when the work especially flows.”
Approaching the poetry
“Contour XLV: With Asura,” “Lorem Ipsum” and “In Cold Hollers” are all “homophonic translations, and so they all fall under the same rubric,” said Karasick of three of the poems in Checking In during a brief poetry lesson over the phone.
She explained, “Each of these [works] take the same sounds of an original poem by somebody else and I’ve translated them. I’ve done an avant-garde, post-modern translation by using the same sounds and rhythms of the original poems but changing all the words, so that if one read it simultaneously with the original poem, it would sound like the same poem, but it’s completely different. It’s a way of commenting on the previous piece; it’s translating it, moving through and across different modes.”
“In Cold Hollers” is a translation of Charles Olson’s 1953 poem “In Cold Hell, In Thicket”; “Contour XLV: With Asura” is based on “Canto 45 with Usura,” a poem by Ezra Pound, which Karasick described as a “famously antisemitic, women-hating, Jews and women are pigs kind of poem”; and “Lorem Ipsum,” which is in English, but plays on the sounds of the Latin of Cicero’s “De finibus bonorum et malorum” (“On the Ends of Goods and Evils”). “Lorem ipsum is the standard placeholder text used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation,” writes Karasick elsewhere. “I am interested in exploring how the notion of ‘place holding’ gets reworked through an impossible relationship both in love and in language.”
As to how to approach a poem that you’ve never read before, Karasick said, “On one level, it depends on how deeply one wants to penetrate the text. The way I like to read is to not worry about what everything means per se, but rather … in reading, I think the most important thing is to feel the text, to go inside and feel its rhythms, its textures…. I work a lot with sound, so I’m really interested how sound itself communicates meaning and so, therefore, a lot of this type of work is about moving with the rhythms and the textures and some of that crazed emotion, how that bleeds through, just through the way that it sounds and feels in your mouth.”
Turning to the poem “Lorem Ipsum,” she said the words mean “pain itself.” She has translated Cicero’s treatise on the theory of ethics into a “passionate love poem” about the “difficulties and grueling angst that one traverses through that. Just like love itself, or pain itself, isn’t something that’s easily definable, so it is with the poem itself, which takes us through this journey of multiple ways that are easily comprehensible and other parts that are strangely defamiliarized and confusing because these very strong emotions are fiercely that…. Just like in life, you come across things that are completely foreign and impenetrable, so, similarly, the poem interweaves through the familiar and the defamiliar, the expected and that which completely takes you into new arenas of wonder and confusion.”
Karasick similarly takes Pound’s “Canto 45” and, playing with the Yiddish word asura, which means forbidden, and the English word usury, creates a new work that’s both a scathing commentary on Pound’s, as well its own poem, with its own meanings.
About “In Cold Hollers,” Karasick said she used the word “hollers” because it’s “homophonically related to hell, but it’s hollering in, calling back into Charles Olson’s original ’53 piece; and his original title, ‘In Cold Hell, In Thicket,’ refers to the opening of Dante’s ‘Inferno.’ What seems simple, it just has layers and layers and layers of history, literary history, philosophical history, as well.”
The title of Olson’s poem refers particularly to “selva oscura,” she said, “which is the dark wood that Dante wanders into in the middle of his life … so Olson’s poem, which riffs on that, is a similar excursion into a visionary experience, where he struggles to come up with a new understanding … from his own midlife … putting a voice to his own time. It is a personal drama of experience, conflict; it really speaks to the wrenching process of living and loving that, by turns, is grueling and funny and dramatic and trivial. My translation of that is dealing with all of those things and, in a way, it’s like, do you remember that old Gwen Stefani song, ‘I Ain’t No Hollaback Girl’? – I am a hollaback girl. I am hollering back, in cold hollers, to this cold hell, and basically calling into that history of both Dante and Olson, the history of post-modernism, 65 years later.”
In talking about Olson’s work and hers, Karasick said, “I sometimes like thinking of translation as trans-elation because you can never really translate anything because of culture and all the different references – in my piece, in my trans-elation, the attention is focused on a world of connected life, the personal, the political, the poetic as a system of relations. And, lastly … highlighting how the words themselves are imaginative participants; the words themselves are creating and recreating the sense of connecting the personal, the political, the poetic.”
And it’s not just the words, but how they are placed on a page that matters in poetry. So, for example, Karasick’s “In Cold Hollers” not only plays on the sound and meaning of Olson’s poem, but also mirrors its typography. “I wanted to keep it very much as he had it,” she said of where the lines break and other aspects of the formatting.
“The notion of the physicality and the materiality of where the words are placed on the page has just as much meaning as what they are communicating. We’re so often used to looking at the left margin … but I want the phrases to be moving and fluid, and that sense of how the white space between the words is equally as important as the words themselves. We can go back to kabbalah and the black fire on white fire, that the whole page becomes a series of fiery energy.”
If I wrote that I had been trying to get a review copy of Rising: The Book of Challah by Rochie Pinson (Feldheim Publishers) since November 2016, readers would find that hard to believe, but the book only arrived at my door recently.
Pinson, who grew up in Vancouver, is co-founder of the IYYUN Centre for Jewish Spirituality with her husband, Rav DovBer Pinson, in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. They have four children. She mentors women and teaches various classes. She also conducts a challah-baking workshop, which she teaches worldwide, including in Vancouver.
For Rising, Pinson has written 352 pages about challah. This book is about her philosophy, spirituality, history and everything you wanted to know about challah. And, yes, it includes recipes – 38 of them for challah and seven for toppings.
“The intent of challah,” writes the rebbetzin, “is to reveal our innate power to nurture and nourish, and reclaim our mothering potential in all the forms it can take.”
Section I, “The Story of Challah,” explains how, as a new bride, Pinson arrived in Kobe, Japan, which had no kosher bakery, and soon got into making 40 challot a week for the Jewish community.
The book then expands to other information about challah, spirituality and other topics, including a detailed examination of each ingredient and information on the concept of “rising.”
Section II is the cookbook, with reviews and details of ingredients and equipment and troubleshooting.
There are eight recipes, including her own classic challah recipe, gluten-free challah and vegan challah; eight holiday specialties, like apple-and-honey challah and pretzel challah; six recipes from around the world, including Moroccan challah, Yemenite challah and Bukharian challah; nine challah innovations, such as a “fish” challah (shaped like a fish with salmon, tuna, mushrooms and other vegetables), a deli challah (with deli meats) and a rainbow challah (using food colouring); and eight recipes for leftover challah, like babka, cinnamon bars and French toasts. Rising also has recipes for seven different challah toppings, including cream cheese frosting, and accompaniments for other dishes, such as challah stuffing and challah croutons.
Section III is called “Laws and Customs,” which is mainly self-explanatory, though it also includes challah meditations. A glossary and index conclude the book.
There are more than 100 colour photographs in Rising and many sketches, such as 37 ways to braid and shape a challah.
Rising really is the definitive “everything you ever wanted to know about challah” book, written with love and nurturing. It contains a huge amount of information, including the story of Pinson’s life “as realized through challah baking, and challah baking as a metaphor for balanced, integrated nurturing of our self and our loved ones.”
This is the book to give to anyone who bakes challah, and to anyone else who might be contemplating it.
Sybil Kaplanis a journalist, author, compiler/editor of nine kosher cookbooks and a food writer for North American Jewish publications, who lives in Jerusalem where she leads weekly walks of the Jewish food market, Machaneh Yehudah, in English.
Gabriella Goliger’s Eva Salomon’s War is an intriguing novel. (photo by Ben Welland))
Award-winning Canadian author Gabriella Goliger has written Eva Salomon’s War (Bedazzled Ink Publishing, 2018), an intriguing novel set between the rise of the German Nazi state and the founding of the state of Israel – two complex historical phenomena whose aftershocks we are still experiencing. But, for Eva Salomon, those huge events are mainly engines moving her own story forward from timid German-Jewish adolescent to courageous Israeli young woman. The novel takes us through many intricacies of the competing historical strands that form the background of Eva’s life. Readers familiar with various bits and pieces of the history can connect the dots through her eyes.
Written as a first-person bildungsroman, the book opens as the Nazis close in on the Jews, who are wondering which of the many possible responses to embrace. Should they stay and resist? Stay, pray and keep their heads down? Should they emigrate, and, if so, where? Should they join the movement to build a Zionist workers’ state in Palestine? So many choices, so many unknowns, and so much peril attached to each decision.
Eva’s beloved older sister, Liesel, immigrates to a socialist kibbutz in the Galilee. Sixteen-year-old Eva and her embittered, widowed father migrate to Tel Aviv. We know what happens to the relatives who feel too old to make the trip.
The character of Eva is loosely based on Goliger’s own aunt. Letters between Eva and Liesel give us many illustrative details of Jewish life in Palestine in those years. In Breslau, they had enjoyed middle-class lives. In Palestine, they quickly have to learn working-class skills and they have to adapt to their shabby new realities among people with no time for pity or introspection.
Kibbutz life is physically harsh but relieved by the high level of ideological commitment between the comrades: “I sleep in a tent and the food is plain, but I never have to think about where my next meal is coming from. Everything is communal and allotted to me, down to my shoes and socks.” Eva flees the misery of life in her father’s tiny flat and finds a place to live with Malka, a Hungarian Jewish seamstress who helps her accommodate to her reduced circumstances.
Malka transforms Eva from a ragged miserable waif to a well-dressed young woman who can make her way in the vibrant, uncertain Jewish Palestinian world. Eva learns the meaning of “ein breirah” – no choice – a theme resonating not only throughout the novel but throughout the decades to the present day as one formative part of Israeli Jewish culture.
Eva finds work as an ozerit (cleaning lady) and starts putting together a life of sorts. She finds a music shop that affords her a bit of pleasure – “my refuge, my paradise” – phonograph records feeding her delight in classical music and her longing for romance. Fittingly, it is where she meets Constable Duncan Rees of His Majesty’s Palestine Police. Their romance encapsulates many conflicting layers of identity, culture, desire and belonging.
Throughout the novel, most of the characters are rent by doubts and competing loyalties. Only the fanatics of all stripes know certainty. The portrayal of Eva’s unbending Orthodox father, seemingly bereft of feeling for his wayward daughter, I found puzzling. We never see anything through his eyes, never understand his inner realities.
Eva is at war with her father, with all rigid religious and political belief systems, with her situation of loving the wrong person, and with her own competing claims of duty. Her personal war intersects with the fighting in Europe, the fighting between Arabs and Jews, the infighting between the various Zionist factions and, crucially, with the growing resistance to the British presence in Palestine.
Eva is a Jewish refugee. Duncan is charged with upholding British laws controlling Jewish immigrants. Despite the growing cultural-personal-political tensions, Eva enjoys their romance. She experiences pleasure and the delights of physical intimacy, which she keeps secret as much as possible. “The more he was my secret, the tighter, I felt, was our bond.” Their emotional intimacy is harder to sustain. One feels it can’t last and I wondered throughout how Goliger was going to handle it (no spoiler here).
The British White Paper on Palestine brings it all to a head. Tensions explode into violence all over the land, from many different directions, aimed at “traitors” to all the intersecting causes. For each faction, “we” are highly individuated and the others are an undifferentiated “they.” Eva, essentially an apolitical person, is helplessly caught up in the sectarian brutality.
One can’t help but read the novel through the prism of the tragic unfolding of events since 1948. Goliger vividly illustrates the human urgencies propelling Arabs and Jews in all directions, and the emotional realities behind all the ideologies.
Near the end, I was reminded of Anne Frank’s “In spite of everything, I still believe people are good at heart.” Eva reflects, “I believe a better world is dawning because … because ein breirah. I must.”
Deborah Yaffe lives in Victoria, where she formerly taught in the women’s studies department of the University of Victoria. An active secular Jewish feminist since reading Elana Dykewomon and Irena Klepfisz in the 1980s, she is grateful for the many Israeli individuals and organizations working against Jewish persecution of Arab Israelis and Palestinians.
Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS, with Hannah Alper. Mycoskie is one of the role models Alper features in her book Momentus: Small Acts, Big Change. (photo from callmehannah.ca)
In Momentus: Small Acts, Big Change (Nelson Trade, 2017), Toronto-based teen activist Hannah Alper profiles people who are doing humanitarian work. Each chapter is devoted to a person who is doing significant tikkun olam (repairing the world) in any number of areas, from the environment to indigenous rights to mental health.
Alper uses a specific formula to describe what her book is essentially about: issue + gift = change. The issue is something an individual is passionate about, whatever the cause might be. The gift is something a person is blessed with or a hobby they might enjoy or want to pursue. With just these two aspects, individuals can change the world.
In the introduction of Momentus, Alper briefly talks about how she got involved in humanitarian work. She and her parents were coming back from a Digital Family Summit, which is a conference to help young individuals use the internet safely. Blogging was never something she had envisioned herself doing, but this conference changed her mind. While still there, she began her own blog, titled “Call Me Hannah.”
Initially, she did not know what she would write about. Then, her parents gave her some encouraging words. They told her to write what she was passionate about. Being 9 years old at the time, Alper was learning about the environment and the problems animals were facing because of habitat loss and deforestation. It especially bothered her because these were problems caused by humans.
Alper began to receive comments from people who were actually trying to do what she advised in her writing. She herself became involved in the World Wildlife Fund and Environmental Defence. But, even though she enjoyed helping these organizations, she felt that something was still missing.
Because of her blog, Alper was invited to WE Day as media. WE was founded by Canadian brothers Craig and Marc Kielburger, and WE Days across North America, the United Kingdom and the Caribbean bring thousands of change-minded people together to celebrate their contributions and be inspired by one another and by well-known speakers. Alper explains that people cannot buy a ticket to a WE Day, but earn an invitation to it through their work.
Two years after her first WE Day, Alper helped promote the event as a representative of the organization. During her first tour, she shared the story of Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai. On the second, she co-hosted a social empowerment section and, in Momentus, she briefly talks about her time meeting other young people during a WE Day tour in 2014. She says that seeing others who were also trying to create change was refreshing to witness.
Role models in different categories have been a main inspiration for Alper’s work and each chapter of her book focuses on one of these mentors and the work they are doing. She hopes that, by highlighting such role models, readers will come to understand that they, too, can make a difference, no matter how old they are, or where their interests and passions lie.
The Kielburgers, Yousafzai, Lilly Singh and Brad Montague are among the change-makers included in Momentus, as is one of Alper’s biggest role models, Severn Cullis-Suzuki, whose father is David Suzuki. Watching a 1992 video in which Severn spoke at the United Nations Earth Summit made Asper realize that she had the ability to take a stance on environmental issues – and that her voice could be heard and make a difference.
“My greatest hope from this book is that people finish it and believe that they have the fullest power and capacity to make a difference,” writes Alper on her blog. “Then, they go out into their community [and take] action. I cannot tell you how excited I am to see how people create their own change.”
One voice can impact so many that a chain reaction can occur when it comes to solving problems. Reading about young people who are passionate about fixing or improving deep-rooted problems is inspiring. As the proverb says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
Chloe Heuchertis a fifth-year history and political science student at Trinity Western University.
Emanuel Lottem, left, and Sheldon Teitelbaum. (photo by Roni Sofer)
After four years of hard work, Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem have completed the first instalment of Zion’s Fiction: A Treasure of Israeli Speculative Literature.
Today, Montreal-born Teitelbaum lives with his family in Los Angeles, but, before that, he lived in Israel for many years – starting with five years in the Israeli army, a period of service that included the 1982 Lebanon War.
“I lived to tell the tale and, when I came back, I received an offer from some local magazines and newspapers, including the Jewish Post & News [in Winnipeg], to write pieces for them, which I accepted, in addition to working on the night desk as a sub-editor,” Teitelbaum told the Independent.
Then, he was hired by the Weizmann Institute of Science as a writer, which he did for a couple of years before moving with his family to California. There, he began writing for the Los Angeles Times, as well as writing a number of articles for the New York Times, Wired, Entertainment Weekly and other publications, while also working at University of Southern California as a science writer.
About Zion’s Fiction, Teitelbaum said, “It is not a book of my stories. I have absolutely no apparent talent in writing stories. But, I have been involved in Israeli science fiction and have been reading it for 40 years. And, it occurred to me at a certain point that the local (Israeli) fiction had reached a level of confidence that merited the attention of the world. As a result, I called up my partner, Emanuel Lottem, who is Israel’s premier interpreter, translator actually, of science fiction … and, I Skyped him and said, ‘You know, I just want to lay down two words to you – Zion’s fiction.’ Apparently, his jaw dropped. It just says the whole story.”
Teitelbaum contacted science fiction grandmaster Robert Silverberg, who he has interviewed in the past, and pitched the idea. Silverberg was hooked and agreed to provide a foreword and to connect them with agent Eddie Schneider of JABberwocky Literary Agency in New York.
As it turned out, publishing houses were not interested and, if not for the last publishing house on their list, they would have had to wait even longer to see their idea in print.
Once they had a publishing house, next came the difficult task of determining what would go into the book.
“We actually had twice as many stories than we needed,” said Teitelbaum. “We decided to save them for the next volume. However, we had a book launching at the Israeli Science Fiction convention in September, and we met with the head of the Israeli Society for Fantasy and Science Fiction. In conjunction with them, we’d publish their newly released volume – a collection of the best of the best of the Geffen winners of the last 17 years.”
(The Geffen Awards are named after the late Amos Geffen, one of the first editors and translators of science fiction in Israel.)
“As you might know,” continued Teitelbaum, “translation is a hideously expensive engagement. And they were gracious enough to take on the initial translation with Emanuel, and I was ready to hunker down with the actual line editing.”
All 16 stories that were selected for the first volume of Zion’s Fiction have received positive reviews worldwide. They are very different from the kind of speculative fiction people read in the West, according to Teitelbaum.
For most Israelis, when it comes to science fiction, Teitelbaum said, “It’s a thing that’s extremely fragile – more fragile than you’d find anywhere else in the world … because, when Hezbollah bombs starts flying, everyone’s nose is to the ground … and there ain’t no room for the fantasy.
“Not to mention that Israel is situated at a crossroads fortress called Megiddo, which the Greeks gave the name Armageddon, which is a lodestone for apocalyptic worry and fretting all over the world … and especially in Israel, [where] nobody does a better job of trying to put off disaster by writing about it.”
The Israeli science fiction that is broadly popular is that which deals with near-future developments in society, with specific connections to what is going on politically.
In terms of readership, Teitelbaum feels Zion’s Fiction will appeal to academics, noting, “There are several Jewish studies programs in North America and Europe [interested]. As someone who volunteers at the local high school my kids went to, teaching science fiction as a course for senior English, I know that, if you want to get kids to read, this is one of the ways to do it.
“I also know that Introduction to Science Fiction in undergraduate classes has upwards of 600 people, and I’d hope this series would ultimately provide academics with a reason to fashion courses on the subject of the Israeli fantastique.”
Teitelbaum also thinks that Zion’s Fiction could serve as an excellent gift for anyone with a soft spot for Israel or an interest in Israeli writing, or for science fiction lovers wanting to explore a unique segment in the genre.
“Unlike American Jewish science fiction, which hits you over the head with issues of religion and intermarriage and, you know, all of the shtetl nonsense, Israeli science fiction is a lot more subtle,” said Teitelbaum. “It doesn’t deal with the Holocaust directly in most instances, although you can see that it’s an underlying theme.
“It takes place in the near future, rather than the far. It’s a little more realistic than you would find in American science fiction. It doesn’t concern itself with Jewish folklore from the old country. It wears its Israeliness easily. Its Israeli characters are identifiable as Israelis.”
Zion’s Fiction is widely available and has already been translated for sale in countries such as Japan, Korea and Russia, with interest expressed in Turkey and Germany. For more information, visit zionsfiction.com. To order the book, go to amazon.com.
