Alan Twigg

Reading expands experience

Letters that highlight friendship, writing that facilitates healing, stories that dissect societal mores – the books reviewed by the Jewish Independent this week represent only a small fraction of those featured at the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival this year.

While the official festival runs Feb. 11-16, opening with Dr. Gabor Maté in conversation with Marsha Lederman about his latest book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, there are a couple of pre-festival events this month: German writer Max Czollek launches the English version of his book De-Integrate! A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century on Jan. 19 and American-Israeli photographer Jason Langer presents his book Berlin: A Jewish Ode to the Metropolis on Jan. 26. As well, there is a post-festival event, on Feb. 28, which sees former federal cabinet minister and senator Jack Austin launching his memoir, Unlikely Insider: A West Coast Advocate in Ottawa.

If the books reviewed by the Independent are any indication, attendees of the festival can expect to have their views challenged and their perspectives broadened; they will be moved, disturbed and amused, sometimes all at once.

Intimate portraits

Two years ago, the JCC Jewish Book Festival featured the book Memories of Jewish Poland: The 1932 Photographs of Nachum Tim Gidal (jewishindependent.ca/gidals-photos-speak-volumes). It was the fulfilment of a dying request that Israeli photographer Tim Gidal made in 1996 to Vancouver scholar, writer and philanthropist Yosef Wosk. The book was released at the same time that an exhibit of its photos was mounted at the Zack Gallery (jewishindependent.ca/jewish-poland-in-1932).

The friendship between Wosk and Gidal was evident in that book and in the exhibit. How the two men – separated in age by some 40 years and in geography by almost 11,000 kilometres – became such good friends is the subject of Gidal: The Unusual Friendship of Yosef Wosk and Tim Gidal, written by Wosk (and, technically, Gidal) and edited by another of Wosk’s good friends, Alan Twigg.

photo - Alan Twigg — Alan Twigg *(PR photo)*

The bulk of Gidal is letters that Gidal and Wosk wrote to each other from 1993, soon after they met, through to Gidal’s death in 1996. The postscript is a letter from Wosk to Gidal’s wife, Pia, mourning Gidal’s death and hoping that “his work and vision continue to inspire others.” Twigg has masterfully edited the multi-year correspondence, which comprised hundreds of letters, into an engaging narrative that offers insight into the core of these undeniably brilliant men, their work, ideas, loves, frustrations, sadnesses and more. Their vulnerability makes this a brave publication for Wosk to have created, and a meaningful one.

The other main component of Gidal is, of course, Gidal’s photographs, which, Wosk writes in the afterword, “serve as background to the letters.” As he did with Memories of Jewish Poland, Wosk mostly lets the photographs speak for themselves. Each photo section has a theme but each image within the section is simply captioned, placed and dated, without commentary.

There is a short chapter on Gidal and one on his and Wosk’s friendship and how this book came about. Gidal is creatively and esthetically put together. Each letter is headed by a key quote from the missive and the date it was sent. Images are included of some of the actual letters, most of which were sent by fax. It is interesting to contemplate whether this fount of communication would exist if it had been made via email.

Wosk and Twigg will talk about Gidal on Feb. 14, 7 p.m., at the book festival. The event is free of charge.

Therapeutic memoirs

Paired together for a presentation are Margot Fedoruk and Tamar Glouberman. The program categorizes them as “modern-day women” who will be presenting their “offbeat memoirs,” summarized by the question, “How B.C. is that?” Indeed, both Fedoruk and Glouberman tell coming-of-age stories of a sort, Fedoruk’s beginning in her 20s and Glouberman’s in her 30s. And they both lead outdoorsy, independent lives that could be described as the B.C. ideal, yet both have also faced many challenges and darker sides of that ideal.

Fedoruk is the author of Cooking Tips for Desperate Fishwives, in which she openly shares her anxieties of being married to a West Coast sea urchin diver – she is lonely without him, must raise their two daughters mostly without him and is worried that an accident may result in her having to live without him. Yet, she loves Rick, even though she does try (unsuccessfully) to convince him to take up another profession and stay closer to home. The pair moves around a lot, and Fedoruk herself takes up many different jobs over the years to make ends meet. But they stick together, getting married after their daughters are all grown up and have left home.

As dysfunctional as their relationship appears at times, Fedoruk had a more challenging life before she met Rick. Her father is a horrible man, her mother dies of cancer and she and her sister lose the family home to her mother’s second husband, also a horrible man. And there’s more. It is no wonder she leaves Winnipeg, eventually settling in British Columbia, though settling may be too strong a word, as she and her family do live in several different places on the coast, with some time in Calgary.

What makes Fedoruk’s memoir unique is the inclusion of a recipe in almost every chapter that reflects the mood or subject matter of the chapter, like the Killer Lasagne in the introduction, which begins, “The night I ran over Rick with my car, I was over four months pregnant with our first daughter.” Other recipes include Easy Curried Chickpeas With Rice, which appears as an affordable comfort food in a chapter about her being exhausted, on her own, caring for her two then-young daughters; and Wild-crafted Stinging Nettle Pesto, which comes after one of her descriptions of the soaps she makes – her business is Starfish Soap Company.

Near the end of her memoir, Fedoruk mentions that she has started therapy. I would have liked her to have written this book further into that process. As honest as she is about her feelings and circumstances, the memoir would have been more layered and impactful had she been further along in understanding how her traumatic childhood experiences, her genes and other factors affect how she moves through the world.

Glouberman has a less tragic background but a similarly transient life – and also loves something that gives her both great joy and great anxiety, the latter of which eventually takes over. In Chasing Rivers: A Whitewater Life, she shares her emotional journey of trying to make a life as a whitewater rafting guide.

One of the few women to guide tours, Glouberman does face sexism, her skills often underestimated by clients, but her male bosses and colleagues all seem to appreciate her abilities – certainly more than she does. She is constantly worried about making a mistake that will kill her or someone else and, while this is rational, given her job and its risks, the feeling becomes overwhelming. With an accident on the road – there is a lot of travel required to get to places like Chilko River, Williams Lake and further afield, outside the province – and her worst nightmare coming true on a rafting trip, Glouberman’s fears have very real incidents on which to grow.

Glouberman tries other types of work, but is always drawn back to the water. She struggles with depression and has a few other harsh experiences that add to her self-doubt. She tries various forms of therapy, some of which make her feel worse. Her family is supportive, though, and her sister’s home in Whistler is a refuge. She is only beginning her journey to healing when the memoir ends, and part of that has to do with getting into a master’s writing program. Both she and Fedoruk, who also went back to university for a writing degree, thank several people for their memoirs coming to fruition.

Glouberman and Fedoruk present at the book festival Feb. 12, 2 p.m. (tickets are $18). They also speak at Congregation Har El that day, at 11 a.m.

The price of victory

The harm inflicted on a society by war culture is front and centre in Israeli writer Yishai Sarid’s book Victorious. The main character, Abigail, is a military psychologist who, basically, tries to make soldiers into better killers, both “helping” them through trauma after they’ve experienced it and teaching them ways to be immune to trauma so that they can “beat the enemy.” Her father, who strongly disapproves of her work with the army, is a renowned clinical psychologist. On more than one occasion, he tries to talk her out of working for the military, but does not succeed. That the character of the father is dying of cancer is not coincidental.

Abigail blurs professional lines everywhere, working for the married man who fathered her son, the man who is now the army’s chief of staff; sleeping with a patient/friend; trying to become close friends with a former patient; and having a sexual relationship with one of the young soldiers whose unit she’s evaluating. The lessons she teaches are chilling, as is her abandonment of a patient who becomes too difficult for her to handle and some of her other actions.

She believes her job is her patriotic duty, even as her own son, Shauli, enters military service, in the paratroopers no less, and her fears for him fight with her pride in his choice. Though, with both his father and mother being staunch militarists, it could be argued that Shauli doesn’t really have a choice.

Victorious is a sparingly written novel that readers will not only ponder but feel well after they put it down. Translator Yardenne Greenspan must be given credit for making Sarid’s words as impactful in English as they are in Hebrew.

Sarid’s book festival event is Feb. 12, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $18.

For the full author lineup and to purchase festival tickets or passes, visit jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival or call 604-257-5111.

A roadmap to remembering

Alan Twigg, author of Out of Hiding: Holocaust Literature of British Columbia, at the gravesite of Rudolf “Rudi” Vrba, who died in 2006. (photo from JCC Jewish Book Festival)

Fittingly for a man who has dedicated his life’s work to the written word, Alan Twigg has compiled a fascinating bibliography. Out of Hiding: Holocaust Literature of British Columbia is one of two books to be launched in a JCC Jewish Book Festival epilogue event on April 5. The other is Sounds from Silence: Reflections of a Child Holocaust Survivor, Psychiatrist and Teacher by Dr. Robert Krell, to whom Twigg’s book is dedicated.

“More than anyone in Canada, Robert Krell has continuously carried the torches of healing, investigation and discourse about the Shoah since the 1970s to counteract ever-encroaching racism, denial and wilful ignorance,” writes Twigg, whose book is also dedicated to the late publisher and editor Ronald Hatch, who died last November. Hatch and his wife Veronica co-managed Ronsdale Press, which published Out of Hiding.

Among other things, Twigg is the founder of the BC BookWorld newspaper, The Ormsby Review (now called The British Columbia Review), the ABCBookWorld reference site, the Literary Map of BC and the Indigenous Literary Map of BC, as well as many of the province’s literary prizes. He has published 20 books and made seven literary documentaries.

Twigg wrote Out of Hiding with the help of many, including, notably, Yosef Wosk, who wrote the book’s afterword, in which Wosk discusses various kinds of hiding – from one’s mission, from persecution, in dreams, in silence, from truth. Wosk notes that the perpetrators of the Holocaust also tried to hide: “The Nazis engaged in fraud, deception and secrecy on a massive scale,” he writes.

“The secrecy was complete and, to a large extent, effective,” he adds. “The very monstrosity of the crime made it unbelieveable. In fact, the Nazis speculated that the unimaginability of their Aktionen would work in their favour.” But this expectation “was frustrated by the Allied victory. [What remained of] Nazi archives were opened, contemporary Jewish documents were discovered, and facts were ferreted out by courts and scholars. Moreover, by 1942, the Free World had gradually learned the truth, albeit not always complete and precise.”

Wosk concludes, “There is much to remember and even more to know as the Holocaust comes out of hiding.”

And this is one of the reasons Twigg compiled this collection.

“I am not a Jew. I am not a German. I simply believe it is the responsibility of everyone on the planet to know more than just a little about the Holocaust,” begins Twigg in the foreword. “It is our collective responsibility to teach our children – with details – about why the Shoah is unique among the many genocides.”

He points out: “No other political regime has ever systematically murdered at least 1.5 million babies and children.”

As well: “Never before or after has a modern, industrial state mobilized all of its resources to systematically commit murder at least six million times in about eight years (from Kristallnacht in 1938 to 1945) and no other government has established a separate killing ground to murder approximately 50,000 women (at Ravensbruck, north of Berlin).

“No other regime has so thoroughly and consistently degraded its victims,” writes Twigg. “Estimates vary but the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum claims Germans created 980 concentration camps, 30,000 slave labour camps, 1,150 Jewish ghettos, 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps and 500 brothels where women were sex slaves.” And yet, Holocaust education surveys have shown that most people would struggle to name one or two camps, other than perhaps Auschwitz.

Twigg believes that, “if the most-heinous, most-planned and most extensive genocide can be deep-sixed by mankind, all genocides thereafter can be shrugged off as natural – as inevitable as forest fires, plagues, droughts, locusts or tidal waves.” If that happens, he argues, then genocide becomes “someone else’s problem.” As for something the magnitude of the Holocaust, he writes, “Most certainly it can happen again.”

Out of Hiding is an intensely personal project for Twigg. He describes the book as “a roadmap back to places and experiences that must never be forgotten, offering a wide range of perspectives from the Holocaust-related books of British Columbian authors.” In total, he covers some 160 books in four sections. Some authors have written, edited or otherwise helped bring into being more than one memoir, novel, report or study; some of the people discussed are the subjects of the publications, rather than the writer.

Part One features relatively long expositions on Rudolf Vrba, Robert (Robbie) Waisman and Krell.

Twigg considers Vrba – who lived in Vancouver for the last few decades of his life – the “most important author of British Columbia.”

Writes Twigg in Out of Hiding, “Historian Ruth Linn estimates there were about 500-700 attempts to escape from Auschwitz-Birkenau, and most failed. Some 75 of these attempts were made by Jews; only five Jews made it successfully to freedom. The most significant of these five was Rudolf ‘Rudi’ Vrba, the main author of the most authoritative report on the true nature of the concentration camps, co-authored with co-escapee Alfred Wetzler.”

The Vrba-Wetzler Report, dated April 25, 1944, “finally revealed to the Allies the true nature and extent of the Holocaust.”

Twigg provides a biography of Vrba and some of what he learned from him as a friend. He also shares that Vrba, who died in 2006, was buried in a “seldom-visited cemetery, known to few people, where there is only a simple headstone.”

The April 5 event will include a video of Wosk chanting a Jewish blessing for Vrba at the graveside – something that apparently has not been done before.

Both Waisman and Krell are discussed in as much depth as Vrba, from their brief childhoods before the Holocaust through to recent history, sharing some of their writings and accomplishments, giving readers a sense of who they are and why their contributions are so vital.

Part Two offers shorter personal summaries on dozens of authors and publications. This section includes Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, Claudia Cornwall, Peter Hay, David Lester, Robert Mermelstein, Heather Pringle, Peter Suedfeld, Mark Zuehlke and many others. It features survivors of the Holocaust, as well as researchers, educators, journalists, graphic artists and editors who have studied the Holocaust, members of the Second or Third Generation, and a few non-Jews.

Part Three features an eclectic mix of 26 writers/artists, including Olga Campbell, Esi Edugyan, Jean Gerber, Rabbi Marvin Hier, Nikolaus Martin, Isa Milman, Norman Ravvin, Colin Upton and others.

Part Four: One Doctor, Two Rabbis comprises three essays. The first is on Dr. Tom Perry, who served with the U.S. Army Medical Corps in the Second World War, and “took a series of rarely seen photos that his widow Claire Perry donated to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre in 1994 along with a five-page letter he wrote to her from ‘somewhere in Germany,’ describing his feelings and impressions of Buchenwald.” The letter is included in this section – and it is a powerful testament, though words don’t capture the horror as much as do his photographs.

The second essay, “Lulek’s Story,” flows from a well-known photo taken by Tim Gidal on July 17, 1945, in a refugee compound near Haifa – front and centre is Israel Meir “Lulek” Lau, holding a Buchenwald banner. Rabbi Meir Lau, who became Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, was the youngest survivor of Buchenwald and his story is moving and inspirational.

Wosk’s afterword rounds out the collection with his thought-provoking reflections on hiding.

“Soon all witnesses will be gone,” concludes Twigg in his author’s statement. “The Holocaust must not be relegated to being merely the psychic preserve of Jews and Germans.”

The double-book launch event is presented with the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and takes place at the Rothstein Theatre. Admission is free but registration via jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival/events or at eventbrite.ca is required. To read a discussion of Krell’s Sounds from Silence, visit jewishindependent.ca/a-child-survivor-reflects.

Book festival is shaping up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Courtesy JCC Jewish Book Festival