Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival

Community milestones … May 2025

Margaux Wosk, left, receives a Community Award from BC Lt.-Gov. Wendy Cocchia (photo from BC Achievement Foundation / Don Craig, photographer)

On May 1, Premier David Eby and Walter Pela, chair of the BC Achievement Foundation, named the recipients of the 22nd annual Community Award. The program, presented by BC Achievement – an independent foundation that honours excellence and inspires achievement throughout the province – recognizes extraordinary British Columbians who build better, stronger and more engaged communities. This year’s recipients included Jewish community member Margaux Wosk.

Wosk is an advocate, artist, designer and entrepreneur who champions disability justice and neurodivergent inclusion.

As president of BC People First, they provide leadership to elevate disabled voices and advocate for meaningful change across the province. Their work breaks down barriers, fosters pride and amplifies underrepresented perspectives through creativity, advocacy and education.

Through their business, Retrophiliac, Wosk designs communication tools and products by and for disabled, LGBTQIA2+ and neurodivergent individuals – empowering others to express themselves, reduce stigma and build community. They also founded the We Belong market, which highlighted neurodivergent and disabled entrepreneurs, and were featured on AMI’s Our Community episode for their advocacy and small business endeavours.

An emerging leader, Wosk spoke on Parliament Hill at the Disability Without Poverty rally and has collaborated with People First of Canada, McMaster University and Curiko on accessibility and small business development. Their artwork – featured in York University’s Mental Health Literacy Guide for Autism, to which they also contributed – reflects their commitment to advocacy through creativity. Several of their products are available from the Museum of Vancouver on their open MOV platform.

“The recipients of this year’s Community Award remind us that the strength of British Columbia lies in the compassion, creativity and commitment of its people,” said Eby. “Whether they’re leading grassroots initiatives or mentoring future changemakers, these individuals exemplify the power of community and the impact of selfless service. Their efforts uplift us all and set a powerful example for what we can achieve together.”

“This year’s program shines a spotlight on emerging leaders alongside long-standing changemakers,” said Pela. “Each recipient demonstrates what’s possible when individuals step up with purpose and heart. Their contributions strengthen our communities and remind us that leadership isn’t defined by title or age – it’s defined by impact, generosity and vision.”

The Community Award recipients are selected by an independent jury panel, whose 2025 members include Mayor Suzan Hewat of Kaslo, Mayor Sarrah Storey of Fraser Lake, and past recipients Herman Ho of Vancouver, Meeka Morgan of Ashcroft and Upkar Singh Tatlay of Surrey.

This year’s award recipients were recognized in a formal presentation ceremony held in Victoria on May 7 in the presence of BC Lt.-Gov. Wendy Cocchia.

Each awardee will receive a medallion designed by Robert Davidson. They will also be celebrated through the online campaign #shinethelightbc, to commemorate their inspirational achievements positively impacting British Columbians.

For more information about the BC Achievement Foundation or Community Award program, visit bcachievement.com.

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photo - Rabbi Dan Moskovitz — Rabbi Dan Moskovitz

Rabbi Dan Moskovitz was honoured with the doctor of Jewish nonprofit management, honoris causa, from Hebrew Union College at its 2025 Graduation Ceremony in Los Angeles.

Moskovitz has served as senior rabbi of Temple Sholom since July 2013. Before joining Temple Sholom, he was associate rabbi at Temple Judea in Los Angeles for 13 years. He is also a past chair of the Reform Rabbis of Canada and was on the steering committee for Canadian Reform Judaism. Moskovitz is the author of numerous articles and publications, including The Men’s Seder (MRJ Press), an experiential journey through the Passover seder for Jewish men.

“As we continue our celebration of both emerging and established leaders through this season of ordination and graduation, we take special pride in awarding honorary degrees to graduates whose professional journeys exemplify our mission and values,” said Dr. Andrew Rehfeld, president of Hebrew Union College. “Through their vision, service and enduring impact, they define how bold leadership can shape a vibrant Jewish future.”

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The fifth edition of the Western Canada Jewish Book Awards, presented by the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival in Vancouver, took place May 13 at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver. There were winners in six awards categories.

Helen Pinsky presented the Nancy Richler Memorial Prize for Fiction to Dave Margoshes for his novel A Simple Carpenter. Set in Middle Eastern “Holy Land” in the early 1980s, against the backdrop of the civil war in neighbouring Lebanon, the protagonist is a Christ-like character trying to live a low-key life in Israel/Palestine. Part biblical fable, part magic realism and part thriller, A Simple Carpenter is a meditation on memory and identity, religious faith and doubt, the yearning for a messiah, and the perennially tangled, fraught state of Arab-Israeli relations.

Bernard Pinsky presented Prof. Richard Menkis with the Pinsky Givon Family Prize for In a “Land of Hope”: Documents on the Canadian Jewish Experience, 1627-1923, which Menkis edited with Prof. Pierre Anctil. The collection prioritizes diverse Jewish voices that express the multiple realities of the Canadian Jewish experience. Organized chronologically, from the arrival of the first Jewish migrants to New France, to Jewish Canadian experiences during and shortly after the First World War, this volume includes sources never before published.

Robert Matas presented the Cindy Roadburg Memorial Prize for memoir/biography to former federal cabinet minister and senator Jack Austin who wrote, with Edie Austin, Unlikely Insider: A West Coast Advocate in Ottawa. The memoir is a reminder of the value of public service as a force for economic progress, social justice and nation-building. As a British Columbian, Austin worked to ensure that BC’s perspectives and interests mattered in Ottawa; as someone who came from a disadvantaged background, he is sensitive to the need to make the country a place of fairness and opportunity for all.

The Diamond Foundation Prize for writing for children and youth was presented by Daniella Abramowich to Ellen Schwartz for Schwartz’s Friends to the Rescue, illustrated by Alison Mutton. Inspired by a true story, and told in two different time periods, the book takes place in Fossa, Italy, a small mountain village that offered refuge to Jews during the Holocaust. When the village suffers a devastating earthquake 65 years later, the Jewish refugees whom the town had helped travel to Fossa to return the favour.

Rhea Tregebov received the Betty Averbach Foundation Prize for poetry from Leanne Averbach for the book Talking to Strangers. In it, Tregebov mourns, praises, prays, regrets, summons, celebrates and bears witness with artistry and tenderness. Talking to Strangers was also awarded the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for poetry in 2024.

The Kahn Foundation Prize for writing on the Holocaust was presented by Saul Kahn to Marie Doduck for her memoir A Childhood Unspoken. Mariette was only 5 years old when the Nazis invaded her hometown of Brussels, Belgium, in 1940. She and her siblings were scattered across the city and countryside, hiding with non-Jews and in convents and orphanages or working for the resistance. Mariette emerged from the war quick-thinking, independent and ready to start a new life in Canada. As she navigated to a new identity as Marie – an industrious and resourceful community member, mother and advocate for children’s rights – Mariette, the silent child, found her voice.

Jurors for the 2025 Western Canada Jewish Book Awards were Miranda Burgess, Susanna Egan, Elisabeth Kushner, Roger Nash, Norman Ravvin and Harriet Zaidman.

Daniella Givon, chair of the awards committee, introduced the evening and Dana Camil Hewitt, director of the JCC Jewish Book Festival, concluded the awards celebration.

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Jessica Kronis is the new director of the Jewish Community Foundation. She brings a wealth of experience from Toronto’s philanthropic sector and a deep commitment to mission-driven work. From her leadership at ACCESS Community Capital Fund to her role with Hillel at Florida International University and helping launch the Nova Exhibition in Toronto, Kronis has consistently built strong programs and meaningful connections.

The Jewish Community Foundation plays a vital role in building a strong, sustainable future for our community. Through endowments, legacy gifts and other forms of planned giving, it helps ensure support for community institutions and responds to emerging needs. The foundation closed the fiscal year with $108 million in assets, surpassing the $100 million milestone. This achievement reflects both the trust our fundholders place in the foundation and the oversight of its investment committee, whose guidance has kept the investment strategy focused, effective and responsibly managed.

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photo - Dr. Siamak Boroomand — Dr. Siamak Boroomand

Dr. Siamak Boroomand has been appointed as King David High School’s new deputy head of school. He will be taking over the position from Alex Monchamp, KDHS’s deputy head of school for the past 24 years, who is moving on to new ventures.

Boroomand brings more than 20 years of experience as an educator and leader in Canadian Accredited Independent Schools (CAIS) institutions across Canada. A proud British Columbian, he graduated from St. George’s School and earned his teaching certification from Simon Fraser University. He began his career teaching chemistry and math at Southridge and Meadowridge schools before relocating to Ontario.

For the past 15 years, Boroomand has been a leader at Branksome Hall, an all-girls International Baccalaureate school in Toronto. There, he served as a science and math teacher before moving into administrative roles, including assistant head of middle school, assistant head of operations and, most recently, assistant head of grades 9-10, where he supported 220 students and their families.

Boroomand will be moving back to Vancouver with his wife, Bonnee, son Aaron and daughter Kayla. He steps into his role at KDHS in August.

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The Ronald S. Roadburg Foundation has awarded a $350,000 multi-year grant to support the new USY (United Synagogue Youth) Lower Mainland Community Director initiative. This funding will subsidize the program’s growth through 2029 and aims to foster deep Jewish engagement for teens through enriching programming, mentorship and community involvement.

The initiative is a collaborative effort between multiple synagogues in a geographic area to serve teens. In the Lower Mainland, the three main participating Conservative congregations are Congregation Beth Israel (Vancouver), Congregation Har El (West Vancouver) and Beth Tikvah Congregation (Richmond). Launched in September 2024 with the hiring of Shayla Brewer as the Lower Mainland’s first community director, the program has already seen growth in local and international USY participation by teens.

Complexities of Berlin

Photographer Jason Langer’s perception of Germany and its capital, Berlin, is a complicated one, and his current exhibition at the Zack Gallery, Berlin: A Jewish Ode to the Metropolis, reflects those complexities. Organized in partnership with the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, the exhibit is Langer’s first show in Canada.

photo - "Boys" by Jason Langer, from his book Berlin — “Boys” *(photo by Jason Langer)*

Langer’s newly published book, Berlin, includes 135 black and white photographs. A selection of these images forms the exhibit at the Zack, which has an emotional sophistication of its own, even though the show is being promoted as a prologue for the book festival. Both the show and the book catalogue the artist’s several trips to Berlin and his explorations of the city. They also provide visually compelling commentary on Langer’s contradictory and evolving feelings for Germany.

photo - A Nazi uniform in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp museum in Berlin. (photo by Jason Langer) — A Nazi uniform in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp museum in Berlin. *(photo by Jason Langer)*

As in life, the then-and-now overlap and, occasionally, the juxtaposition of the past and the present are jarring in Langer’s imagery. On the one hand, Germany is the country where the Holocaust originated, the country that erased its Jewish population almost entirely and spearheaded the destruction of the Jews of Europe. On the other hand, it is a modern country of laughing kids, hardworking people and beautiful architecture, a country that acknowledges its past actions and tries to make amends to the Jews. It is a country inspiring fear, hatred, respect and admiration in varying measures.

Langer writes in an essay about his relationship with Germany and its progression from total negativity to growing understanding. When he was 6 years old, his family moved from his native United States to Israel, where he spent his formative years, until age 11, on a kibbutz.

“Every year, each children’s house would visit the Holocaust memorial, located on the kibbutz property, during Yom Kippur…. We were asked to walk silently and led into a courtyard with one building and three short walls,” writes Langer. “I remember the walls were made of large, rectangular stones, grey in colour and a bit rough and oddly shaped. We learned about how the Jews had suffered, first as slaves in Egypt and then in the Holocaust by the Germans.”

Later, as an adult, he “vaguely remembered having heard fearful stories of German people from my mother and grandmother, though my mother also made jokes about Germans, putting on a comic fake accent. She died in 2003 and I inherited her books, among other things, including a kind of illustrated encyclopedia titled The Wonderful Story of the Jews, written by Jacob Gewirtz. It was published [in 1970], not long before our move to Israel. The text refers to the Germans’ ‘unspeakable crimes’ against the Jews, as well as the ‘unending ravages of war, persecution and tyranny’ they had faced. Some of the illustrations are quite scary, showing buildings on fire and Jewish people menaced by gun-wielding Nazis. The book presents Israel as a place of refuge, the kibbutzim as almost unique.”

After being exposed to such ideas during childhood, Langer’s predominant feeling towards Germany was aversion. But then, in 2008, when he was already an established photographer, one of his friends suggested he photograph Berlin.

“He thought the city would be a good match for my sensibilities but I met his suggestion with trepidation and fear,” Langer recalled. “I harboured many preconceived ideas about Germans and Germany. I imagined Berlin as a vast, cold, unfriendly, gritty place, but, at the same time, it seemed exciting and sexy somehow.

“I decided to see Berlin for myself, keen to challenge my existing ideas and also uncover reminders of the Jewish people who had lived there, until they fled or were hunted down and killed by the Nazis.”

photo - Photographer Jason Langer’s exhibit at the Zack Gallery runs to Feb. 16 — Photographer Jason Langer’s exhibit at the Zack Gallery runs to Feb. 16. (photo from Jason Langer)

In the next five years, Langer visited Berlin frequently. “From 2009 to 2013,” he said, “I made five trips for two weeks at a time. I stayed in a flat with about six people. When they were going on vacation, they would let me know, and I would fly over and occupy their rooms. They would also give me advice on where to go.”

During those visits, he took multiple photographs and strived to form a new narrative regarding his feelings and associations regarding Germany and its people.

“This work is an attempt to remember, confront and unwind my attitudes about Germans, Germany, Berlin and my Jewish inheritance; these images are part discovery, part remembrance and part fantasy,” he explained. “They’re my attempt to stand where Jewish people were rounded up and deported, to remember but also reassess. They’re an effort to confront my internal attitudes and prejudices, to look into people’s eyes and find a continuation of kindness, to be open to the happiness of contemporary life in Berlin.”

Some photographs in the gallery are full of anguish and terrible beauty, like the Holocaust Memorial, consisting of 2711 concrete slabs (stelae) of different heights, or an ornate door of the Stiftung Neue Synagogue, built in 1865, the only synagogue in Berlin to survive the war, though its interior was burnt.

The horror of the war is also reflected in the image of an old, dilapidated shed, the “goat house,” where one Jewish family, a mother and a daughter, hid for several years to survive the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate Jews. No water, no heat, no electricity, just the women’s indomitable spirits and relentless wish to live.

Every photo has a story to tell. Many a story of heroism and tragedy. But there are other pictures, too, reflecting modern Berlin, the city of now. Laughing boys, a tired-looking woman, an anti-fascist demonstration, various streets and buildings.

Langer writes: “It was a strange mix of death and life.… There was a sense of youth, freedom and joy I felt in Berlin.… Whenever I wandered, I took it as a gift of prolonged, uninterrupted time for reflection.”

The artist’s wanderings and reflections led to the creation of the photobook Berlin.

“This book is not a document,” said Langer. “It is a dream within a dream within another dream. Berlin is immense, there was no way I could cast a wide enough net to what it’s like. Instead, I have painted a picture of then and now, pain and pleasure, some people who died long ago and those who are living and young, all from my own perspective.”

Berlin: A Jewish Ode to the Metropolis opened on Jan. 6 and will continue at the Zack Gallery until Feb. 16. For more information, visit jasonlanger.com.

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

Jews in trench coats

Canadians and Americans are similar, but different. To see this obvious statement in practical terms, two books – by two authors who will speak in Vancouver next month – provide an entertaining and educational contrast.

Andrew Kirsch and Douglas London are retired spies. Well, the term “spy” is, they both readily admit, a bit laden for a job that Kirsch characterizes as a lot of “hurry up and wait” and that London describes as “hours and hours of routine, and a few moments of adrenaline.”

Kirsch is a Canadian and author of I Was Never Here: My True Canadian Story of Coffees, Codenames and Covert Operations in the Age of Terrorism. London is American and author of The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence. They will present as part of the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, in an event dubbed “Jews in Trench Coats,” on Feb. 13.

Kirsch, who grew up in Toronto, left a job in the financial sector in London, England, after the 2005 terror attacks in that city and joined the Canadian Security Intelligence Services, CSIS. He describes himself as “part of a post-9/11 wave of civically minded Canadians who had left our day jobs to do our part in the age of terrorism.”

London’s career in the field was longer, symmetrically spanning 17 years on either side of 9/11, which is, obviously, the Western world’s iconic intelligence failure of the current era.

In the United States, the FBI is the domestic security service, much like our RCMP, while the CIA works almost exclusively outside the country. Similarly, in Israel, the Mossad deals with foreign intelligence and covert activities, while Shin Bet manages internal security. “In Canada, we have one organization [CSIS], and it’s responsible for covering the globe while operating largely domestically,” writes Kirsch.

The lack of awareness around CSIS is one of the reasons Kirsch wrote his book. If the CIA knocks on your door, many people around the world would know to be instantly on alert. If CSIS knocks on a Canadian’s door, Kirsch admits, it usually requires a quick spiel about what CSIS is and what it does. He also wrote the book because, when he and most of the other agents he knows first got interested, there was little to read on the subject of what they might expect.

If most Canadians don’t know what CSIS is, new Canadians can be expected to know even less. The author shares a cute anecdote about how he shorthands his role for Arabic speakers.

“The Arabic term for intelligence service is Mukhābarāt,” he writes. Obviously, somebody from an Arabic speaking country might understandably be anxious when someone knocks on the door and declares themselves representatives of the security service.

“I’d simply say, ‘Canadian Mukhābarāt. Nice Mukhābarāt.’ That might get a laugh and a foot in the door,” he said.

In typical Canadian fashion, Kirsch downplays the drama. He’s no James Bond.

“These aren’t high-stakes negotiations over baccarat and cocktails at a casino. It’s much less glamorous. I was in the coffee and conversations business,” he writes. Nevertheless, he charms with amusing anecdotes, foibles and practical jokes (he and his former colleagues are serious and professional, he insists, but they need to blow off steam). One gets to know the man and the organization.

While Kirsch is modest in speaking of his work and that of CSIS, he makes their significance clear.

“Canada is one of the safest countries in the world. This is not because we don’t face threats, but because we do an admirable job of protecting our citizens against them,” he writes. “That is how law enforcement and intelligence agencies tend to work. If we do our job, you won’t know we were ever needed in the first place.”

One of the most notable incidents in recent history when the work of CSIS did hit the front pages was the foiled Toronto 18 plot in 2006, when a cadre of radicalized Canadians plotted to explode truck bombs in southern Ontario. That was a disaster that didn’t happen because of intelligence, but Kirsch acknowledges tragedies where intelligence failed.

In 2014, for example, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau shot and killed Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, a soldier who was standing guard at the National War Memorial, and then stormed Parliament Hill but was killed before he could reach the heart of our democracy.

And just because Canadians have been blessedly fortunate not to suffer more terrorism doesn’t mean Canadians aren’t involved in some of the horrors we see abroad. A Vancouverite was convicted in absentia for involvement in a suicide bomb attack on Israeli tourists in Burgas, Bulgaria, in 2012. Five Israelis and the bus driver were killed and more than 35 other Israelis injured.

Kirsch admits he was worn down by the bureaucracy of the job, but his decision to leave the agency was based on family obligations, when his wife became pregnant. He clearly holds CSIS and his former colleagues in great esteem.

London’s reflections are not so kind. He calls the CIA in the last couple of decades “a cult of personality.”

“The senior ranks became an ever more homogenous collection cut from the same mold, focused more on ambition than the mission, the organization, or the workforce,” writes London. “While there were thankfully brilliant exceptions, the cadre had drunk their own Kool-Aid as to their own brilliance and worth.”

London also paints a more dramatic picture than his Canadian counterpart – not surprising, given the lopsided size and prominence of their respective organizations in the world.

There is cajoling involved in recruiting people to the CIA. One of the crucial tasks of a successful operations officer is determining a person’s motivations. To one potential recruit, London said, “It was Allah’s will that we meet … so we can together accomplish something bigger than ourselves.” In this case, it was an appeal to religious and national pride, not material reward. In other cases, material reward was enveloped in a person’s (usually a man’s) sense of providing for family, in which case London would emphasize that the “ability to contribute modestly to your family’s well-being” was something that would be undertaken by a good family man, not a traitor to his country.

London writes about antisemitism he encountered from among colleagues – especially fellow recruits early in his career, many of whom had never met a New Yorker, let alone a Jew. Both authors write of keeping their Jewishness under the radar. Occasionally, a throwaway comment could still stun.

Kirsch was meeting with a Sunni Muslim who was ranting about his hatred of Shia Muslims.

“And he rolled back into his seat and he stroked his big bushy beard and said, ‘You know, Andrew, they are worse than the Jews.’

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt more Jewish than in that moment,” writes London.

In an amusing observation near the end of his book, London claims people in his business are notorious yentas.

“It’s a pity really that confidentiality considerations prevent the creation of a People magazine, Us Weekly or TMZ program for the agency. Perhaps ironic, but the very same people hired to protect our nation’s most guarded national secrets are absolutely the biggest gossips.”

London proves this in a book that is as juicy as CIA censors would allow.

Jews in Trench Coats, featuring London and Kirsch, takes place at 6 p.m., Monday, Feb. 16. Tickets are $18. The JCC Jewish Book Festival runs Feb. 11-16, with free and ticketed events for all ages. Details at jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival.

Lives shaped by war

Heroism and survival took on new meaning for me after reading George Halpern’s From School to Sky: Joseph’s Tale of War and Gina Roitman’s Don’t Ask. The first is a biography of a certain time in Halpern’s father’s life, the latter is a fictional work that centres around a daughter’s search for her mother’s history during that same time period, the Second World War. Both books are featured at this year’s Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival.

Halpern takes part in the Feb. 12, 10 a.m., by-donation event A Literary Quickie, in which he and seven other authors each have five minutes to pitch their books. Roitman appears with Lynda Cohen Loigman (The Matchmaker’s Gift: A Novel) in A Day to Celebrate Human Closeness, which takes place at 2 p.m., on Feb. 14 ($18).

Halpern’s pitch to me included only some of the actions that make his father, Joseph Halpern, a hero. In reading the book, which is based on months’ worth of interviews George did with his dad, who died in 2011, I discovered several more reasons. Joseph was a fighter pilot for the Russian Air Force (Joseph’s town, Vladimir Volynsky, was in the part of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union weeks after the war started). He was a Soviet prisoner for a spell, then trained as a special forces commando. He was captured by Nazis on a mission, but escaped. Following the war, he defected (to the Americans in Berlin), taking his Russian plane with him, but then returned to Russia to fulfil a promise he made to someone who had saved his life. He founded an orphanage, helped create the Israeli Air Force, etc., etc.

The most compelling part to me of Joseph Halpern’s story, however, is his honest appraisal of himself, his humility and his humanity, even though he wasn’t always humane. He admits his “fearless attitude would be combined with special training – including brainwashing – and I would truly believe that I was invincible.” He is open about wanting to have killed more Nazis than he did, and that he personally killed someone in an act of revenge. His complexities include the life he had to build after immigrating to Canada, caring for his kids through his wife’s struggle with mental illness, obtaining two doctorates, working with NASA, finding love again and more.

Similarly, though in a fictional setting, Roitman’s novel deals with multi-layered human beings, some of whom survive because they committed acts of which they are not proud – and they carry the guilt for the rest of their lives. As Joseph’s trauma travels beyond his own self and is passed on in some degree to his children, so does the character Rokhl’s carry over to her daughter Hannah.

Rokhl doesn’t talk much, and certainly not about her experiences during the Holocaust, in contrast to her husband, who has already passed away when the novel begins – what little Hannah knows of her heritage has come from her father. Hannah only receives her mother’s wisdom through notes that Rokhl leaves her, the last of which Hannah finds in her mom’s purse after Rokhl dies, apparently by suicide: “I am not her,” it says.

Don’t Ask traces Hannah’s attempt to figure out the mystery of that note and deal with the grief of her mother’s death, while also brokering a real estate deal between a German buyer and a Holocaust survivor who lives in Quebec and owns a tract of land in the Laurentians. Hannah’s parents immigrated to Montreal after the war; Hannah, their only child, was born in a DP camp in Germany, which they had called home. Since the Holocaust, “Her father could not say the word ‘German’ without spitting” and, in her last encounter with her mother, in which Hannah shared the news that she was traveling to Germany, her mother had threatened, “If you go, it will be over my dead body, do you hear me?”

In the guise of a budding romance between Hannah and Max, her counterpart in Germany, Roitman addresses many challenging questions about the intergenerational nature of culpability and forgiveness, of duty to one’s parents and the responsibility for building one’s own life, of nursing hatred or risking love. She does so in a fashion that sometimes pushes belief – for example, Hannah and Max are not young, yet they lack much understanding of what attraction is, and Hannah, despite her professed curiosity about her mother’s past doesn’t explore until the end of the book four boxes of her mother’s notes, which have sat in her closet for an undisclosed amount of time prior to her mother’s death. Yet, Roitman also writes in a way that makes you care about the characters and what happens to them. The story of Rokhl’s Holocaust experiences and that of Hannah’s budding relationship (and the weight of history that it and the real estate deal unearth) are enthralling and Don’t Ask is a hard book to put down until you finish it.

Horn co-launches book fest

Dara Horn and David Baddiel open the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival on Feb. 6. (photos from JBF)

Early in her new book, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, Dara Horn reflects on a controversy at the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam, where an employee who wore a kippa to work was told by his employers to hide it under a baseball cap because it might interfere with the museum’s “independent position.”

“The museum finally relented after deliberating for four months, which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding,” writes Horn.

The snappy summation is typical of the author’s approach: biting wit in the face of affronts of various dreadfulness. And the affronts pile up, supporting the incendiary thesis of the title.

Horn discusses the world’s interest in Anne Frank’s story, including the insistence on repeating the line from her diary, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” Leaving aside the fact that Frank wrote these words before she experienced how truly evil at heart some people can be, Horn writes, the line provides a “gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity).”

Horn, who is part of the Feb. 6 launch event for the 2022 Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, is a novelist with a PhD in Yiddish and Hebrew comparative literatures. Her take on contemporary antisemitism is suffused with her understanding of how Western audiences expect “coherence” and often an uplifting ending to the stories in our literature or other entertainment.

“Holocaust novels that have sold millions of copies both in the United States and overseas in recent years are all ‘uplifting,’ even when they include the odd dead kid,” she writes. “The Tattooist of Auschwitz, a recent international mega-bestseller touted for its ‘true story,’ manages to present an Auschwitz that involves a heartwarming romance. Sarah’s Key, The Book Thief, The Boy in [the] Striped Pyjamas, and many other bestsellers, some of which have even become required reading in schools, all involved non-Jewish rescuers who risk or sacrifice their own lives to save hapless Jews, thus inspiring us all.”

These uplifting stories, she points out, make up a large chunk of Holocaust-related literature, yet illustrate phenomena that were almost nonexistent during the Holocaust: non-Jews risking their lives to save Jews.

“Statistically speaking, this was not the experience of almost any Jews who endured the Holocaust,” she writes. “But for literature in non-Jewish languages, that grim reality is both inconvenient and irrelevant.”

She summarizes: “Dead Jews are supposed to teach us about the beauty of the world and the wonders of redemption – otherwise, what was the point of killing them in the first place?”

On the subject of non-Jewish rescuers, Horn goes into an extensive exploration of the life of Varian Fry, an American man who worked for the Emergency Rescue Committee, a group of American intellectuals that, beginning in 1940, distributed emergency American visas to endangered European artists and thinkers. What they envisioned rescuing was not so much the individuals themselves, but the very concept of European civilization, which they correctly believed to be in mortal danger from the Nazis. But, rescuing a culture’s greatest artists, writers and thinkers and sequestering them to safety in America, Horn posits, is itself “a sort of eugenics.”

For someone with an explicit distaste for disproportionate attention to rescue stories, Horn devotes a significant chunk in the middle of the book to what amounts to a biography of Fry. As the reader starts wondering how this fits into the larger thesis, Horn points out how the veneration of the more universal European culture for which Fry and his colleagues risked their lives was not extended to the particular Jewish culture that was the expressed target of the Nazis.

“Fry tried to save the culture of Europe, and for that he should be remembered and praised,” Horn writes. “But no one tried to save the culture of Hasidism, for example, with its devotion to ordinary, everyday holiness – or Misnagdim, the opposing religious movement within traditional Eastern European Judaism, whose energy in the years before the war was channeled into the rigourous study of musar, or ethics. Entire academies devoted to the Musar Movement were destroyed, their books burned out of the world, their teachers and leaders and scholars murdered – all the things that everyone feared would happen to the vaunted culture of Europe. No rescue committee was convened on behalf of the many people who devoted their lives and careers to … the actual study of righteousness. For them, there were no Varian Frys.”

Horn notes that, in the 1990s, there was a burgeoning of Holocaust museums and exhibitions all over the United States, including the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

“The idea was that people would come to these museums and learn what the world had done to the Jews, where hatred can lead. They would then stop hating Jews.

“It wasn’t a ridiculous idea, but it seems to have been proven wrong. A generation later, antisemitism is once again the next big thing, and it is hard to go to these museums today without feeling that something profound has shifted.”

She suggests that the lesson some people take from these exhibitions is the opposite of what was intended. The idea of the museums is that everyone should learn the depths to which humanity could skin sink, she writes.

“But this has come to mean that anything short of the Holocaust is, well, not the Holocaust. The bar is rather high.”

Therefore, when people are shot in a synagogue in Pittsburgh or San Diego, this is “not the Holocaust” and, presumably, nothing to get too concerned about in the greater scheme of Jewish victimization. Harassing Jewish college students is not the Holocaust. Lobbing missiles at sleeping children in Israeli cities is not the Holocaust. Even hounding ancient Jewish communities out of entire countries and seizing their assets is not the Holocaust. Horn does not mention Martin Niemöller, but she seems to be suggesting that, if “they” are coming for “the Jews,” most people will not speak up until it reaches something akin to the Holocaust, which we may have unwittingly recast not as the endpoint of hatred and antisemitism but as the stick by which the world measures threats to Jewish people.

An antisemitic attack in Jersey City, N.J., provides Horn with insights into how mainstream audiences try to make sense of antisemitic violence.

New Jersey’s flagship newspaper, the Star-Ledger, noted that “the attack that killed two Orthodox Jews, an Ecuadorian immigrant and a Jersey City police detective has highlighted racial tension that had been simmering ever since ultra-Orthodox Jews began moving to a lower-income community.”

Horn points out a few of the factual and logical inconsistencies in the media’s coverage, including that the assailants had never lived in Jersey City, so they weren’t reacting to any state of tension there. Moreover, the community that was attacked was accused of “gentrifying” a “minority” neighbourhood.

“This was remarkable, given that the tiny Hasidic community in question, highly visible members of the world’s most consistently persecuted minority, in fact came to Jersey City, fleeing gentrification, after being priced out of long-established Hasidic communities in Brooklyn,” she writes.

The book concludes rather unexpectedly, not with recipes for solving the contemporary crisis or explicit calls to action, but rather with reflections of her experience with Daf Yomi, the page-a-day, seven-and-a-half-year journey through the Babylonian Talmud. She provides a lovely and succinct explanation of Rabbinic Judaism.

“Until the year 70 CE, Judaism had been centred at the ancient temple in Jerusalem, where worship was mediated through priests offering sacrifices,” writes Horn. “After the Romans destroyed this temple and exiled the people, there was no particular reason for this religion, or even simply this people, to survive in any form. But on the eve of this temple’s destruction, one sage, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, had himself smuggled out of the besieged city of Jerusalem in a coffin, after which he convinced the Roman general Vespasian to allow him to open an academy for Torah scholars in a small town far from Jerusalem. Both Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai and Judaism faked their own deaths in order to survive this cataclysm. The small cadre of scholars in that small town reinvented this religion by turning it into a virtual-reality system, replacing temple rituals with equally ritualized blessings and prayers, study of Torah, and elaborately regulated interpersonal ethics. The sages frantically arguing about when and how to recite which prayers are survivors and descendants of survivors, remnants of a destroyed world. They are anxious about remembering every last detail of that lost connection to God, like mourners obsessing over the tiniest memories of a beloved they have lost. One might expect that this memory would eventually fade, that people would ‘move on.’ Instead the opposite happens. Once the process of memory becomes important, the details do not fade but rather accrue – because the memory itself becomes a living thing, enriched by every subsequent generation that brings new meaning to it.”

Without batting readers over the head, Horn seems to be advocating what Jews have always done – finding meaning, comfort and guidance by interrogating ideas and arguing across centuries with the greatest minds of the tradition. She may be, as she says, “part of a ridiculously small minority that nonetheless played a behemoth role in other people’s imaginations,” but her Daf Yomi practice reminds her that she is far from alone.

“I turn the page and return, carried by fellow readers living and dead, all turning the pages with me,” she concludes.

Horn will be joined at the virtual festival opening Feb. 6, 1 p.m., by David Baddiel, whose book Jews Don’t Count shares themes and emotions with Horn’s. Baddiel’s book, like others in this (sadly) flourishing genre, was reviewed in these pages recently (jewishindependent.ca/ tackling-the-hatred-head-on). They will be in conversation with Marsha Lederman, Western arts correspondent for the Globe and Mail.

For the full book festival schedule, visit jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival.

Beauty amid harshness

Rachel Rose, left, and Ami Sands Brodoff take part in the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival on Feb. 8.

None of us knows what lies ahead. We might think we do, but a lack of awareness one moment can have tragic impacts, mental or physical illness can overtake us, and our actions and reactions can hurt ourselves and others, whether harm is intended or not. Control is a fiction. And two recently published short story collections that will be featured at the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival on Feb. 8 explore that fact with tales that should make most of us feel grateful for the relative boringness of our lives.

Poet Rachel Rose’s debut novel, The Octopus Has Three Hearts, presents a series of unconventional characters in life-challenging situations difficult to imagine oneself in and yet portraying familiar emotions. The characters in Ami Sands Brodoff’s The Sleep of Apples will be easier for many readers to recognize in themselves, but they are also a diverse group of people for whom living is more of a task than a pleasure. In both collections, instances of uncomplicated joy, love and connection are rare. Nevertheless, they leave one feeling melancholically appreciative of the incomparable value of life, and acutely mindful of its fragile nature.

Rose’s stories are explicitly linked by the animals with whom her people interact, from dogs to rats to pigs to parrots and others, including, of course, an octopus. The title story centres around a polyamorous relationship, the narrator husband, his wife (who is a biologist at an aquarium) and one of his wife’s partners trying to find an octopus who’s escaped their tank under the biologist’s watch. The animal’s attributes – intelligence, fluidity, ambiguity, etc. – have obvious symbolic meaning not only within this particular chapter but the collection as a whole; similarly with the other animals that figure into Rose’s narratives.

The Octopus Has Three Hearts was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and Rose is no stranger to awards and recognition for her writing. She is the poet laureate emerita of Vancouver for good reason. She writes with succinct and oft-times detailed brutality, with touches of dark humour, and with much insight into humanity. Elements of her characters – whether they be ex-cons, cheating spouses, or people who just made a terrible mistake – are within all of us to some degree and our world would probably be a better place if we confronted these aspects of ourselves, instead of burying them or pretending they don’t exist.

Similar themes appear in The Sleep of Apples, a more overtly Jewish compilation. Rather than animals linking the chapters, the people are related or connected in some way to one another. Miri’s Bubbe Zelda dies in the first story and, right away, loss, guilt, love, identity, tradition – throughout the book, no matter the characters’ gender, sexuality, age, upbringing, relationship and friendship choices, career path, they must deal with these and other basic elements of existence. Death is always present. But so, too, is the will to live, to forgive, and to care for oneself and for others.

It is interesting to think of the creative process and how people come up with stories that are out of the ordinary yet resonate. Some of the language and situations in these short stories will shock and discomfort readers. Many of the characters will not resemble people most of us regularly encounter. But, ideally, if we’re willing, they will open our minds in a way that will help us navigate the real world more thoughtfully and with more compassion.

The Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival is online only this year. For the full lineup of authors, visit jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival.

Klein speaks on climate crisis

Seth Klein brings his book A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency to the Jewish Book Festival on Feb. 22. (photo by Erica Johnson)

At this year’s virtual Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, which runs Feb. 20-25, Seth Klein is among the many writers featured. He will talk about his new book, A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, which came out last September.

Klein was the founding director of the B.C. office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), a position he held from 1996 to 2018, and was also a founder of the B.C. Poverty Reduction Coalition. He is a board member with the nonprofit Dogwood and an advisory board member for the Columbia Institute’s Centre for Civic Governance. He is a founder, advisor and instructor for Next Up, a leadership program for young people committed to social and environmental justice, as well. He spoke with the Independent in advance of his Feb. 22 book festival presentation.

JI: How did you come to write this book?

SK: When you spend 22 years at the CCPA, you’re forever in this place of what you think should happen versus what our governments are prepared to consider, but never more so than in the case of the climate emergency, where we all live in this harrowing space. I wanted to write a book that would tackle that, that would convince particularly our political leaders, specifically those who say they get it, to be more daring than they have been to date in tackling the emergency.

Originally, the book was to have a single chapter on the Second World War, as an example of rapid economic transformation, but the more I delved into that story, the more I saw parallels between the war and the current crisis – not just on the economic front, but well beyond that. I saw parallels in terms of the role of civil society, the mobilization of the populace, the role of Indigenous people and the need to take care of those who make sacrifices; for example, those working in the fossil fuel industry, who need a just transition, modeled after the care for returning soldiers. I also saw cautionary tales around the squashing of civil rights, the things we don’t want to repeat. To speak to a parallel to which the Jewish community has the most connection: the response to refugees.

JI: Can you say a little more about that last point?

SK: Despite Canada rallying to fight the good fight in Europe, we slammed the door on Jewish refugees before, during and after the war. Years ago, I heard Cindy Blackstock, the amazing Indigenous child welfare advocate, give a very simple definition of reconciliation: reconciliation means not having to say “sorry” twice – you learn from what you did. Canada’s behaviour towards the Jewish community during the Second World War was shameful. I believe that the issue of global climate refugees is going to be one of the defining issues of the next 50 to 100 years. We’re going to have to decide who we want to be this time.

JI: You write that the Mackenzie King government resisted entering the Second World War until the last moment and, even after joining, was slow to ramp up efforts to what was needed. You note that the first nine months of the war are called by historians “the phony war,” and write that we seem to be in the “phony war” stage in our fight against the climate crisis. Can you elaborate on that?

SK: The comparison is really strong. The “phony war” is the period between when they declared war and when things got real. At the beginning of the war, the threat was not clear and present to most Canadians. The fall of France was the moment that the popular zeitgeist shifted. Today, we have the Trudeau government passing a bill acknowledging the climate emergency one day, in the summer of 2019, and then, the next day, re-approving the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. That is what I call “the new climate denialism.” It manifests in all these governments who say they get it but don’t act like they actually do. In our province, it manifests most clearly in having the most robust climate plan in the country, which we do, and, at the same time, doubling down on fracking and LNG – and you can’t make the math work. That’s the phony war.

JI: What are the assumptions that block government progress on climate action?

SK: The measures that have been adopted so far are largely grounded in what are called “neoliberal” assumptions, which state that society should self-organize according to individual economic interests – the “free hand of the market,” as opposed to the idea that government should function to ensure what is in the best interests of all, so change is left to be voluntary. That’s not working now, and it wouldn’t have worked during the war. When something is an emergency, you don’t make it voluntary.

JI: There is an incredible parallel to COVID-19.

SK: Yes! How do you know when a government knows it’s in emergency mode? These are the four markers: 1) You spend what it takes to win; 2) You create new economic institutions to get the job done, like C.D. Howe, the Liberal cabinet minister [in King’s government] who created 28 new crown corporations to get the job done; 3) You move from voluntary, incentive-based measures to mandatory ones as needed; 4) You tell the truth about the nature and the extent of the crisis and what you have to do.

We did all four of those things in the war. In COVID, we can quibble about the extent that our government has done all four of those things, but I would argue that they have. We’re spending – though it still doesn’t hold a candle to what we did in the war, by the way, but we’re spending. We shifted to mandatory – we locked down the whole economy for some time. We’ve created audacious new programs like CERB that, 10 months ago, none of us would have imagined. Is it too slow sometimes? Yes, but they’ve shifted the mindset. And we have briefings every day, which tell us the truth about the severity of what’s happening. Yet, when it comes to the climate emergency, none of our provincial or federal governments hits any of those markers.

JI: You also describe some cautionary lessons from our wartime experience. Can you elaborate on those?

SK: Aside from the response to refugees, there were all kinds of shameful things, such as War Measures Act stuff, like interning political activists and making political parties illegal, and, most shamefully, the wholesale internment of Japanese-Canadians. There was also the poisoning of Indigenous lands by the very crown corporations whose formation I was so impressed by. These are all examples of state over-reach. The point in recalling these things is to go eyes wide open into the next emergency. To some extent, we have, in fact, already learned as a society – [Brian] Mulroney replaced the War Measures Act with the Emergencies Act, which has safeguards against those types of things. We need the leaders of today to be as bold and innovative as the leaders we had then – and we also need them to be different.

JI: What was the scale of the economic transformation during the war, and how did they pull that off? What are a couple of highest priority steps in your “battle plan”?

SK: The same four steps I’ve already outlined: spend what you have to spend to win, create new economic institutions, move from voluntary to mandatory as required, and rally the public by telling the truth. During the war, they increased government spending tenfold. When C.D. Howe was pressed about the amount of money being spent, he simply said, “If we lose the war, nothing matters.” He carefully controlled all of the supply chains to prioritize the war, including recruiting private businessman, big names like H.R. Macmillan, J.W. Woodward, who abandoned their private interests and served for years as “dollar-a-year men” to serve as controllers and head up these crown corporations because, in an emergency, you don’t leave the allocation of scarce resources to the market – you prioritize what has to be done.

Remember, from 1942 to 1945, the sale of private automobiles in the U.S. of A., the heart of car culture, was illegal. That didn’t happen due to the goodwill of the automakers. They were told. They were busy making stuff for the war effort, making money, but they didn’t decide what to make. We need to approach the climate emergency like C.D. Howe approached the war. We need to conduct an inventory. How many electric buses do we need, how many heat pumps, how many solar arrays, how many wind farms? And, if there is a gap – and there is – we need to decide how we’re going to fill it. Through contracts with the private sector? OK. And, if that’s not enough, we create a new generation of crown corporations to expedite what needs to happen.

JI: Do you think we can rise to the climate emergency in time?

SK: I am trying, in the book, to walk a line. I think, too often, for years, climate communication has been polarized between Pollyannas and pessimists. The leaders we most remember from the Second World War walked a careful line between telling the truth about the severity of the crisis and still imparting hope. Can we do this in time? We don’t know. The reminder I offer to readers is that Canada had a population of 11 million people in the Second World War and over one million Canadians enlisted. You know what they didn’t know? Whether they could win. We know how the story ended, but they didn’t [when they volunteered]. They did what they had to do anyway, and that’s what we have to do.

Matthew Gindin is a freelance journalist, writer and lecturer. He has been published in Philosophy Now, Tricycle, the Forward and elsewhere. He blogs on Medium and is master teacher at Or Shalom Synagogue in Vancouver.

Jewish Poland in 1932

This photo, called “Generations,” was taken by Tim Gidal in Tel Aviv in 1935. (courtesy Zack Gallery)

The current show at the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery, Invisible Curtain: The 1932 Polish Photographs of Nachum Tim Gidal, was organized in partnership with the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, which runs Feb. 20-25. Gidal (better known as Tim Gidal or Tim N. Gidal) was a renown photojournalist of the last century and the exhibit’s images come from the new book Memories of Jewish Poland: The 1932 Photographs of Nachum Tim Gidal. (For a review, click here.)

The driving force behind the book’s publication was Yosef Wosk, who wrote its preface. Wosk approached Zack Gallery director Hope Forstenzer and Jewish Book Festival director Dana Camil Hewitt about a year ago, Forstenzer told the Independent. “He suggested we have a Tim Gidal show at the gallery to coincide with the festival and his newly published book,” she said.

Both Wosk and Forstenzer curated the exhibit. “Together, we chose about 50 images for the show, as many as the gallery could fit. It couldn’t include all the images in the book, of course,” said Forstenzer.

photo - A self-portrait by photographer Tim Gidal, taken in 1974 — A self-portrait by photographer Tim Gidal, taken in 1974. *(courtesy Zack Gallery)*

The history of the photographs is best described by the photographer himself in the book’s introduction. In 1932, Gidal, then 23, traveled with two friends to Poland from his hometown of Munich, Germany. It was his first trip abroad. “My knowledge of the political, economic and social conditions of the Jews in Poland didn’t seem to square with my feelings about their spiritual life,” he wrote. “So I decided to go and see for myself.”

Gidal, who passed away in 1996, took numerous photographs of people and places, as he went from shtetl to shtetl on his three-week “little odyssey.” He wrote: “I encountered spiritual and material heights and depths: material well-being and abject poverty, rejuvenation and dissolution. Some were rich, but many more were very poor. It was a hopeless poverty, endured with an incredible humility. I met men of faith and hypocrites … atheists, socialists and communists, Zionists and Bundists, Orthodox and assimilationists. We also experienced the all-pervading Jewish humor.”

photo - Tim Gidal’s cousin Gershon in the doorway of the family’s rope shop, in Lowicz, Poland. The photo was taken by Gidal in 1932 — Tim Gidal’s cousin Gershon in the doorway of the family’s rope shop, in Lowicz, Poland. The photo was taken by Gidal in 1932. *(courtesy Zack Gallery)*

Everything the young photographer experienced was reflected in his images, including those now on display at the Zack. We see children laughing and women looking far older than their real years. We see ancient eyes and tired, worn hands. We see educated men reading in front of a synagogue, and broken windows and peeling walls the next street over. And we know something Gidal didn’t know at the time, which makes this book and the show all the more poignant: not many years later, most of these people would be murdered in the Holocaust, and they and their entire way of life would be lost. But, in Gidal’s photos, his subjects remain alive. According to Wosk, “Each photograph is a monument, a letter in light.”

Gidal’s 1932 Polish photo essay comprises only a small portion of the master’s body of work. His photography journey spanned almost seven decades and encompassed most major players and momentous events of the 20th century.

One of the pioneers in the field of modern photography, Gidal made his debut in 1929 with his first published photo report. He was a proponent of the style of the “picture story” and he captured most of his subjects unaware, instead of staging elaborate scenes. Very few of his subjects posed for his photos, and every image tells a story.

Four years after his trip to Poland, Gidal moved to Palestine. During the Second World War, he served as a staff reporter for a British army magazine. A wanderer and a chronicler of life, he traveled a lot and lived in the United States for awhile. He taught and illustrated books. He exhibited widely.

photo - Tim Gidal took this photograph of Buchenwald survivors arriving in Palestine in 1945. It is one of the images featured in the exhibit Invisible Curtain, on display until Feb. 25 — Tim Gidal took this photograph of Buchenwald survivors arriving in Palestine in 1945. It is one of the images featured in the exhibit Invisible Curtain, on display until Feb. 25. *(courtesy Zack Gallery)*

A portion of the Zack exhibition is dedicated to Gidal’s artistic photography after 1932. The pictures demonstrate his technical progress, as well as his breadth of interests and subjects. There is a lyrical photo, “Generations,” taken in Tel Aviv in 1935 and another – a dramatic portrait of the youngest survivors of Buchenwald, taken in 1945 upon their arrival in Palestine. There is a photo of Mahatma Gandhi at the All-India Congress in Bombay in 1940 and the fascinating picture called “Handshake,” taken in Florence in 1934, which shows two men shaking hands in front of a wall covered with multiple posters of Mussolini.

Half a century before Photoshop was invented, Gidal experimented with his images, compiling them in different combinations and creating something unique, like his triptych of Winston Churchill of 1948 or the Rhomboid photomontage of 1975.

As a photo reporter, Gidal used his camera to record the 20th century in all its glorious and painful contradictions, and his early 1932 Polish photographs serve as a symbol of his multifaceted canon.

Invisible Curtain opened on Jan. 5 and the exhibit will continue until Feb. 25. To see the show’s digital equivalent, visit online.flippingbook.com/view/891736. To book an appointment to see it at the gallery, email Forstenzer at [email protected]. To attend the virtual book launch on Feb. 11, 7 p.m., and to see the full book festival lineup, visit jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival.

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

Gidal’s photos speak volumes

The book Memories of Jewish Poland: The 1932 Photographs of Nachum Tim Gidal lets the photos do most of the talking. And they speak strongly and with passion of a lively, bustling and diverse community, the vast majority of whom were killed in the Holocaust.

“Of the 3.3 million Jewish residents of Poland before World War II, only 380,000 were still alive by 1945,” notes the book’s curator, local scholar, writer and philanthropist Yosef Wosk, in the preface. Wosk will help launch the release of Memories of Jewish Poland on Feb. 11, in a “prologue” event of the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, which opens Feb. 20. He also helped organize Invisible Curtain, the current exhibit of Gidal’s work that is being co-presented by the festival with the Zack Gallery.

photo - Yosef Wosk will launch the book Memories of Jewish Poland: The 1932 Photographs of Nachum Tim Gidal on Feb. 11 at a virtual Jewish Book Festival event — Yosef Wosk will launch the book Memories of Jewish Poland: The 1932 Photographs of Nachum Tim Gidal on Feb. 11 at a virtual Jewish Book Festival event. *(photo by Joshua Berson)*

Wosk was friends with Gidal, who he met in Jerusalem, where Gidal lived. Born in Munich in 1909, Gidal had made aliyah in 1936, but then lived in various places before returning to Jerusalem in 1970; he passed away in 1996. It was not only Gidal’s dying wish that the 1932 Polish photos be published in book form, but that they be allowed to “speak for themselves.” And that request has been honoured. In addition to Wosk’s brief preface, the book opens with some notes written by Gidal for a 1984 exhibit and includes an introduction to Gidal’s work by photography historian, researcher, author and curator Nissan N. Perez, founder of the Israel Museum’s photography department. At the end, there is a list of the plates included in the book and a brief biography of Gidal. A map of Poland, indicating the locations in which the photos were taken, bookends the commentary and photographs.

“This book illustrates the largest number of photographs from Gidal’s Polish photo essay ever assembled. It is not, however, a catalogue raisonné: more than 20 images are not included,” writes Wosk. The reproductions included in the volume are taken from prints in Wosk’s collection and that of the Israel Museum. Wosk thanks Diane Evans, “master teacher, photographer, bookseller and friend in photography,” for serving “as a patient, experienced and disciplined midwife in giving birth to this book.”

Gidal – born Ignaz Nachum Gidalawitsch – was motivated to travel to Poland “by his desire to know more about his family’s background,” writes Perez. The photographs Gidal took were “actually a rather small chapter of his oeuvre at the beginning of his outstanding career, an exercise in perfecting his vision.”

“He gains the interest of the viewer not by staging elaborate scenes, but by capturing expressions and gestures that can only be described as both intimate and straightforward,” explains Perez. “As he said in one of the many meetings conducted toward the exhibition in 1995, ‘My photographs, I like to think, are variations on the everlasting tragicomedy of human life.’”

The images in Memories of Jewish Poland are prime examples of Gidal’s ability to capture images of life as it is happening, in all its unromantic but beautiful distinction.

“In the heterogenous assembly of the Polish galut (diaspora), I myself became immersed in the flow of Jewish life from the past to the future,” wrote Gidal for the 1984 exhibit. “When we left Poland after three weeks, I had passed through an invisible curtain, which had separated East and West. Now the curtain had opened, and I was made to feel the unifying presence of Jewry.”

A selection of Gidal’s 1932 Polish photos is currently on display at the Zack Gallery (for the full story, click here). The Memories of Jewish Poland book will be launched at a virtual Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival prologue event Feb. 11, 7 p.m. For tickets to the prologue and other Jewish Book Festival events, visit jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival.

Interview insightful, fun

Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo, whose latest novel is The Last Interview, opens the JCC Jewish Book Festival Feb. 20. (photo from JBF)

This year’s Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival opens online Feb. 20, with Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo, whose latest novel, The Last Interview, brilliantly sprinkles facts amid a lot of fiction and interjects humour into much pathos. It entertains, of course, and, as all good books do, it raises many salient points that will get readers thinking – and feeling – about, in this case, storytelling, marriage, truth, parenting, friendship, lies, family, identity, media, politics and relationships. So, life.

In The Last Interview, the protagonist, who is suffering from a chronic form of depression and writer’s block, responds to an interview sent to him “by an internet site editor who collected surfers’ questions.” He later notes, “It was supposed to be only an interview, nothing else, but slowly – it seems I can’t do it any other way – I’ve been turning it into a story. I was supposed to leave Dikla and the kids and the dysthymia out of it. And all of them are in it.” This inability to stop himself from telling stories about others in his published writing is an Achilles’ heal in his personal life, but a boon to his professional one.

His interview answers are sometimes short and direct:

“How do you manage to deal with the loneliness that’s part of writing?

“I don’t.”

But, most often, they are quite involved, going into more detail, retrospection and introspection than the questioners would ever have expected. We learn about his failing marriage, but also its sweet beginnings. We are privy to his feelings about his best friend, who is dying of cancer. We see how he struggles to be a good father to his three kids. We hear some of his travel adventures. We witness his attempts to extricate himself from an unwanted speech-writing gig. We share his discomforts with the Israeli-Palestinian situation. We find out a bit about his motivations for writing:

“If I don’t write, I have nowhere to put my memories, and that’s dangerous. I have a problem. I don’t forget anything. My forgetting mechanism is completely screwed up. All the partings, the deaths, the unexploited opportunities. They are all trapped in my body, and writing is the only way to release them … if I don’t occasionally unburden myself of the weight of some of those memories, I won’t be able to breathe. No air will enter my body. Or leave it.”

Part of his current creative block – “I was supposed to be writing a novel this year. Instead, I’m writing answers to this interview” – is that he and his wife are becoming more distant. “I can’t say that I became a writer to win Dikla’s heart, but I can assume that with another, less stimulating woman, I wouldn’t be writing.” He notes that, since his first letter to her, “In fact, everything I’ve written since then, eight books, is one very long letter addressed to her.” At the end of a lengthy response to the question, “All of your books are written in the same style. Have you ever thought of writing something completely different? Maybe science fiction? Fantasy?” he says that genre wouldn’t make any difference: “In any case, it would turn out that, once again, I wrote about an impossible love.”

While the overall mood of The Last Interview is solemn, there are many funny parts. One especially hilarious section is the writer’s response to the question, “When will they produce a film adaptation of your latest book? When I read it, I could actually imagine the movie.” As the writer shares the details of an encounter with a filmmaker of a similar opinion, the conversation cynically – but with the ring of truth – moves from flattery to the many ways in which the movie will ultimately be unrecognizable from the book, yet concluding nonetheless with the filmmaker enthusing, “The minute I finished it, I said to my wife: This is a movie!”

With a writer as intelligent, sensitive and amusing as Nevo and an interviewer as experienced as the Globe and Mail’s Marsha Lederman, the book festival’s opening event should be well worth attending. For tickets to it, and for the full lineup of events, visit jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival. The festival runs to Feb. 25.