Skip to content

  • Home
  • Subscribe / donate
  • Events calendar
  • News
    • Local
    • National
    • Israel
    • World
    • עניין בחדשות
      A roundup of news in Canada and further afield, in Hebrew.
  • Opinion
    • From the JI
    • Op-Ed
  • Arts & Culture
    • Performing Arts
    • Music
    • Books
    • Visual Arts
    • TV & Film
  • Life
    • Celebrating the Holidays
    • Travel
    • The Daily Snooze
      Cartoons by Jacob Samuel
    • Mystery Photo
      Help the JI and JMABC fill in the gaps in our archives.
  • Community Links
    • Organizations, Etc.
    • Other News Sources & Blogs
    • Business Directory
  • FAQ
  • JI Chai Celebration
  • JI@88! video
Scribe Quarterly arrives - big box

Search

Follow @JewishIndie

Recent Posts

  • Jews support Filipinos
  • Chim’s photos at the Zack
  • Get involved to change
  • Shattering city’s rosy views
  • Jewish MPs headed to Parliament
  • A childhood spent on the run
  • Honouring Israel’s fallen
  • Deep belief in Courage
  • Emergency medicine at work
  • Join Jewish culture festival
  • A funny look at death
  • OrSh open house
  • Theatre from a Jewish lens
  • Ancient as modern
  • Finding hope through science
  • Mastering menopause
  • Don’t miss Jewish film fest
  • A wordless language
  • It’s important to vote
  • Flying camels still don’t exist
  • Productive collaboration
  • Candidates share views
  • Art Vancouver underway
  • Guns & Moses to thrill at VJFF 
  • Spark honours Siegels
  • An almost great movie 
  • 20 years on Willow Street
  • Students are resilient
  • Reinvigorating Peretz
  • Different kind of seder
  • Beckman gets his third FU
  • הדמוקרטיה בישראל נחלשת בזמן שהציבור אדיש
  • Healing from trauma of Oct. 7
  • Film Fest starts soon
  • Test of Bill 22 a failure
  • War is also fought in words

Archives

Tag: essays

A multidimensional memoir

With her latest book, Olga Campbell sets out to leave a legacy, one that encompasses the trauma of the past but also the richness of the present and hope for the future.

image - Dear Arlo book coverDear Arlo: Letters to My Grandson is Campbell’s third book. Her first, Graffiti Alphabet, comprised photographs of graffiti she found around the Greater Vancouver area. Her second, A Whisper Across Time, was her family’s Holocaust story.

The first essay in Dear Arlo is about Campbell’s parents, Tania and Klimek. They lived in Warsaw. “They were surrounded by family and friends and had much to look forward to,” writes Campbell. “Then, in 1939, everything changed. The Nazis invaded Poland from the west, the Soviets from the east. Life as they had known it stopped.”

Klimek would be arrested by the Soviets first, a pregnant Tania two weeks later. They were sent to different Russian prison camps. They survived, but the baby didn’t, nor did any of Tania’s family, most notably, her twin sister and parents, Campbell’s maternal grandparents. 

“Several months after their release from the prison camps, my parents found themselves in Baghdad, Iraq,” writes Campbell. “By that time, my mother was pregnant with me and could go no further. I was born in Baghdad on February 14, 1943.”

Eventually, after living in both Palestine and the United Kingdom, the family came to Canada. It wasn’t an easy life, learning a new language and new culture, or a long one for Campbell’s mother, who died at 52 of cancer.

image - A page from Olga Campbell’s memoir Dear Arlo: Letters to My Grandson, which features letters, art, poems, essays and recipes
A page from Olga Campbell’s memoir Dear Arlo: Letters to My Grandson, which features letters, art, poems, essays and recipes.

Campbell shares her stories and wisdom with readers as a grandmother speaking to her only grandson, Arlo, with whom she obviously has a special relationship.

“I am writing this book as a legacy for you,” she writes in the first letter to Arlo. “A multidimensional memoir. A compilation of my writing, my art and a few family recipes. These writings and art are my responses to events in my life. The losses, trauma, grief … and the joy, happiness and love. It’s about the angst and awe of life, which is ever-changing, full of challenges but also magical.”

Brief letters to Arlo are spread throughout the memoir, which is gloriously full of Campbell’s artwork – painting, mixed media, sculpture and more, all of it in colour. A graduate of Emily Carr University of Art + Design, she has had many exhibitions since deciding to become an artist in her 40s, having started her professional life as a social worker. She has participated in the Eastside Culture Crawl since its inception almost 30 years ago, and has been a consistent part of the West of Main Art Walk (Artists in Our Midst) as well.

In addition to the art and letters in Dear Arlo, Campbell includes some of her poetry and essays. She shares how she came to write her second book, her experiences dealing with intergenerational trauma, her path to spirituality, how she found courage, and more.

She writes about losing her husband, in 1994. “Along with him, my plans and dreams for the future also died,” she writes. He died of a stroke at 49 years old – the pair had been together for 32 years, married for 26 of those years.

She shares the story of how she came to have her current dog, Nisha. “I was very sick in September 2019 with what my doctor now believes was COVID, before anyone had heard of COVID,” writes Campbell. Struggling many months with breathing difficulties, she turned, in desperation, to Ganesha, a Hindu god. “My wish to him was to remove all obstacles to my physical, emotional and mental well-being.”

A couple of days later, there came a knock at her door. Two work acquaintances were there, asking if she could adopt a rescue dog. Campbell did, and Nisha “was extremely timid, jumping, trembling and shaking at every sound, every movement. I held her all day every day for the first week to calm her down and get her used to me. She is still a little timid but every day she becomes more brave. She is playful, full of fun and great company,” writes Campbell. “She did remove all obstacles to my physical, emotional and mental health.”

Another uplifting essay is the one on how Campbell has “never come of age.” When she paints and creates with friends, she feels like she is 5 years old, she says. When with her teenage grandson, she also feels like a teen, and sees “the wonder of the world.”

image - A page from Olga Campbell’s memoir Dear Arlo: Letters to My Grandson
A page from Olga Campbell’s memoir Dear Arlo: Letters to My Grandson.

Campbell has role models, older friends and neighbours who still have bucket lists and exercise regimes. Having traveled much herself  –  Myanmar, Morocco, Vietnam, India, Cambodia, Laos, Turkey and other places – she now wants “to do inward travel. To get to know myself and others around me. To find the mystery inside. To nourish relationships with the people I know and with new people that I meet.” She wants to have different adventures: “Creative adventures, people adventures, spiritual adventures.”

There are more than a dozen recipes in Dear Arlo – from an apple torte that a 5-year-old Arlo bet Campbell she wouldn’t make (which she did but he never ate); to cabbage pie and Russian salad, recalling when Arlo was teaching himself Russian; to broccoli and cheese soup, vegetarian meatloaf and ginger apple tea, in response to Arlo’s request for some recipes.

Campbell is grateful for many things.

“I have had a good marriage and a wonderful family – my lovely daughter, her loving partner and my wonderful grandson Arlo,” she writes.

“I have dealt with losses and tragedies in my life, including the premature death of my husband, but I survived, and now I am happy. Those intense feelings of sadness that I grew up with no longer plague me. I can be triggered, but on the whole, I am fine.”

The memoir ends as it begins, with a letter to Arlo, who, says Campbell, has been “the best grandson I could ever have imagined.”

She writes, “The past provides us with valuable lessons that we can use to inform our present and future. A sense of connection and continuity with the people who came before us. This adds a depth and richness to our lives. I look forward to having many more adventures with you.”

We get to see Arlo grow up, in photos throughout the book. And the photo placed squarely in the centre of this last letter is perfect: Arlo in the driver’s seat of his new red convertible, toque on, giving a thumbs up, smiling, with Campbell beside him, also bundled up for a cold drive, but also with a big smile.

To purchase Dear Arlo or Campbell’s previous books, visit olgacampbell.com. 

Campbell’s artwork is on display at the Zack Gallery Jan. 8-27, with an artist reception Jan. 9, 6-8 p.m. Campbell speaks as part of the JCC Jewish Book Festival on Jan. 23, 7 p.m., in the gallery.

Posted on December 13, 2024December 15, 2024Author Cynthia RamsayCategories BooksTags art, Dear Arlo, essays, history, Holocaust, letters, memoir, Olga Campbell, painting, poetry, sculpture, second generation

Exploring ideas, worlds

“If there is one thing we learn during difficult times, it’s that community plays a crucial role, fostering unity, resilience and offering emotional support,” writes Dana Camil Hewitt, director of the annual Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, in her introduction to this year’s event, which will once again bring community members together to share stories and conversations – and in a difficult time.

The festival opens Feb. 10 with playwright, journalist and author Michael Posner in conversation with Alan Twigg, founder and editor for 33 years of BC BookWorld, about Posner’s three-volume biography of musician, composer and poet Leonard Cohen. The opening night includes a live musical performance with Harriet Frost and Martin Gotfrit, which illustrates perfectly how the influence of books extends beyond the printed page.

The world around us and how it shapes who we are, and vice versa, is front and centre in the Feb. 11 festival event Essays as Life Stories, featuring Vancouver’s Yosef Wosk and Hamilton’s Gary Barwin.

Traveling beyond the world

image - Naked in a Pyramid book coverIn his new book, Naked in a Pyramid: Travels & Observations, scholar, rabbi and philanthropist Yosef Wosk brings readers along on his extraordinary journeys throughout the world. But this is no Rick Steves guidebook. There are no hotel recommendations or Top 10 must-see lists. Far from it. Rather than inspiring wanderlust, in fact, some of Wosk’s adventures will make the reader happy to be home in an easy chair experiencing vicariously rather than accompanying him on these not-always-alluring quests. 

Wosk acknowledges that travel for him is not about R&R but always about adventure, challenging himself to discover not only the world but his place in it. Travel, for him, is “more of an intuitive imperative, a pilgrimage to the ends of the earth so that I might know both the planet and myself better.”

To these ends (literally), Wosk has traveled to both the north and the south poles. His reflections on being – within a little more than a year of each other – at the figurative top and bottom of the planet, lead to fascinating metaphysical contemplations. He is also provoked to contest mundane assumptions when he sees, at the South Pole, an upside-down globe. Why, he realizes he has never contemplated, should north be on top?

Wosk does not just see stuff, or even experience it, like an ordinary traveler, but finds himself transported beyond even the remote locales he visits to some supernatural planes. Near the North Pole, for example, he alarms travel-mates by laying down, albeit densely insulated, on the frozen Arctic ground “like some marooned sapien seal.” Becoming one with the planet’s most northerly extremity, he recalls, “I was seized by this unanticipated epiphany of transcendent unity.” 

The intensity with which he lives the places he encounters makes for a fascinating read and those of us who lack his depth of connection with the ethereal may feel pangs of jealousy, if not inferiority, at failing to experience as profoundly.

He visits Venice, the birthplace of Marco Polo – well, one of the reputed birthplaces – and finds resolve from the “Master of Travelers, the one who dared.” But Venice, as magnificent as it is, seems to be among the least remarkable of Wosk’s destinations.

“I have explored caves and caverns in Israel, Thailand and deep within the Rock of Gibraltar where Neanderthals lived for over 100,000 years, and also entered the coastal caves along the cerulean Na Pali coast in Kauai,” he writes. “Gazing into the luminous waters of the Blue Grotto in Capri, one of the most enchanting islands on the planet, one senses its womb of wonders.”

Claustrophobia is a recurring theme (for the reader, if less so the writer), with reminiscences of crawling on his back into a sarcophagus, descending into the bowels of a Soviet-era nuclear-powered Arctic icebreaker, or meditating (naked) in the subterranean hollows of the pyramid that gives the book its title. 

The book is deeply personal, including revealing insights into his deepest thoughts, as well as the sorts of travel nightmares to which anyone can relate, such as being stuck together with a sulky travel companion who he had considered a potential love interest, but who turns out to be the roommate from hell. He seems to recognize that his well-intentioned psychoanalyzing of her behaviour may not have been the remedy he had hoped.

His sense of being an outsider is not merely social but otherworldly.

“I have always felt like a fool, somewhat awkward in an unfamiliar world – as if I have just awakened from a distant dream and been planted, like Adam, in a strange Garden of Gaia. I spent most of my life as an unrepentant pilgrim, exploring often exotic and embarrassing sensations of mind, body and soul.” 

He openly admits that some of these sensations are enhanced by herbal or chemical assistance.

“On a beach off the road from Pafos to Limassol, in southern Cyprus, a friend and I took LSD at the fabled birthplace of Aphrodite,” he writes. “The beach was gravel and the waters rough but as the long, foaming waters born of the massive surf around the Rock reached the shore, one could easily imagine the earth being impregnated by the semen-bubbled surf and picture the goddess of love emerging from the sea.”

The book is about travel, but Wosk also covers voyages more broadly defined, such as the process of moving through life itself, including the reflection that a great rabbi imparted to him.

“One of my teachers, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, used to tell us that you don’t have to wait until you’re dead to die; that one can be involved in a succession of deaths and rebirths, that there is non-mortal death and resurrection while still alive,” writes Wosk.

In a harrowing experience while illicitly climbing the Egyptian pyramid of the title, he seems to have exactly this sort of non-mortal death, which may well have been entirely mortal had things turned any further awry.

Wosk has rubbed shoulders (or, more accurately, minds) with greats like Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan and Joseph Campbell. He worked at the right hand of Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel as his teaching assistant and calls the late humanitarian author “one of the most influential mentors in my life.”

If Wosk sometimes seems a figure remote from the ordinary human, he yanks himself back down to earth in numerous segments, such as explaining how he overcame his intimidation at applying for Harvard’s divinity school. He eventually conquers his resistance and completes the graduate school application in the mechanic’s anteroom while his car is being serviced nearby. Even by the standards of a vegetarian, which he is, Wosk’s culinary tastes are decidedly and literally down to earth. (Favourite food? The potato.)

He refers modestly to his extensive philanthropy, which includes the Beit Wosk Community Centre, in Ashkelon, Israel, and the Dena Wosk School of Performing Arts at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver (named for his late mother), but elides hundreds of other contributions over the years.

He pays tribute to his late father Morris (“MJ”) and late uncle Ben, who arrived as children in this country. The brothers did odd jobs before starting a business collecting and repairing used pots and pans, which they shined up and sold around town using a horse and buggy. From this, they graduated to a storefront and later a furniture chain. Eventually, the brothers reshaped the city’s skyline with some of Vancouver’s most recognizable high-rise residential towers. To say the family came a long way from rural Ukraine is an understatement. MJ Wosk is estimated to have donated $50 million to a variety of causes.

It is difficult to sum up this book as this or that genre. While one section is an extended poem, much of the rest reads as prose poetry. Moreover, it is travel journal, philosophy treatise, theological tract and memoir of a person who curates and collects not just fascinating objects (which he does) but ideas, experiences and memories. Perhaps the book could be best described as an exhibition, a retrospective of a just a few of the intangible treasures Wosk has amassed in a lifetime that seems more unique than every life, by definition, is.

As fellow thinker John Ralston Saul said of this book, “He brings us a life intensely lived.” To appreciate how intensely, one really needs to immerse oneself in these pages.

 – Pat Johnson

Exploring language’s many facets

Gary Barwin’s Imagining Imagining is reflective, sentimental, intellectual and absurd. His facility with the English language is remarkable and he is more well-read than most of us, but there are various levels of understanding of any text, and everyone will take away something of value from this imaginative and mind-expanding collection of essays.

image - Imagining Imagining book coverThe multiple-award-winning author of some 30 books, including the bestselling Yiddish for Pirates, Barwin is also a musician, composer and artist. He draws upon all his varied skills and interests in his imaginings. He begins with reflections on the Hebrew alphabet, where the Book of Genesis says the world began: “the earth was without form and void until God gave shape or reality to it, all with words. With the letters that form the Hebrew alphabet.” He talks of the letters’ sounds and shapes, even illustrates the letter shin with an extra arm on the left that looks like it is topped with a crown, the image of which appears on the tefillin box that Orthodox Jews place on their forehead for morning prayers. According to a kabbalist text, there is a letter missing from the Hebrew alphabet and some think this four-armed shin might be it. “So, the thinking goes, we might already know what it looks like. But we don’t know what new sound it might make, this new sound that might heal the universe.”

While lauding language and its potential as a cause for hope, Barwin warns that language can also lull and trick us. “We must always look very carefully at language. At its beauty, its mystery. Its power to make us think and feel things. Its power to make and remake the world,” he writes.

If it’s not obvious already, Barwin is a big thinker. And he has a big vocabulary. Imagining Imagining might be a book to read as an ebook, for easy access to a dictionary. For the most part, however, his skill as a writer means that we get the gist if not the whole idea, that our curiosity is piqued and we continue to revel in our own thoughts long after we finish reading an essay.

Those who have read Barwin’s novels will know that he has a great sense of humour, and there are many smiling, even laugh-aloud, moments in these essays. One essay is entirely devoted to humour, and it’s fascinating – and funny. In it, he shares his favourite poem, “Modern Poem,” written by Martin Laba: “one, two, / three, four, / five, you idiot.”

“I like it because we can empathize with the feeling of having read something, perhaps a modern poem, something that is so hard to understand, that appears to be saying something willfully inaccessible or that appears so entirely pointless that it seems to be deliberately trying to make you feel like an idiot,” writes Barwin. “I like the poem because of the nice twist, the surprise at the end, the shock of recognition. Oh yes, I know poems like this. And I know that feeling.”

There are many shocks of recognition in Imagining Imagining, as there are shocks of non-recognition. Barwin is a smart, accomplished person and his views on things – from Hebrew letters, to insomnia, to ampersands, to his grandfather’s moustache, and more – will have you thinking about yours in new ways. For example, that chapter on humour stresses the immense value in laughter, not the least of which is that it “gives us an alternative to despair,” it allows us “the ability to frame our experience.”

“Through humour, we are able to stand outside what’s happening and look at it philosophically. Through humour, we find a way to engage, to think about what is happening and still have agency,” writes Barwin.

Engagement, community, the interconnectedness of all things. Barwin challenges readers to think outside the box, to reconsider what is a box, whether a box can ever truly exist. Speaking “mostly but not entirely metaphorically,” Barwin asks about the need for (cell) walls, “don’t things morph into one another, if only eventually? The same is true of concepts and abstractions. One person’s manbun is another’s mantra. Is it true that someone’s pain is my pain and it is only the self and society which create reasons to keep them at a distance? I want my thinking and feeling to reflect the fundamental unipanrhizomatubiquity between/of things.”

After reading Imagining Imagining, you should have a notion of what “unipanrhizomatubiquity” means, even though Prof. Google doesn’t. That feeling of getting it, not getting it, is an unsettling sensation perhaps, but it’s one that propels questions, discovery. That makes what seems impossible potentially possible. That makes reading – and so many other things – exciting and worthwhile.

– Cynthia Ramsay

For the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, guide visit jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival. 

Posted on January 26, 2024January 24, 2024Author Pat Johnson and Cynthia RamsayCategories BooksTags essays, Gary Barwin, JBF, JCC Jewish Book Festival, Jewish Book Festival, travel, writing, Yosef Wosk

Trying to fix broken wings

Not fitting in. Being misunderstood and miscategorized. These are recurring themes in Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage, edited by Loolwa Khazzoom, a Seattle writer, musician, activist and occasional contributor to the Independent.

image - Flying Camel book coverThe book was first released in the 1990s and was recently re-released.

“I wish I could say that this book is no longer as revolutionary, cutting-edge, or as needed as it was when I began compiling it in 1992, but, unfortunately, that is not the case,” writes Khazzoom, the daughter of an Iraqi Jew, in the new introduction. “Even though there have been changes – shifts in consciousness, language, and even representation – Mizrahi and Sephardi women remain overall excluded, in theory and practice, from spaces for women, Jews, Middle Easterners, people of colour, LGBTQI folk, and even Mizrahim and Sephardim. In addition, so many of the presumably inclusive conversations about us seem basic and superficial, with an undertone of it being a really big deal that these conversations exist at all.”

Khazzoom’s struggle to fit in led her to Seattle, in large part because it is home to one of the largest Sephardi communities in the United States. But even in that milieu she found herself an outsider.

“In June 2014, however, on the first sh’bath [Sabbath] after driving my U-Haul up the coast from Northern California, I was appalled by a sermon so sexist – where women were equated with ‘meat’ – that I walked out of the Sephardi synagogue, just 15 minutes after arriving,” she writes.

“I have been a hybrid all my life, forever caught between two or more worlds,” writes Caroline Smadja in her contribution to the collection. It is a state of being that is shared by many of the writers.

Yael Arami, born in Petah Tikvah to parents from Yemen, speaks of others’ perceptions of her.

“In Germany, I have had to avoid certain areas, fearing local skinheads’ reaction to my skin colour. In France, I have been verbally ridiculed and insulted for being yet another ignorant North African who does not know French,” she writes. “In California, people’s best intentions have resulted in a number of social blunders: When I left a tip in a San Francisco café, I got a courteous ‘gracias’ from the politically correct Anglo waiter. After a predominantly African-American gospel group sang at a Marin County synagogue, several members of the congregation approached me, to express their admiration for our wonderful gospel performance! It seems that wherever I go in white-majority countries, I am, in accordance with local stereotypes, seen as the generic woman of colour – Algerian in France, African-American or Puerto Rican in California.”

Rachel Wahba, an Iraqi-Egyptian Jew, calls out politically correct hypocrisy.

“Sometimes, when I bring up the oppression of Jews in Arab countries, progressive Jews get strangely uncomfortable – as if recognizing the Jewish experience under Islam would make someone racist and anti-Arab,” she writes. “During my mother’s cancer support group intake, I listened as my mother told her story of living in Baghdad and surviving the Farhud. She ended with an ironic ‘I survived the Arabs to get cancer?’ The Jewish oncology nurse was shocked that my mother was so ‘blunt.’

“Should we revise our history? Leave out the details of our oppression under Islam? Pretend my mother never saw the Shiite merchants in Karballah wash their hands after doing business with her father, because he was a ‘dirty Jew?’”

The book’s title comes from an essay by Lital Levy, “How the Camel Found Its Wings” and an Israeli film of the same name.

The metaphor involves the repair of a broken statue of a flying camel, which actually stood at the entrance to the international fairgrounds in Tel Aviv in the 1930s. In the film, the two wings of the camel become stand-ins for a dichotomy that mostly excludes Mizrahi/Sephardi Jews and yet still casts them in a negative light.

“By the end of the screening, the camel had found two new wings, and I got to thinking,” writes Levy. “I started putting my own pieces together – making my own flying camel out of the remnants of the past, borrowing missing pieces from the present, and using my imagination and willpower to try to make it all stick together. The pieces of my own American childhood, the histories that preceded it in Israel and in Iraq, and the challenges I see before me in my work are the various fragments I have been remembering and re-membering into an integral whole. I do not yet know its shape – camel, dromedary, llama, yak – but I do not care, as long as it will fly.”

Posted on April 8, 2022April 7, 2022Author Pat JohnsonCategories BooksTags equality, essays, Flying Camel, identity, Jewish heritage, Loolwa Khazzoom, Mizrahi, racism, Sephardi, women
Proudly powered by WordPress