fiction

VIFF’s mixed offerings

Franz stars newcomer Idan Weiss. (photo from lene Film Production)

As it does every year, the 2025 Vancouver International Film Festival, which runs Oct. 2-12, has offerings of particular interest to the Jewish community. Below are the synopses (less some of the hyperbole) from the festival’s website of the three films featuring Jewish content, as well as the three films about Israel, all of which are from Palestine and other countries – there are no films from Israel in this year’s festival. The Jewish Independent, which has been a media partner of the festival for more than 20 years, has chosen to sponsor Franz.

Franz

You don’t need to have read Kafka to know what “Kafkaesque” means – the idea that the world is a nightmare, a sick joke at your expense, continues to resonate a century after the writer died. Franz Kafka’s “uneasy dreams” have inspired filmmakers like Orson Welles, David Lynch, Michael Haneke, Terry Gilliam and Roman Polanski, to name a few, and now director Agnieszka Holland has delivered a biopic that’s Kafkaesque and then some.

Holland blends scenes from Kafka’s life as a German Jew in Austro-Hungarian Prague with dramatizations of his short stories and – at the film’s most surreal – documentary footage of Kafka’s present-day tourist economy (“Who will join me for a Kafka burger?”). Franz (2025) is densely layered but lively, starring newcomer Idan Weiss, whose tragicomic presence suggests a persecuted clown somewhere between Charlie Chaplin and Adrien Brodie.

Franz is in German and Czech with English subtitles, and runs 127 minutes. It screens Oct. 7, 8:45 p.m., at Vancouver Playhouse, and Oct. 11, 3:30 p.m., at Granville Island Stage. (18+)

Orphan

Orphan (2025) is set in communist Hungary in the late 1950s. Conceived during the war and brought up by his mother, Andor (Bojtorján Barabás) is convinced his father will return one day. Instead, another man emerges to stake his claim to both mother and child. Berend (Grégory Gadebois) is a butcher and a gentile and, even worse, a divorcee. Appalled, Andor is determined to save his mother from this brute.

The latest film from Son of Saul director László Nemes builds Andor’s world from the inside out, through the child’s troubled eyes. This personal vision grants us access to the wider history unfolding on the edge of the frame, which Andor barely comprehends: the fallout from the Holocaust, the crushing grip of the communist state.

Orphan is in Hungarian with English subtitles, and runs 132 minutes. It screens Oct. 2, 8:45 p.m., at Fifth Avenue Cinema (19+) and Oct. 4, 6:30 p.m., at International Village 9. (18+)

Cover-Up

Cover-Up (2025) pulls viewers into the uncompromising ethos of journalist Seymour Hersh. From exposing the My Lai massacre to unraveling CIA abuses and Abu Ghraib atrocities, Hersh has spent decades dragging concealed histories into the light – often at great personal and political cost. In this portrait, Oscar-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras (Citizenfour) and Emmy-winning Frontline producer Mark Obenhaus trace Hersh’s process. “I barely trust you guys,” Hersh quips, establishing a candid and often thorny dynamic between subject and directors.

Cover-Up is a meditation on source protection, moral clarity and the imperative to report when it’s needed most. Its story bridges past and present: Hersh is still reporting, now turning his gaze toward Gaza.

Cover-Up has a content warning for graphic violence. It screens at Fifth Avenue Oct. 11, 5:45 p.m. (19+), and at International Village 10 on Oct. 12, 3:45 p.m. (18+)

Divine Intervention

Palestinian Elia Suleiman is at the height of his powers with this series of deadpan, interconnected, absurdist vignettes about Palestinian life on either side of an Israeli military checkpoint. Mutely following the travails of two lovers – one who lives in Nazareth, the other in Ramallah – as they navigate the wall between them, Divine Intervention (2002) is surreal, satirical and biting in its political criticism. It’s both sad in its vision of the world but also warm in its humour.

All but forgotten from the mainstream filmgoing consciousness, Jacques Tati’s innovations with form and tone have been repurposed by filmmakers as varied as Roy Andersson, Aki Kaurismäki, Ulrich Seidl and, perhaps most of all, Wes Anderson. But Suleiman’s method of feeding the Tati-esque through the prism of Palestinian experience creates something completely new that walks a line between melancholy and absurdity. And what an amazing soundtrack!

Divine Intervention is in English, Arabic and Hebrew with English subtitles, and runs 92 minutes. It screens Oct. 6, 8:45 p.m., at VIFF Cinema, and Oct. 12, 3:45 p.m., at the Cinematheque. (18+)

Palestine 36

Set during the 1936 Palestinian uprising against British colonial rule, this historical drama follows an ensemble of characters. Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya), a peasant, straddles two worlds – the city of Jerusalem and his farming village. Denied fair wages, a Jaffa port dockworker (Saled Bakri) joins the rebel movement. Elsewhere, a widowed mother (Yafa Bakri) stashes away an heirloom gun in hopes of defending her family from the British military’s raids.

Shot on location and interspersed with archival footage, the film boasts an international cast, including Hiam Abbas, Jeremy Irons and Liam Cunningham. Palestine 36 (2025) is the third feature from writer-director Annemarie Jacir to be selected as the Palestinian entry for best international feature at the Academy Awards.

Palestine 36 is in Arabic and English with English subtitles, and has a running time of 118 minutes. The film is at Fifth Avenue Oct. 9, 9 p.m., and Oct. 10, 11:45 a.m. (19+)

With Hasan in Gaza

Three unearthed MiniDV tapes from 2001 offer a time capsule of life in Gaza before devastation. What begins as a search for a former prison mate leads to a road trip from the north to the south of Gaza, accompanied by Hasan, a local guide whose fate remains unknown. As the camera moves through Gaza’s streets and landscapes, it captures fleeting moments of everyday life: vendors, schoolchildren, shopkeepers, relatives and strangers, all going about their days in a place that, today, has been forever altered.

In With Hasan in Gaza (2025), Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari transforms forgotten footage into a time capsule. What was once ordinary is now precious, even endangered. “It is a film about the catastrophe and the poetry that resists,” Aljafari writes.

With Hasan in Gaza is in Arabic with English subtitles, and runs 106 minutes. It screens Oct. 10, 3:30 p.m., at VIFF Cinema and Oct. 12, 6:30 p.m., at International Village 8. (18+)

– from viff.org

Thriller delves into AI world

Daniel Kalla commands readers’ interest from the first sentence of his latest thriller, The Deepest Fake. And he keeps us turning pages straight to the end, not only as we contemplate who might be the culprit(s) of our hero’s apparent demise, but also as we consider the ideas Kalla puts forward about artificial intelligence, intellectual property, relationships, trust, measures of a successful life, and more.

Jewish Independent readers will be familiar with Kalla, who, in addition to being a writer of many international bestselling novels, is an emergency room physician here in Vancouver. The JI interviewed Kalla in 2023 and has reviewed of a few of his previous novels.

The plot-driving topic of The Deepest Fake – artificial intelligence – is new territory for the doctor-writer, who has penned many medical and science thrillers, using his physician’s knowledge to powerful effect. But he also has written an historical fiction trilogy set in Shanghai during the Second World War, where thousands of Jews fleeing Europe found safe haven, even as China and Japan were at war, so we know Kalla’s not afraid to do the research necessary to create a realistic-seeming fictional world centred around places and concepts less familiar to him, and to most readers.

As much as The Deepest Fake highlights some of the moral issues surrounding AI, it also explores other big issues, like medical assistance in dying (MAiD), fidelity in marriage and business partnerships, the foundations of trust, and where the creative process begins and who owns it. Kalla manages to cover all this ground and raise so many relevant questions while telling a great story. The Deepest Fake begins with a bang – “Liam Hirsch never seriously contemplated dying before his forty-ninth birthday – until today” – and keeps up the pace throughout.

Liam, founder and chief executive officer of a thriving AI company, TransScend, is suffering from a mysterious medical condition that’s first diagnosed as an aggressive form of ASL (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). His symptoms – twitches and challenges with movement – have been getting worse, and he’s likely to lose basic motor function within months, maybe a year.

Despite the seriousness of his illness, Liam hesitates to tell his wife and kids, the former not only because of the pain it will cause, but because, weeks before, he discovered, with the help of a private investigator, that his wife was cheating on him. Adding to Liam’s stresses and the book’s adventure are some accounting irregularities at his company, the competitive nature of the tech world and the potentially manipulative AI app that he helped create. So, when it becomes obvious that someone wants Liam gone, the suspects are numerous, including his wife, all his staff, an aggrieved former business partner, and the technology itself.

The Deepest Fake is a fun, satisfying read.

Deborah Wilde makes magic

Writer Deborah Wilde is more public now about the Jewish elements in her novels, which have always had a Jewish sensibility. (photo from Deborah Wilde)

East Vancouver author Deborah Wilde has been a writer since childhood, when she filled countless notebooks with her stories. Born and raised in Greater Vancouver, she also spent some years in Kitimat; hers was the only Jewish family in town. She read Isaac Bashevis Singer and watched Neil Simon movies. It was an upbringing she describes as being “rich in tradition.”

Wilde started her writing career in TV and film. “I loved it. I got to be in writers’ rooms, it was a real privilege,” she said. However, she added, screenwriters are “part of a machine: you’re hired to work on other people’s stories. I wanted to tell my stories.” These stories, as it turns out, are ones with strong Jewish representation and tough, sassy female protagonists.

With the movie industry being in what she describes as “a terrible state,” Wilde took the leap into young adult fiction. In writing the Nava Katz series, she was pleased to find that many of her screenwriting skills were transferable to this new genre. “Dialogue is my happy place,” she laughed. “I had a great time doing it.”

She knew that she had to have Jewish protagonists. “I was an avid reader as a kid but I only saw myself in Holocaust stories,” she explained. “Where was the Jewish girl falling down the rabbit hole or going through the cupboard into Narnia?”

In Wilde’s books, we meet a Jewish mom from Mumbai, and the love interest in her current series is a Mizrahi Jew. Diversity even within the Jewish community is vital, she said. “I want smart Jewish women who have adventures, who are the object of desire.”

Having embarked on her career in fiction, Wilde has reached her initial goal of publishing five books in three years. It took a lot of stamina and she learned that being an independent (or “indie”) young adult author was “not sustainable.” Setting her sights on an adult audience, she took inspiration from her “love of old Hollywood – it was the banter. And I’d always read romances,” she said, “so I wanted to include that as well.”

Wilde settled on first-person, urban fantasy. A relatively new but extremely popular genre, urban fantasy tales are set in the world we live in but with magical and supernatural elements. Ordinary or “mundane” activities are constantly disrupted by these troublemaking nasties, sometimes with deadly consequences.

And that is where we meet Jewish heroine Ashira Cohen, private investigator. Walking down a Vancouver street, Cohen comes across a “grimy convenience store selling long-distance phone cards and bongs.” A Vancouver scene we probably recognize, but she might also run into a bodyguard who’s been possessed by a demon or a delinquent teen with a talent for vanishing into thin air. Cohen is fast-talking, feisty and funny, but she’s also “someone you’d want to run into at Café 41,” said Wilde.

Meanwhile, Cohen’s finances are in a state, her love life is stagnant and she’s extraordinarily (and creatively) accident prone. The character is unsentimental, caustic and cynically bored. An interview with a young adult client gave her, she says, “all the details about their nauseatingly cute courtship and very little useful information.”

Wilde’s novels bring a big helping of zany chaos, a nod to the screwball comedies of the 1940s, staple viewing in the author’s childhood home. But, while the books conform to established genres – such as the “chosen one” trope, the terribly attractive and just as infuriating nemesis – they’re also full of little winks at the reader: neurotic elders, Jewish idioms, references to Jewish traditions.

Wilde’s talent lies in her ability to layer elements of regular life – like an eye-rolling teen whose statements sound like questions, or the intrusive badgering of Ash’s mother at a moment when tensions are already running high – over the frenzied dangers of the world inhabited by Cohen. The result is fiction that is absurd, surreal and peppered with rapid-fire dialogue reminiscent of the classic film His Girl Friday.

There is also a serious undercurrent. The author seasons her prose with references to history. For example, one of the magical characters, Meryem, is a Turkish magic refugee who has fled the “purges.”

Jewish representation is very important to Wilde. “There is so little fiction and television with strong, tough Jewish characters,” she said. The Jezebel narrative isn’t a Jewish story but, explained Wilde, “it has a Jewish sensibility – because that’s my own. It’s authentic to my experience.”

There has always been a Jewish flavour to Wilde’s writing, but it was more subtle; it could be found in the humour. “Readers would find the Jewish stuff eventually,” she said. “But now I’m talking about it in my ads, or even in certain interviews. I’m more public about it now.”

This is one of the aspects that makes Wilde’s work original. While Greek, Celtic, Roman and Norse tales have been all the rage for years, Jezebel’s Jewish folklore and mythology make it stand out. “I won’t write it if I don’t have something original to say,” said Wilde. And that’s where we find a magical organization called Nefesh, or, in Hebrew, “soul” or “life.”

Wilde is both a prolific writer and a businessperson. Talking about the switch to indie authorship, she describes it as “exhausting and a huge learning curve.” She is now both an author and her own publishing house. She has learned about search engine optimization, how to print and distribute books, the advantages of the different platforms and the wizardry required to publish ebooks online. But, despite all the technology that runs behind the scenes, Wilde finds that “word of mouth is still the best form of advertising – many people comment on my ads with things like, I just bought this book because of all the comments, so it had better be as funny as you all said!”

But she’s not alone in her work: her team now includes her husband (who designed the back end of her online store), an editor, cover designers and a slew of peers on whom she has depended for critical (but kind) feedback, moral support, professional insight and companionship.

Wilde sells her books directly to readers. She explained that, when you buy from Amazon, “you’re actually leasing the book.” Instead, she said, “When you buy digitally from an author, you actually own the book – it’s yours, not just a link you have access to while you have that device.”

Past and present intersect with Wilde’s writing. Most of her grandfather’s family was killed in the Warsaw Ghetto. Of those who survived, she said, “They ended up in a displaced persons’ camp in Germany. My mom was born prematurely in that camp, delivered by a former Nazi doctor.” So, stories about how Jews once lived in Russia, which invaded Poland in 1939 and fully occupied it at the end of the Second World War, “that was my childhood.”

Having been raised by her grandparents, Wilde said, “I know there is absolutely an aspect of me working through this generational trauma, baggage, but, at the same time, there’s also me working through the patriarchal aspect of Judaism.”

Shula Klinger is an author and journalist living in North Vancouver.

Writing the human condition

Maya Arad and Eshkol Nevo are featured in the JCC Jewish Book Festival prologue event Jan. 19.

The JCC Jewish Book Festival begins its 40th year with a discussion that’s sure to be as intriguing as it is relevant. The two Israeli writers featured in the festival prologue event Jan. 19 – Maya Arad and Eshkol Nevo – are keen observers and talented communicators, even as their characters are not.

Boundaries, generational differences, family, love, work, politics, social mores, and other themes run through both Arad’s (New Vessel Press, 2024) and Nevo’s Inside Information (Other Press, 2023). Each book comprises three novellas, though Nevo’s very loosely connects all the narratives, so dubs itself a novel, despite the stories being almost completely unrelated. Melancholic would best describe the mood of both works.

While the English version of Arad’s The Hebrew Teacher was published just this year – translated by Jessica Cohen – the Hebrew version came out in 2018. Its stories retain their immediacy, and readers will be able to relate to some aspect(s) of every one.

The title story, “The Hebrew Teacher,” is brilliant. When Ilana arrived in the United States from Israel in 1971 and started teaching, her Hebrew classes, both children and adult, at her synagogue and at the university, were packed: “Parents wanted their children to be able to chat in Hebrew, not just recite the prayers…. Everyone wanted to know a little Hebrew before they visited Israel. They wanted to learn the new songs.” Of course, those songs are far from new at this point in Ilana’s career, yet she still holds them and their visions of Israel dear.

But enrolment in the Hebrew-language university courses has been dropping for almost two decades, both because “Israel was a tough sell these days. It wasn’t the fledgling little country of 45 years ago. Nor was Ilana the same beaming young woman who’d arrived, thick copper braid over one shoulder, to regale the riveted students with stories about hiking from the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee, working on a kibbutz, and firing an Uzi when she served in the Israel Defence Forces.”

Into Ilana’s tenuous professional world – her husband has just retired from the university and other key allies have moved on – comes a new hire, Yoad Bergman-Harari, who’d been born Yoad Harari but had “added on his father’s original name, Bergman.” When Ilana asks why, he responds, “‘To negate the negation of the diaspora’ … as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.”

The differences in their worldviews – particularly on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – and approach to collegiality are stark. While Ilana has taught at the university for decades, she holds none of the cards here, as Yoad is the latest newfangled intellectual thing, and a professor, so can pretty much write his own ticket, and does.

In “A Visit (Scenes),” Miriam comes to the States for a three-week visit with her only child, Yoram, his wife Maya and their son Yonatan. Miriam makes the journey because her son rarely returns to Israel and she has yet to meet her grandson in person. In a string of short snippets, mostly from Miriam’s perspective but also from Yoram’s and Maya’s, we are privy to what everyone is feeling – which boils down to a lot of unhappiness. The lack of honest, open communication contributes to the tensions and dissatisfactions, which build as the visit goes on.

The final story, “Make New Friends,” is kind of mystifying at first, as we watch Efrat, an educated, successful woman with a good husband, start to spiral as she tries to protect their unpopular teenaged daughter from being hurt by so-called friends. She gets way too involved, even entering the teen social media universe, and it’s only when Efrat realizes that she herself doesn’t belong to any group or have any real friends that she begins to understand her reactions (and actions) to her daughter’s situation.

One review of The Hebrew Teacher comments that Arad, in these novellas, “probes the demise of idealism and the generation gap that her heroines must confront.” This is an apt description. And it could be said that Nevo also explores the demise of idealism in Inside Information, which was translated from Hebrew into English by Sondra Silverston.

The first two stories of the novel have similar plotlines – men who are led by their sexual desires to act in illegal or inappropriate ways. The main difference between the protagonists is that the “hero” in “Death Road,” Omri, goes mostly willingly towards his potential downfall while Dr. Caro, the main character of “Family History,” tries to convince himself that he did nothing wrong.

In “Death Road,” while on a trip to Bolivia following the recent breakup of his marriage, Omri runs into newlyweds Ronen and Mor. Once back in Israel, he reads in the newspaper about the death of Ronen in a cycling accident in Bolivia. He decides to go to the shiva – as he drives there, his “mind filled with more and more images of Mor’s surprise nocturnal visit to my room two weeks earlier.”

As Omri lays out the story, he proves an unreliable narrator. Nothing ultimately ends up being what it seems at first. More details become known. Questions arise. It’s a thriller of sorts, but one that doesn’t seem all that original or urgent. There are twists but nothing that’ll stop readers in their tracks.

The femme fatale reappears in the next story, “Family History,” this time in the form of a young medical resident who supposedly mistakes the ostensibly paternal gesture of the respected Dr. Caro for sexual harassment and files a complaint that threatens the good doctor’s reputation. Even as Caro tells his story, he’s trying to convince himself as much as us about the purity of his motivations. But he’s a widower who obviously loved his wife, he seems well-liked at work and good at his job. He is a more empathetic character than Omri, and the twist in this story does elicit some surprise, and puts Caro’s actions into an even darker light.

The last part of the novel, “A Man Walks Into An Orchard,” is a direct rift on the talmudic tractate about four Jewish sages who went into pardes, which means both paradise and orchard, and only one came out unharmed. In Nevo’s story, husband and wife Ofer and Chelli go for one of their regular Saturday walks in the orchard. This Saturday, though, Ofer needs to pee, so he gives his phone to Chelli and goes into the trees, while she waits on the road. And waits. He never comes back. He is never found.

The way in which Chelli and her two children work through their loss is emotionally engaging. She and her son become estranged, while she and her daughter become closer as they search Ofer’s blogs for clues to his potential whereabouts. He had intended to complete 100 stories of 100 words each, and then publish a book. He had posted his 99th story the week before he disappeared.

There is something satisfying in this third tale, though it takes a detour into Chelli’s drug-induced visions to somewhat resolve the mystery of Ofer’s disappearance. It highlights our desire for things to make sense, to know what happened. When that’s impossible, storytelling can fill in the blanks.

The Maya Arad and Eshkol Nevo event on Jan. 19 takes place at 1 p.m., at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver. Olga Campbell gives a talk on her memoir (jewishindependent.ca/a-multidimensional-memoir) and its exhibit on Jan. 23, 7 p.m., at the Zack Gallery. The book festival and the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre present a talk by Roger Frie on his book Edge of Catastrophe: Erich Fromm, Fascism and the Holocaust on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan. 27, 7 p.m. The festival itself opens Feb. 22 – with Selina Robinson in conversation about her new memoir, Truth Be Told – and runs through Feb. 27. Events will be posted at jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival as they are confirmed.

Putting the fun in dystopia – Steven Mayoff’s The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief

For all intents and purposes, it shouldn’t work, but Steven Mayoff’s The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief is a grand work of, let’s say, magical fiction that uses humour in large measure to elicit some very serious thoughts about art, politics, law, love, faith, community and more.

Mayoff takes part in two events during the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival: on Feb. 11, he presents at Burquest Jewish Community Association in Coquitlam and, on Feb. 12, he is at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, along with Jeffrey Groberman, author of Globetrotting Strikes Again! Groberman also presents at Har El in West Vancouver on Feb. 11.

It is hard to describe simply the plot of The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief. The title character is a middling artist who, when we meet him, is struggling to finish a painting. Outside his window, he has just seen – after a break of 13 years – three figments of his imagination. The Figs, as he calls them, present themselves in the forms of Judas, Fagin and Shylock, and they have returned with an important mission for Grief.

“The Supreme One,” who the Figs represent, was impressed by Grief’s scandalous, and most famous, painting of Prince Edward Island icon Anne of Green Gables as a Holocaust survivor, which Grief described in an interview as a statement “on the post-911 world we’re living in, where nobody is safe anymore and the primary victim is the delusion of our collective innocence.” Despite that Grief has not had much artistic or other success in the years since that painting – and that he is not actively involved in the island’s Jewish community – the Supreme One wants Grief to build PEI’s first synagogue. Once complete, the province will be consecrated as the new Promised Land, according to the Figs.

Among Grief’s many challenges – once he decides to take on the mission – is that the Supreme One has decreed that the synagogue must be built on a particular plot of land, a once-sacred place that has become a garbage dump and the focus of much political intrigue. It is hard to keep track of all the political manoeuvrings in this novel, but they sadly resonate, with some reality in their self-serving and unscrupulous nature.

It takes Mayoff awhile to set up the many pieces of his narrative puzzle. The characters are numerous, and quirky only begins to describe them. The societal issues that arise as Grief tries to achieve his mission, the role played by the media – both conventional and unconventional – in what ends up happening, the reliability and unreliability of friendship and love … so many factors are up in the air and changing as the story progresses. Somehow Mayoff juggles them all in a way that allows readers to follow along, discovering various elements as Grief does, and losing our naiveté as he does.

The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief is an ambitious novel that delivers beyond its promise.

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

Mysteries to be solved

The past can consume you if you let it. And reality isn’t as easy to discern as you might think. Two recently published thrillers from Simon & Schuster share these themes in common, but their authors address them in completely different ways.

Anna Porter’s Gull Island takes readers on an unsettling, at-times gory, modern-day journey through the protagonist’s thoughts and memories as she visits alone her family’s isolated island cottage and a ferocious storm hits, unmooring her boat and rendering her cellphone ineffective. Roberta Rich’s The Jazz Club Spy begins with a brutal pogrom in 1920 Ukraine and then jumps to 1939 Manhattan, where the protagonist, now a young woman, sees in passing one of the Cossacks who rampaged her village – as she starts looking for him to exact her revenge, she is enlisted by the US government to help find him for them, as he is a possible conspirator in an assassination plot.

Neither genre – psychological thriller or espionage novel – is the type of fiction I’d generally pick up, but I enjoyed both. They provided an escape, I learned a few things, I wanted to know how they would end.

While The Jazz Club Spy started off gritty and harsh, by the second chapter it read more like a young adult novel. Given the state of the world at the moment, I didn’t find that necessarily a negative thing. I rooted for Giddy Brodsky, who survived that traumatic pogrom and was now helping her family pay the rent and feed themselves, her dad having left for reasons we eventually find out.

As a cigarette girl in a club, Giddy uses her natural sleuthing skills – looking through customers’ pockets, listening to conversations for clues, etc. – to help her friend Hattie’s clairvoyant act. After Giddy sees the Cossack on a tram, but loses him in the crowd, she puts those skills to personal use, and then uses them to help the government. This happens after she asks a club regular who works in the immigration department for assistance, and he shares with her that the Cossack is an “undesirable” and could she help the government track him down.

Giddy is not only a competent detective but an aspiring entrepreneur, who creates her own makeups and lotions. The money she earns from spying goes to help her set up her own beauty store. But, to achieve success, she must first complete her mission, one that is complicated by love and the dangerous situations she must place herself in to root out the Cossack and try to prevent the assassination and a potential global political crisis.

The Jazz Club Spy is all about external threats and heroic acts. There is no doubt about Giddy’s strength, purpose and whether she’s a good person. Gull Island, on the other hand, is all about internal threats and acts that cause harm (even if that isn’t the intent). Jude’s a great unknown, even to herself, and she gets progressively more disoriented as the storm hits the island and she struggles to get the water pump working, hurts herself in various accidents, and drinks we’re not quite sure how much alcohol while she’s there.

Jude has come to the island at her mother’s request. Jude’s father has gone missing and a copy of his will is apparently at the cottage. She is also there for personal reasons, to rummage about, to figure something out, to look through old photographs; there are many of her sister, not so many of her. Jude has grown up in a dysfunctional family and the cottage was not generally a happy place. As the storms intensify – the rain and wind outside, the memories barraging Jude and the physical cuts and bruises she receives along the way, dealing with broken glass, wild animals and things not so clear – the tension ratchets up. When the sun returns and Jude surveys the damage left behind, a key piece of the mystery is understood.

Porter isn’t afraid to explore dark places, and she masterfully leads readers through Jude’s turmoil. I found it noteworthy that the book Jude finds at the cottage to read is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. “I had abandoned it years ago because I didn’t want to feel as insignificant as the author had made me feel,” thinks Jude. “But tonight, being alone in the cottage, with something digging under the bedroom window, feeling insignificant would be useful.” Spoiler alert: by the end of the novel, she is set to finish the book.

A mission to encourage

Aren X. Tulchinsky is Vancouver Public Library’s new writer in residence. (photo by Jeff Vinnick / VPL)

As this year’s writer in residence at the Vancouver Public Library (VPL), Aren X. Tulchinsky proudly represents his two cherished identities as a transgender man and as a Jewish person.

“I bring all of my lived experience into the residency,” said Tulchinsky in a Jewish Independent interview. “I am out and proud as a member of the Jewish community and the LGBTQ2S+ community, and I bring my identities with me into the residency. I guess you could say this is a very Jewish and queer residency. The library has been very supportive of me.”

Tulchinsky wears his heart on his sleeve or, at least his right bicep, which is ringed with a tattooed chai in Hebrew letters. “We celebrated the launch of my residency with an evening of words and music, during which I read from new and previous work, and was accompanied by local klezmer musicians,” he noted.

The 65-year-old Toronto native is probably best known for the award-winning 2003 novel The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky, under his former name, Karen X. Tulchinsky, which evokes the 1933 antisemitic riot at Toronto’s Christie Pits park. He has had a varied career in film and television writing, editing and directing, and penning short and long fiction, including lesbian romance, notably the novel Love Ruins Everything.

Tulchinsky came out as lesbian as a teenager, and has been writing stories since.

Tulchinsky was named in September to the VPL post, which was launched in 2005 to promote Canadian literature. Among past resident writers are Miriam Libicki (jewishindependent.ca/drawing-on-identity-judaism), Sam Wiebe, Rawi Hage and Gary Geddes. Last year’s appointee was Black Canadian writer Harrison Mooney, author of the critically applauded Invisible Boy: A Memoir of Self-Discovery.

Tulchinsky, who lives in Vancouver, responded to the VPL’s call for applications and was shortlisted. “Then I was called in for an interview with about 10 people from the programs and learning department at the VPL central branch,” he said.

“It was a bit intimidating to be interviewed by a whole group of people, but I must have impressed them because, a few days later, the manager of the department phoned to let me know that they had chosen me for the position.”

Asked if he thought his being transgender was a factor in his selection, Tulchinsky replied: “Not really. The only way my identity as a transman was significant is that in the posting the VPL was encouraging writers from under-represented groups to apply.

“Judging from most of their past writers-in-residence, I assumed they would give the position to a more mainstream writer, so I have never applied in the past. Their encouragement for writers from diverse backgrounds … is what motivated me to apply.”

One of his chief responsibilities is acting as a mentor to emerging writers, in particular, those from marginal communities.

“It is my mission to encourage writers from marginalized communities, specifically, BIPOC, Indigenous and LGBQ2S+ writers, to attend my (free public) workshops and apply for a spot on my one-on-one consultation afternoons,” Tulchinsky explained. “I think Jews, People of Colour and queer and trans writers all have a lot to teach the mainstream world about our lived experiences. I want writers from under-represented communities to feel comfortable to come forward and let their voices be heard.

“Traditionally, Canadian literature has been dominated by white, straight, cis-gendered men (and a few women). We have a lot to catch up on. We all gain from a more diverse society and more diverse voices in Canadian literature.”

The residency will also allow Tulchinsky time for his own writing, principally, the first draft of a novel entitled Second Son, a family saga that draws on events in his own past.

The main character, Charly (formerly Charlotte) Epstein-Sakamoto, is a biracial, transgender man coming to terms with PTSD resulting from a tragedy that devastated his family decades earlier.

“The heart of the novel is based on my own journey transitioning from female to male, a child’s death in my family, and my experiences in a long-term, interracial, cross-cultural (Jewish-Japanese) relationship,” said Tulchinsky.

“Charly knows he’s a boy, even though his parents, his doctor, his teachers and all the other kids at school insist he’s a girl. When Charly’s brother (the first son and his only sibling) Joshua is killed in a tragic bike accident, his dad is so devastated he sinks into a deep depression, his mother begins an affair with her sister-in-law, and Charly finally begins to assert his true gender identity.”

Tulchinsky is also developing another novel, based on family stories and beginning in Russia in 1941.

“As I was writing the novel and researching the Holocaust, I started thinking about how many Canadians think the Holocaust began in 1939, with World War II, but the reality is the oppression of Jews by Hitler and the Nazis began years before the war, within days of Hitler becoming chancellor of Germany in January of 1933.

“I began writing another novel that begins in 1932, when Germany – Berlin in particular – was one of the most progressive places in the world. In Berlin at that time there were numerous gay clubs and cabarets, safe places for gay men, lesbians and trans people to gather, and the Jewish community was also thriving.

“That all changed overnight once Hitler came to power. I ended up with two new historical novels that I am still working on.”

Tulchinsky’s CV is lengthy, and one wonders how he has been able to be so productive.

“To be honest, part of my diverse career has to do with the fact that I found it impossible to survive as a novelist, even though I had numerous books published,” he said. “I am a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto, which provides advanced training in film and television. Since then, I have worked as a writer and video editor on numerous television series. I have found it more possible to make a living in film and TV than I could as a novelist. The downside is I rarely have time to work on novels. This residency at the VPL is affording me time to write, which is a real gift.”

His advice to aspiring writers is be disciplined and tenacious.

“You need discipline to sit in a chair and write or you will never finish a novel. And you need tenacity to get your work published. Most writers get a lot of rejections before they find a publisher. Every time you get a rejection, just send your work out again,” he said.

Being Jewish and queer, Tulchinsky looks with growing dismay at what is happening today.

Twenty years ago, The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky reminded Canadians of a shameful history. It remains among the top 10 Canadian books ever borrowed from the VPL.

The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky follows a Jewish family living in Toronto’s Kensington Market in the 1930s and ’40s and is set against the backdrop of a massive antisemitic riot.

“On Aug. 16, 1933, at an amateur league softball game in Christie Pits park – a neighbourhood filled at the time with Jewish and Italian immigrant families – members of the antisemitic Swastika Club showed up with a giant swastika flag, which set off a riot between Jews and gentiles that involved 15,000 people and lasted throughout the night and is the largest race riot in Canadian history,” Tulchinsky said. “Unfortunately, with antisemitism, racism, transphobia and homophobia back on the rise throughout the world, the themes in the novel are just as relevant today as they were when I originally wrote the book.”

Tulchinsky thinks the current polarizing, often acrimonious, debate over sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) issues is “an effort on the part of the political right-wing to inflate the importance of cultural wars to distract people from the real issues we should be focusing on, such as climate change, wealth inequality and homelessness.

“I once saw a bumper sticker that read: ‘If you’re against abortion – don’t have one.’ I think it is the same when it comes to SOGI. If you are heterosexual and cis-gendered, you can either be an ally to the LGBTQ2S+ community and actively support us and fight for our rights, or you can leave us in peace.

“As an out and proud transman, I am just living my authentic life. And I hope I can serve as a positive role model to trans and non-binary kids who are struggling with their identity.”

Janice Arnold is a freelance writer living in Summerland, BC.

Kalla’s toxic new thriller

“I see how it looks…. Just another teen suicide. Or maybe an accidental OD. Another addict who fooled his parents. No…! I know my Owen…. Never, never, never….”

This is the reaction of Owen’s mother – who happens to be a U.S. senator – to her son’s death in Daniel Kalla’s latest thriller Fit to Die (Simon & Schuster Canada). L.A. detective Cari Garcia initially writes off the reaction as a mother ignorant of her child’s drug use, and bristles against the political pressure to determine the young track star’s cause of death. When she learns he died from ingesting a capsule that contained 2,4-Dinitrophenol, or DNP – used as a fertilizer, pesticide or explosive, but also abused by people to lose weight – she becomes more motivated to solve the mystery, in part because of a tragedy in her own past.

Meanwhile, here in Vancouver, toxicologist Dr. Julie Rees is dealing with a mysterious increase in deaths among bodybuilders, finding out that DNP is the cause. Then, a famous pop star and social media influencer dies in her penthouse, showing the same symptoms. And the co-owner of a wellness centre with locations in Los Angeles and Vancouver dies of a similar overdose. All the cases are connected and the L.A. and Vancouver police and medical personnel have to work together to find out who’s behind the influx of DNP on the market.

Like all of Kalla’s books, Fit To Die is an intriguing read, suspensefully written. While I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I have his other thrillers – it was somewhat repetitive and the main characters’ backstories didn’t ring as true to me – I still wanted to know whodunnit. I also value having learned about the real-life issue of toxic diet pills and gaining some insight into body dysmorphia and eating disorders. I trust Kalla’s facts, as he is not only a writer, but an emergency room physician and a University of British Columbia clinical associate professor. He was kind enough to answer some questions via email.

JI: There are some Jewish-sounding surnames in the novel. In what ways does your being Jewish enter into your novel writing?

DK: Well, in this case the Hertzberg-Davis Centre is the real forensic lab for the LAPD. So that made it easy. I couldn’t remove the Jewish influence in my writing even if wanted to, which, obviously, I don’t. I’ve written a historical trilogy, The Far Side of the Sky, that is explicitly a Jewish story. In thrillers like Fit to Die, I don’t consciously think about my background or religion, but there is no doubt it influences the writing.

JI: Do you name characters after friends, or sometimes offer naming opportunities for charity auctions or the like?

DK: Haha. I learned early in my writing career to never name a character after a friend. It only ends badly. I’ve never auctioned off a character name for charity, but I would love to. It can be agony finding the right character name. Why not outsource it?

JI: This is your 10th thriller. How has your writing style and/or process evolved since your first one?

DK: I hope I’ve learned from some of my past mistakes. Paradoxically, it gets easier and harder. Easier in the sense that I’m more confident in my voice and the nuts and bolts of my storytelling. Harder in that I’m more critical of my writing and fear becoming derivative in my stories. But the one thing that keeps me going is my enthusiasm for telling a new story. I think I’m more passionate than ever.

JI: From the several thrillers of yours that I’ve read, your topic choices are timely and coincide with current events. The medical side, you’ve got covered. But what are some of your sources for other aspects? In this book, for example, how the dark web works and even the pop culture aspects, including language, like “partizzle”?

DK: I obviously have a huge advantage with respect to the medical background, but that’s only a part of it. As you point out, this story – about a (real) and deadly diet pill that is marketed online to the most vulnerable and amplified by toxic social media – took some intense research. I had to learn all about body dysmorphia and immerse myself in the TikTok culture, which explains some of the Zoomer slang one of the character uses, like “partizzle.” I was lucky to have a local VPD superintendent help guide me through the logistics of what an investigation into this kind of complex online conspiracy would look like.

JI: Where do you find time to write?

DK: For me, it’s never about the time. I’m lucky to work in the ER, which is shift work, but I think I could find time no matter what my day job was. For me, it’s all about momentum and inspiration. When I have those, I find the time. When I don’t, free time doesn’t help.

JI: What part of your soul does writing feed?

DK: Not to sound overly melodramatic, but it kind of feeds my core. Medicine does, as well, but in a very different sense. I find purpose as a doctor, but I find my passion as a writer. I can imagine retiring one day from medicine, but I can’t imagine not writing.

JI: Can you speak about the process of getting a book from idea to publication?

DK: The challenge of transforming the kernel of an idea into a publishable novel always seems insurmountable from the outset – this book particularly. I wanted to build a compelling mystery and resurrect some characters from a past novel (The Last High) and introduce new ones, all while tackling a highly sensitive yet vitally relevant topic: how the toxic diet culture and social media prey on the most vulnerable. I like to think I met the challenge, but, of course, that’s for each reader to decide.

This year’s book award winners

The fourth edition of the Western Canada Jewish Book Awards, presented by the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, culminated in a May 24 event at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver at which the winners in six categories – fiction, non-fiction, memoir/biography, children and youth, poetry, and Holocaust writing – were announced.

Winning the Nancy Richler Memorial Prize for fiction was Simon Choa-Johnston for House of Daughters, a stand-alone sequel to The House of Wives. Based on the author’s family, this multi-generational family saga opens when Emanuel Belilios, a wealthy Jewish opium oligarch, suddenly leaves Hong Kong, and his junior-wife, Pearl, blames Semah, the senior-wife. Pearl kicks Semah out of the mansion where the polyamorous trio had lived and shuns everyone, including her daughter. This is a story of passions and regrets, wealth and survival, set in Eurasian Hong Kong’s high society.

In the non-fiction category, the Pinsky Givon Family Prize went to Alan Twigg, editor of Gidal: The Unusual Friendship of Yosef Wosk and Tim Gidal, a selection of letters between Israeli Tim Gidal, a pioneer in photojournalism, and Vancouver scholar and art collector Yosef Wosk. In the late 1920s, with his handheld Leica, Gidal was able to travel in interwar Europe, capturing rare images of Polish Jews prior to the Holocaust. Wosk first encountered Gidal’s work in a magazine in 1991 – the photo “Night of the Kabbalist” captivated him. Wosk was determined to meet the photographer and eventually did. The two became close and the letters – selected by Twigg from hundreds the friends exchanged over two decades – both memorialize Gidal as an artist, scholar, historian of photography and “hero among the Jewish people,” and also capture the essence of Gidal and Wosk’s friendship.

The Cindy Roadburg Memorial Prize for memoir/biography was given to Marsha Lederman for Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed. In it, Lederman delves into her parents’ Holocaust stories in the wake of her own divorce, investigating how trauma migrates through generations. At the age of 5, Lederman asked her mother why she didn’t have any grandparents, and her mother told her the truth: the Holocaust. Decades later, her parents having died and now a mother herself, Lederman began to wonder how much history had shaped her life and started her journey into the past, to tell her family’s stories of loss and resilience.

Boy from Buchenwald by Robbie Waisman (with Susan McClelland) took the Diamond Foundation Prize for children and youth writing. In 1945, Robbie Waisman, then Romek Wajsman, had just been liberated from Buchenwald, a concentration camp where more than 60,000 people were killed. He was starving, tortured and had no idea if his family was alive. Along with 472 other boys, these teens were dubbed “the Buchenwald Boys.” They were angry at the world for their abuse, and turned to violence: stealing, fighting and struggling for power. Few thought they would ever be able to lead functional lives again, but everything changed for Romek and the other boys when Albert Einstein and Rabbi Herschel Schacter brought them to a home for rehabilitation.

The Betty Averbach Foundation Prize for poetry went to Tom Wayman’s Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back: Poems for a Dark Time, which explores the question of how to live in a natural landscape that offers beauty while being consumed by industry, and in an economy that offers material benefits while denying dignity, meaning and a voice to many in order to satisfy the outsized appetites of a few. A cri de coeur from a poet who has long celebrated the voices of working people, the collection also grapples with why “anyone, in this era so profoundly lacking in grace, might want to make poems – or any kind of art.”

Rounding out the awards was the Kahn Family Foundation Prize for Holocaust writing, which was given to But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust by Charlotte Schallié (editor) and illustrators Miriam Libicki, Barbara Yelin and Gilad Seliktar. But I Live is a co-creation of the novelists and four Holocaust survivors: David Schaffer, brothers Nico and Rolf Kamp, and Emmie Arbel. Schaffer and his family survived in Romania due to their refusal to obey Nazi collaborators; in the Netherlands, the Kamps were hidden by the Dutch resistance in 13 different places; and, through the story of Arbel, who survived Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, we see the lifelong trauma inflicted by the Holocaust. The book includes historical essays, a postscript from the artists and words of the survivors.

Each category in the 2023 Western Canada Jewish Book Awards was assessed by five jurors, in different configurations, from the following professionals: Linda Bonder, a retired librarian; Susanna Egan, professor emeritus of literature in English from the University of British Columbia; Dave Margoshes, who writes fiction and poetry on a farm west of Saskatoon; Norman Ravvin, a writer, teacher and critic living in Montreal; Rhea Tregebov, an author of fiction, poetry and children’s picture books, and a retired professor in the UBC Creative Writing Program; Elisabeth Kushner, a librarian and writer living in Vancouver; Karen Corrin, former head librarian of the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library at the JCC; Nicole Nozick, former executive director of the Vancouver Writers Fest and former director of the JCC Jewish Book Festival; and Anita Brown, who is working with the Waldman Library.

Daniella Givon, chair of the awards committee, introduced the May 24 event, sharing a bit about the awards and thanking all the sponsors and participants for the high calibre and diversity of the submissions. The winning authors then said a few words, and Dana Camil Hewitt, director of the JCC Jewish Book Festival, closed the proceedings with more thank yous, and an invitation for everyone to purchase and enjoy the books.

– Courtesy Cherie Smith JCC 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.