JCC Jewish Book Festival

Jews against Spanish fascism

The new historical novel by Vancouver writer David Spaner, Keefer Street, is as much about the idea of Keefer Street as it about the real East Vancouver avenue. This is appropriate, because the book is a reflection on the Spanish Civil War and its Canadian, especially its Jewish, volunteers. For the dead and the survivors, the war was a living hell. But for the survivors and anyone else with a direct or inherited memory of the 1936-39 conflagration, it is an idea. It has been called the Last Great Cause – and that is the underpinning of Spaner’s story.

Spaner takes part in the Feb. 26 JCC Jewish Book Festival event Jewish Fiction from Western Canada, in which Saskatchewan writer Dave Margoshes (A Simple Carpenter) is also featured.

Keefer Street toggles back and forth between the Spanish Civil War and a 1986 reunion of fighters and hangers-on (with occasional detours to family vignettes in other eras and areas). The storyline follows veterans of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, the ragtag Canadian volunteers who made their way to Spain in direct defiance of their own government, joining American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, as well as French, Poles and others signing on in a pre-Second World War proxy against Hitler and Mussolini and their Spanish incarnation, Francisco Franco.

The narrator, Jake Feldman (later Jack Fields), is a Mac-Pap from the neighbourhood – that is, the Strathcona area of East Vancouver, specifically Keefer Street, where waves of immigrants have planted their first roots in Canada. By the time we join Feldman’s spirited (if predictably stereotypical) Jewish family, Strathcona’s Jews have already begun moving to the Oak Street corridor and its environs, but the Jewish element remains prominent among the multicultural milieu of the area.

Spaner, who has written extensively about Vancouver’s left-wing (see Solidarity: Canada’s Unknown Revolution of 1983, jewishindependent.ca/history-of-left-coast), list-ticks a raft of momentous and minor Vancouver signposts and events, including Stanley Park’s hollow tree, the Sylvia Hotel’s Jewish roots, the lost, lamented Woodward’s flagship department store, Theatre Under the Stars (still going), Eastside firebrand Rose Barrett and her boy Dave, the Carnegie Library turned Downtown Eastside community centre, and the blacklisted singer Paul Robeson singing at the Peace Arch for binational audiences.

Obscure local trivia is also tucked into the pages. The Industrial Workers of the World got their nickname Wobblies here in Vancouver. David Oppenheimer, Bavarian Jew, became the city’s second mayor and has an eponymous park in the Downtown Eastside where the fictional Feldman family frolics. Local gal Sadya Marcowitz became Mary Livingstone and married Jack Benny, going on to become a major radio star.

More momentous local events are introduced, including the On-to-Ottawa Trek, the 1935 Ballantyne Pier riots and the upheaval around the visit of the Nazi warship Karlsbad earlier that year.

The life of Jake/Jack takes on a bit of a Forrest Gump feel with his uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time, such as when he just happens to be watching an amateur baseball game in Toronto when Nazis descend in what we know now as the infamous antisemitic (and anti-antisemitic counteroffensive) Christie Pits riots.

Keefer Street is sometimes a didactic (perhaps necessarily, given the times) 101 on antisemitism in Canada, including Toronto’s Swastika Club and Quebec’s philo-fascist Adrien Arcand.

The flashbacks feature the parents’ hardscrabble migrant experience and their engagement in the shmata and fur trades, as well as the moderately idyllic life of Vancouver kids and teens in the 1930s. Apparently before the advent of Netflix, something called “shooting pool” was a popular pastime.

Hindsight allows Jake to reflect on the legal proscriptions against enlisting with a foreign militia, then the social ostracism on their return due to the associations of Spanish partisans with communism, then McCarthyism, then the apathy and ignorance of the Me Generation and its aftermaths, in which successive generations don’t know the role the Spanish Civil War or its belligerents played in 20th-century history.

The 1986 reunion allows for the exploration of the emotions of former fighters, wondering what their impacts were and what their lives have become.

Jews played a major role in the Spanish Civil War, as Keefer Street’s central protagonists demonstrate. This was understandable as a first military salvo against fascism, but Spaner illuminates another massive historical consonance that may be overlooked.

“Along with everything else the Civil War stood for, it meant a Jewish return to Spain after centuries in exile,” says one of the characters at the reunion. “During the Spanish Inquisition of the 15th century, the country’s considerable Jewish population, though it had lived there for eons, was given the choice of conversion or expulsion. Many were expelled. In the 1930s, Jews returned to Spain, volunteering in disproportionately large numbers – over half of the American nurses, for instance, from a country three-point-something percent Jewish. One personal note. In 1937, I crossed the same ocean going to Europe that my parents had fled across, coming from Europe just a generation earlier. My parents fled the barbarism of pogroms, inquisitions. I came back to fight it.”

Says Spaner through his character Jake: “Funny how a short time can define a lifetime. For a lot of the volunteers, the Spanish Civil War years are the big memory but, when you think about it, the war lasted less than three years. I was there about a year-and-a-half and so much of it’s a blur.”

The JCC Jewish Book Festival runs Feb. 22-27. For tickets and the full schedule, visit jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival.

Campbell’s art at Zack

Artist Olga Campbell and her grandson Arlo, for whom Campbell wrote her memoir, Dear Arlo: Letters to My Grandson. (photo from Olga Campbell)

Recently, Olga Campbell published her third book, a memoir, Dear Arlo: Letters to My Grandson. Campbell’s new solo show with the same name opened at the Zack Gallery on Jan. 9. It features a selection of paintings and sculptures from the book, as well as a short film.

“The film starts the exhibition,” Campbell told the Independent. “It contains my photographs of Vancouver and its people. It is called Everybody Has a Story. The show and the book portray one of those stories – my story. But millions of other people have their stories, too, and, in the film, in my photos, I tried to tell some of those stories.”

Campbell said, “The book and the show are my answers to the questions my grandson asks. He is interested in our family’s past. We are very close, he and I. We just went to Nepal together. I thought I would write this book for him, as my legacy.”

The book does not concentrate exclusively on pain and tragedy, on the deaths of her family members in the Holocaust. It also celebrates the power of art and writing as a transformational and healing tool. Besides letters to her grandson, the book includes Campbell’s poetry and art, essays written by the artist, and her family’s traditional recipes. (See jewishindependent.ca/a-multidimensional-memoir.)

The Zack Gallery show is a subset of the book, a selection of paintings and sculptures the memoir highlights. The paintings are mostly collages based on the artist’s photographs. Each photo is Photoshopped into infinity, so none of the faces in the paintings have any resemblance to their origins. Campbell likes to experiment with images, looking at them from different perspectives, applying different approaches. Like her inner child who never grew up, she plays with them, making up different stories for different levels of perception.

One of the paintings, “Corridor of Memories,” has a couple of faces looking at the viewer with thoughtful, slightly anxious expressions. Behind those faces, a long corridor stretches into an unknown distance. The memories that come from that distance seem diverse and unsettling, a mix of positive and negative, but different for everyone.

image - “Corridor of Memories” by Olga Campbell — “Corridor of Memories” by Olga Campbell. (photo by Olga Livshin)

“There is bad there but there is also some good stuff there,” she said. “I played with the faces in that painting. I thought it would be interesting to make them three-dimensional. That’s how I came up with the sculptures in the show. They are the result of the images unfolding from 2D to 3D.”

Another painting that underwent a similar metamorphosis is “Shall We Dance? – self meeting Self.” Campbell explained: “I took this image from the confines of a frame and brought it to life by making it three-dimensional. The title, ‘self meeting Self,’ refers to the small self, the individual, the ego, meeting the Universal Self, and the ensuing dance of Self-discovery, joy and wonder of life.”

The 3D dancers – a thickened silhouette of the flat painted image beside it – rotate. They are accompanied by the song “Shall We Dance,” played by a tiny music box, when someone winds it up.

image - “The Sky is Falling” by Olga Campbell — “The Sky is Falling” by Olga Campbell. *(photo by Olga Livshin)*

Sometimes Campbell’s reconstruction of images results not in an additional dimension but in a deepening complexity of the original idea. In “The Sky is Falling,” she took a person’s outline from the painting beside it and embellished it with everything that she felt was relevant to our hectic lives. Unlike most of the other paintings in the gallery, there is no face in this one. The grey danger hangs over all of us, regardless of our facial features or skin colour.

“There are lots of similarities in our world today and the one that preceded WWII,” said Campbell. “That’s why I put a crow in that painting. A crow is a traditional symbol of death, but also of transformation, of change and the future.”

Like the book it is based on, the show is not linear. It reflects the artist’s response to various events in her life, both happy and sad, from her coming of age, to the current war in Ukraine. Both the memoir and the show emphasize Campbell’s personal journey through the beauty and the trauma of life, so inextricably entangled together.

At the gallery on Jan. 23, 7 p.m., Campbell will discuss her book and her art in an event co-presented by the Zack Gallery and the JCC Jewish Book Festival. Campbell’s exhibit will be on display until Jan. 27. To learn more, check out the artist’s website, olgacampbell.com.

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

Robinson kicks off book fest

The JCC Jewish Book Festival opens Feb. 22 with Selina Robinson talking about her memoir, Truth Be Told. (photo from JCC Jewish Book Festival)

This year’s JCC Jewish Book Festival opens Feb. 22 with Selina Robinson talking about her recently published memoir, Truth Be Told.

Most Jewish Independent readers will be familiar with the events that propelled Robinson to write this book. The first chapter, called “Four Fateful Words,” starts at what some people may think is the beginning – when, during a Jan. 30, 2024, webinar, Robinson said the state of Israel was reestablished on a “crappy piece of land.” But she believes she had been targeted for months.

“It was sloppy language, nothing more, but it provided the Gotcha! for anti-Israel extremists to build a case that I was racist, Islamophobic, intolerant and an evil monster that needed to be canceled,” she writes.

“In an ideal world, it would have been the extremists who were dismissed, not me. In an ideal world, we would be blessed with leaders who can differentiate between right and wrong.”

Truth Be Told covers the fallout from her comments. Premier David Eby initially seemed prepared to stand by Robinson, but the political pressure – including from a group of Muslim clergy who threatened the NDP’s access to Muslim voters unless Robinson was dismissed – soon led to him firing her from cabinet, though he never used the word.

“I told the premier that if he wanted my resignation, I would give it to him, but he needed to ask for it,” writes Robinson.

“In the end, he didn’t fire me and I didn’t resign, although the undeniable conclusion of the call was that I was no longer in cabinet.”

After taking some time to absorb the situation, Robinson rallied.

“As part of my t’shuvah [repentance], the premier asked that I make a series of calls to Muslim community leaders,” she shares. “I began to think: What if I could engage with these groups and bring the Jewish community and the Arab and Muslim communities together in some way? These two heartbroken communities, both fearful for their families overseas and feeling powerless to effect change, could find commonality in that shared experience, at the very least. Action is always an antidote to hopelessness and helplessness. I could do this as part of my role as an MLA and the government could take credit for doing something meaningful that makes a positive difference for both these aching communities. For me, this would be a profound form of redemption, of t’shuvah, and also of tikkun olam [repair of the world].”

But this ray of light was soon extinguished, the idea being deemed “too political.”

“I knew in that moment that this was no longer my place, no longer my government, no longer my political party,” writes Robinson. “A place and a party where I belonged would recognize the opportunity for someone who was seen to have transgressed to do some good. My place, my party, would recognize the value of bringing people together. A place where I belonged would not be afraid to try something unique and potentially powerful.”

Robinson quit the NDP and finished her term as an MLA as an independent. She was going to retire anyway, but this was not how she wanted her political career to end.

And it was quite a career. With a master’s degree in counseling psychology, Robinson spent most of her working life as a family counselor and in senior roles in various social service agencies.

“I never planned to enter politics,” she writes. “The first real engagement I had was speaking to Coquitlam City Council, my hands shaking, in support of an emergency cold weather refuge for homeless people proposed by a church in my neighbourhood.”

One of the councilors suggested she run for council, and she did. She was elected to Coquitlam City Council in 2008 and reelected in 2011. Truth Be Told gives readers a glimpse of what that experience was like, what Robinson accomplished as a councilor, and more. We find out how and why she made the leap to provincial politics in 2013 – a decision in which the late John Horgan played a pivotal role. The memoir is dedicated to Horgan, for whom Robinson had great respect and a close relationship. As premier, Horgan was the one who appointed Robinson minister of finance after the 2020 election that gave the NDP a majority government. She held that position through COVID, the government managing to file budget surpluses despite the challenges the pandemic brought.

“What saddens me right now is that people are losing faith in government,” writes Robinson. “That is especially distressing because if anything should have renewed people’s faith in government, it was the collective response to the pandemic.”

When Horgan stepped down as premier in 2022 because of the toll his cancer treatments were taking on him, Robinson began to more seriously reflect on her own future. She had been in public service for so long, she wanted to spend more time with her family. In Truth Be Told, we learn more of her own fight against cancer – a fight that started in 2006, a fight she seems to have won, finding out on Oct. 6, 2023, that her cancer had disappeared. The celebration was short-lived. That evening, news started coming in of Hamas’s terror attacks on Israel.

Robinson’s ambivalence about running for reelection was one of the reasons she didn’t pursue the party leadership vacancy Horgan’s departure opened. Other candidates bowed out, and Eby was anointed the new leader of the BC NDP and became premier in November 2022.

Robinson calls herself an “eternal optimist,” and that attitude has served her well. Despite being effectively demoted by Eby after he became premier, Robinson threw herself into the position of post-secondary education and future skills minister. It is interesting to read about some of the issues in that sector, and of the other portfolios Robinson held, as well as get some insider knowledge of how politics works and about the personalities of the people who represent us.

The crux of Truth Be Told is Robinson’s “four fateful words,” the reactions to them, and what was said and done – or, more importantly, what was not said and what was not done. Many of her colleagues were “quiet allies,” not willing to speak out.

“There are lessons from my experience that transcend my personal story,” she writes. “There are lessons for our democracy about the necessity to stand up to coercion from interest groups and harassment from mobs. There are lessons for leaders about how to act (and how not to act) when presented with choices between what is easy but wrong and difficult but right. There are lessons about speaking up rather than remaining silent.”

Truth Be Told is about a person doing what they passionately believe in, a person living their values – some of which were instilled at Camp Miriam, where Robinson was a counselor in her youth – and trying to make what they feel are positive contributions to the world.

Given what happened to her, Robinson could be forgiven for giving up and going quietly into obscure retirement. But that’s not who she is. She asks Canadians to have the courage to speak up, while recognizing that we should not “kid ourselves that a millennia-old problem will be resolved in a day.” She ends her book with calls to action, suggestions of what we each can do to counter antisemitism, as Jews (for example, don’t hide, “engage respectfully or not at all” and don’t give up) and non-Jews (speak up and engage with Jews, among other things), and as a society (for instance, protect students and nurture real inclusion). She includes some resources for readers wanting to explore various topics more.

In the “Final Reflections” chapter, Robinson writes, “We will never be perfect. The world will never be faultless. But repairing the world must always be our guiding star. Our reach must always exceed our grasp.”

Profits from the sale of Truth Be Told will be donated to the Parents Circle-Families Forum (theparentscircle.org/en) and Upstanders Canada (upstanderscanada.com).

The JCC Jewish Book Festival runs Feb. 22-27. For the full list of events and participating authors, visit jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival.

Kiki more than a muse

History is fickle. Who becomes known as great in their field, whose work is displayed in museums or taught in schoolbooks? When there is a tangible product – a building, a painting, a book, whatever – the chances seem higher that you’ll be remembered. But what if you were mainly a muse to others, what if you could enthrall audiences with your voice but never recorded an album, if you created works of art that people liked and even bought, but you didn’t create in the popular style of the day, or you were a woman in a man’s world?

Most readers will not have heard of Kiki de Montparnasse, born Alice Prin in 1901, in Châtillon-sur-Seine, about 240 kilometres southeast of Paris, to an unwed mother who wasn’t much into mothering. But most would likely recognize her – she modeled for many an artist (Alexander Calder, Tsuguharu Foujita, Amedeo Modigliani, to name a few, as well as Maurice Mendjizky, with whom she fell in love for awhile). And, during her seven-year relationship with surrealist photographer Man Ray (who thought himself more of a painter), she posed for him many a time. In 2022, one of Ray’s most famous images of her, called “Le Violon d’Ingres,” sold for $12.4 million, the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction.

Yet, what of her own work, her talents, her accomplishments?

Cultural historian Mark Braude gives Kiki her overdue due with his latest book, Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love and Rivalry in 1920s Paris, which Braude will discuss with University of British Columbia professor emeritus of history Chris Friedrichs at the JCC Jewish Book Festival on Feb. 24, in an event called Art & History: Paris, Jews and Surrealism.

While Kiki wasn’t Jewish, so many of the artists she hung out with were, including, of course, Ray, who was born Emmanuel “Manny” Radnitzky. If she hadn’t lived among the who’s who of Dada and Surrealist art, perhaps she wouldn’t have been overshadowed, mostly forgotten. She was a commanding performer, she sold at least a few dozen paintings, wrote a memoir, appeared in films. By all accounts, a success. But, as “Queen of Montparnasse,” the early-1900s bohemian paradise in Paris, Kiki lived on the more wild side. Addiction would speed along her end – she died in 1953, only 51 years old. Another reason, perhaps, that her legacy was not as lasting.

As much as Braude’s account is about Kiki, it is about the time in which she lived and the people among whom she lived. Because, “as she experienced her era and channeled that experience into her art, Kiki shared drinks and cigarettes and ideas with many of the people who would shape how their century saw and thought and spoke: Modigliani, Stein, Picasso, Barnes, Matisse, Guggenheim, Calder, Duchamp, Breton, Cocteau, Flanner, Hemingway,” writes Braude. “And Man Ray, whose emergence as a modern artist must be understood as intimately linked to her own.”

While Kiki may not have left much physical evidence behind of her influence, it doesn’t mean she wasn’t influential. Living as she did, with whom she did, Braude writes: “Evolving in concert with them, watching them become who they were, challenging them and joking with them, working with them and through them, Kiki, too, played her role in shaping the cultural history of the past hundred years.”

Braude’s book is not only a fascinating read, but a reminder that none of us is insignificant. Even if our names are lost to history, we matter, we impact others and the world around us.

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

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.

Roots of Arab-Israeli conflict?

The historic milestones that led to the creation of the state of Israel are well known: Theodor Herzl’s Zionist congresses, the Balfour Declaration, the Partition Resolution, the War of Independence. Oren Kessler – who participates in the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival on Feb. 13 – believes that a significant chunk of history has been largely overlooked and he sets out to right that wrong in his new book, Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict. The Arab uprising of 1936 to 1939 in Palestine, he writes, “was the crucible in which Palestinian identity coalesced.” It also set in stone the intransigence toward Jewish self-determination in the region.

An Arab reaction to increased Jewish migration to Palestine – presaging both the potential for an eventual Jewish majority in the British-controlled Mandate and an even more alarming political outcome, a Jewish national homeland – inspired three years of Arab terror and British colonial repression, with the Jews inevitably caught between, argues Kessler.

Beginning with a series of strikes and protests in April 1936, the haphazard opposition to British rule and Jewish immigration was soon corralled and led by the notorious Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, into a mass movement of terror and anti-colonial (and anti-Jewish) violence.

While the British, on the one hand, hammered the Arab guerrillas – and plenty of civilians – they also rewarded that violence with policies such as those emerging from the 1937 Peel Commission report and the 1939 White Paper, both of which effectively caved to Arab demands by massively reducing Jewish immigration just as the Nazis were closing their fists across Europe. At the same time, the British left the Arabs unsatisfied by throwing tiny offerings to the Jews as a sign of compromise.

So unyielding was the mufti’s opposition to even considering Jewish migration that his Arab Higher Committee boycotted the various commissions’ hearings.

“Amid Hajj Amin’s boycott, no Arabs came forward,” writes Kessler. “Jerusalem Vice Mayor Hassan Sidqi Dajani, the mufti opponent who had once contemplated testifying, was found along the train tracks outside the city with two broken hands and two bullet holes in his forehead.”

In the end, the revolt was a disaster for everyone.

“The great revolt had exacted a withering toll on Palestine,” writes Kessler. “About 500 Jews had been killed and some 1,000 wounded. British troops and police suffered around 250 fatalities in their ranks. But the most onerous price of all was paid by the Arabs themselves: at least 5,000 – perhaps more than 8,000 – were dead, of whom at least 1,500 likely fell at Arab hands. More than 20,000 were seriously wounded.”

The Arab economy in Palestine was ruined, even as the Jewish economy hummed along.

Kessler’s thesis is that the events of 1936-1939 deserve to be recognized more as pivotal to the history of the region as a whole. There are also voluminous parallels and lessons for contemporary times in his review of that era.

The uprising did not, in the end, prevent Jewish national self-determination in Palestine. What it did prevent was a refuge for the Jews of Europe when they needed it most – and, for at least some of the players in this tragic drama, like the Hitler-allied mufti, perhaps that was a reward in itself.

The Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival runs Feb. 10-15. For tickets, visit jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival.

True crime wraps up festival

They both made headlines in their day, and then were more or less forgotten. A social climber who ends up convicted of killing his wife in one instance, an inventor-turned-money launderer in the other. Two very different men living in different eras who achieved the wealth and lifestyle they sought, then lost it all in spectacular fashion.

Historian Allan Levine and filmmaker David Rabinovitch close the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival on Feb. 15, 8 p.m., at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver with the event Jewish True Crime Stories, moderated by SM Freedman, who spent years as a private investigator in Vancouver before becoming a bestselling author of psychological thrillers. Levine will talk about his latest book, Details Are Unprintable: Wayne Lonergan and the Sensational Café Society Murder (2020), and Rabinovitch will talk about : The Mob and the Dark Side of the American Dream (2023), his first book.

Both true crime publications have a similar structure. They both have a cast of characters at the beginning, followed by a prologue or preface, then the narrative proceeds chronologically, beginning with each protagonist’s origin story, and following the circumstances and decisions that led to their headline-grabbing lives. Both books have extensive notes and bibliographies. Levine and Rabinovitch each read more than a thousand pages of court transcripts and related documents, like witness testimonies and letters, as well as newspapers of the day. These types of resources, written as events were unfolding, allow both authors to tell their stories with an immediacy that propels readers along. In both books, it feels as if what we’re right in the midst of what is happening.

For Levine, the idea of exploring Toronto-born opportunist Wayne Lonergan’s conviction for the Oct. 23, 1943, murder of his wife, Patricia Burton Lonergan, the daughter of a wealthy German-Jewish family in New York City, came from reading a 1948 Cosmopolitan article by Raymond Chandler. The renowned detective fiction writer listed Lonergan’s case as #9 in his list of the “10 greatest crimes of the century.” There have been a couple of novels based on the case and, writes Levine, “Over the years, the story of the murder, with the requisite number of theories about Lonergan’s sexual identity, has been told and retold in countless tabloid newspapers and magazines and remains a favourite topic of crime and mystery bloggers.”

Lonergan’s bisexuality plays an important part in the story, including his initial alibi, and Levine adds social context in this and other instances, such as describing the mores of the café society into which Lonergan married. Levine takes the tabloid aspect out of the telling, in that he seems to have harnessed the facts and his conclusion as to Lonergan’s innocence or guilt seems solid.

Rabinovitch’s ability to step back and tell the story of Wolfe Rabin in an apparently unbiased way is even more impressive, given that Rabin is his uncle. Granted, Rabinovitch never met Rabin, but still, family is family.

“How did my father’s brother, raised in an immigrant Jewish family in a remote Canadian prairie town [Morden, Man.], become a jukebox tycoon, a crony of gangsters and the mastermind behind an audacious and complex international money-laundering scheme?” writes Rabinovitch. “My investigation would reveal his world and a tale of jukeboxes, money laundering and organized crime.”

Rabin was a smart, creative and resourceful person. “He invented the car radio. He was a wartime profiteer. He designed the first jet-age jukebox. He was an international bonds trader,” writes Rabinovitch. “Wolfe and his sexy wife Trudy were a glamorous couple.”

But, early in his career, Rabin makes a deal with the proverbial devil, a mobster, and it’s a deal that makes him rich at first. But a competitor – fellow Manitoban David Rockola – successfully sues for patent infringements in the late 1940s, putting Rabin out of business and in need of money to pay back his criminal investors. It is fascinating to read of the mob connections to the jukebox industry, an industry that pulled in millions a week because, as Rabinovitch writes, “Even at the nadir of the Depression, anyone could afford a nickel for a song.”

And Rabin’s story becomes even more incredible after his jukebox business fails. In pursuit of much-needed cash, he becomes involved with stolen bonds, in what the U.S. Department of Justice called “the largest money-laundering scheme in history.” Eventually, the law does catch up with Rabin and some of his associates. Jail time is served. But Rabin’s biggest secret was only revealed long after his death in 1967, after Rabinovitch completed the draft of this book. It is one of the sadder elements of Rabin’s story. Despite all his achievements, there is much Rabin missed out on in his quest for wealth.

The Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival runs Feb. 10-15. For tickets, visit jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival.

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

In 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.

The 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.

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.

Book Fest epilogue event

Jack and Edie Austin (photos from JCC Jewish Book Festival)

Former federal cabinet minister and senator Jack Austin, who has been involved in politics and public policy for more than 50 years, and his daughter, Edie Austin, editorial page editor of the Montreal Gazette, will be in conversation with Ronald Stern, founder and president of Stern Partners, on Feb. 28, 7 p.m., at the Rothstein Theatre as a Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival epilogue event.

The two will discuss their book, Unlikely Insider: A West Coast Advocate in Ottawa, about Jack Austin’s public service. With both historical perspective and an eye to the future, Austin reflects on events and people whose impacts are still being felt, and on the enduring challenges of Canadian life. For tickets ($18) to attend the event, visit jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival.

– Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival