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"The Basketball Game" is a graphic novel adaptation of the award-winning National Film Board of Canada animated short of the same name – intended for audiences aged 12 years and up. It's a poignant tale of the power of community as a means to rise above hatred and bigotry. In the end, as is recognized by the kids playing the basketball game, we're all in this together.

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Tag: Michaela Carter

Novels about love, art

Inspired by real people, Jai Chakrabarti and Michaela Carter have written novels that explore the Holocaust and its impacts. Their books also happen to share common themes. Notably, the power of art to change the world, and the power of love to change a person.

Chakrabarti (A Play for the End of the World) joins Gary Barwin (Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy) on Feb. 6 in a Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival event, moderated by Helen Pinsky, called Mythical Quests. Carter (Leonora in the Morning Light) and Meg Waite Clayton (The Postmistress of Paris) take part in the event Art and War on Feb. 9, moderated by Hope Forstenzer.

In Chakrabarti’s A Play for the End of the World, the quest is that of child survivor Jaryk Smith, who travels from New York to India in 1972 to collect the ashes of his best friend and fellow Holocaust survivor, Misha, who died of a heart attack. Misha had ventured to India to help a village mount a production of Rabindranath Tagore’s Dak Ghar (translated as “The Post Office”), which Jaryk and Misha had performed when they were under the care of Janusz Korczak (aka Pan Doktor by the children) in Warsaw in 1942.

image - A Play for the End of the World book coverWhile Jaryk, Misha and all the other characters are fictional, Korczak and Dak Ghar were very real. “The play is about a dying child living through his imagination while quarantined,” writes Chakrabarti in the author’s note. “Pan Doktor chose to stage the play to help his orphans reimagine ghetto life and to prepare them for what was to come.”

The Indian villagers are also being prepared for what is to come – they are under threat of expulsion, or worse, from the government; already, protesters have been imprisoned, even killed. The Indian professor promoting the play wants to bring international attention to their plight.

Tangled up in all this is Lucy, who Jaryk loves but abandons in New York when he hears about Misha’s death. One of the many choices Jaryk faces is whether he can accept the happiness that Lucy and life in general can offer him.

Happiness is a rare and difficult-to-achieve state in Carter’s novel, as well. The Leonora of the book’s title is artist Leonora Carrington, who was born in England in 1917 and died in Mexico in 2011. An unofficial part of the Surrealist movement (because women weren’t allowed), Carrington was an acclaimed painter and writer. Of her relationships, the most famed would be with fellow Surrealist Max Ernst, who was twice her age at their time of meeting.

“I was drawn to Leonora Carrington before I even knew who she was,” writes Carter in the author’s note. “Long intrigued by the Surrealist artists, by their playful take on creativity and their celebration of surprise and strangeness, I had set out, in 2013, to write a fictional story placed among them, set between the wars and with a young woman at its centre.”

image - Leonora in the Morning Light book coverIt was only later that Carter, at the Tate Gallery, came across a piece by Carrington, as well as the book Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art by Susan L. Aberth. For months, Carter says, she resisted the idea of writing a novel, but “read everything about Leonora I could get my hands on, as well as everything available about Max and Peggy Guggenheim, who was, I realized, an integral part of their story.”

Ernst had many lovers, including Guggenheim, who helped him get to the United States, but Carter’s novel posits that Carrington was his true soulmate, and that he was Carrington’s. Their affair is interrupted by the Second World War, however, and, after we get to meet the couple in 1937, the novel mainly alternates between Carrington’s story from that point and Ernst’s from 1940, as he is trying to escape from France. While the two met in London, they moved to Paris – Ernst first (Carrington’s father apparently had a hand in Ernst’s work being declared “the product of an immoral mind,” which was an arrestable offence at the time in London), then Carrington.

Leonora in the Morning Light – which is named after a painting Ernst made of Carrington – takes readers to 1943, by which time Ernst is in Arizona and Carrington is in Mexico; both married to other people.

“During her 94 years on this earth, she created thousands of magical, mystical works of art – drawings, paintings, statues, masks, plays, short stories and her masterful novel, The Hearing Trumpet,” writes Carter of Carrington. “She was also an eco-feminist who fervently believed in the innate rights of all individuals – of humans, animals, plants and the earth itself.”

Visit jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival for the full festival lineup and tickets.

Posted on January 28, 2022January 27, 2022Author Cynthia RamsayCategories BooksTags fiction, historical fiction, Jai Chakrabarti, Janusz Korczak, JCC Jewish Book Festival, Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst, Michaela Carter, painting, Rabindranath Tagore, Surrealism, theatre

Book festival is shaping up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Courtesy JCC Jewish Book Festival

Posted on December 17, 2021December 16, 2021Author JCC Jewish Book FestivalCategories BooksTags Alan Twigg, Ami Sands Brodoff, Dana Camil Hewitt, Daniel Sokatch, Dara Horn, David Baddiel, fiction, Gary Barwin, Hal Niedzviecki, Heather Morris, Holocaust, Isa Milman, Jai Chakrabarti, Jewish Book Festival, Leah Garrett, Meg Waite Clayton, Menachem Kaiser, Michaela Carter, non-fiction, Rachel Rose, Robert Krell, Second World War, short stories, Yosef Wosk
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