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image - A graphic novel co-created by artist Miriam Libicki and Holocaust survivor David Schaffer for the Narrative Art & Visual Storytelling in Holocaust & Human Rights Education project

A graphic novel co-created by artist Miriam Libicki and Holocaust survivor David Schaffer for the Narrative Art & Visual Storytelling in Holocaust & Human Rights Education project. Made possible by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

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Tag: non-fiction

Surviving the Gulag

Surviving the Gulag

Dressed for a Dance in the Snow: Women’s Voices from the Gulag by Monika Zgustova (Other Press, 2020) is the first book to focus exclusively on women who lived in the Gulag. It is an intimate look at nine women, who shared their experiences with Zgustova. Regrettably, several of them passed away before the book was published.

The word Gulag is the acronym for Main Administration of Camps (in Russian), which was the government agency in charge of the former Soviet Union’s forced-labour camp system, which started under Vladimir Lenin. The system continued through Joseph Stalin’s rule and the term is also used to refer to any forced-labour camp in the former Soviet Union, including camps that existed in post-Stalin times. The camps housed a wide range of people, from actual criminals to political prisoners.

Zgustova was born in Prague. In the 1970s, her parents took her and her brother on a trip to India. Instead of returning to Prague, they went to the United States, where she studied at the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago. She taught Russian in several American universities before moving to Barcelona, where she works as a writer and translator.

The book’s translator is Julie Jones, who is a professor emeritus of Spanish at the University of New Orleans.

In 2008, Zgustova traveled to Moscow, learned about the women of the Gulag and decided to interview some of them. To do this, she also traveled to Paris and London.

image - Dressed for a Dance in the Snow book coverZgustova writes in the book’s introduction that she wants her readers to learn about the Gulag “through the stories of the nine intelligent, sensitive and strong women [she] had the honour of interviewing.”

“What these women found in the Gulag was their hierarchy of values, at the top of which were books and invulnerable, selfless friendship,” writes Zgustova.

Zayara Vesyolaya, her sister and their friends were celebrating her sister’s successful thesis defence in 1940, when Vesyolaya was arrested, imprisoned and sent to Siberia. The people there would compose and memorize poetry and recite it at night to develop their minds through literature.

Susanna Pechuro was sentenced to 25 years in a forced labour camp for ostensibly belonging to a group of Jewish dissidents. She was in 11 prisons and seven work camps.

Ella Markman was part of an anti-Stalin group and sentenced to forced labour in the mines of the Arctic Circle.

Elena Korybut-Daszkiewica came from a Polish family, spent the war in Ukraine but was arrested as a collaborator and sent to work in the mines above the Arctic Circle, where she kept a Pushkin book that was passed from person to person.

Valentina Iyevleva was imprisoned after having an affair with an American and having his daughter.

Natalie Gorbanevskaya was arrested and sent to a psychiatric hospital because she went to a demonstration and was a well-known dissident.

Janina Misik, a Polish woman with a half-Jewish father, was sent to a work camp.

Gayla Safonova was born in a labour camp and raised there.

Irina Emelyanova is one of the most interesting of the women interviewed for the book, and the best known. Her mother was Boris Pasternak’s last love and the inspiration for Lara in Doctor Zhivago. She and her mother were sent to the Gulag after Pasternak’s death because of their connections to him.

Each woman’s story is moving and the theme running through all the oral histories is their strength in surviving. Zgustova also includes their struggles after their release. It is a remarkable book to read.

Sybil Kaplan is a journalist, lecturer, book reviewer and food writer in Jerusalem. She created and leads the weekly English-language Shuk Walks in Machane Yehuda, she has compiled and edited nine kosher cookbooks, and is the author of Witness to History: Ten Years as a Woman Journalist in Israel.

Format ImagePosted on May 29, 2020May 28, 2020Author Sybil KaplanCategories BooksTags former Soviet Union, FSU, Gulag, memoir, Monika Zgustova, non-fiction
Meet new or favourite writers

Meet new or favourite writers

The Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival starts this Saturday night (Feb. 9) with Joshua Cohen, author of Moving Kings and ATTENTION: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. It continues for five literary-filled days at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, and here’s a sampling of books you might want to add to your reading list, and authors you might like to meet.

book cover - JudgmentSet in 1920, in the fictional shtetl of Golikhovke during the Russian civil war, Judgment, by David Bergelson (1884-1952), is a melancholic novel about humanity in a time of uncertainty, where different political factions are warring, each under their own ultimately meaningless banner; neighbours cannot trust one another, let alone strangers; and justice is meted out randomly by a cruel, indifferent force.

Stationed in an also fictitious abandoned monastery called Kamino-Balke, near Golikhovke, the sickly Bolshevik Filipov is in control of the area along the Ukraine-Poland border. There are smugglers who travel across the border for commercial reasons and Socialist Revolutionaries who travel across it in preparation for an uprising against the Bolsheviks. Jews and non-Jews live together in relative tolerance but political loyalties, ethnic ties and differing ideas of morality ensure a constant tension. All live in fear of being captured by one of Filipov’s agents, as guilt of a crime does not need to be proven for a person to be beaten, imprisoned and/or shot.

What makes this novel beautiful is Bergelson’s prose. Imaginative metaphors: “Large, invisible hands merrily picked up whole heaps of snow and just as merrily released them.” Animated objects: “… the coat lay there bent over, dejected, as if it had made a long, pointless, idiotic journey” and “The cannons’ muzzles – black, fat and eyeless – stared longingly in the direction of the forests around Moshne….” Humour: “Stone fences suited the inhabitants of Yanovo, for all of them were as stubborn as their stone fences: stone upon stone.” And empathy, in this case, for the undercover agent Yokhelzon, whose “eyes (which inspected everything, people said) had already taken in the horror of death – they winked joyfully, so that the horror would not show afterward.”

As should be obvious, Harriet Murav and Sasha Senderovich have done a masterful job of translating Judgment from Yiddish to English. They also provide a fascinating introduction to the novel, its historical context, the author and his other works (Bergelson was executed in 1952, on Stalin’s orders), the book’s title, form, themes and use of language.

Senderovich will be at the book festival on Feb. 10, 3:30 p.m.

***

book cover - Silence, je tombeMichèle Smolkin’s novel Silence, je tombe is a witty, philosophical novel that explores how people can become isolated from one another, including themselves. Told from the perspectives of a few protagonists, readers will likely relate to many of the feelings expressed.

The novel starts with a pregnant Tania, as she, her husband Paul and their toddler Margot are making the drive to their new home in “Manhattan, Kansas, The Little Apple,” from Vancouver. Tania’s disenchantment is obvious and she expresses her anger towards her husband – who, as a professor of philosophy, couldn’t find a job elsewhere – with vicious (and very funny) sarcasm, mostly in her thoughts, but aloud, as well. She had imagined a different life for herself – living in New York, the Big Apple, for one thing; and certainly not in the Bible Belt. As a Francophone Jew, she anticipates that fitting in might be a problem.

As the book progresses, we get to know Tania, Paul and a disturbed man named Kevin, plus a couple of other minor but important characters. Through them, we contemplate love, what attracts people to one another and what forces them apart, what happiness is, what actions might be unforgivable, how our childhoods influence our adulthoods, and, of course, the inadequacy of words for certain situations, and understanding why, sometimes, silence is the only possible response.

Smolkin’s talk – the book festival’s first-ever French-language event – will take place Feb. 10, 5 p.m. (Note: Festival program shows incorrect time.)

***

book cover - A River Could Be a TreeA River Could Be a Tree is, thankfully, not the memoir of a person who goes from believing fanatically in one religion to being swept away as unquestioningly into another, though it might seem like it would be, given some aspects of the press material. “How does a woman who grew up in rural Indiana in a fundamentalist Christian cult end up a practising Jew in New York?” asks part of the blurb on the book flap. Well, for starters, Angela Himsel seems to always have been an inquisitive person, and never an avid follower of Herbert Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God. She was an obedient child, but is still struggling with understanding how her parents believed so much in the church doctrine that they didn’t give her sister the care that might have prevented her death at a young age.

A River Could Be a Tree is a measured, often humourous, always intelligent memoir. Himsel starts with a prologue that gives readers a very large hint as to what led her to ultimately convert to Judaism: she and her boyfriend Selig were, “just once … careless about birth control.”

But the journey to that point is long and more complicated, and Himsel takes readers through it with the benefit of hindsight, hard-won insights and a writing style that is serious, honest but unsentimental, and filled with initially unexpected levity. As but one example, a mere three paragraphs into Chapter 1, in which Himsel talks about her parents’ religious heritage, Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism, she writes about Martin Luther, that, at age 41, he “married a nun, a woman he had helped smuggle out of a convent in a herring barrel. While irrelevant to Luther’s religious beliefs, a nun in a herring barrel is always worth mentioning.”

And A River Could Be a Tree is well worth reading. Himsel will speak at the book festival on Feb. 11, 7:30 p.m.

***

book cover - Why You Eat What You EatThere is so much information in Why You Eat What You Eat: The Science Behind Our Relationship With Food by Rachel Herz. And a refreshing aspect of the book is that it’s not written from a dogmatic, all-knowing viewpoint. Herz acknowledges that sometimes studies come to different conclusions, sometimes scientific progress means that what was once thought true is disproven, and that different people will experience food, exercise and other things differently. Readers looking for certainty might be disappointed, but those wanting to learn will learn a lot. Who doesn’t want to know, for example, why tomato juice is one of the most popular drink orders on planes? Does sugar really help the medicine go down, so to speak, i.e. reduce the effects of pain? And why can buying ethically branded or organic products make us less charitable?

But Why You Eat What You Eat is more than an amalgamation of trivia. Herz has compiled a very readable and relatively comprehensive resource that will, as the title promises, help explain why we eat what we eat; how all of our senses – taste, smell, sight, touch and hearing – affect how we experience food. And knowing these things just might make us feel better about ourselves, and make choices that would serve us better.

Herz will be at the book festival on Feb. 13, 6 p.m.

Format ImagePosted on February 8, 2019February 7, 2019Author Cynthia RamsayCategories BooksTags Angela Himsel, Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, David Bergelson, fiction, food, French, memoir, Michèle Smolkin, non-fiction, Rachel Herz, science, translation, Yiddish

JI gets Rockower, Shore a WIBA

The Jewish Independent is among the winners of this year’s American Jewish Press Association Rockower Awards for Excellence in Jewish Journalism. The awards were presented at the AJPA annual conference, held in conjunction with the Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly in Los Angeles, Nov. 13-15.

The JI won first place for excellence in editorial writing for a trio of opinion pieces: “Let’s talk about Nini …” (Feb. 26, 2016), “Much more yet to learn” (Oct. 7, 2016) and “Inspired by Standing Rock” (Dec. 9, 2016). Placing second in the same circulation category (14,999 and under) was Intermountain Jewish News, based in Denver, Colo.

About the Independent’s “Let’s talk about Nini …” submission, the AJPA’s Rockower jury commented that it demonstrated “great writing, clear intent and galvanized a call to action in support of Jewish Federation’s decision to host an Israeli singer with controversial political views. Readers took heed.”

The editorial “Much more yet to learn” was about the need for Holocaust education and “Inspired by Standing Rock” connected the story of Chanukah, “of standing for one’s beliefs (and existence) and triumphing in the end,” with that of the protesters in North Dakota, who stood up against the U.S. government’s plans to run an oil pipeline through a cemetery and under a water reservoir near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

***

Jewish community member Paul Shore of Whistler won this year’s Whistler Independent Book Awards (WIBA) non-fiction prize for his memoir Uncorked, set within the rampart walls of a village in Provence. Farida Somjee of Vancouver won the WIBA fiction prize for her novel The Beggar’s Dance, set in the streets of coastal Africa.

The winners were announced by WIBA organizers Lynn Duncan and Kilmeny Denny at the Whistler Writers Festival’s improvisational Literary Cabaret at the Maury Young Arts Centre. Two-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Canadian Humour Terry Fallis said, “It is wonderful to see talented, up-and-coming, independent authors recognized. It is a challenging process to start out on your own and work to have your creativity discovered.”

“In Uncorked, Shore’s use of the game of pétanque as a point of entry to address areas of personal alienation is a great literary and narrative choice,” said J.J. Lee, one of the judges for the non-fiction award, and CBC radio host, author and Governor General’s Literary Award finalist. “This memoir made me laugh; especially Paul’s foil Hubert, who is a star. And its funny and illuminating stories contain a soul that is touching, too!”

[For the Independent’s review of Uncorked, click here.]

Posted on November 24, 2017November 23, 2017Author The Editorial BoardCategories LocalTags books, journalism, newspapers, non-fiction, Paul Shore, Rockower
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