Canadian Jewish Heritage Month

Twelve exquisitely written stories depicting the search for human connection and the attempt to fit in far from home. All the Shining People explores migration, diaspora, and belonging within Toronto's Jewish South African community, as individuals come to terms with the oppressive hierarchies that separate, and the connections that bind. Seeking a place to belong, the book's characters -- including a life-drawing model searching the streets for her lover; a woman confronting secrets from her past in the new South Africa; and a man grappling with the legacy of his father, a former political prisoner -- crave authentic relationships that replicate the lost feeling of home.

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An intimate co-creation of three graphic novelists and four Holocaust survivors, But I Live consists of three illustrated stories based on the experiences of each survivor during and after the Holocaust. David Schaffer and his family survived in Romania due to their refusal to obey Nazi collaborators. In the Netherlands, brothers Nico and Rolf Kamp were separated from their parents and hidden by the Dutch resistance in thirteen different places. Through the story of Emmie Arbel, a child survivor of the Ravensbr|ck and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, we see the lifelong trauma inflicted by the Holocaust. To complement these hauntingly beautiful and unforgettable visual stories, But I Live includes historical essays, an illustrated postscript from the artists, and personal words from each of the survivors. As we urgently approach the post-witness era without living survivors of the Holocaust, these illustrated stories act as a physical embodiment of memory and help to create a new archive for future readers. By turning these testimonies into graphic novels, But I Live aims to teach new generations about racism, antisemitism, human rights, and social justice.

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In these deeply-felt, slyly humorous stories, David Bezmozgis pleads no special causes but presents immigrant characters with all their contradictions and complexities, their earnest and divided hearts.

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Marsha Lederman always knew her parents were different, and at five, she learned about the Holocaust. Decades later, her parents dead and a mother to her own young son, Marsha is reeling in the wake of her divorce. She wants her parents' help, but in their absence, she is gripped by a need to understand the trauma that shaped them, and she begins her own journey into the past, to tell her parents' stories of loss and survival. This is a compelling memoir of Holocaust survival and how trauma migrates through generations with empathy, humour, and resilience.

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"A reflection on how trauma is passed from generation to generation. In The Listener, a daughter receives a troubling gift: her mother's stories of surviving World War II in Poland. Irene Oore's Jewish mother married a Gentile Polish officer, which allowed her to escape the death camps. But constantly on the verge of starvation, she lived a harrowing and peripatetic existence as she struggled to keep her own mother and sister alive. Throughout the memoir, Oore reveals a certain ambivalence towards the gift bestowed upon her. The stories of fear, love, and constant hunger traumatised her as a child. Now she shares these same stories with her own children, to keep the history alive. Irene Oore is the co-author of Marie-Claire Blais: An Annotated Bibliography. Born in Łód´z, Poland, she immigrated to Israel as a child and is now a professor of French at Dalhousie University in Halifax."-- Provided by publisher.

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A middle-aged Jewish man who fantasizes about being a cowboy goes on an eccentric quest across Europe after the 1941 Nazi invasion of Lithuania.

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This long, narrative poem, Radiant Shards: Hoda's North End Poems, traces the sacrifice and suffering of devoted but destitute parents, Russian immigrants who are acutely affected by the Depression and struggle relentlessly to survive in Winnipeg. More importantly, with its focus on the life experience and inner world of their tenacious daughter - and as the first poetic project to give voice to a Jewish sex worker, a figure that has been all but erased from literary history - Radiant Shards is a compassionate and humanizing work. The poem invokes Adele Wiseman's 1974 novel Crackpot, described by Jewish Studies scholars Ruth Wisse as a foundational twentieth-century literary text and by Josh Lambert as a radically feminist work. This book imagines the interior life of the novel's protagonist, an obese Jewish sex worker named Hoda, who services the boys and men of North End Winnipeg during the first half of the twentieth century. In Radiant Shards, Hoda reflects personally and knowingly on the experiences of her complicated life. Against the structural arc of novelistic events that shape her worldview, she plumbs the depths of her suffering and the triumph of her will from a poetically imagined position of maturity and self-awareness. This creative project also incorporates archival/historical photographs housed in the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada and the Archives of Manitoba. These images ground the poet's lyric presentation of Hoda and deepen the resonant voice of a character that originally was modelled on an actual North End resident.

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When her marriage suddenly ends, and a diary documenting her beloved grandfather’s escape from Nazi-occupied Netherlands in the summer of 1942 is discovered, Naomi K. Lewis decides to retrace his journey to learn about her family history. Despite suffering from extreme disorientation and a lifetime of anxiety, she travels alone for the first time. Moving from Amsterdam to Lyon—relying on the marvels of GPS—she discovers family secrets and her own narrative as a second-generation Jewish Canadian.

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In October, 1973, Leonard Cohen travelled to the Sinai desert and inserted himself into the chaos and bloodshed of the Yom Kippur War. Cohen dived headlong into the midst of a global crisis and met hundreds of fighting men and women at the worst moment of their lives. With access to never-before-seen material written by Cohen himself, along with dozens of interviews and rare photographs, journalist Matti Friedman revives this fraught and stunning time, presenting an intimate and unforgettable portrait of the artist, and of the young people who heard him sing in the midst of combat.

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"When Elaine Levine's eccentric older brother, Isaac, moves back from LA to the quiet suburb of Thornhill, Ontario, to help her care for her suddenly motherless grandchildren, he finds himself embroiled in even more neighbourhood drama than he would like. Meanwhile, a nanny, miles from her own family in the Philippines, cares for a young boy who doesn't fit in at school. In a house down the street, a young mother is given the news that her marriage is over by her mother-in-law while her husband sits silent. And a woman in mid-life contends with the task of cleaning out the house in which she grew up, while her teenage son struggles with why his dad moved out. This stunningly intimate collection of stories, which spans fifteen years in the lives of the Levine family and the other characters, is an exquisite portrait of a Jewish community, the secular and religious families who inhabit it, and the tensions that exist there, by a writer with a keen eye for detail, a gentle sense of humour, and an immense literary talent."-- Provided by publisher.

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