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Oct. 11, 2013

Love of music shared with public

Ethan Minovitz’s CD and DVD collections have been donated to the Waldman Library.
OLGA LIVSHIN

Ethan Minovitz was a man wearing many hats, and his untimely death in February 2013 has left all of them empty. By education, he was a journalist, by inclination, a music lover, and by soul, a Jew. Combining all three, he found his calling. For many years, Minovitz was a co-host and co-producer of the weekly program Anthology of Jewish Music on Vancouver Co-op Radio.

One of his Anthology of Jewish Music co-hosts, David Litvak, told the Independent: “We met about 18 years ago at Co-op Radio. Ethan was co-producing the Anthology of Jewish Music with Alan Tapper. Ethan had an encyclopedic knowledge of Jewish music. He came to every broadcast with a bag of Jewish music from his own collection. He found his recordings everywhere: some obscure groups, tapes, vinyl records, CDs. He would get them at flea markets, Hadassah bazaars, at concerts, on YouTube.”

According to Litvak, Minovitz was an archivist of Jewish music and musicians, trying to collect as much material as possible. “Klezmer tunes and cantorial arrangements, classical Jewish melodies and new bands – his collection was eclectic. Some of the recordings were unique. The entire collection – he collected for many years – was probably the best, most extensive collection of Jewish music on the West Coast. Maybe in Canada. It was unbelievable.”

Litvak greatly admired Minovitz’s wealth of knowledge on the subject. “It was an education just to listen to him talking about Jewish music. He was a great researcher, too, and used his skills for his radio programs. He even sang with the Vancouver Jewish Folk Choir out of the Peretz Centre [for Secular Jewish Culture]. Ethan loved singing.”

After Minovitz’s passing, his friends helped the family sort out his affairs, and the collection – hundreds of CDs, tapes and records – was one of their main concerns. “It would be a shame to lose them,” said Litvak. “We suggested to Ethan’s sister to donate the collection to the Vancouver Jewish library. The library agreed to take the CDs. I helped them to categorize the collection, but lots of work was done by the library volunteer students.”

For Minovitz’s sister, Lise Minovitz, her brother’s sudden death was a tragic shock. “He was 50 years old and he died at home,” she said. “Per the coroner, he died of natural causes due to complications of insulin-related diabetes. I tend to attribute his early passing to poor diet in combination with diabetes.”

She recalled her brother’s strong sense of humor and creativity. “He had a lot of knowledge about everything, and had a great memory. He enjoyed research and music, spent a lot of time on the Jewish radio program.

“Initially, he may have purchased some CDs. Later, in his effects, I found numerous letters from artists, Jewish communities and radio stations from around the world. He had written to them, introducing himself as a host of the program, and requested CDs that could be aired on the show. In many cases, artists were very willing to donate CDs or provide them for a fee. This resulted in an extremely eclectic collection of Jewish music from everywhere from Brooklyn to Ethiopia. I made the decision to donate the CDs to the Vancouver Jewish library after his passing, as it was recommended to me by several people. I wanted the collection to go somewhere where his memory could be honored, they could be kept together, and many people would have the opportunity to enjoy them.”

The Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library was ecstatic to receive such a marvelous collection, said librarian Karen Corrin. “I’ve known Ethan for many years. He often volunteered for the library, when I just started working there. He was a whiz with the computer, very good at research. He knew music and videos; could always say what was what and what we should buy.”

Helen Pinsky, another Waldman librarian, explained, “There were thousands of CDs and DVDs in the collection. We were lucky to have six library students during the summer, on their practicum from the Langara [College] library program. Some of them knew music very well. They and some volunteers, including David Litvak, had to categorize all the CDs before we could catalogue them. It took weeks. We’re keeping about 90 percent of the collection, approximately 800 CDs of Jewish music…. We had to change our existing genres and music categories to get our system to accommodate all the CDs from the collection.”

“Cataloguing also takes time, sometimes hours, especially when we have a unique CD,” added Corrin. “We put a label on each CD that it belongs to Ethan Minovitz’s collection.”

The library has also bought one spinner – a CD displayer – and part of the collection is already available to the library patrons, but the work continues.

“We need one or two more spinners to fit the entire collection, plus signage on the spinners,” said Pinsky. “We’re going to hold a fundraiser for them, and sell the rest of the collection.”

Some of the DVDs to be sold at the fundraiser have nothing to do with Jewish music. According to Pinsky, the collection includes a couple boxes of anime DVDs from around the world. Anime was another Minovitz’s passion, his hobby. He was one of the moderators of the Big Cartoon Database (BCDB) website, a forum dedicated to anime films. His friend Dave Koch, in his touching obituary on the site, called Minovitz “the self-proclaimed animation research guru.”

Koch remembered: “He was, in many ways, the heart and soul of BCDB. He joined the BCDB about 10 years ago, and it was immediately obvious that Ethan was at home in our group. His love of animation showed – he had tremendous knowledge on the subject. And what he did not know, he would research. That was one thing about Ethan, the man knew how to look something up. He soon became our resident expert on just about anything.”

During their years together on the site, Minovitz contributed numerous new cartoons for inclusion in the cartoon database, hundreds of Excel spreadsheets a year. “Nobody ever saw this,” wrote Koch, “because they went directly to me. He formatted his finds in such a way it made it easy for me to slip them into the database. He would go on tears – sometimes Japanese, sometimes Russian, sometimes Czech. I would feel overburdened when getting them, and then I would think about all the work to find, sort and enter them into Excel. That would be overwhelming, but that was what Ethan did behind the scenes. Ethan contributed at least 55,000 cartoons this way.

“But, most importantly, Ethan was my friend. We talked a lot. Sometimes about BCDB and what and where it was going, but often about other things. His trips to Israel were always a point of joy for him, and I loved listening to his stories. While we never met face-to-face, we knew each other very well. And I am proud to call him my friend.”

The fundraiser at the Waldman Library is planned for December.

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

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