Tikkun olam, repairing the world, is a central tenet of Jewish life, but sometimes the task can seem overwhelming. The climate crisis looms large for all of us, but especially for younger folks, who will bear the brunt of its effects. A new graphic novel for 6-to-12-year-old readers offers an optimistic, fun story about the power of kindness – towards ourselves, other people, animals, the environment – to energize and inspire us to action, to at least try and fix things.
I Can Hear Your Heart Beep, published by Planet Hero Kids in Vancouver, is the first book of the children’s graphic novel series Steve and Eve Save the Planet. Written by Paul Shore and Deborah Katz Henriquez, with imaginative and colourful illustrations by Prashant Miranda, the book is being released on Feb. 25, in recognition of International Day of the Polar Bear, which takes place Feb. 27. One of the book’s two main characters is a polar bear, Steve, who lives in the Arctic. Steve, Eve (an electric vehicle) and their friends come to realize that it is up to them to do whatever they can to clean up the environment and try to stem the global warming that is, among other things, reducing the animals’ food supply.
Eve ends up in the Arctic accidentally. Bullied and ostracized by her “gassy car cousins,” who tell her, “You’re just a heartless machine, sister – like us – you’ll never make a difference in this world!” she takes off (she has wings) to find her “pack,” other electric vehicles. On her way to Norway, she experiences a malfunction that lands her in the Arctic, where she is found by Steve, who’s having problems of his own – driven to stealing food because he’s so hungry, and missing his parents, who went away to find food and haven’t returned.
I Can Hear Your Heart Beep is the genesis story of the two likely-to-become environment heroes, Steve and Eve. We find out their motivations and meet their first sidekicks/allies, the other Arctic animals, and Burger the Booger, their first nemesis of, no doubt, more to come.
For readers wondering about the choice of an electric car as a heroine, Shore writes on the book’s website: “The spark that started our Planet Hero Kids journey first became visible when my pyjama-wearing 8-year-old daughter spontaneously hugged an electric car! That day of our first EV test drive, my daughter laid her little body on the car’s hood with arms outstretched across it, and with one ear against the smooth metal she said, ‘she has a heartbeat.’ The fact that the car seemed calm, gentle and fun … seemed to tell her that the machine was as friendly as a family pet.
“The realization that young children intuitively understand what is healthier for them and the planet sent me in search of partners to help create an uplifting climate action kids book that would cultivate hope and a sense of opportunity during the challenging era in which our children find themselves growing up.”
Shore took the idea to Henriquez, who, he told the Independent, he “first met at an author’s reception at the JCC book festival several years ago!” The pair began their collaboration, eventually connecting with Miranda.
I Can Hear Your Heart Beep can be ordered from Amazon. For more information on the series, visit savetheplanetbook.com.
Making old, familiar stories new and fresh again. Writer Sandy Lanton and illustrator Kim Barnes do just this with their take on Red Riding Hood: Lily Blue Riding Hood, published by Seattle’s Intergalactic Afikoman.
Lily loves to skateboard and almost every page of Lily Blue Riding Hood is full of movement, as she swiftly rolls to everywhere she needs to be. On Purim, it’s to Granny’s house, with her blue hoodie pulled over her Queen Esther costume, its crown atop her helmet, her backpack full of hamantashen she’s just baked (leaving behind the messiest of kitchens). On the way, she passes Thaddeus T. Wolfe and chats long enough with him that the smell of the hamantashen gets him plotting how he can get Granny’s treats for himself.
Readers can make their own treats using the recipe for Lily’s Skateboarding Hamantashen, which are the regular triangle shape, but then attached to a long flat cookie, the “skateboard,” and either small round cookie or candy “wheels.” The recipe page also includes a paragraph on what Purim is and how it’s celebrated.
Lily Blue Riding Hood is a colourful and humour-filled modern-day Jewish fairy tale that will make both adult and child readers smile.
Marie Doduck speaks with a guest at the launch of her book A Childhood Unspoken on Jan. 22. (photo by Josias Tschanz)
“We survived.” These are the words that adult Marie Doduck would tell her childhood self, Mariette, who survived the Holocaust being moved from hiding place to hiding place over a period of five years.
Doduck was answering a question during a book launch laden with emotion – deeply sad as well as celebratory and with moments of laughter – Jan. 22 at a packed Rothstein Theatre. Her book, A Childhood Unspoken, was just released by the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program.
In a conversation with Jody Spiegel, director of the memoirs program, Doduck spoke of how she is two people – the European Jewish child, Mariette Rozen, who never grew up, and the Canadian adult, Marie, who she had to create to suit her new surroundings after arriving in Vancouver with three orphaned siblings in 1947.
“Mariette will never grow old,” she said. “The child Mariette will always be the child inside and that’s what survivors live. We left the child that was in Europe, we created a wonderful life here in Canada, but when I speak and when I leave this room Mariette stays in this room and I become Marie again.”
Doduck explained her long hesitancy in sharing her story, not only because of the vulnerability it requires, but because the experiences of survivors like her had been dismissed and diminished in the past.
“As a child survivor,” she said, “we were told that we didn’t have a story.”
For decades after the end of the Holocaust, the term “survivor” was largely reserved for those who had been in concentration camps or subjected to forced labour. Child survivors who had been hidden or otherwise managed to escape capture and murder were deemed not to have suffered like older survivors.
This silent or quietly conveyed message was underscored by the way child survivors were treated after the war, even by well-intentioned adults like the families who fostered some of the 1,123 orphans, including Doduck, who came to Canada under the auspices of Canadian Jewish Congress from 1947 to 1949.
“We were from outer space,” she said of the reactions she and fellow child refugees received from Canadians. “We saw things that children should never have seen.”
Placed in homes with new families, with little or no assistance in addressing what they had experienced, many children did not do well.
“Of the 40 children who came to Vancouver, my brother Jacques and myself, I think, were the only two lucky children who stayed with the same family,” Doduck said. “My sister [Esther] didn’t stay with her first family, she became an au pair. Henri jumped from family to family.”
In some cases, said Doduck, the children were told they would die by the time they were 30 “because we were not normal in the Canadian eyes.”
Doduck wrote the book with Dr. Lauren Faulkner Rossi, assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University. Speaking at the event and addressing Doduck directly, Faulkner Rossi acknowledged that the process was difficult.
“You would have to become the child Mariette many times,” she said, noting that Doduck was forced to plumb memories she has tried to forget. Faulkner Rossi said Doduck had to trust her, though Doduck’s “inclination is to trust no one – a crucial Holocaust childhood lesson that is never quite unlearned.”
“It’s a hard process for any child survivor to write their story,” Doduck said, not only because of the emotional toll but also because of the imperfections of childhood memories. “Did we hear it from adults? Did we live it? I wanted the truth.”
Doduck pressed Faulkner Rossi wherever possible to substantiate her recollections with historical evidence. During the process, Doduck recalled things she thought had been lost. “Sometimes one memory triggers another that you thought you had forgotten,” she said.
Doduck is a founding member of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, through which she has shared her history with tens of thousands of students and others. She is also a philanthropist and community leader, volunteering and leading events, including co-chairing, with fellow VHEC co-founder Dr. Robert Krell, the 2019 conference of the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants, in Vancouver.
Before Doduck’s presentation, VHEC executive director Nina Krieger described Doduck as “a force … a formidable and sought-after champion for many community organizations. She is also a mentor and a friend to so many, including me, and has inspired more than a generation of community leaders, especially young women, with her vision, passion, tenacity and work ethic, not to mention good humour and grace.”
The book launch event was presented by the VHEC and the Azrieli Foundation. Doduck’s daughters Cathy Golden and Bernice Carmeli read from the book. Arielle Berger, managing editor of the Azrieli Foundation, noted that, since 2005, the foundation has published more than 150 memoirs of Canadian survivors of the Holocaust. The foundation provides the books for free to schools and universities and also provides teaching resources and training to educators. This was the first in-person book launch since the pandemic.
The full theatre was still during an emotional moment when Doduck addressed her family in the front rows.
“I don’t say it often and I want to say it publicly to my children, my family sitting here, thank you for accepting who I am,” said Doduck, now a great-grandmother, before acknowledging the lack of experience with which she approached parenting. “When I was blessed with my children, my husband had to teach me how to go to the library and get a book,” she said. “I never knew a story to tell the kids.”
As a child, she said, Mariette was never hugged, never put to bed, was never kissed, never had a toy and never had a bedtime story.
“My first toy, I was 36 years old, I was the guest speaker in Winnipeg at a fundraiser,” she said, “and they gave me my first doll. I still have it. The only doll I ever had in my whole life.”
As a founding member of the local group of child survivors who meet regularly, Doduck tried to explain the uniqueness of child survivors to their own children.
“We all passed something to them that we didn’t realize we were doing, a burden that we gave to our children, our firstborn,” she said. “I apologize to all the firstborn. We didn’t mean to put a burden on you.”
She takes pride and sees a sense of progress in the different ways her three daughters have viewed her.
“My middle daughter, Bernice, always accepted me. That’s the way mom is,” she said. “That’s the middle child of all the survivors’ children. And my youngest daughter, Cheryl, may she rest in peace, only thought of me as a Canadian. So, I progressed. I fulfilled my duty in becoming Marie, the Canadian.”
A formula for survival for a child in the Holocaust: “Don’t trust anyone; never speak unless spoken to; never give your real last name; if you see your brothers and sisters, don’t run to them: cross over to the other side of the street. Don’t cry and don’t get sick; just survive.”
This is how the character of Mariette Rozen of Brussels, Belgium, aka Marie Doduck of Vancouver, Canada, was fashioned during her formative years between the ages of 6 and 11 during the Holocaust, beginning in 1940. Those words of caution from her older brother Jean, painfully scoured from the mists of Marie’s memory, have become a kind of coat that one takes off in polite company, but it is a mantle that never left her, even in her 80s, as Marie looks back in her memoir on her two lives: a child Holocaust survivor and a Canadian with a lifetime of achievement in the arts, family life, business and service to her community.
Entitled A Childhood Unspoken, this book of only 138 pages is a powerhouse! Co-authored and researched by Simon Fraser University history professor Lauren Faulkner Rossi, the memoir is written in two authentic voices: Marie Doduck the Canadian citizen, 86-year-old mother, grandmother and great-grandmother who, while recollecting her past, slips back into Mariette Rozen, being hunted or hiding in Belgium in the 1940s or transitioning to a new life in Vancouver in the 1950s. I began reading the first chapter silently. Then, the urgency and honesty of the voices behind the prose came alive. I wound up reading the entire book aloud to my partner Ruth, who grew up with Marie and shares high school memories with her.
It was an intense experience. There is in the book an urgency to at last speak the unspoken repressed memories of her traumatic childhood, to unearth and – most importantly – to verify the truth of Marie’s memory about where Mariette had been, with whom and where she lived as she was bounced from one location in Belgium to another while running from the Nazis. Marie wondered: did Mariette really see her mother and brother snatched from a Brussels street by the Nazis or did that happen in a dream? Did she have grandparents? This and much more was verified through Faulkner Rossi’s research. Marie’s memory grew clearer, however, when she described the frustration of Mariette the teenaged refugee whose lack of English drove her to draw pictures in order to communicate with her Vancouver foster parents, the Satanoves.
But Mariette desperately wanted to catch up on her education, to fit into the Kerrisdale schools of Vancouver. To become a Canadian. Very quickly, and to the amazement of other children, she not only learned English but even seized leading singing roles in school operettas. As a married woman, the same talent, grit, brains and determination guided Marie to leadership roles in her children’s schools, in her synagogue, in Jewish charities and in business with her husband, Sidney Doduck. She gained such a wide reputation as a Holocaust witness and survivor that she was invited to address the German parliament, which she refused.
Several of the Shoah episodes retold by the Doduck-Rossi team bear repeating here. In a Belgian orphanage where Mariette’s Jewish origins had been carefully guarded, one of the nuns told the Nazis about her but then confessed it to the Mother Superior, who quickly opened a sewer for Mariette and banged the metal plate closed over her. Mariette waited for hours, terrified in the black sewer while rats crawled over her and the boots of Nazi soldiers clanged on the metal plate above. The Nazis left empty-handed.
Chased by Nazis, Mariette took shelter in a Belgian barn but knew that she couldn’t hide in a loose haystack because they would be probing them with pitchforks, so she chose a tightly-bound bale, dug a hole for herself, crawled in and pulled the hay in behind her. Sure enough, a Nazi came and began probing the loose stacks with a pitchfork. As he left, he stuck the fork into Mariette’s bale and pierced her hand. When the farm housewife came to rescue her, she found blood all over and took the child into the kitchen for repairs. “Who is doing all the screaming?” Mariette wondered out loud. “It’s you,” said the woman as she disinfected and bandaged the wound.
Although Mariette saw much brutality and death, there were some good people. Among her many saviours was a “good” German soldier. Mariette had been swept up on a Brussels street along with many other Jews and non-Jews, packed into a cattle car and transported to a concentration camp overnight. When the doors slid open at the camp, a Nazi soldier screamed in German, “What is my sister doing on this train?” Without hesitation, Mariette began screaming back the few German words she knew and the Nazi soldier took her off the train, put her into a motorcycle sidecar, drove her to the outskirts of town and dropped her off.
I was inspired by Marie’s Judaism. There is also much to be admired about her lack of hate and her anti-hate philosophy, her lack of self-pity and the life force that drove her to accomplish so much and to give back so much. Yet this book is also a tribute to Marie’s brothers and sisters and to all of those approximately 1,200 traumatized Jewish children who were brought to Canada after the war and strove to fit in and to make themselves a new life. It’s a memoir that Marie’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren can proudly cherish as a history of their ancestor who is one of this country’s great Jewish Canadians.
Stan Goldman is a retired English teacher who lives in Richmond.
Max Czollek, left, speaks with Prof. Chris Friedrichs, after Czollek launched his new book here Jan. 19. (photo by Pat Johnson)
German attempts to create a cohesive national narrative into which newcomers must integrate is a mistake – and the role Jewish Germans play in this “Theatre of Memory” is especially problematic, according to Max Czollek, a provocative thinker who was hosted by the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival last month.
Czollek visited Vancouver Jan. 19, the only Canadian stop on a North American tour promoting the English translation of his book De-integrate: A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century. He excoriated the German integration process as an ideological disaster.
“The only integration Germany has done well is the integration of old Nazis,” he said, explaining that about 99% of Nazi core perpetrators never met justice and, in fact, often succeeded in postwar Germany despite their wartime activities. By contrast, he notes in his book, those who challenged the Nazi regime were often viewed in the postwar context as politically untrustworthy: “[A]fter all, they had already revealed themselves as willing to resist the structures of the German state before.”
While the failure of the larger integration scheme is a theme of Czollek’s book, his main thesis is that Jews are being used to cover up the atrocities of the past. In the contemporary German narrative of integration, newcomers to the country are expected to assimilate into a vaguely defined “guiding culture” (Leitkultur) and not misbehave, Czollek told an audience in the Zack Gallery. But, despite that the vast majority of German Jews are migrants, too, that expectation is not imposed on them. Instead, Jewish Germans are assigned a different and unique role in a German narrative that seeks a return to a normality that was shattered by the Nazi era.
Positioning German Jews collectively as bit players in a larger narrative of redemption reduces them to a cover for the history of their own destruction, he argued: “Because, as long as there are Jews in Germany, then Germans can’t be Nazis.” He later said, “We don’t feel this is our function – making Germans feel good again.”
Czollek, who was born in East Berlin in 1987, two years before the reunification of Germany, explained the different postwar experiences of the tiny Jewish populations of East Germany and West Germany. Numerically, though, these experiences are overwhelmed by those of post-Soviet Jews: 90% of German Jews are migrants from the former Soviet Union or their descendants, he said. And these migrants (or, in the term used for their children and grandchildren, “postmigrants”) are excluded from the burdens placed on other newcomers, especially Muslims. In fact, said Czollek, Muslim immigrants play a role in this narrative, too, in which “good Germans” must now protect Jews against perceived threats from Muslims.
The author looks with a particularly jaundiced eye at German Jews who subscribe to this narrative, such as those who vote for the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) based on anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant policies. “Maybe the next time the mosques are going to burn first, but then the synagogues are going to be next,” Czollek said. “We know if the Muslims won’t be able to live safe in Germany, then the Jews won’t either.”
The very idea of a German “guiding culture” is flawed, Czollek argues, not only because the unification of Germany in the 19th century brought together diverse tribes and groupings into what is now purveyed as a unitary nation, but because the postwar immigration of diverse peoples has made such a unified culture unworkable. “Because, given its current state of social diversity, arriving at an ethnically and culturally homogeneous Germany would simply require ethnic and cultural cleansing,” Czollek writes.
A central flaw in the integration narrative, he argues, is that, no matter how long someone named Mohammad has lived in Germany, they will be subject to different criteria of good citizenship. Neo-Nazis who commit arson against refugee shelters or march down the street chanting “Heil Hitler” are not accused of failing to integrate into the German culture, he noted.
“[A]t what point are you no longer considered an immigrant who refuses to integrate [Integrationsverweigerer], but simply a frustrated German?” he asks.
Czollek contends that the narrative of a prevailing German culture (and integration into it) has seeped from the far-right across the spectrum. “Not a single democratic party platform neglects to centre this term in discussions of social belonging,” he writes. “No discussion panels about migration are complete without someone underscoring the importance of integration.”
Czollek argues for a live-and-let-live approach, but suggests the advocates of integration aren’t interested.
“They can eat weisswurst with sweet mustard for lunch and drink at least one litre of beer a day,” he writes. “I have no problem with that and neither do my friends. And that’s precisely the point that fundamentally separates those of us who would defend a concept of radical diversity from those proponents of German guiding culture: we want to create a space in which one can be different without fear, while the other side wants to implement cultural criteria for belonging that by necessity exclude those who don’t align with their concept.”
The original German version of Czollek’s book was published in 2018, shortly after the far-right AfD had become the third-largest party in the Bundestag. Rather than spurring a backlash against extremism, other politicians took a page from the playbook, he argues, with the parties of the right, centre and left warning of the perils of nonintegrated newcomers.
Czollek views the AfD’s rise as a symptom as much as a cause – “Suddenly things everywhere are staining Nazi brown,” he writes – and he sees a different avenue for political success in the face of the far-right surge.
“I don’t believe Germany will win the fight against the New Right without the votes of (im)migrant, postmigrant, Jewish and Muslim citizens,” he writes. “And this critical – if perhaps unfamiliar – new alliance requires strong narratives, the willingness to accept self-criticism from all sides, and a political vision for a society beyond the current integration paradigm.”
Czollek has a doctorate from the Centre for Antisemitism Research at the Technical University of Berlin, has published books of poetry, and is a co-editor of Jalta, a journal of contemporary Jewish culture. He has been involved in political and multicultural theatre in Berlin for many years but with this, his first nonfiction book (translated into English by Jon Cho-Polizzi), he burst on the scene as a contentious public intellectual. The opposition to his work evoked not just political challenges but also public efforts to discredit him based on his identity as a patrilineal Jew.
Czollek’s presentation, in conversation with Markus Hallensleben, associate professor in the department of Central, Eastern and Northern European studies at the University of British Columbia, was opened by book festival director Dana Camil Hewitt. The main festival runs Feb. 11-16.
Steve and Eve Save the Planet is an illustrated graphic novel series that tries to address the challenges of this climate-change era while inspiring children with adventure, laughter and hope. The project is the creation of authors Paul Shore and Deborah Katz Henriquez, and illustrator Prashant Miranda.
In the first book in the series, I Can Hear Your Heart Beep, readers will be introduced to Steve, a kooky polar bear with a magical power gifted to him by the Northern Lights, and Eve, a feisty electric car who wants to change the world. The 200-page illustrated work-of-art will be available to pre-order from Amazon in paperback, hardcover and ebook formats as of Feb. 14, and the book launch will take place on Feb. 25, 1 p.m., at Arts Umbrella on Granville Island.
Parents or their kids can sign up to Planet Hero Kids at savetheplanetbook.com/signup to follow Steve and Eve as their adventures begin to unfold.
Photographer Jason Langer’s perception of Germany and its capital, Berlin, is a complicated one, and his current exhibition at the Zack Gallery, Berlin: A Jewish Ode to the Metropolis, reflects those complexities. Organized in partnership with the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, the exhibit is Langer’s first show in Canada.
“Boys” (photo by Jason Langer)
Langer’s newly published book, Berlin, includes 135 black and white photographs. A selection of these images forms the exhibit at the Zack, which has an emotional sophistication of its own, even though the show is being promoted as a prologue for the book festival. Both the show and the book catalogue the artist’s several trips to Berlin and his explorations of the city. They also provide visually compelling commentary on Langer’s contradictory and evolving feelings for Germany.
A Nazi uniform in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp museum in Berlin. (photo by Jason Langer)
As in life, the then-and-now overlap and, occasionally, the juxtaposition of the past and the present are jarring in Langer’s imagery. On the one hand, Germany is the country where the Holocaust originated, the country that erased its Jewish population almost entirely and spearheaded the destruction of the Jews of Europe. On the other hand, it is a modern country of laughing kids, hardworking people and beautiful architecture, a country that acknowledges its past actions and tries to make amends to the Jews. It is a country inspiring fear, hatred, respect and admiration in varying measures.
Langer writes in an essay about his relationship with Germany and its progression from total negativity to growing understanding. When he was 6 years old, his family moved from his native United States to Israel, where he spent his formative years, until age 11, on a kibbutz.
“Every year, each children’s house would visit the Holocaust memorial, located on the kibbutz property, during Yom Kippur…. We were asked to walk silently and led into a courtyard with one building and three short walls,” writes Langer. “I remember the walls were made of large, rectangular stones, grey in colour and a bit rough and oddly shaped. We learned about how the Jews had suffered, first as slaves in Egypt and then in the Holocaust by the Germans.”
Later, as an adult, he “vaguely remembered having heard fearful stories of German people from my mother and grandmother, though my mother also made jokes about Germans, putting on a comic fake accent. She died in 2003 and I inherited her books, among other things, including a kind of illustrated encyclopedia titled The Wonderful Story of the Jews, written by Jacob Gewirtz. It was published [in 1970], not long before our move to Israel. The text refers to the Germans’ ‘unspeakable crimes’ against the Jews, as well as the ‘unending ravages of war, persecution and tyranny’ they had faced. Some of the illustrations are quite scary, showing buildings on fire and Jewish people menaced by gun-wielding Nazis. The book presents Israel as a place of refuge, the kibbutzim as almost unique.”
After being exposed to such ideas during childhood, Langer’s predominant feeling towards Germany was aversion. But then, in 2008, when he was already an established photographer, one of his friends suggested he photograph Berlin.
“He thought the city would be a good match for my sensibilities but I met his suggestion with trepidation and fear,” Langer recalled. “I harboured many preconceived ideas about Germans and Germany. I imagined Berlin as a vast, cold, unfriendly, gritty place, but, at the same time, it seemed exciting and sexy somehow.
“I decided to see Berlin for myself, keen to challenge my existing ideas and also uncover reminders of the Jewish people who had lived there, until they fled or were hunted down and killed by the Nazis.”
Photographer Jason Langer’s exhibit at the Zack Gallery runs to Feb. 16. (photo from Jason Langer)
In the next five years, Langer visited Berlin frequently. “From 2009 to 2013,” he said, “I made five trips for two weeks at a time. I stayed in a flat with about six people. When they were going on vacation, they would let me know, and I would fly over and occupy their rooms. They would also give me advice on where to go.”
During those visits, he took multiple photographs and strived to form a new narrative regarding his feelings and associations regarding Germany and its people.
“This work is an attempt to remember, confront and unwind my attitudes about Germans, Germany, Berlin and my Jewish inheritance; these images are part discovery, part remembrance and part fantasy,” he explained. “They’re my attempt to stand where Jewish people were rounded up and deported, to remember but also reassess. They’re an effort to confront my internal attitudes and prejudices, to look into people’s eyes and find a continuation of kindness, to be open to the happiness of contemporary life in Berlin.”
Some photographs in the gallery are full of anguish and terrible beauty, like the Holocaust Memorial, consisting of 2711 concrete slabs (stelae) of different heights, or an ornate door of the Stiftung Neue Synagogue, built in 1865, the only synagogue in Berlin to survive the war, though its interior was burnt.
The horror of the war is also reflected in the image of an old, dilapidated shed, the “goat house,” where one Jewish family, a mother and a daughter, hid for several years to survive the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate Jews. No water, no heat, no electricity, just the women’s indomitable spirits and relentless wish to live.
Every photo has a story to tell. Many a story of heroism and tragedy. But there are other pictures, too, reflecting modern Berlin, the city of now. Laughing boys, a tired-looking woman, an anti-fascist demonstration, various streets and buildings.
Langer writes: “It was a strange mix of death and life.… There was a sense of youth, freedom and joy I felt in Berlin.… Whenever I wandered, I took it as a gift of prolonged, uninterrupted time for reflection.”
The artist’s wanderings and reflections led to the creation of the photobook Berlin.
“This book is not a document,” said Langer. “It is a dream within a dream within another dream. Berlin is immense, there was no way I could cast a wide enough net to what it’s like. Instead, I have painted a picture of then and now, pain and pleasure, some people who died long ago and those who are living and young, all from my own perspective.”
Berlin: A Jewish Ode to the Metropolis opened on Jan. 6 and will continue at the Zack Gallery until Feb. 16. For more information, visit jasonlanger.com.
Olga Livshinis a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
Canadians and Americans are similar, but different. To see this obvious statement in practical terms, two books – by two authors who will speak in Vancouver next month – provide an entertaining and educational contrast.
Andrew Kirsch and Douglas London are retired spies. Well, the term “spy” is, they both readily admit, a bit laden for a job that Kirsch characterizes as a lot of “hurry up and wait” and that London describes as “hours and hours of routine, and a few moments of adrenaline.”
Kirsch is a Canadian and author of I Was Never Here: My True Canadian Story of Coffees, Codenames and Covert Operations in the Age of Terrorism. London is American and author of The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence. They will present as part of the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, in an event dubbed “Jews in Trench Coats,” on Feb. 13.
Kirsch, who grew up in Toronto, left a job in the financial sector in London, England, after the 2005 terror attacks in that city and joined the Canadian Security Intelligence Services, CSIS. He describes himself as “part of a post-9/11 wave of civically minded Canadians who had left our day jobs to do our part in the age of terrorism.”
London’s career in the field was longer, symmetrically spanning 17 years on either side of 9/11, which is, obviously, the Western world’s iconic intelligence failure of the current era.
In the United States, the FBI is the domestic security service, much like our RCMP, while the CIA works almost exclusively outside the country. Similarly, in Israel, the Mossad deals with foreign intelligence and covert activities, while Shin Bet manages internal security. “In Canada, we have one organization [CSIS], and it’s responsible for covering the globe while operating largely domestically,” writes Kirsch.
The lack of awareness around CSIS is one of the reasons Kirsch wrote his book. If the CIA knocks on your door, many people around the world would know to be instantly on alert. If CSIS knocks on a Canadian’s door, Kirsch admits, it usually requires a quick spiel about what CSIS is and what it does. He also wrote the book because, when he and most of the other agents he knows first got interested, there was little to read on the subject of what they might expect.
If most Canadians don’t know what CSIS is, new Canadians can be expected to know even less. The author shares a cute anecdote about how he shorthands his role for Arabic speakers.
“The Arabic term for intelligence service is Mukhābarāt,” he writes. Obviously, somebody from an Arabic speaking country might understandably be anxious when someone knocks on the door and declares themselves representatives of the security service.
“I’d simply say, ‘Canadian Mukhābarāt. Nice Mukhābarāt.’ That might get a laugh and a foot in the door,” he said.
In typical Canadian fashion, Kirsch downplays the drama. He’s no James Bond.
“These aren’t high-stakes negotiations over baccarat and cocktails at a casino. It’s much less glamorous. I was in the coffee and conversations business,” he writes. Nevertheless, he charms with amusing anecdotes, foibles and practical jokes (he and his former colleagues are serious and professional, he insists, but they need to blow off steam). One gets to know the man and the organization.
While Kirsch is modest in speaking of his work and that of CSIS, he makes their significance clear.
“Canada is one of the safest countries in the world. This is not because we don’t face threats, but because we do an admirable job of protecting our citizens against them,” he writes. “That is how law enforcement and intelligence agencies tend to work. If we do our job, you won’t know we were ever needed in the first place.”
One of the most notable incidents in recent history when the work of CSIS did hit the front pages was the foiled Toronto 18 plot in 2006, when a cadre of radicalized Canadians plotted to explode truck bombs in southern Ontario. That was a disaster that didn’t happen because of intelligence, but Kirsch acknowledges tragedies where intelligence failed.
In 2014, for example, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau shot and killed Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, a soldier who was standing guard at the National War Memorial, and then stormed Parliament Hill but was killed before he could reach the heart of our democracy.
And just because Canadians have been blessedly fortunate not to suffer more terrorism doesn’t mean Canadians aren’t involved in some of the horrors we see abroad. A Vancouverite was convicted in absentia for involvement in a suicide bomb attack on Israeli tourists in Burgas, Bulgaria, in 2012. Five Israelis and the bus driver were killed and more than 35 other Israelis injured.
Kirsch admits he was worn down by the bureaucracy of the job, but his decision to leave the agency was based on family obligations, when his wife became pregnant. He clearly holds CSIS and his former colleagues in great esteem.
London’s reflections are not so kind. He calls the CIA in the last couple of decades “a cult of personality.”
“The senior ranks became an ever more homogenous collection cut from the same mold, focused more on ambition than the mission, the organization, or the workforce,” writes London. “While there were thankfully brilliant exceptions, the cadre had drunk their own Kool-Aid as to their own brilliance and worth.”
London also paints a more dramatic picture than his Canadian counterpart – not surprising, given the lopsided size and prominence of their respective organizations in the world.
There is cajoling involved in recruiting people to the CIA. One of the crucial tasks of a successful operations officer is determining a person’s motivations. To one potential recruit, London said, “It was Allah’s will that we meet … so we can together accomplish something bigger than ourselves.” In this case, it was an appeal to religious and national pride, not material reward. In other cases, material reward was enveloped in a person’s (usually a man’s) sense of providing for family, in which case London would emphasize that the “ability to contribute modestly to your family’s well-being” was something that would be undertaken by a good family man, not a traitor to his country.
London writes about antisemitism he encountered from among colleagues – especially fellow recruits early in his career, many of whom had never met a New Yorker, let alone a Jew. Both authors write of keeping their Jewishness under the radar. Occasionally, a throwaway comment could still stun.
Kirsch was meeting with a Sunni Muslim who was ranting about his hatred of Shia Muslims.
“And he rolled back into his seat and he stroked his big bushy beard and said, ‘You know, Andrew, they are worse than the Jews.’
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt more Jewish than in that moment,” writes London.
In an amusing observation near the end of his book, London claims people in his business are notorious yentas.
“It’s a pity really that confidentiality considerations prevent the creation of a People magazine, Us Weekly or TMZ program for the agency. Perhaps ironic, but the very same people hired to protect our nation’s most guarded national secrets are absolutely the biggest gossips.”
London proves this in a book that is as juicy as CIA censors would allow.
Jews in Trench Coats, featuring London and Kirsch, takes place at 6 p.m., Monday, Feb. 16. Tickets are $18. The JCC Jewish Book Festival runs Feb. 11-16, with free and ticketed events for all ages. Details at jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival.
Heroism and survival took on new meaning for me after reading George Halpern’s From School to Sky: Joseph’s Tale of War and Gina Roitman’s Don’t Ask. The first is a biography of a certain time in Halpern’s father’s life, the latter is a fictional work that centres around a daughter’s search for her mother’s history during that same time period, the Second World War. Both books are featured at this year’s Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival.
Halpern takes part in the Feb. 12, 10 a.m., by-donation event A Literary Quickie, in which he and seven other authors each have five minutes to pitch their books. Roitman appears with Lynda Cohen Loigman (The Matchmaker’s Gift: A Novel) in A Day to Celebrate Human Closeness, which takes place at 2 p.m., on Feb. 14 ($18).
Halpern’s pitch to me included only some of the actions that make his father, Joseph Halpern, a hero. In reading the book, which is based on months’ worth of interviews George did with his dad, who died in 2011, I discovered several more reasons. Joseph was a fighter pilot for the Russian Air Force (Joseph’s town, Vladimir Volynsky, was in the part of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union weeks after the war started). He was a Soviet prisoner for a spell, then trained as a special forces commando. He was captured by Nazis on a mission, but escaped. Following the war, he defected (to the Americans in Berlin), taking his Russian plane with him, but then returned to Russia to fulfil a promise he made to someone who had saved his life. He founded an orphanage, helped create the Israeli Air Force, etc., etc.
The most compelling part to me of Joseph Halpern’s story, however, is his honest appraisal of himself, his humility and his humanity, even though he wasn’t always humane. He admits his “fearless attitude would be combined with special training – including brainwashing – and I would truly believe that I was invincible.” He is open about wanting to have killed more Nazis than he did, and that he personally killed someone in an act of revenge. His complexities include the life he had to build after immigrating to Canada, caring for his kids through his wife’s struggle with mental illness, obtaining two doctorates, working with NASA, finding love again and more.
Similarly, though in a fictional setting, Roitman’s novel deals with multi-layered human beings, some of whom survive because they committed acts of which they are not proud – and they carry the guilt for the rest of their lives. As Joseph’s trauma travels beyond his own self and is passed on in some degree to his children, so does the character Rokhl’s carry over to her daughter Hannah.
Rokhl doesn’t talk much, and certainly not about her experiences during the Holocaust, in contrast to her husband, who has already passed away when the novel begins – what little Hannah knows of her heritage has come from her father. Hannah only receives her mother’s wisdom through notes that Rokhl leaves her, the last of which Hannah finds in her mom’s purse after Rokhl dies, apparently by suicide: “I am not her,” it says.
Don’t Ask traces Hannah’s attempt to figure out the mystery of that note and deal with the grief of her mother’s death, while also brokering a real estate deal between a German buyer and a Holocaust survivor who lives in Quebec and owns a tract of land in the Laurentians. Hannah’s parents immigrated to Montreal after the war; Hannah, their only child, was born in a DP camp in Germany, which they had called home. Since the Holocaust, “Her father could not say the word ‘German’ without spitting” and, in her last encounter with her mother, in which Hannah shared the news that she was traveling to Germany, her mother had threatened, “If you go, it will be over my dead body, do you hear me?”
In the guise of a budding romance between Hannah and Max, her counterpart in Germany, Roitman addresses many challenging questions about the intergenerational nature of culpability and forgiveness, of duty to one’s parents and the responsibility for building one’s own life, of nursing hatred or risking love. She does so in a fashion that sometimes pushes belief – for example, Hannah and Max are not young, yet they lack much understanding of what attraction is, and Hannah, despite her professed curiosity about her mother’s past doesn’t explore until the end of the book four boxes of her mother’s notes, which have sat in her closet for an undisclosed amount of time prior to her mother’s death. Yet, Roitman also writes in a way that makes you care about the characters and what happens to them. The story of Rokhl’s Holocaust experiences and that of Hannah’s budding relationship (and the weight of history that it and the real estate deal unearth) are enthralling and Don’t Ask is a hard book to put down until you finish it.
Letters that highlight friendship, writing that facilitates healing, stories that dissect societal mores – the books reviewed by the Jewish Independent this week represent only a small fraction of those featured at the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival this year.
While the official festival runs Feb. 11-16, opening with Dr. Gabor Maté in conversation with Marsha Lederman about his latest book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, there are a couple of pre-festival events this month: German writer Max Czollek launches the English version of his book De-Integrate! A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century on Jan. 19 and American-Israeli photographer Jason Langer presents his book Berlin: A Jewish Ode to the Metropolis on Jan. 26. As well, there is a post-festival event, on Feb. 28, which sees former federal cabinet minister and senator Jack Austin launching his memoir, Unlikely Insider: A West Coast Advocate in Ottawa.
If the books reviewed by the Independent are any indication, attendees of the festival can expect to have their views challenged and their perspectives broadened; they will be moved, disturbed and amused, sometimes all at once.
Intimate portraits
Two years ago, the JCC Jewish Book Festival featured the book Memories of Jewish Poland: The 1932 Photographs of Nachum Tim Gidal (jewishindependent.ca/gidals-photos-speak-volumes). It was the fulfilment of a dying request that Israeli photographer Tim Gidal made in 1996 to Vancouver scholar, writer and philanthropist Yosef Wosk. The book was released at the same time that an exhibit of its photos was mounted at the Zack Gallery (jewishindependent.ca/jewish-poland-in-1932).
The friendship between Wosk and Gidal was evident in that book and in the exhibit. How the two men – separated in age by some 40 years and in geography by almost 11,000 kilometres – became such good friends is the subject of Gidal: The Unusual Friendship of Yosef Wosk and Tim Gidal, written by Wosk (and, technically, Gidal) and edited by another of Wosk’s good friends, Alan Twigg.
Alan Twigg (PR photo)
The bulk of Gidal is letters that Gidal and Wosk wrote to each other from 1993, soon after they met, through to Gidal’s death in 1996. The postscript is a letter from Wosk to Gidal’s wife, Pia, mourning Gidal’s death and hoping that “his work and vision continue to inspire others.” Twigg has masterfully edited the multi-year correspondence, which comprised hundreds of letters, into an engaging narrative that offers insight into the core of these undeniably brilliant men, their work, ideas, loves, frustrations, sadnesses and more. Their vulnerability makes this a brave publication for Wosk to have created, and a meaningful one.
The other main component of Gidal is, of course, Gidal’s photographs, which, Wosk writes in the afterword, “serve as background to the letters.” As he did with Memories of Jewish Poland, Wosk mostly lets the photographs speak for themselves. Each photo section has a theme but each image within the section is simply captioned, placed and dated, without commentary.
There is a short chapter on Gidal and one on his and Wosk’s friendship and how this book came about. Gidal is creatively and esthetically put together. Each letter is headed by a key quote from the missive and the date it was sent. Images are included of some of the actual letters, most of which were sent by fax. It is interesting to contemplate whether this fount of communication would exist if it had been made via email.
Wosk and Twigg will talk about Gidal on Feb. 14, 7 p.m., at the book festival. The event is free of charge.
Therapeutic memoirs
Paired together for a presentation are Margot Fedoruk and Tamar Glouberman. The program categorizes them as “modern-day women” who will be presenting their “offbeat memoirs,” summarized by the question, “How B.C. is that?” Indeed, both Fedoruk and Glouberman tell coming-of-age stories of a sort, Fedoruk’s beginning in her 20s and Glouberman’s in her 30s. And they both lead outdoorsy, independent lives that could be described as the B.C. ideal, yet both have also faced many challenges and darker sides of that ideal.
Fedoruk is the author of Cooking Tips for Desperate Fishwives, in which she openly shares her anxieties of being married to a West Coast sea urchin diver – she is lonely without him, must raise their two daughters mostly without him and is worried that an accident may result in her having to live without him. Yet, she loves Rick, even though she does try (unsuccessfully) to convince him to take up another profession and stay closer to home. The pair moves around a lot, and Fedoruk herself takes up many different jobs over the years to make ends meet. But they stick together, getting married after their daughters are all grown up and have left home.
As dysfunctional as their relationship appears at times, Fedoruk had a more challenging life before she met Rick. Her father is a horrible man, her mother dies of cancer and she and her sister lose the family home to her mother’s second husband, also a horrible man. And there’s more. It is no wonder she leaves Winnipeg, eventually settling in British Columbia, though settling may be too strong a word, as she and her family do live in several different places on the coast, with some time in Calgary.
What makes Fedoruk’s memoir unique is the inclusion of a recipe in almost every chapter that reflects the mood or subject matter of the chapter, like the Killer Lasagne in the introduction, which begins, “The night I ran over Rick with my car, I was over four months pregnant with our first daughter.” Other recipes include Easy Curried Chickpeas With Rice, which appears as an affordable comfort food in a chapter about her being exhausted, on her own, caring for her two then-young daughters; and Wild-crafted Stinging Nettle Pesto, which comes after one of her descriptions of the soaps she makes – her business is Starfish Soap Company.
Near the end of her memoir, Fedoruk mentions that she has started therapy. I would have liked her to have written this book further into that process. As honest as she is about her feelings and circumstances, the memoir would have been more layered and impactful had she been further along in understanding how her traumatic childhood experiences, her genes and other factors affect how she moves through the world.
Glouberman has a less tragic background but a similarly transient life – and also loves something that gives her both great joy and great anxiety, the latter of which eventually takes over. In Chasing Rivers: A Whitewater Life, she shares her emotional journey of trying to make a life as a whitewater rafting guide.
One of the few women to guide tours, Glouberman does face sexism, her skills often underestimated by clients, but her male bosses and colleagues all seem to appreciate her abilities – certainly more than she does. She is constantly worried about making a mistake that will kill her or someone else and, while this is rational, given her job and its risks, the feeling becomes overwhelming. With an accident on the road – there is a lot of travel required to get to places like Chilko River, Williams Lake and further afield, outside the province – and her worst nightmare coming true on a rafting trip, Glouberman’s fears have very real incidents on which to grow.
Glouberman tries other types of work, but is always drawn back to the water. She struggles with depression and has a few other harsh experiences that add to her self-doubt. She tries various forms of therapy, some of which make her feel worse. Her family is supportive, though, and her sister’s home in Whistler is a refuge. She is only beginning her journey to healing when the memoir ends, and part of that has to do with getting into a master’s writing program. Both she and Fedoruk, who also went back to university for a writing degree, thank several people for their memoirs coming to fruition.
Glouberman and Fedoruk present at the book festival Feb. 12, 2 p.m. (tickets are $18). They also speak at Congregation Har El that day, at 11 a.m.
The price of victory
The harm inflicted on a society by war culture is front and centre in Israeli writer Yishai Sarid’s book Victorious. The main character, Abigail, is a military psychologist who, basically, tries to make soldiers into better killers, both “helping” them through trauma after they’ve experienced it and teaching them ways to be immune to trauma so that they can “beat the enemy.” Her father, who strongly disapproves of her work with the army, is a renowned clinical psychologist. On more than one occasion, he tries to talk her out of working for the military, but does not succeed. That the character of the father is dying of cancer is not coincidental.
Abigail blurs professional lines everywhere, working for the married man who fathered her son, the man who is now the army’s chief of staff; sleeping with a patient/friend; trying to become close friends with a former patient; and having a sexual relationship with one of the young soldiers whose unit she’s evaluating. The lessons she teaches are chilling, as is her abandonment of a patient who becomes too difficult for her to handle and some of her other actions.
She believes her job is her patriotic duty, even as her own son, Shauli, enters military service, in the paratroopers no less, and her fears for him fight with her pride in his choice. Though, with both his father and mother being staunch militarists, it could be argued that Shauli doesn’t really have a choice.
Victorious is a sparingly written novel that readers will not only ponder but feel well after they put it down. Translator Yardenne Greenspan must be given credit for making Sarid’s words as impactful in English as they are in Hebrew.
Sarid’s book festival event is Feb. 12, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $18.
For the full author lineup and to purchase festival tickets or passes, visit jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival or call 604-257-5111.
Eve ends up in the Arctic accidentally. Bullied and ostracized by her “gassy car cousins,” who tell her, “You’re just a heartless machine, sister – like us – you’ll never make a difference in this world!” she takes off (she has wings) to find her “pack,” other electric vehicles. On her way to Norway, she experiences a malfunction that lands her in the Arctic, where she is found by Steve, who’s having problems of his own – driven to stealing food because he’s so hungry, and missing his parents, who went away to find food and haven’t returned.
