Arts & Culture – Page 32

Bar mitzvah reveals tensions

Nicholas Guerriero, left, Lorene Cammiade and Rudy Smith rehearse a scene from Bema Productions’ staging of Men Overboard, which will be at Emanu-El Synagogue’s Black Box Theatre May 5-15. Guerriero plays Jay Silver, a Buddhist monk and the youngest son of Zaida Ernie, Cammiade portrays Eva Fuzesi, the bar mitzvah tutor from Hungary, and Smith plays Doug Silver, Ernie’s middle son and a psychotherapist. (photo from Bema Productions)

Next month, Victoria’s Bema Productions mounts the first full production of Men Overboard.

Winner of the Long Beach Playhouse New Play Contest and a finalist for the Woodward-Newman New Play Award, Men Overboard was written by Rich Orloff. After well-received readings and workshops in New York, Philadelphia, Long Beach and Dayton, the play comes to Victoria, where the première will be directed by Kevin McKendrick.

photo - Things get rough in Men Overboard: Rudy Smith puts a (fake) stranglehold on Nicholas Guerriero — Things get rough in Men Overboard: Rudy Smith puts a (fake) stranglehold on Nicholas Guerriero. *(photo from Bema Productions)*

The play focuses on a bar mitzvah for a boy, Abraham, who doubts he’s ready to become a man. The event brings together Abraham’s politician father and the father’s two brothers, a therapist and a Buddhist monk. Add their fading but forceful father and Abraham’s bar mitzvah tutor, a woman who loves Abraham and possibly one of his uncles, and it’s easy to see that Abraham is torn between obedience and defiance of his father. Tensions grow, affecting everyone in the family, until anger becomes abuse and it becomes clear that the family’s status quo is no longer an option. Men Overboard asks “What makes a man?” as it explores the responsibility each of us has to protect the souls of those we love.

The Bema production stars Lorene Cammiade, Nicholas Guerriero, Asa O’Connor-Jaeckel, Evan Roberts, Alf Small and Rudy Smith. It is produced by Alan Segal and takes place May 5-15 at Congregation Emanu-El Synagogue’s Black Box Theatre, 1461 Blanshard St. For tickets ($25) and showtimes, visit eventbrite.ca/e/295008758137.

– Courtesy Bema Productions

Take a comedy break

Left to right, Ori Laizerouvich, Israel Atias, Daniel Gad and Omer Perelman Striks co-star in The New Black. (photo from ChaiFlicks)

I have to improve either my Hebrew comprehension or my English speedreading skills before April 12. The second season of The New Black premières that day on ChaiFlicks and it’d be great if I could understand more of what was going on – even with my limited capacity, the first season was an absolute blast.

Also recently premièring on the streaming service ChaiFlicks, which carries all sorts of Israeli films and TV shows, was the second season of Checkout, an Israeli comedy in the tradition of American sitcoms Superstore, The Office and Parks and Recreation. It has some seriously funny moments, though a couple of the characters may grate on folks, as some of the characters on the aforementioned American shows did.

Superstore takes viewers into an Israel that most Jews will recognize, but that will be less familiar to those whose only experience of Israel is via the news. The show is set in a small supermarket, Issachar’s Bounty, in a small town, Yavne. The store’s patrons are regulars, and one in particular, fanny-packed customer Amnon, who has a complaint or gets into a confrontation every time he comes in to shop, is particularly annoying, as often is his main sparring partner, the brash cashier Kochava. But the other characters – notably Shira, the store manager who idolizes and sees herself as an up-and-coming Steve Jobs – offer enough less-in-your-face humour that the show is well worth watching if you like reality-show-type comedies. As in the other shows of this genre, there is a camera crew making a documentary about the store, so the characters not only interact with one another, but express their views in interview snippets with the film crew.

photo - The cast of Checkout, left to right: Amir Shurush, Noa Koler, Keren Mor, Yaniv Swissa, Dov Navon, Daniel Styupin and Aviva Nagosa — The cast of Checkout, left to right: Amir Shurush, Noa Koler, Keren Mor, Yaniv Swissa, Dov Navon, Daniel Styupin and Aviva Nagosa. *(photo from ChaiFlicks)*

In the guise of humour, many a true observation is made in Superstore, which touches upon social inequality, terrorism, racism, homophobia and many other issues. Viewers can choose to just laugh at the goings-on depicted or they can take more away from the show. The same can be said of The New Black, which has some uncomfortable moments – for example, are we supposed to laugh when one of the yeshivah students is appalled when his matchmaker sets him up with a woman who uses a wheelchair? I don’t think so. I think we’re supposed to be appalled at his behaviour, behaviour that one can easily imagine of many self-absorbed 20-something guys who fancy themselves a prize despite all evidence to the contrary.

That the four yeshivah boys at the centre of The New Black seem like regular college-age men is why the show has broad appeal. That is does, while also being packed with somewhat-high-level (to non-Orthodox Jews) talmudic discussions, is a notable achievement. It is easy to see why the show was nominated for eight Israeli Television Academy Awards. It is smart, engaging, fast-paced and has a fantastic soundtrack. While non-Jews will have to watch it with a semi-knowledgeable Jewish friend and non-Hebrew-speaking Jews will occasionally have to press pause to take in the subtitles fully, The New Black has legs … and Borsalinos aplenty.

For access to these two comedies, and many other programs, visit chaiflicks.com.

Trying to fix broken wings

Not fitting in. Being misunderstood and miscategorized. These are recurring themes in Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage, edited by Loolwa Khazzoom, a Seattle writer, musician, activist and occasional contributor to the Independent.

The book was first released in the 1990s and was recently re-released.

“I wish I could say that this book is no longer as revolutionary, cutting-edge, or as needed as it was when I began compiling it in 1992, but, unfortunately, that is not the case,” writes Khazzoom, the daughter of an Iraqi Jew, in the new introduction. “Even though there have been changes – shifts in consciousness, language, and even representation – Mizrahi and Sephardi women remain overall excluded, in theory and practice, from spaces for women, Jews, Middle Easterners, people of colour, LGBTQI folk, and even Mizrahim and Sephardim. In addition, so many of the presumably inclusive conversations about us seem basic and superficial, with an undertone of it being a really big deal that these conversations exist at all.”

Khazzoom’s struggle to fit in led her to Seattle, in large part because it is home to one of the largest Sephardi communities in the United States. But even in that milieu she found herself an outsider.

“In June 2014, however, on the first sh’bath [Sabbath] after driving my U-Haul up the coast from Northern California, I was appalled by a sermon so sexist – where women were equated with ‘meat’ – that I walked out of the Sephardi synagogue, just 15 minutes after arriving,” she writes.

“I have been a hybrid all my life, forever caught between two or more worlds,” writes Caroline Smadja in her contribution to the collection. It is a state of being that is shared by many of the writers.

Yael Arami, born in Petah Tikvah to parents from Yemen, speaks of others’ perceptions of her.

“In Germany, I have had to avoid certain areas, fearing local skinheads’ reaction to my skin colour. In France, I have been verbally ridiculed and insulted for being yet another ignorant North African who does not know French,” she writes. “In California, people’s best intentions have resulted in a number of social blunders: When I left a tip in a San Francisco café, I got a courteous ‘gracias’ from the politically correct Anglo waiter. After a predominantly African-American gospel group sang at a Marin County synagogue, several members of the congregation approached me, to express their admiration for our wonderful gospel performance! It seems that wherever I go in white-majority countries, I am, in accordance with local stereotypes, seen as the generic woman of colour – Algerian in France, African-American or Puerto Rican in California.”

Rachel Wahba, an Iraqi-Egyptian Jew, calls out politically correct hypocrisy.

“Sometimes, when I bring up the oppression of Jews in Arab countries, progressive Jews get strangely uncomfortable – as if recognizing the Jewish experience under Islam would make someone racist and anti-Arab,” she writes. “During my mother’s cancer support group intake, I listened as my mother told her story of living in Baghdad and surviving the Farhud. She ended with an ironic ‘I survived the Arabs to get cancer?’ The Jewish oncology nurse was shocked that my mother was so ‘blunt.’

“Should we revise our history? Leave out the details of our oppression under Islam? Pretend my mother never saw the Shiite merchants in Karballah wash their hands after doing business with her father, because he was a ‘dirty Jew?’”

The book’s title comes from an essay by Lital Levy, “How the Camel Found Its Wings” and an Israeli film of the same name.

The metaphor involves the repair of a broken statue of a flying camel, which actually stood at the entrance to the international fairgrounds in Tel Aviv in the 1930s. In the film, the two wings of the camel become stand-ins for a dichotomy that mostly excludes Mizrahi/Sephardi Jews and yet still casts them in a negative light.

“By the end of the screening, the camel had found two new wings, and I got to thinking,” writes Levy. “I started putting my own pieces together – making my own flying camel out of the remnants of the past, borrowing missing pieces from the present, and using my imagination and willpower to try to make it all stick together. The pieces of my own American childhood, the histories that preceded it in Israel and in Iraq, and the challenges I see before me in my work are the various fragments I have been remembering and re-membering into an integral whole. I do not yet know its shape – camel, dromedary, llama, yak – but I do not care, as long as it will fly.”

Dutch family’s secrets

“Twins run in the family, you know,” Stella ter Hart’s mother, Sophia, said to her nonchalantly when Stella was pregnant with her first child. That this was news to Stella is a first sign that there was a great deal about her family she did not know. In fact, she wasn’t aware she had much family at all.

Thus begins Stella ter Hart’s book Discovering Twins: A Journey into Lives.

As a high school graduation gift, Stella and her mother made the trip from Estevan, Sask., to Holland. There, she meets an endless web of confusingly related kin – almost all on her father’s side. A visit to the home of family on her mother’s side raises questions in the teenager’s mind.

“‘Oom Jacob and Tante Becca are Jewish,’ I stated rather than questioned, ‘no one other than Jewish people are named Jacob and Rebecca.’

“And, in a style completely out of character for her, almost resignedly, my mother replied, ‘Yes, they are.’

“There was no further clarification of her answer, no offering up of a tidbit of a childhood memory, as might be expected when revealing so vast a thing as religiously specific relatives for the first time.

“‘So, if Oom Jacob is your first cousin, and he has the same last name as your mother’s maiden name, then he is the son of your mother’s brother,’ my new skill of dissecting family relationships now sharply honed, I added, ‘so your mother must have been Jewish, too.’

“In a split second, she came back at me, her voice strident with an unexpected, insistent, and lashing response, ‘NO! My mother was NOT Jewish. According to the Germans, she was Italian because she married an Italian.’”

Whether that logic ever truly convinced her mother, Sophia, it did not sit well with ter Hart. After her mother’s death, ter Hart began a genealogical quest. Slowly and excruciatingly, she pieces together the tragic fates of almost the entire maternal line.

“Our extended circle of family, formerly numbering over 1,200, was reduced to the less than 20 who returned, or were known to have survived, creating a psychological tsunami shock-wave impacting existing and future generations,” writes ter Hart.

The book recreates ter Hart’s prewar extended family, flashing back from postwar comfort in Canada. She captures what must have been a dawning realization among Dutch Jews in the earliest months of what became the Holocaust, as relatives who were relocated to the east inexplicably never wrote back.

“How many ‘workers’ did this totalitarian German regime require for its slave labour force? Where was the food to feed them all going to come from and the rooms to house them all? Supplies were already hitting dangerous lows in the cities, and rationing was strictly enforced.

“The unsettling sentiment echoing throughout the community for months raised its voice again. What in heaven’s name would the Germans do with grandparents and babies? This didn’t seem like a necessary part of war. This was something else.”

As ter Hart’s research expands, numbers and dates leap off the page.

“The ages and dates are, each time, an emotional shock. The eye at first does not even see, let alone accept, the horrific truths the numbers expose. Mothers with all their young children around them all killed at the same time, or an elderly couple, obviously arrested and deported together, also murdered together. The gruesomeness and cruelty of it all is staggering and overwhelming,” she writes.

On Sept. 30, 1942, 103 family members were murdered at Auschwitz, the youngest 15 years old, the oldest 54. On June 11, 1943, 64 family members were gassed at Sobibor, aged 2 to 68.

The author seeks to build suspense, but her discoveries are, generally, no surprise to those with knowledge of the history. The emphasis on twins – across generations, the family seems to have an occurrence of twins about twice the average – gives the reader an anxious sense that, at some point, some family members are going to fall into the hands of the monstrous Dr. Josef Mengele.

“Not wanting to know, but needing to know, I researched the lists of Mengele Twins, now publicly available. None of our family were on that list, as most had been deported and killed before Mengele began his murderous experimentations. Small comfort,” she writes.

The narrative at the beginning of the book devolves near the end into something of a genealogist’s notebook, with records, short biographies and charts. Generally, the book hangs together, though an editor’s hand could have been firmer, to avoid easily avoidable clangers like misspelling Anne Frank’s name.

Snapshot of Jewish life

Looking Back, Moving Forward is available for purchase from the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia. (photo from JMABC)

The first thing many readers will do upon opening the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia’s Looking Back, Moving Forward: 160 Years of Jewish Life in BC is try and find their friends’ writeups and those of the organizations with which they volunteer or work. That is, if they didn’t submit their own writeup for the publication. If they did send in their bio or one for their family, then that’s the first page to find.

Even people who grew up in the province and have a multigenerational presence here will find novel tidbits in this 284-page hardcover (or soft) coffee table book. Published to celebrate the museum’s 50th anniversary last year, it is appropriately dedicated to Irene Dodek (1930-2019) and Cyril E. Leonoff (1925-2016). Leonoff was founding president of the Jewish Historical Society of British Columbia, which was established in January 1971. Dodek, also a founder of the museum and archives, “helped define its direction early on and conducted more than a hundred oral history interviews with members of our community.” More about Dodek and Leonoff can be found in the first pages of the book, before the greetings from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Premier John Horgan.

In her president’s message, Carol Herbert writes, “Our stories are fascinating, and demonstrate the evolution over time of our communities, from a few small clusters of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe in late 19th century to present-day diverse Jewish communities, comprised of individuals who originated from across the world; Sephardic, Mizrahi and Ashkenazi; secular and religious; leaders, activists and advocates for Jewish and general community causes.”

Both Herbert and the book’s editor, Michael Schwartz, director of community engagement for the JMABC, acknowledge that this publication is a partial snapshot of the community. They both encourage readers who haven’t done so yet “to share your memories of where we’ve been, celebrate with us where we are, and join us in envisioning where we might be headed,” writes Schwartz.

A chapter on the history of the JMABC begins the book proper. It is followed by brief regional histories – Victoria, Vancouver, Kootenay/Boundary, Okanagan, Prince George, Sunshine Coast, Central Vancouver Island and Whistler. The chapter on organizations is divided into those that work in advocacy and activism; religious observance; education; youth groups and camps; seniors; arts, culture and leisure; Zionism; Holocaust education; and anchor organizations. That last one, by the way, is where you’ll find the Jewish Independent (pages 126 and 127).

The Notables chapter is sorted chronologically: pioneers (1886-1945), postwar (1945-1970), modern (1970-2000), contemporary (2000-2010) and emerging (2010-present). Within each section, people are listed alphabetically by surname, as are the entries in the Family Album chapter. Rounding out the publication is a list of donors and an index.

Looking Back, Moving Forward offers a broad overview of many of the major players in the B.C. Jewish community over the 160 years since Jews first arrived here. It focuses on accomplishments and takes readers right up to 2021. It is easy reading, and no one need worry that any dirty laundry is aired. Given the celebratory nature of the book, none of the submitters (including the JI) talk about the challenges they’ve faced or controversies, and neither do any of the introductions to the various sections.

Some history is given only passing mention, such as what community fundraising structures were in place prior to the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver’s emergence in 1987, for example, but the book isn’t meant to be a comprehensive historical tome. Rather, it’s a fun, page-flipping community yearbook of sorts, which will hopefully motivate people to both learn more about the community and contribute their stories to its archival record.

Looking Back, Moving Forward is available in hardcover ($100) and softcover ($50). To place an order, contact the museum offices at 604-257-5199 or [email protected]. Shipping is available across Canada for a fee of $20 per book.

Gallery’s new guides

New docent program at the Zack gets underway. (photo from Zack Gallery)

Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery director Hope Forstenzer recently instituted a new docent program, to train guides for the art gallery.

“I came up with the idea of creating a group of volunteer docents for the gallery right after I got here, which means right before the pandemic,” Forstenzer told the Independent.

Unfortunately, the pandemic made it impossible to implement the idea at that time, and the initiative only became reality in the past few months.

“My job as the gallery director is only half-time,” Forstenzer said. “Even when I’m working, I’m frequently in meetings or visiting studios or doing other work that takes me away from engaging the people in the gallery. I created the docent program to make sure the gallery was staffed with friendly and available faces, with people who knew about the shows, could make sales, and could answer questions.”

Initially, about a dozen people responded to her invitation to become volunteer docents at the Zack. “Some dropped out for various reasons as we were getting underway,” she said. “Others have come along since.

Currently, we have six docents on our active roster.”

Before the docents could perform their assigned duties, they needed a certain amount of training on the gallery rules and procedures.

“The docents each attended two training sessions, both lasting about an hour,” said Forstenzer. “Sometimes, we’d do the whole training in one session, but it varied. The second training shift was usually about our sales system, which isn’t difficult, but isn’t something most of the docents have seen or used before. In the first training session, I explained what their responsibilities were, we discussed scheduling, and I’d either show them how to use our sales system or invite them back to learn it on a different day…. Then they did a shift with me in the gallery as backup. Then they were ready to go.”

The first docent started at the Zack last October. “Some of them have taken breaks due to the Omicron,” said Forstenzer, “but others have stayed throughout.”

She has lots of plans for her volunteer docents. “The primary purpose of having the docents in the gallery right now is to have a knowledgeable and friendly presence that welcomes visitors,” she said. “They can also make sales. As the restrictions due to COVID lift (hopefully), the docents will also help me run events in the gallery, both for kids and for adult groups. Eventually, I hope they’ll be able to run some of these events themselves. We might even schedule some docent-led viewings of shows.”

At the moment, most docents do one shift a week, each shift three or four hours long, but Forstenzer is flexible about that. “Some do two shifts a week. Some split their shifts and go for a swim or a workout in the middle and then come back. It is up to them, and I create a schedule based on their availability and the gallery’s needs.”

She added that all the docents take their volunteering seriously. “If someone can’t make their shift, they let me know,” she said. “If I can cover it, I will. If not, the gallery won’t have a docent that day.”

The docents vary widely in age and experience. Some are students. Others are retirees or people participating in various community centre programs. Gail Bloom shared with the Independent a bit about herself and why she became a docent at the gallery.

Bloom worked as a city planner in San Francisco. “I studied city planning in college and then worked as a practising planner,” she said. “I love cities and was interested in public utilities. My chief role for over a dozen years was sorting out public financing of major infrastructure projects in San Francisco. It was very satisfying to see the fruition of that work across the city.”

She retired about 20 years ago. “My home is still in the Bay Area. I live there with my husband, and my son’s family also live nearby, but, last fall, I came to Vancouver for an extended winter visit with my daughter – she lives here and teaches at Emily Carr.”

Bloom, who turns 70 this month, has been volunteering in many fields since her retirement. “I lead the Board of Children’s Book Project and presently serve on a regional public health agency at the Marin/Sonoma Mosquito and Vector Control District,” she said. “I have also enjoyed working on state, local and federal election campaigns, mentoring youths, and helping with the major fundraising event for the Oakland Museum of California.”

She has always been interested in art. “I love cities, as I said, and the museums are a big part of that – especially art museums. In the last couple months, I visited the Vancouver Art Gallery and a small community gallery at the Deep Cove Cultural Centre. There is a show at the VAG now that I’d recommend – Emily Carr and Edith Heath. Heath was a local San Francisco ceramic artist; she started her iconic tile and pottery company out of her little apartment in San Francisco in the ’40s.”

Of course, when she visited the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver for the first time, the Zack Gallery attracted her. “As I’m interested in the arts personally and enjoy art museums, their new docent program seemed like a good fit,” she said. “And my family were thrilled that I found the gallery and something meaningful to do with my time. Now, I’m at the gallery every week. My docent days are Mondays.”

Besides volunteering, Bloom takes advantage of several other programs the JCC offers. “The aquatics program is pretty great,” she said. “I also attended several sessions of the book fair last month, and I just started watching VJFF [Vancouver Jewish Film Festival]. I’m fortunate to have time to participate in them all.”

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

Get $5 off Ahed’s Knee admission at VIFF

A still from Ahed’s Knee, which screens at Vancity Theatre March 25, 26 and 28. The movie – which won the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival – is about a celebrated Israeli filmmaker named Y, who arrives in a remote desert village to present one of his films at a local library. Struggling to cope with the recent news of his mother’s terminal illness, he is pushed into a spiral of rage when the host of the screening, a government employee, asks him to sign a form placing restrictions on what he can say at the film’s Q&A. Told over the course of one day, the film depicts Y as he battles against the loss of freedom in his country and the fear of losing his mother.

For $5 off the ticket price, use the promotional code VIFFKNEE22 at goviff.org/aheds-knee.

– Courtesy Vancouver International Film Festival

A rediscovered novella

Moshkeleh Ganev, a forgotten novella by Sholom Aleichem, was recently resurrected from obscurity by gifted translator Curt Leviant.

Missing from the standard edition of Sholom Aleichem’s collected works, which was published after his death, Leviant came across a brief citation of the story in a Yiddish literary quarterly published in Israel, while doing research on another project at the Hebrew University library. Leviant went on to translate it into English and Moshkeleh the Thief was published in 2021 by University of Nebraska Press.

The story stands out as a lively and endearing picture of shtetl life in Russia’s Pale of Settlement. Sholom Aleichem himself wrote in 1903 that the work celebrated a phase in his career when he had, he said, “really begun to write,” and was not merely “fooling around.”

I read Moshkeleh at a rapid clip as soon as it was mailed to me by Leviant, unable to stop due to the inescapably arresting character of the narrative. Sholom Aleichem has the ability to keep readers riveted to his stories, as though we are living in the community he is describing. His narratives are always very much alive in this sense.

Tsireleh, the attractive daughter of Chaim Chosid, a wine-cellar manager (a marginalized role for many Jews of that time, whose sights were set on more prestigious occupations), was, for me, a pivotal character in the tale for several reasons.

Unlike Chava in Tevye the Dairyman, Tsireleh was another variation on the Sholom Aleichem theme of a daughter whose involvement with non-Jews (Chvedka) posed a challenge to a sense of Jewish identity. The nine Tevye stories were authored over several years, starting in 1894. Moshkeleh was first serialized in a Warsaw Yiddish paper in 1903, when five of the Tevye stories had already been published; the remaining four were published after 1904. So, thematic strands interwoven in the lives of characters like Chava and Tsireleh that were important to the author may have overlapped. For example, Tsireleh comes close to the same threat to tradition in her relationship with Maxim Tchubinski, a non-Jew, and her elopement with him to a Christian monastery, but is whisked away by Moshkeleh at the 11th hour.

It is tempting to think that, despite Tsireleh’s nascent feminism, she was a pushover for any man who declared his love for her in passionate terms, as did both Maxim and Moshkeleh. But one can also see her elopement with the latter – even though he is a horse thief fated for deportation – as an enduring commitment to the faith of the family she left behind in her drive toward independence. Far from being overly impressionable in matters of the heart, there remained a silent commitment to the Jewish faith, unlike Tevye’s Chava.

Also unlike Chava, Tsireleh was a contrarian from the get-go, who longed for a different life than the one she felt she was saddled with as Chaim Chosid’s daughter. She had earlier rebelled against the yet-to-be role of subservient wife, becoming pregnant and going on to appropriate the domesticity envisioned for her sisters, not to mention all the young women in the shtetl. Her own metaphor was not becoming a clucking hen who sits on her eggs until they hatch, only to repeat the process several times over. She rebelled against the idea of marrying at too young an age to experience the world in a different way, and rebelled against the thought of having to marry a suitable man from a respectable family. She promised herself she would build her life differently. Eloping with a non-Jew like Maxim Tchubinski on a Pesach night was a dramatic example of why, unlike other characters in the novel, she wasn’t cut from an ordinary mold.

Yet her elopement with Moshkeleh does show an enduring commitment to her Jewish faith. Perhaps Tsireleh was for Sholom Aleichem a character representing themes he wrestled with when it came to communities in which opportunities for assimilation were an ever-present temptation – or threat.

David Begelman, PhD, is a psychologist in New Milford, Conn.

The excitement of holidays

As meaningful and fun as most of the Jewish holidays are, there’s a lot of running around, cleaning, cooking and other preparation that generally goes into them. Three recently published children’s books – two about Passover and one on Shabbat – capture the joys of the holidays, and the craziness that can sometimes precede them.

Passover, Here I Come!, written by D.J. Steinberg and illustrated by Emanuel Wiemans was put out this year by Grosset & Dunlap. It’s a compilation of short poems, all related to Passover, from “Scrub-A-Dub-Dub!” preparations to “Bye-bye, Bread!” and “Hello, Matzoh!” it goes through pretty much every aspect, including the Passover story, what’s for dinner and the search for the afikomen.

“Made by Me!” is about making up the seder plate, and all the plate’s items and their symbols are noted alongside the illustration. For the poem “Our Magic Table,” the drawings and words again combine to wonderful effect. We see the tables from set-up to guest-filled, and the typesetting, leaving gaps between the letters forming the words “g r o w s a n d g r o w s,” communicate the truly magic nature of a Pesach table that does seem to fit an enormous number of people, when we’re lucky to have many friends and family join in our celebrations.

Steinberg’s verse and Wiemans’ drawings work well together, simultaneously entertaining and teaching. The basics of Passover are all covered in Passover, Here I Come! which even includes a recipe for Mom’s Matzoh Brei after the four-line poem “World’s Best Breakfast.”

A Persian Passover (Kalaniot Books) by Etan Basseri with illustrations by Rashin Kheiriyeh, also contains a recipe – for hallaq, which is Persian-style charoset. In addition, the end of the book features a brief description of Passover and what goes on the seder plate, a glossary of Persian and Hebrew words used in the story, and a couple of paragraphs on Jews in Persia, known today as Iran, though, notes Basseri, “the culture and main language of this region is still called ‘Persian.’”

Set in Iran in the 1950s, A Persian Passover follows siblings Ezra and Roza, who are helping their family get ready for the holiday. Everyone is put to work and Roza is finally old to enough to accompany older brother Ezra to the synagogue, where families bring their own flour “to be mixed, rolled and baked into soft, delicious matzah.” Though older, Ezra is not necessarily wiser and he’s still a kid, with energy to burn. Not having learned from an earlier collision with a neighbour – as he ran a lap around the house, being timed by Roza – Ezra once again asks Roza to measure how fast he can run to the next street corner, freshly baked matzah in hand.

“But he didn’t see the rut in the road up ahead. ‘Oof!’ yelped Ezra as he tripped and fell. Splat! went the bag of matzah as it dropped into a puddle.

“‘The matzah!’ they exclaimed together.

“‘That was all the matzah we had for the week. Now it’s gone. What will we tell Mama and Baba?’ asked Roza.” (The glossary notes that baba means dad in Persian.)

Ezra and Roza set out to find replacement matzah before the seder starts, and we meet more of the neighbourhood folk. Hopefully, it won’t be too much of a spoiler to know that the kids succeed – not only receiving kindness, but also showing kindness to others along the way.

The last book that recently came out has to do with matzah, but not with Passover, which is why it’s included in this brief roundup even though it’s about Shabbat. Good for year-round reading, Bubbe and Bart’s Matzoh Ball Mayhem, written by Bonnie Grubman and illustrated by Deborah Melmon, was published by Seattle’s Intergalactic Afikoman last November. Created by two dog lovers, it begins, “This is Bubbe’s story. Believe me that it’s true. Her puppy loved each Friday night like Jewish puppies do.

“When Bubbe made her matzoh balls, Bart was at her feet, waiting for a ball to fall, and not some doggie treat.”

While Bart’s begging doesn’t achieve the desired result, he does get to eat all the matzah balls he’s able to catch. Bubbling away in the pot on the stove, the matzah balls grow so large that they blow off the lid and zoom all over the room. Not to be held back by “a better lid, and some very sticky tape,” the balls continue to fly. And we get to count them as they do. (Another spoiler alert: Bart gets to eat an awful lot of matzah.)

Eventually, with a little magic, calmness is restored and dog and house are cleaned up in time for Shabbat dinner with the family.

Bubbe and Bart’s Matzoh Ball Mayhem ends with a couple of paragraphs about Shabbat, “a very special day of the week,” and a short glossary.

A roadmap to remembering

Alan Twigg, author of Out of Hiding: Holocaust Literature of British Columbia, at the gravesite of Rudolf “Rudi” Vrba, who died in 2006. (photo from JCC Jewish Book Festival)

Fittingly for a man who has dedicated his life’s work to the written word, Alan Twigg has compiled a fascinating bibliography. Out of Hiding: Holocaust Literature of British Columbia is one of two books to be launched in a JCC Jewish Book Festival epilogue event on April 5. The other is Sounds from Silence: Reflections of a Child Holocaust Survivor, Psychiatrist and Teacher by Dr. Robert Krell, to whom Twigg’s book is dedicated.

“More than anyone in Canada, Robert Krell has continuously carried the torches of healing, investigation and discourse about the Shoah since the 1970s to counteract ever-encroaching racism, denial and wilful ignorance,” writes Twigg, whose book is also dedicated to the late publisher and editor Ronald Hatch, who died last November. Hatch and his wife Veronica co-managed Ronsdale Press, which published Out of Hiding.

Among other things, Twigg is the founder of the BC BookWorld newspaper, The Ormsby Review (now called The British Columbia Review), the ABCBookWorld reference site, the Literary Map of BC and the Indigenous Literary Map of BC, as well as many of the province’s literary prizes. He has published 20 books and made seven literary documentaries.

Twigg wrote Out of Hiding with the help of many, including, notably, Yosef Wosk, who wrote the book’s afterword, in which Wosk discusses various kinds of hiding – from one’s mission, from persecution, in dreams, in silence, from truth. Wosk notes that the perpetrators of the Holocaust also tried to hide: “The Nazis engaged in fraud, deception and secrecy on a massive scale,” he writes.

“The secrecy was complete and, to a large extent, effective,” he adds. “The very monstrosity of the crime made it unbelieveable. In fact, the Nazis speculated that the unimaginability of their Aktionen would work in their favour.” But this expectation “was frustrated by the Allied victory. [What remained of] Nazi archives were opened, contemporary Jewish documents were discovered, and facts were ferreted out by courts and scholars. Moreover, by 1942, the Free World had gradually learned the truth, albeit not always complete and precise.”

Wosk concludes, “There is much to remember and even more to know as the Holocaust comes out of hiding.”

And this is one of the reasons Twigg compiled this collection.

“I am not a Jew. I am not a German. I simply believe it is the responsibility of everyone on the planet to know more than just a little about the Holocaust,” begins Twigg in the foreword. “It is our collective responsibility to teach our children – with details – about why the Shoah is unique among the many genocides.”

He points out: “No other political regime has ever systematically murdered at least 1.5 million babies and children.”

As well: “Never before or after has a modern, industrial state mobilized all of its resources to systematically commit murder at least six million times in about eight years (from Kristallnacht in 1938 to 1945) and no other government has established a separate killing ground to murder approximately 50,000 women (at Ravensbruck, north of Berlin).

“No other regime has so thoroughly and consistently degraded its victims,” writes Twigg. “Estimates vary but the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum claims Germans created 980 concentration camps, 30,000 slave labour camps, 1,150 Jewish ghettos, 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps and 500 brothels where women were sex slaves.” And yet, Holocaust education surveys have shown that most people would struggle to name one or two camps, other than perhaps Auschwitz.

Twigg believes that, “if the most-heinous, most-planned and most extensive genocide can be deep-sixed by mankind, all genocides thereafter can be shrugged off as natural – as inevitable as forest fires, plagues, droughts, locusts or tidal waves.” If that happens, he argues, then genocide becomes “someone else’s problem.” As for something the magnitude of the Holocaust, he writes, “Most certainly it can happen again.”

Out of Hiding is an intensely personal project for Twigg. He describes the book as “a roadmap back to places and experiences that must never be forgotten, offering a wide range of perspectives from the Holocaust-related books of British Columbian authors.” In total, he covers some 160 books in four sections. Some authors have written, edited or otherwise helped bring into being more than one memoir, novel, report or study; some of the people discussed are the subjects of the publications, rather than the writer.

Part One features relatively long expositions on Rudolf Vrba, Robert (Robbie) Waisman and Krell.

Twigg considers Vrba – who lived in Vancouver for the last few decades of his life – the “most important author of British Columbia.”

Writes Twigg in Out of Hiding, “Historian Ruth Linn estimates there were about 500-700 attempts to escape from Auschwitz-Birkenau, and most failed. Some 75 of these attempts were made by Jews; only five Jews made it successfully to freedom. The most significant of these five was Rudolf ‘Rudi’ Vrba, the main author of the most authoritative report on the true nature of the concentration camps, co-authored with co-escapee Alfred Wetzler.”

The Vrba-Wetzler Report, dated April 25, 1944, “finally revealed to the Allies the true nature and extent of the Holocaust.”

Twigg provides a biography of Vrba and some of what he learned from him as a friend. He also shares that Vrba, who died in 2006, was buried in a “seldom-visited cemetery, known to few people, where there is only a simple headstone.”

The April 5 event will include a video of Wosk chanting a Jewish blessing for Vrba at the graveside – something that apparently has not been done before.

Both Waisman and Krell are discussed in as much depth as Vrba, from their brief childhoods before the Holocaust through to recent history, sharing some of their writings and accomplishments, giving readers a sense of who they are and why their contributions are so vital.

Part Two offers shorter personal summaries on dozens of authors and publications. This section includes Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, Claudia Cornwall, Peter Hay, David Lester, Robert Mermelstein, Heather Pringle, Peter Suedfeld, Mark Zuehlke and many others. It features survivors of the Holocaust, as well as researchers, educators, journalists, graphic artists and editors who have studied the Holocaust, members of the Second or Third Generation, and a few non-Jews.

Part Three features an eclectic mix of 26 writers/artists, including Olga Campbell, Esi Edugyan, Jean Gerber, Rabbi Marvin Hier, Nikolaus Martin, Isa Milman, Norman Ravvin, Colin Upton and others.

Part Four: One Doctor, Two Rabbis comprises three essays. The first is on Dr. Tom Perry, who served with the U.S. Army Medical Corps in the Second World War, and “took a series of rarely seen photos that his widow Claire Perry donated to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre in 1994 along with a five-page letter he wrote to her from ‘somewhere in Germany,’ describing his feelings and impressions of Buchenwald.” The letter is included in this section – and it is a powerful testament, though words don’t capture the horror as much as do his photographs.

The second essay, “Lulek’s Story,” flows from a well-known photo taken by Tim Gidal on July 17, 1945, in a refugee compound near Haifa – front and centre is Israel Meir “Lulek” Lau, holding a Buchenwald banner. Rabbi Meir Lau, who became Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, was the youngest survivor of Buchenwald and his story is moving and inspirational.

Wosk’s afterword rounds out the collection with his thought-provoking reflections on hiding.

“Soon all witnesses will be gone,” concludes Twigg in his author’s statement. “The Holocaust must not be relegated to being merely the psychic preserve of Jews and Germans.”

The double-book launch event is presented with the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and takes place at the Rothstein Theatre. Admission is free but registration via jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival/events or at eventbrite.ca is required. To read a discussion of Krell’s Sounds from Silence, visit jewishindependent.ca/a-child-survivor-reflects.