Meet great writers at the JCC

CYNTHIA RAMSAY SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN

Family, faith, humor and heroism are themes that permeate this year's Cherie Smith JCC Book Festival which features literary readings, book signings, children's activities and more. Running from Nov. 15-20 at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, here is a small sample of what you can look forward to at the festival.

A New York opening

The festival opens with local author Nancy Richler (Throwaway Angels and Your Mouth is Lovely) in conversation with New York's Letty Cottin Pogrebin, co-founder of Ms. magazine and author of nine books, and neuroradiologist and author Aryeh Lev Stollman, winner of the inaugural Chaim Potok Literary Award.

Pogrebin is a contributing editor to Tikkun and Moment magazines. Her non-fiction books include Deborah, Golda and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America, which is a very personal examination of Pogrebin's struggle with what she calls in the book her "two sacred causes, Judaism and feminism." The recently released Three Daughters is Pogrebin's first foray into fiction and she does it with humility and humor.

The story of three sisters, Three Daughters opens with the always-in-control Shoshanna, trying to collect the remains of her Filofax, which she accidentally left on the roof of her car and the contents of which are now strewn about the freeway:

"The driver of the Dodge Caravan gave Shoshanna the finger, gesticulating furiously through his windshield like the villain in a silent movie.

"You couldn't blame the guy. She was a horrific sight – a wild-eyed middle-aged virago in a mud-splattered coat racing across the Henry Hudson Parkway to snatch a piece of paper from the pavement. She rammed the paper into her pocket and ran back to the shoulder of the road, unflustered by her close call, then dropped to her haunches and studied the oncoming traffic. That was the nerve-racking part, waiting for the right conditions, the perfect moment to lunge.... She'd timed it perfectly, her road dance.

"Wait. Run. Retreat.

"Wait. Run. Retreat.

"Shoshanna might have passed for a litter-phobic environmentalist but for her periodically emptying her overstuffed pockets onto the back seat of her Volvo and smoothing each bedraggled sheet with the tenderness of a poet saving love letters from the flames."

Also predominantly family-oriented in their subject matter, Stollman's writings often mix his medical expertise with his in-depth knowledge of Judaism. He has written two novels, The Far Euphrates and The Illuminated Soul, but his most recent publication is a return to his earlier genre of short stories. The Dialogues of Time and Entropy is a well-written collection overall but there are moments when Stollman focuses more on style than clarity.

In the title story, for example, the female protaganist describes the motivations of the settlers in Israel as not being based on religion or geopolitics alone, but as coming "from the air, which in our time has become considerably denser, or from water, which in our time has become exceedingly electric, or from natural, borderless forces, wind, dew, the tropism of plants." It is only in the next paragraph that this is explained as turbines, orchards and flowers. However, insightful moments and interesting plots dominate and Stollman is able to realistically convey the humanity of his characters, enabling readers to better understand their own motivations and place in the world.

Join a critical brunch

Vancouver Province movie critic David Spaner joins Vancouver Sun theatre critic Peter Bernie, Sun music critic Kerry Gold and Sun books editor Rebecca Wigod for brunch during the festival. CBC Radio One's Afternoon Show's theatre critic Jerry Wasserman will moderate the panel and discussion.

Spaner recently published Dreaming in the Rain: How Vancouver Became Hollywood North by Northwest, an examination of the current state of the film industry in Vancouver and its history. Dreaming in the Rain is also a history of the city itself:

"Kitsilano is one of those old working-class neighborhoods that seems to get more gentrified the more the baby-boom generation ages," writes Spaner. "In 1968, though, when Robert Altman came to shoot That Cold Day in the Park in Tatlow Park, the neighborhood was one of the capitals of the counter-culture's borderless 'New Nation.' ('A nation of alienated young people,' Abbie Hoffman said. 'We carry it around with us as a state of mind.') ... Kitsilano's main street, Fourth Avenue, as much as an immigrant enclave in New York, had its own music, language, dress, food and politics. Suddenly, everything was on the agenda in this revolution - street protests, feminism, marijuana, gay rights, Vietnam, ecology, student radicalism, culture."

Film and history buffs will find Spaner's look behind the movie and TV sets fascinating. Interviews with such people as actor Babz Chula and independent filmmaker Larry Kent allow readers more insight into the local movie world than any network TV entertainment show could.

Spaner and his critical colleagues will share anecdotes from their professional lives with festival-goers Nov. 16.

Humor and heroism

Among the many activities for younger readers, author Dan Bar-El will be at the Young Authors' Tea Nov. 16 and author Sally Rogow will read from her most recent book Nov. 20.

At the tea, Bar-El will give a talk on writing and read from Things are Looking Up, Jack, a humorous mystery targeted toward younger readers. Adults will also find Jack somewhat amusing, as Bar-El combines in a unique and intelligent way nursery rhymes and children's stories with which most people are familiar. Jack and Jill, Humpty Dumpty, Chicken Little and Little Bo Beep are just some of the characters who get together in this silly tale to figure out why people and things keep falling down in Mother Goose land.

In a completely different vein, Rogow's Faces of Courage: Young Heroes of World War II is a serious and important work that celebrates the people who dared to fight back, rescue others, join resistance movements or simply survive the Holocaust. In the collection, Rogow includes fictional composites of heroes and heroines, as well as the real-life stories of Jacques Lusseyran, a blind 16-year-old who organized the student resistance group in Paris; German youth Helmuth Huebener, Karl-Heinz Schnibbe and Rudolf Wobbe, known as the Huebener Group, who defied Adolf Hitler; and Jacob, a Polish boy who survived the tragedy. Rogow, who is also a professor emerita of the education faculty at the University of British Columbia, writes very matter-of-factly: Jacob's reaction when he finds out that his brother was shot by the Gestapo is simply, "I was in shock." The style suits the work, however, since the stories are powerful and don't require much embellishment.

Worldly awareness

Robyn Sarah will read from her poems, stories and essays on Nov. 17. She recently launched A Day's Grace: Poems, 1997-2002 and she has published two collections of short stories, A Nice Gazebo and Promise of Shelter. Sarah writes with empathy and what seems to be great experience of the world. In reading her stories and poems, you feel that she has been in the situations that she describes, even those such as that described in "A Vision of the Future":

"After the Oil Wars, the big boys / Laid waste the fields.

"The usual things got said / by poets, pundits and the common man / left to pick up the pieces. / In a room with a drawn shade / a girl stood gazing at her own / face in a cracked mirror. / Could that be her? / Does the world just go on, then?

"Yes: on and on. / And in the early morning sun / a woman sits upon a stair / of broken stone / in the middle of what was once a lawn / in front of a burnt house. / She clutches a handbag, staring straight ahead / as a small wind speaks round her ears."

For more information on the festival, call 604-257-5111.

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