Irene Watts

JCC Book Fest awards given

Western Canada Jewish Book Award 2018 winners, left to right: Roger Frie, Deborah Willis, Kathryn Shoemaker and Irene Watts. Missing: Tilar Mazzeo. (photo by Cynthia Ramsay)

Deborah Willis became a writer, in part, because it is a way “to learn about the things that you’re curious about.” Irene N. Watts and Kathryn E. Shoemaker were motivated to reimagine a decade’s-old story in light of its relevance to pressing issues of today. And, in his latest work, Roger Frie found a way to discuss a past for which, previously, “the words were missing for how to speak about it.”

The Western Canada Jewish Book Awards, presented by the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, took place on April 26. Self-proclaimed book lover Daniella Givon, who is part of the JBF committee and was chair of the awards committee, introduced the evening.

“As I looked for ways to enhance the Jewish Book Festival,” she said, “I had a vision that book awards would marry the goals of the festival with the celebration of, and support the achievements of, local Jewish writers from Western Canada and showcase the winning authors. Since then, we’ve already gone through the process of bringing the ideas to fruition with the help of a subcommittee and the first round of awards … a beautiful ceremony was held here two years ago, recognizing five best-deserving authors.”

This year, four awards were presented, as chosen by the selection committee of former librarian Linda Bonder (Victoria); author and librarian Elisabeth Kushner (Vancouver); author and poet Dave Margoshes (near Saskatoon); writer, teacher and critic Norman Ravvin (Montreal); and Judith Saltman, professor emerita at the University of British Columbia School of Library, Archival and Information Studies. The winners were Calgary-based Willis for The Dark and Other Love Stories (Diamond Foundation Prize for fiction); Tilar J. Mazzeo, who divides her time between Maine, New York and Vancouver Island, for Irena’s Children (Pinsky Givon Family Prize for non-fiction); Vancouver’s Watts and Shoemaker for Seeking Refuge (Jonathan and Heather Berkowitz Prize for children and youth literature); and Frie, professor of education at Simon Fraser University and affiliate professor of psychiatry at UBC, for Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility after the Holocaust (Kahn Family Foundation Prize for writing on the Holocaust).

At the awards ceremony, each of the donors, or their representative, announced the winner of their sponsored award, which included a cash component. The winners – except for Mazzeo, who could not attend – read excerpts from their books and were interviewed briefly by Marsha Lederman, Western arts correspondent for the Globe and Mail.

Frie, who seven years ago discovered his maternal grandfather’s involvement with the Nazis, told Lederman, “This was a past no one had spoken about and, as I soon learned to understand, I think the words were missing for how to speak about it.” About the war in general, he said, his parents – who immigrated in the 1950s to Canada (Frie was born here) – talked about Germany’s responsibility for the Holocaust, however they did not speak about what his grandparents believed or what their involvement was in the war. He has found, in his research, that this “is a common dynamic amongst Germans in the postwar period.” He said that, while Germany has faced its past, “the emphasis on collective memory and collective understanding and collective responsibility has, in some way, allowed individual families to avoid confronting the past, and this book [Not in My Family] is very much a representation of that.”

Lederman described Mazzeo’s book as “astonishing.”

“I knew nothing about Irena Sendler before I picked up this book, so this has been a gift,” she said. “Irena Sendler was a Polish woman who saved … thousands of Jewish children during the Holocaust with amazing feats of courage, often in the Warsaw Ghetto. Her story is incredible, this book is incredible, and I can only hope that Steven Spielberg gets his hands on a copy.”

Shoemaker gave a brief presentation on the creative process she and Watts went through to create the graphic novel Seeking Refuge, which is based on Watts’ book Remember Me (first published in 2000). And Watts spoke of the challenge of cutting 27 chapters down to nine. “What I had to keep in mind,” said Watts, “is you can get so carried away by cutting and changing the language to make it more dynamic that you lose the story a little bit, and I had to watch that I didn’t diminish the characters.”

About the cover of the graphic novel, which features a girl sitting on a suitcase looking forlorn, Watts said Shoemaker “told the story in that one image.” Later, in response to a question from Lederman, Watts said the current refugee crisis was “the major reason to bring this book back in a different format.”

As for Willis, she spoke with Lederman about her winning collection of short fiction. “I was writing the stories for about five years, and I actually started noticing that the word ‘love’ was coming up over and over again. I was at first a little dismayed by that because I was thinking, oh, love stories, that’s been done. But then I embraced it and I wanted to try and explore that theme in a way that was true to my esthetic, or my goals as a story writer. I set it almost as a challenge.”

After an open Q&A with the authors, JCC Jewish Book Festival director Dana Camil Hewitt wound up the event with thanks to the sponsors, judges, awards committee and audience.

For an interview with Watts and Shoemaker, visit jewishindependent.ca/meet-award-winning-artists and, for a review of Not in My Family, visit jewishindependent.ca/a-grandfathers-sins.

Looking for nominees … the nominated and the winners

The Centre for Judaism of the Lower Fraser Valley is looking for nominations for its annual Lamplighter Award, which honours a young person who has performed an outstanding act of community service.

Candidates must be between the ages of 6 and 18 and submission of potential recipients must include two references describing the child’s community service. The chosen lamplighter will receive the award during Chanukah at an evening ceremony at Semiahmoo Shopping Centre.

“Chanukah celebrates the victory of light over darkness and goodness over evil,” said Simie Schtroks. “This is a most appropriate opportunity to motivate and inspire young people to make this world a brighter and better place. By filling the world with goodness and kindness, that light can dispel all sorts of darkness.”

To nominate a candidate for the award, contact Schtroks as soon as possible at c4j@shaw.ca.

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This summer, David Granirer received a Meritorious Service Medal from the Governor General of Canada. The award recognizes a deed or activity that has been performed in a highly professional manner, or according to a very high standard: often innovative, this deed or activity sets an example for others to follow, improves the quality of life of a community and brings benefit or honour to Canada.

Granirer is a counselor, stand-up comic and mental health keynote speaker. Granirer, who himself has depression, has taught stand-up comedy to recovering addicts and cancer patients, and founded Stand Up for Mental Health, a program teaching comedy to people with mental health issues, in 2004. He has trained Stand Up for Mental Health groups in partnership with various mental health organizations in more than 50 cities in Canada, the United States and Australia. His work on mental health is featured by media worldwide and has garnered several awards.

Granirer also teaches Stand-Up Comedy Clinic at Langara College, and many of his students have gone on to become professional comics.

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This year’s Mayor’s Arts Award for Community Engaged Arts went to Earle Peach. A singer, songwriter, composer, conductor, arranger, teacher and performer, Peach leads four choirs in the city and hosts a monthly community coffee house in Mount Pleasant. He teaches privately, and records musicians for demos and albums. He performs with Barbara Jackson as a duo called Songtree and also has a band called Illiteratty.

The emerging artist honour went to Ariel Martz-Oberlander, a theatre artist, writer and teacher. As a Jewish settler on Coast Salish territories with diasporic and refugee ancestry, her practice is rooted in a commitment to place-based accountability through decolonizing and solidarity work. She divides her time between theatre and community organizing, and specializing in creative protest tactics on land and water.

Martz-Oberlander is a facilitator with the True Voice Theatre Project, producing new shows by residents of the Downtown Eastside and vulnerably housed youth, in collaboration with the Gathering Place and Covenant House. Her most recent work, created with support from the LEAP program, won a research and development prize from the Arts Club. Martz-Oberlander is also the associate producer for Vines Festival, presenting accessible, free eco-art in Vancouver parks. Good art is accountable to the community, raises up voices rarely heard and is vital to repairing our world.

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On Oct. 3, the Koffler Centre of the Arts announced the four winners of the 2017 Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature, all of whom were on hand at the award luncheon at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Toronto.

Winners in two of the categories are based in Vancouver. Miriam Libicki won the non-fiction award for Toward a Hot Jew (Fantagraphics Books Inc.), which the jury described as, “An admirably complicated response to being a woman and a Jew in our time, a thrilling combination of memoir, journalism and art.” And Irene N. Watts and Kathryn E. Shoemaker took the prize in the children’s/young adult category for Seeking Refuge (Tradewind Books), which the jury described as, “A superb graphic novel dramatizing the Kindertransport, a powerful story enhanced by firsthand experience and beautiful black-and-white illustrations.”

The other winners were Peter Behrens’ Carry Me (House of Anansi Press) for fiction and Matti Friedman’s Pumpkinflowers (McClelland & Stewart) for history.

The history shortlist included Max Eisen’s By Chance Alone (Harper Collins Publishers) and Ester Reiter’s A Future Without Hate or Need: The Promise of the Jewish Left in Canada (Between the Lines). Runners-up in the fiction category were Eric Beck Rubin’s School of Velocity (Doubleday Canada) and Danila Botha’s For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I’ve Known (Tightrope Books). In non-fiction, Sarah Barmak’s Closer: Notes from the Orgasmic Frontier of Female Sexuality (Coach House Books), Judy Batalion’s White Walls (Berkley/Penguin Random House) and David Leach’s Chasing Utopia (ECW Press) were runners-up, while Deborah Kerbel’s Feathered (Kids Can Press) and Tilar Mazzeo and Mary Farrell’s Irena’s Children (Margaret K. McElderry Books) were on the children’s/young adult short list.

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In September 2017, local community member Dr. Arthur Wolak was elected for a three-year term to the board of governors of Gratz College, a private liberal arts college in suburban Philadelphia. Founded in 1895, Gratz is the oldest independent and pluralistic college for Jewish studies in North America. Accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, Gratz is also recognized by Israel’s Ministry of Education and Culture. Through its undergraduate and graduate programs, Gratz educates students to become effective educators, administrators and community leaders.

Meet award-winning artists

Seeking Refuge, written by Irene Watts and illustrated by Kathryn Shoemaker, has been shortlisted for the 2017 Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature. Published by Tradewind Books, the graphic novel is one of the three finalists in the children’s/young adult category.

While this year’s Vine winners will be announced Oct. 3 at a luncheon in Toronto, Vancouverites can meet Watts and Shoemaker later this month at Word Vancouver, and again at the Vancouver Writers Festival in October. The multiple-award-winners, who are both founding members of the Children’s Writers and Illustrators of British Columbia Society, have worked together on several publications, including Good-bye Marianne, a graphic novel based on Watts’ play and subsequent novel of the same name, which also included Shoemaker illustrations.

In Good-bye Marianne, readers meet Marianne Kohn. Set in Berlin in 1938, a week after Kristallnacht, the 11-year-old struggles to understand and cope with the increasing restrictions placed on Jews in Nazi Germany, and the fierce antisemitism she and her family encounter, with a couple of exceptions. The story begins with Marianne not being allowed into her school – all of the Jewish students have been prohibited from attending. As well, her father has disappeared. The situation, as we know from history, worsens, and her mother makes the heartrending decision to send Marianne with “a group of 200 children who are leaving for homes in England,” one of the first groups to be rescued in the Kindertransport.

Seeking Refuge sees Marianne safely to London, arriving Dec. 2, 1938. While protected from physical harm in her new country, Marianne does not escape antisemitism and poor treatment.

In an interview with CBC, Watts commented on Shoemaker’s choice of medium for Seeking Refuge, noting how the grey of the pencil was so well-suited to the story.

“Seeking Refuge is a darker, sadder story, taking place in a time of blackouts, black-and-white films, coal-foggy London, especially the winter months, a gloomy time and place,” said Shoemaker in an interview with the Jewish Independent. “In Good-bye Marianne, Marianne is happier than in Seeking Refuge because she is with family, her home, her country, her language. So, yes, the backgrounds are light, often white. She is anxious about her being sent away but she is not yet sad about it. She is not yet a displaced refugee.”

The possibility of using Seeking Refuge as a way in which to teach younger readers about the current refugee crisis has not gone unnoticed by reviewers and interviewers.

“Stories, in whatever genre, help us to discover more about our place in the world and who we are,” Watts told the Independent. “Immersing ourselves in the lives of fictional characters and their stories, we gain insight of how others live.” While acknowledging that readers will “take whatever message they are ready to understand from the books they read,” she added, “Marianne’s story, though set in the past, is still a familiar one. There are many refugees in the world. Seeking Refuge concerns one child, and how she responds to losing home, friends, family, birthplace, language, culture. In reading about Marianne, a reader may wonder how he would cope in this situation; maybe respond with more kindness and understanding to anyone struggling to make a new life.”

Marianne’s story is similar to – but not the same as – that of Watts, who was educated in England and Wales after her escape from Berlin via the second rescue train in December 1938. Skipping ahead 30 years, she and her husband moved to Canada in 1968, she said, “to give our children a better future.” They immigrated to Alberta.

A playwright and director for Theatre in Education and a drama teacher and consultant in England, Watts taught drama in Hobbema (now Maskwacis), where they lived for a short time before moving to Edmonton. In Edmonton, she was director of Citadel on Wheels and Wings, a children’s touring company that traveled all over Alberta. “We even took our shows to schools in the Northwest Territories,” she said, noting that, among the company’s alumni are Jackson Davies and the late Susan Wright.

“After a few years,” said Watts, “my late husband accepted a position in Vancouver and our four children and I followed. This was in 1976. My base was in White Rock, B.C., and I moved to Vancouver in 2000.”

That Watts likes to write in different genres is clear from the way in which Seeking Refuge came into being.

“Good-bye Marianne began life as a play, which premièred at the Norman Rothstein Theatre in 1994,” Watts explained. “It was produced by Carousel Theatre, and toured widely. It has had many productions, both in Canada and the U.S.A., and will be touring with Theatre New Brunswick for three months in the spring of 2018. I had been a playwright long before I became a novelist. I decided to write the novel because there was still much to say beyond the confines of the play. Kathy Lowinger, then publisher of Tundra Books, rescued the manuscript from the slush pile, and published it in 1998.

“I received countless letters from children, wanting to know what happens next, and so completed both the novel and the play Remember Me, on which Seeking Refuge is based. The trilogy, which ends with Finding Sophie, was later published in an omnibus edition, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Kindertransport, as Escape from Berlin.”

For readers anticipating a possible third graphic novel, Watts told the Independent she has “no plans to write about Marianne and Sophie again.”

Shoemaker and Watts collaborated on Watts’ first book for Tradewind, A Telling Time, “which places the story of Queen Esther and the story of Purim in three time frames: modern-day Canada, Nazi-occupied Vienna and the biblical era of Persia. So,” said Watts, “when Kathie told me she had read my play Good-bye Marianne and suggested that it would make an interesting graphic novel, I needed no persuasion, and together we embarked on our next project – a new genre for me. Since then, we have done several other books together, for both Tundra and Tradewind Books.”

A Telling Time, which Shoemaker described as “a picture book for older children about the parallel stories of Queen Esther and how she saves her people and a 1939 secret Purim party,” was recognized by the International Youth Library in Munich, Germany, with a 2006 White Raven special mention.

“For that book,” said Shoemaker, who teaches children’s literature at the University of British Columbia, “I did a huge amount of research. As well, Irene shared many resources with me.

“While I was illustrating A Telling Time,” she said, “I was working on my MA in children’s literature at UBC. Instead of doing an academic thesis, I wrote a graphic novel. During the process of finishing it up, Irene asked me what it was like to write a graphic novel and I told her that, for her, it would be a snap, as it is very much like writing a play or screenplay, as you write primarily dialogue, and, similarly to writing a play scene by scene, a graphic novel is written panel by panel. In response to my answer, Irene told me that Good-bye Marianne had been a play before it was a novel.”

Shoemaker said she drew up several pages of Good-bye Marianne for Watts to send to Tundra as a proposal for a graphic novel. “It was about to have its 10th anniversary, so it was good timing,” said Shoemaker. “Tundra had never done a graphic novel before but they agreed to it.”

Graphic novels were still a relatively new phenomenon at that time. “Other than Chester Brown’s Louis Riel and books for adults, there were almost none,” said Shoemaker. “It was a bit of challenge working with an editor who did not understand the form and also who didn’t seem to understand how closely Irene and I work.

“You will often hear that editors like to keep writers and illustrators apart. I hate that. Irene and I work closely on everything that we do.”

Their creative process begins with Watts writing a rough draft. “She doesn’t number the panels but she describes all the key actions she wants to see occur along with the dialogue,” explained Shoemaker. “From that version, I go back into the manuscript to visualize the sequence of panels. When I do that, I create panel numbers and add in additional panels that may be close-ups, wordless images and additional panels to handle complex conversations. After I’ve done that, I begin a visual dummy, drawing out the entire book panel by panel. When that is complete, I sit down with Irene and go through it panel by panel. As we go through it, we decide what stays, what goes and what more we might need. The best thing about our working together is that we highly respect each other’s ideas and we both listen, consider and change things without any kind of ownership because we consider the work ours. It is our book, not mine, not hers, but ours.”

Watts and Shoemaker will be at Word Vancouver on Sept. 24, 12:45 p.m., at the main branch of Vancouver Public Library in the South Plaza (the Quay) and the Writers Fest on Oct. 18, 1 p.m., at Revue Stage on Granville Island. For more information on both of these festivals and for tickets to the latter ($17), visit wordvancouver.ca and writersfest.bc.ca, respectively.