Books

In December 1944 Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “Never were we freer than under the German Occupation. We had lost all our rights, and first of all our right to speak. They insulted us to…
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Themes of identity, history, faith and family run through the 2019 JQ Wingate Literary Prize long list. This year’s 13-strong list includes two rediscovered works…
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Has any subject ever been better a fit for the parable of the blind men and the elephant than the Israel-Palestine conflict? You know the one. Several blind men inspect an…
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If you want to know what it feels like to be a child of survivors, read this slim and vital poetry collection. Holocaust literature rarely features the trauma reverberating in the…
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Avrom Sutzkever, one of the great Yiddish writers of the 20th century, was born in 1913 in Smorgon, now Belarus, and died in 2010 in Tel Aviv. He grew up in Siberia, where the…
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Ernest Bloch, who was born in Switzerland in 1880 to a Jewish family but spent most of his adult life in America, was the prototypical “citizen of nowhere”. “In Switzerland,” he…
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In times like these, where it can seem that our differences outweigh our commonalities, Neil MacGregor’s Living with the Gods is a comforting big-picture consideration of the…
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Kafka’s closest friend, Max Brod, died in Israel in 1968. His estate, including a number of Kafka manuscripts, became the subject of a legal battle that went all the way to…
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Where to Find Me tells of the unlikely relationship between Hannah Keralis, a teenager living in Notting Hill, and her elderly neighbour, Flora Dobbs. They meet only fleetingly…
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Seymour Mayne has been teaching at the University of Ottawa since 1973 where he is a Professor of Canadian Literature, Creative Writing, and Canadian Studies. A four-time winner of…
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