Joyce Wayne

Back when Scott McIntyre entered Canadian publishing, the business still carried the aura of a gentleman’s profession. Deals were sealed with a handshake, followed by wine or martinis in a posh restaurant. Jack McClelland, one of the central figures in McIntyre’s revealing memoir, was at his height, publishing the writers who would constitute a national…

I avoided reading Beloved when it appeared in 1987. Toni Morrison won a Pulitzer Prize for it, and later she became the first African American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but I still stayed away. For decades, I heard the book was difficult — the events in it so evil, so…

While I was first reading these two novellas by Nora Gold, a man was charged for threatening a Jewish city councillor in Toronto and a cartoon depicting Benjamin Netanyahu as a bloodsucking vampire appeared in La Presse, the second-largest newspaper in Quebec (it was later removed). The Toronto police had just reported a significant rise in antisemitic…

The devices outgrew us. We couldn’t control them. I know; I helped build them.— On the Beach (1959) How, they ask, could I, being who I now am and understanding what I now understand, ever have said and done the things I am describing? — Tony Judt They became more common after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: stories about…

This past July, the Jewish historian and activist Irving Abella died. His obituary reminded me of None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933–1948, the ground-breaking book he co-wrote with Harold Troper, and especially of Ottawa’s abysmal history of exclusionary immigration policies. Before, during, and directly after the Holocaust — even when Hitler’s intention to annihilate European Jewry was known — the country accepted fewer than 13,000 Jewish…

I always say this but it’s true, there areso many thingsI don’t understand,I don’t mean steak tartare, I mean irony, corpses, how to not see yourself everywhere in comparison. How to see instead what’s there. — Anne Carson My sweeping experiment with life on the left began when I was nineteen and living in a student commune in…

Seventy-five years ago, three days after Japan formally surrendered, bringing the Second World War to a close, Igor Gouzenko vanished from the Soviet embassy on Charlotte Street in Ottawa’s tranquil Sandy Hill neighbourhood. Over the next forty-eight hours, something of a legend was born. The details and chronology differ depending on the teller, but most agree that…