Norman Ravvin

Not since the Limelighters, early 1960s folkies, has Simferopol made its way to the centre of art that is wild and smart. Of that old central Crimean city, where Jews set up farming colonies in the 1920s, the Limelighters sang out in proudly stentorian Yiddish: “Az men fort kine Sevastopol, Iz nit veit fun …

In early 1936, New Yorker writer Janet ­Flanner, a regular contributor to the magazine’s “Letter from Europe” column, filed three lengthy profiles on Adolph Hitler. The New Yorker ran them in a format more commonly used for Americans of note—people whom we now call celebrities. With the Berlin Summer Olympics on the…

In 1989 I attended Toronto Harbourfront’s International Festival of Authors, where Mordecai Richler launched Solomon Gursky Was Here. After reading, perched on a chair behind a table stacked high with hardcovers, Richler put up with me, along with a few hundred others, telling him something wry aimed at opening conversation as he wrote his name on the novel’s title…

Michael Marrus’s new book, Some Measure of Justice: The Holocaust Era Restitution Campaign of the 1990s, is a compelling and detailed portrait of what he views to be a key moment—possibly a paradigm shift—in the understanding and reception of the Holocaust. In a turn of events that he views as…

In interviews regarding her new novel, The Winter Vault, Anne Michaels sets the stakes high for herself and her readers. Describing her goals to Eva Tihanyi, she expressed the need “to learn how to live better as a human being. To find a way to think about things that are essential to being a…

Stephens Gerard Malone’s I Still Have a Suitcase in Berlin reflects a shifting approach by Canadian writers to the country’s relationship to war. The books that set the stage for it—although they approach the link between European history and a Canadian point of view differently—include Timothy Findley’s The Wars and Michael Ondaatje’s The English …

Holocaust writing in Canada has taken a number of forms. Survivors have created a large catalogue of memoir—in print, on video, professionally and privately published. Major Yiddish writers, most notably Chava Rosenfarb, have turned their own experiences into historically detailed fictional tableaux. Since the 1960s, writers with no personal contact with the events of the war have grappled with its…

Gil Courtemanche made his literary reputation with his first novel, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, which confronted the Rwandan genocide. International in scope, it reflected Courtemanche’s longstanding interest in politics in the developing world, which he has also addressed as a columnist in Le Devoir. It became a bestseller, translated into numerous…