Northern Shadows

Many years ago, I was mistaken for a literary Jew. My first book, Raymond and Hannah, had just been published—a novel-in-emails about a long-distance relationship between a graduate student in Toronto and a yeshiva student in Jerusalem—and I had been invited to participate in a Jewish literary festival in Vancouver. Some moments in a writer’s life can be confusing; others are fraught and grueling. The part where somebody flies you to another city and puts you up in a hotel and buys you meals and talks to you about your work isn’t. You go. I went.

I was on a panel about “the future of Jewish fiction in Canada.” It’s a testament to my youthful arrogance that I found it perfectly natural the organizers of a Jewish literary festival would want my perspective. I mean, who wouldn’t? Then again, the main character in my book was Jewish, I had just returned from a group tour of Israel with other writers (not of all of whom were Jewish) where I had met all the major...