Their Everyday Lives

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 crime. In the weeks since, bus shelters and condo buildings in Canada’s largest city have been defaced with detestable slurs and symbols. A man was arrested for allegedly targeting antisemitic statements at children outside of Toronto’s city hall. And the windows of a synagogue north of downtown were smashed with a hammer, in what the B’nai Brith Canada advocacy group has condemned as an incident of “normalized” antisemitism.

Amid an atmosphere of growing fear and hate, Gold’s novellas focus directly on the everyday decisions of Jewish Canadians just trying to live their lives. In Yom Kippur in a...