TORONTO — Six books on Jewish themes were honoured at the Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Awards last week, and while that is fewer than in most previous years, the 23rd annual ceremony seemed to achieve a new level of maturity and to reach further beyond the Jewish community than ever before.

The 2011 Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Awards were conferred last week in Toronto. Pictured from left are winning writers  Judie Oron, Charles Foran, Tarek Fatah, Alison Pick, Robert Eli Rubenstein and Harold Troper. [Nick Kozak photo]

The 2011 Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Awards were
conferred last week in Toronto. Pictured from left are winning writers  Judie Oron, Charles Foran, Tarek Fatah, Alison Pick, Robert Eli
Rubenstein and Harold Troper. [Nick Kozak photo]

TORONTO — Six books on Jewish themes were honoured at the Helen and Stan Vine
Canadian Jewish Book Awards last week, and while that is fewer than in
most previous years, the 23rd annual ceremony seemed to achieve a new
level of maturity and to reach further beyond the Jewish community than
ever before.

One reason may be that the Koffler Centre of the Arts-hosted event was held in a substantial city venue – the spacious and well-appointed Bram and Bluma Appel Salon of the Toronto Reference Library – as opposed to the Jewish institutional spaces of previous years, thus giving it a patina of cultural relevance for a much wider audience.

Also, it didn’t hurt that comic author and raconteur Michael Wex, himself a former prize winner for his nonfiction book Born to Kvetch, was the wry master of ceremonies. Wex’s Yiddish-inflected witticisms added immensely to the evening’s entertainment quotient, as did Brian Katz’s richly coloured musical segues on keyboard.

But it was the distinctive excellence of the prize-winning books and authors that really made the evening shine.

Tarek Fatah, whose book The Jew Is Not My Enemy: Unveiling the Myths that Fuel Muslim Anti-Semitism (McClelland & Stewart) won the Politics and History prize, received a strong ovation for his rousing political comments about the dangers of Islamofascism and the rush of many nations to bully and condemn Israel and the Jewish people.

Antisemitism today “is far more a danger to the rest of humanity than it ever was in Hitler’s worst time,” Fatah said. “Because today we are dealing with nuclear bombs in the hands of a people who believe in life that comes only after death. And that is why I wrote this book.”

The prestigious fiction prize went to Alison Pick for Far to Go (House of Anansi), a Holocaust story focusing on an affluent and secular Jewish family in Prague. Raised as a Christian, the now-Jewish Pick explained that she found out by accident that her father was Jewish, that her great-grandparents had died at Auschwitz, and that her grandparents came to Canada and began a new life that didn’t include Judaism. “This family secret has informed my entire writing career,” she said.

Judie Oron, author of Cry of the Giraffe (Annick) which won in the Youth Literature category, told an equally amazing and dramatic story as a screen beside her displayed two photographs of her adopted Ethiopian-Jewish daughter, Wuditu, taken “before and after slavery.” As she tells in the book, Oron went to the war-torn country and bought the child out of slavery with “a few tattered, dirty” bills of Ethiopian currency.

Robert Eli Rubinstein won in the Holocaust Literature Category for An Italian Renaissance: Choosing Life in Canada (Urim Publications), a memoir of the physical and spiritual rejuvenation of his parents, Hungarian survivors of the Holocaust.

Harold Troper took the Jewish Scholarship prize for The Defining Decade: Identity, Politics, and the Canadian Jewish Community in the 1960s (University of Toronto Press), which traces the “blooming” of the Jewish community in the decade when it reached its maturity, and fully engaged with the national community at all levels. Hy Bergel, who gave the award to Troper, described the book as “a compelling history, presented with energy, clarity and purpose.”

Charles Foran, a journalist and author of eight previous books, won in the Biography and Memoir category for Mordecai: The Life and Times (Random House Canada). Foran, who is not Jewish, said one of the most challenging aspects of the project lay in “getting both the basics and the essentials of Judaism right.” He thanked editor Louise Dennys as well as the late Richler’s wife and children for their invaluable assistance.

The evening also included a poignant tribute, delivered by Wex, to the late Chava Rosenfarb, the last of Canada’s original generation of post-war Yiddish writers, who died in 2010.