Montreal writer wins top Canadian Jewish Book prize

TORONTO — It is not a glittering gala event like the Giller Prize, nor does it carry the gravitas of the Governor General’s Awards, but the Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Awards ceremony – which was held May 25 at the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre in downtown Toronto – is the Jewish community’s annual reaffirmation of its strong commitment to homegrown Jewish literature.

From left: The CJN’s promotions manager David Collin, Winning author Peter C. Newman and Lori Starr executive director for the Koffler Center of the Arts. [Rachel Singer photo]

From left, Tiana Koffler Boyman, chair of the Koffler Centre of the Arts’ board of directors; winning authors Barrie Wilson, Joseph Kertes, Ami Sands Brodoff, Peter C. Newman, Isa Milman, Reinhold Kramer and Kathy Kacer, and Marc Boyman.

TORONTO — It is not a glittering gala event like the Giller
Prize, nor does it carry the gravitas of the Governor General’s Awards,
but the Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Awards ceremony –
which was held May 25 at the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre in
downtown Toronto – is the Jewish community’s annual reaffirmation of
its strong commitment to homegrown Jewish literature.

Attended by more than 200 people, the 21st annual awards ceremony honoured eight authors who came from Victoria, Brandon, Montreal and New York, as well as Toronto, to receive their prizes. The winning titles were chosen from a pool of more than 100 submissions by Canadian authors or permanent residents, published in 2008 and reflecting Jewish themes or significant Jewish content.

The top fiction prize went to Ami Sands Brodoff of Montreal for her novel The White Space Between, a Holocaust-related tale that explores a mother-daughter relationship against the backdrop of modern Montreal. The novel is published by Toronto-based Second Story Press, which also produced The Diary of Laura’s Twin by Toronto author Kathy Kacer, the winner in the youth literature category.

For Kacer, it was an extraordinary moment – the culmination of a week in which she won two other major literary prizes, a U.S. Jewish Book Council award for The Diary of Laura’s Twin and a Yad Vashem award for children’s Holocaust literature for Hiding Edith, one of her nine previous books. “It’s been a good week,” she told The CJN. “I’ve been overwhelmed with awards. I kind of pinch myself every day.”

Barrie Wilson, the Toronto author who took the history prize for How Jesus Became Christian (Random House Canada) explained that the book arose as a result of his intellectual explorations into early Christianity, as well as his personal experiences as a former Anglican married to a Jewish woman, who eventually converted to Judaism. “As part of that conversion experience, I learned how Jewish Jesus was and how non-Jewish Paul was,” he said. “I found that the religion of Paul sideswiped the religion of Jesus, and I looked at the true roots of Christian anti-Semitism.”

For Isa Milman, it was a visit to an old Jewish cemetery in Lipton, Sask., that set her on the “wondrous journey” that resulted in Prairie Kaddish (Coteau Books), which took the poetry prize. The poems therein took her four years to write, the Victoria-based poet, who is a child of Holocaust survivors, told The CJN. “From the moment I stepped into that Lipton cemetery, I was hooked. I knew I had to pursue this.”

Yet another prize-winning title centrally informed by the Holocaust was Gratitude (Penguin Canada), by Joseph Kertes, who won the prize in Holocaust literature for his rich tale set in a Hungarian village in 1944. “It was a subject I was trying to avoid most of my life,” he said. “It was something I ran from, in a sense, and yet it raised itself up to me quite frequently. . . . I had to go to rooms in my mind that I didn’t want to – dark rooms – and yet they were always there.  So it took me many years to both run from and execute this work.”

In accepting his prize in biography and memoir, Peter C. Newman – the legendary Canadian author whose most recent work is Izzy : The Passionate Life and Turbulent Times of Izzy Asper, Canada’s Media Mogul (Harper Collins Canada) – gave an expansive speech about the late Asper’s many remarkable qualities, including his generosity as a philanthropist, sharp sense of humour, and tendency to play bizarre practical jokes. “I’ve written about a lot of Canadians in my books, but Izzy was the most interesting,” Newman commented. “Why? Because he was a mensch, in every sense of the word.”

For scholarship on a Jewish subject, the prize went to Reinhold Kramer for Mordecai Richler: Leaving St. Urbain (McGill-Queen’s), which may be the strongest biographical work on Richler yet published. “I realized that all I had to do was read a few of his books and put a few of his words together,” said the author, a professor of English at Brandon University. “You don’t even have to be a great writer. Because Richler is so good, if you pulled a few things together you could end up with a good book.”

David Roskies won the prize for Yiddish literature for Yiddishlands (Wayne State University Press), which is in part a memoir of his mother, Masha, a formidable force in the Montreal Yiddish community, and her circle of Yiddishists and intellectuals; it is also a vibrant portrait of how Jewish culture was transported from eastern Europe to Montreal. Roskies concluded his acceptance speech by singing a Yiddish song from his late mother’s repertoire that was first sung in Vilna in 1919.

What goes into the making of a book? The CJN asked Roskies. “Well, it has to be a book that you have to write,” he replied. “So once you throw yourself into it, it takes over your life: that’s what happened to me. I spent two years writing this book, basically day and night – which is to say, when you’re not actually writing it, you’re thinking it. In my case, I started writing this book the day I got up from shivah after my mother died. It was a book I knew I would have to write some day, but I couldn’t write it so long as she was alive.”

For the first time, the 21-year-old awards ceremony was held in a downtown location rather than in its previous home in the Leah Posluns Theatre in North York. Although the seats seemed less comfortable and the post-ceremony reception overcrowded in the smaller lobby, the event was well attended and by all indications a success.

The only serious disappointment was that an appearance by famed detective novelist Howard Engel had to be postponed due to illness. Engel, who was to receive a lifetime achievement award, assured The CJN by telephone that he is looking forward to the honour at a future date.