Feb 11
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PJ LIBRARY – FOR KIDS
Sun Feb 11, 11:00am FREE REGISTER
ERIC A. KIMMEL
The legendary Eric A. Kimmel is the author of over 150 books for children, including the classics Anansi and the Moss-Covered Rock and the Caldecott Award Honor Book Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins. Eric is a five time winner of the National Jewish Book Award and has been awarded the Sydney Taylor Lifetime Achievement Award by the Association of Jewish Libraries for his work.
Eric will be presenting several of his more recent books for ages 4-8, as well as for ages 8-12
AT VANCOUVER TALMUD TORAH on Monday, Feb 12, 10:00am.
The Story of Esther; Right Side Up: Adventures in Chelm; Escape from Egypt; A Whale of a Tale
OUR LOCAL HERO, RUDOLF VRBA
Sun Feb 11, 1:00pm FREE
JONATHAN FREEDLAND / The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World
In Conversation with Richard Menkis
(The author will appear on screen from London.)
Rudolf Vrba was a UBC professor and a prominent figure in our community. The Escape Artist tells how, in April 1944, he became one of the very first Jews to escape Auschwitz – and did it to warn the world. Determined to let the last Jews of Europe know what fate awaited them at the end of the railway line, he and fellow escapee Fred Wetzler climbed mountains, crossed rivers, and narrowly missed German bullets until they had smuggled out the first full account of Auschwitz the world had ever seen – a forensically detailed report that would eventually reach Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the Pope. And yet too few heeded Vrba’s warning. Some could not believe it, others thought it easier to keep quiet. And yet, in the end, the Vrba-Wetzler report would help save 200,000 Jewish lives. That’s why the author argues that Rudolf Vrba deserves to be honoured alongside Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler, and Primo Levi, among those whose experiences define our understanding of the Holocaust.
JONATHAN FREEDLAND is a columnist for The Guardian in London. He is a past winner of an Orwell Prize for journalism and has written 12 books including nine thrillers, mostly as Sam Bourne. The Escape Artist is a 2023 National Jewish Book Award Winner for Biography and Holocaust.
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH VANCOUVER HOLOCAUST EDUCATION CENTRE
ESSAYS AS LIFE STORIES
HOW BC IS THAT? – OFFBEAT MEMOIRS
Sun Feb 11, 4:00pm $18
In conversation with Alan Twigg and Elee Kraljii Gardiner
GARY BARWIN / Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity
From John Coltrane to the Hebrew alphabet, the celebrated novelist and poet has expanded his repertoire to include essays. In this collection he engages brilliantly with the big questions in life and explores aspects of his Jewish identity. Sparked with the joyful wordplay Barwin is known for, these essays are brimming with clever anecdotes, sagacious tales, and a palpable warmth.
GARY BARWIN is a writer, composer, and multidisciplinary artist and the author of 26 books including Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted and Yiddish for Pirates, which both won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award.
YOSEF WOSK / Naked in a Pyramid: Travels and Observations
Having circumnavigated the world and also visited both Poles, Yosef Wosk has been a progenitor of psychogeography. The title piece conjures one of his most dramatic experiences from the time he climbed the Great Pyramid of Giza. “I spent most of my life as an unrepentant pilgrim, exploring often exotic and embarrassing sensations of mind, body and soul”, he writes. Naked in a Pyramid is an unconventional book by an original thinker.
YOSEF WOSK is a rabbi, philanthropist, educator, author, scholar, community leader and prominent figure in the BC arts scene. Here, for the first time, he reveals his private world in a medley of observations.
CANADIAN JEWISH STORIES
Sun Feb 11, 6:00pm $16
NORMAN RAVVIN / Who Gets In : An Immigration Story
The book is an eye-opening account of Jewish immigration in the 1930s, focusing on Ravvin’s grandfather Yehuda Yosef Eisenstein’s struggle against anti-Semitic immigration policies. Based on archival research as well as poignant family letters, the book blends biography and memoir, revealing his grandfather’s fight against xenophobia and challenging Canada’s perceived benevolent and tolerant image.
NORMAN RAVVIN is the award-winning author of The Girl Who Stole Everything and A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity, and Memory. He is a professor at Concordia University in Montreal.
Norman will also present at 2:00pm at White Rock South Surrey JCC, by donation.
NEW YORK’S JAZZ-AGE UNDERWORLD
Sun Feb 11, 7:30pm $18 BUY TICKETS
DEBBY APPLEGATE
In Conversation with ROBERTA RICH (Roberta will appear on screen from Colima, Mexico)
DEBBY APPLEGATE / Madam: the Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age
More than the biography of the remarkable Jewish madam Polly Adler, the queen of the underworld in Jazz Age New York, this is a colourful, funny and unorthodox history of Jewish life told through the perspective of a “good Jewish girl” from a Russian shtetl who immigrated to Brooklyn and rose to become “the Female Al Capone” and one of the most renowned Jewish-American women in the 20th century. Her brothels were underworld salons that catered to everyone from the
Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers to celebrity artists, politicians and gangsters. The New York Times Book Review praised Madam as a “fast-paced tale of radical, willful transformation,” and “a breathless tale told through extraordinary research.”
DEBBY APPLEGATE is a historian whose first book, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. She lives in Connecticut, USA.
ROBERTA RICH author of The Jazz Club Spy
The Jazz Club Spy is a riveting historical thriller about a Jewish cigarette girl in 1930s New York who recognizes the soldier who had burned down her Russian village years earlier in a pogrom, only to be swept up in a political conspiracy on the eve of World War II. From the gritty tenements to the glittering Jazz clubs of the 1930s, this is a thrilling novel about a brash young woman who must use all her wits to save the ones she loves.
ROBERTA RICH is the bestselling author of The Midwife of Venice, which was published in thirteen countries, The Harem Midwife, and A Trial in Venice. She lives in Vancouver and Colima, Mexico.