Feb 26
FOR CHILDREN GR. 4-7 – at VTT
Wednesday, Feb 26, 9:00am FREE
ELLEN SCHWARTZ / Friends to the Rescue
Illustrated by ALISON MUTTON
Inspired by a true story, and told in two different time periods, Friends to the Rescue takes place in Fossa, Italy, a small mountain village that offered refuge to Jews during WW II. When the village suffers a devastating earthquake 65 years later, the Jewish refugees whom the town had helped travel to Fossa to return the favour.
ELLEN SCHWARTZ is an award-winning author of twelve children’s books including Heart of a Champion, Princess Dolls, as well as her memoir Galena Bay Odyssey. She is the winner of the 2020 Western Canada Jewish Book Award for Children/Youth Literature.
JEWISH FICTION FROM WESTERN CANADA
Wednesday, Feb 26, 6:00pm $18 Buy tickets
Moderator: Tom Wayman
DAVE MARGOSHES / A Simple Carpenter
Set in Middle Eastern “Holy Land” in the early ‘80s, against the backdrop of the civil war in neighboring Lebanon, the novel’s protagonist is a Christ-like character trying to live a low-key life in contemporary Israel/Palestine. Part biblical fable, part magic realism, and part thriller, “Dave Margoshes’s A Simple Carpenter is many things: a meditation on memory and identity, on religious faith and doubt, on the yearning for a messiah, and on the perennially tangled, fraught state of Arab-Israeli relations. This is a novel as beguiling as it is ambitious.” — Guy Vanderhaeghe
DAVE MARGOSHES is a poet and fiction writer. He has published twenty books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry and his work has appeared widely in literary magazines and anthologies. He is the recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Dave lives near Saskatoon, SK.
DAVID SPANER / Keefer Street
Jake Feldman grows up in the working-class immigrant neighborhood of Strathcona in Depression-era Vancouver. Jake’s left-wing, rabble-rousing street politics eventually lead him to join the international volunteers fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Fifty years later, he recaptures the passion of his youth during a reunion of civil war volunteers in Spain.
This is the first novel to bring to life the vibrancy of Strathcona and its largely Jewish Keefer Street and explores how to preserve your idealism in order to live a life of purpose.
DAVID SPANER has been a feature writer, movie critic, reporter, and editor for numerous newspapers and magazines. His most recent book, Solidarity: Canada’s Unknown Revolution of 1983, was nominated for the George Ryga Prize for Social Awareness in Literature.
QUEER JEWISH STORIES
Wednesday, Feb 26, 8:00pm $18 Buy tickets
SARA GLASS / Kissing Girls on Shabbat
In conversation
A moving coming-of-age memoir in the vein of Unorthodox and Educated, about one young woman’s desperate attempt to protect her children and family while also embracing her queer identity in a controlling Hasidic community.
Growing up in Brooklyn’s Orthodox community, Sara Glass knew one painful truth: what was expected of her and what she desperately wanted were impossibly opposed. Tormented by her attraction to women and trapped in a loveless arranged marriage, she found herself unable to conform to her religious upbringing and soon, she made the difficult decision to walk away from the world she knew.
SARA GLASS, Ph.D. is a therapist, writer, and speaker who helps members of the queer community and individuals who have survived trauma to live bold, honest, and proud lives. She lives in Manhattan.