In November 2013, the Jewish community centres (JCCs) of Greater Toronto hosted a Jewish Book Festival with only three authors, a production so small it was easy not to notice.
But the JCCs’ second annual Jewish Book Festival, which unfolds at both the Schwartz/Reisman Centre and the Prosserman JCC from Nov. 9 to 16, features a much-expanded roster that will likely generate a lot more attention and community involvement.
The diverse program spotlights 16 mostly American authors and their newly published books, with themes ranging from parenting to sporting events, health to the Holocaust, interfaith issues to Israel. Although the festival apparently lacks a strong headlining author, it is anchored by a large book and gift sale.
In terms of thematic intensity, the books run the gamut from a seemingly placid cookbook about food preserving – Mrs. Wheelbarrow’s Practical Pantry, by Cathy Barrow – to an edgy, or at least cutting-edge, memoir, Blood, Marriage, Wine & Glitter, by Toronto-based S. Bear Bergman, about his experience as one of two transgender fathers of a young son.
“We like to attract different audiences and we have to make sure that every segment of our population has something to choose from,” says Gustavo Rymberg, programming director of the Schwartz/Reisman Centre.
Although it comes immediately on the heels of Holocaust Education Week, the festival is also hosting several Holocaust-themed events including readings from the non-fiction book A Replacement Life by Borish Fishman and the novels Shanghai Escape by Toronto author Kathy Kacer, The Sweetness by Sande Boritz Berger, and Jacob’s Oath by Martin Fletcher.
Eager to involve young families, the festival has scheduled several talks on parenting just when parents will be dropping off their children for Sunday morning Hebrew school at both JCCs. Titles include Ruth Feldman’s The Green Bubbie, a book about grandparenting; and Amy S. F. Lutz’s Each Day I Like It Better, a book about how to care for children with autism, Carla Naumburg’s Parenting in the Present Moment and Logan Levkoff’s Got Teens?
Other featured titles are John Rosengren’s The Fight of Their Lives, about the ugly Marichal-Roseboro baseball brawl of 1965; David Kalis’s Vodka Shot, Pickle Chaser, a memoir about his experience seeking his family’s past in the Soviet Union; Seth Fishman’s young adult tale The Well’s End; Yael Ben-Zion’s Intermarried; Lynn Davidman’s Becoming Un-Orthodox; and Richard Cohen’s Israel, Is It Good for the Jews?
The roughly 350 JCCs across North America have collectively proclaimed November as Jewish Book Month, and many hold book festivals during the month. JCC programmers chose from more than 300 books and authors that were showcased during a three-day conference in New York in May.
Ironically, the now-defunct Toronto Jewish Book Fair was a fixture of the city’s November calendar until several years ago, when the Koffler Centre for the Arts amalgamated it with the Canadian Jewish Book Awards into the Toronto Jewish Literary Festival and moved it to the spring.
But nature and the Jewish communal calendar apparently both abhor a vaccuum, so a large November book festival is back on the roster once again.
“We’re not competing with them, we are very different,” Rymberg asserts, referring to the springtime Toronto Jewish Literary Festival and the eight-day autumnal festival that he has programmed.
The Schwartz/Reisman Centre is in the Lebovic Campus, 9600 Bathurst St. in Vaughan. The Prosserman JCC is in the Sherman Campus, 4588 Bathurst St. in North York. Tickets to the readings are $5 each. For details or to purchase tickets, please visit srcentre.ca or prossermanjcc.com, or phone 905-303-1821, ext. 3006.