BOOKS

BOOKS Family stories run through Jewish book festival

by Charlie Smith

This year’s Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival is shaping up as a family affair.

That’s because in some cases, local authors are related to others who are speaking on the same day or evening. And in other presentations, authors are dealing with wrenching family-oriented issues.

“It was not planned as such but it became such,” festival director Dana Camil Hewitt told the Straight by phone.

For example, on Monday (February 22) morning, Bonnie Sherr Klein will discuss her children’s book, Beep Beep Bubbie, with students at two Jewish day schools in a virtual presentation from her home. It features a grandma who gets a new scooter, which concerns her granddaughter, Kate. But after a while, Kate realizes that the scooter enables them to have fun shopping at Granville Island.

Klein is also a documentary filmmaker who has relied on a scooter herself since suffering a stroke many years ago. The evening of that same day, her son, Seth Klein, will be interviewed by political scientist and climate-policy expert Kathryn Harrison about his book A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, in a separate virtual presentation.

A Good War delves deeply into Canada’s remarkable effort to ramp up military production during the Second World War. This enables Klein, former B.C. director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, to offer valuable lessons for how governments in the 21st century can take giant leaps in a short period of time to stave off a climate breakdown.

“We’re very excited to have him in conversation with Kathryn Harrison from UBC,” Camil Hewitt said.

Also on February 22, Calgary author Naomi K. Lewis joins educator Abby Wener Herlin in conversation about her well-regarded memoir, Tiny Lights for Travellers. Nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2019, Tiny Lights for Travellers explores her Jewish identity while retracing her grandfather’s escape from the Nazi-occupied Netherlands.

Two U.S. authors, Myla Goldberg and Ilana Masad, are scheduled to speak together on February 23 at an event entitled “On the Mothers and Daughters Spectrum”. Goldberg, a Brooklyn-based novelist and banjo and accordion player, is the New York Times bestselling author of Bee Season, which deals with family breakdown. Another of her novels, Wickett’s Remedy, takes place during the Spanish flu pandemic at the end of the First World War.

Her latest novel, Feast Your Eyes, features a narrator describing how her mom juggled a photography career with parenthood. Lit Hub has described it as a “mother-daughter story, an art-monster story, and an exciting structural gambit”.

The other author that evening, Masad, tells a tale in All My Mother’s Lovers about a queer, pot-smoking daughter’s discovery of five sealed envelopes that her recently deceased mother had addressed to five men. This event will be moderated by the Globe and Mail’s Marsha Lederman.

The family theme will be featured again on February 24 when Carleton University political science professor Mira Sucharov will launch her new book, Borders and Belonging: A Memoir, which delves into childhood phobias triggered by her parents’ divorce and the challenges of writing and teaching about Israel-Palestine relations. This event will be moderated by Vancouver psychiatrist Max Sucharov, who is her father.

That evening, another event will have a family theme. Entitled “Creativity Runs in the Family”, it will feature two Vancouver sisters, Naomi Eliana Pommier Steinberg and Myriam Steinberg, each discussing their books.

Naomi Steinberg’s Goosefeather: Once Upon a Cartographic Adventure is both a memoir and a travelogue. It details how she spent 382 days travelling around the world by road, rail, land, and sea, performing her one-woman show. She begins in a French town where her non-Jewish maternal grandfather saved her Jewish grandmother from the Nazis.

Sister Myriam Steinberg’s Catalogue Baby: A Memoir of (In)fertility chronicles her decision to become a mother after turning 40, relying on the support of family and friends, as she didn’t have a partner.

“They have a joint moderator [Lani Brunn], a very good friend of theirs, who knows both very well and read the books,” Camil Hewitt said. “Each book is outstanding. They are fantastic personalities.”

The final event at this year’s Cherie Smith VCC Jewish Book Festival, featuring Jewish actor and author Tovah Feldshuh, was originally scheduled on February 25 but was recently postponed until April 15. Feldshuh, who has portrayed former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir and former U.S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has written a new memoir, Lilyville: Mother, Daughter, and Other Roles I’ve Played.

“Almost all of the events except for Tovah Feldshuh are ‘pay what you can,’” Camil Hewitt said. “This means there’s a free option for everything.” g

Clockwise from left: The Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival features Myla Goldberg (photo by Richard Avedon), Seth Klein (photo by Erica Johnson), and Myriam Steinberg (photo by Diane Smithers).

Festival TIP SHEET

THIS YEAR’S VIRTUAL Cherie Smith

JCC Jewish Book Festival features international authors from several countries. Here are three top picks. c ESHKOL NEVO (February 20)

The festival will open with bestselling Israeli author Eshkol Nevo (photographed), whose newest novel, The Last Interview, reads like a structured interview but, according to

Jewish Book Council reviewer Ranen Omer-Sherman, “rapidly evolves into a disquieting examination of the protagonist’s soul as one disturbing revelation leads to the next”. Moderated by the Globe and Mail’s Marsha

Lederman. c NORMAN LEBRECHT (February 21)

British historian Norman Lebrecht, author of Genius and Anxiety: How

Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947, describes how Jewish visionaries such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Marcel

Proust, Franz Kafka, and Albert Einstein left an indelible mark. Moderated by musicologist Richard Kurth. c CARLA GUELFENBEIN (February 21)

Chilean novelist Carla Guelfenbein’s newest book, In the Distance With You, revolves around an 80-year-old ascetic woman’s impact on those around her, taking readers through Chile’s history from the 1950s to the present day.

Moderated by festival director Dana

Camil Hewitt. g

Almost all the events are…‘pay what you can.’

– festival director Dana Camil Hewitt

The Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival runs from Saturday (February 20) to Wednesday (February 24), with the closing event featuring Tovah Feldshuh taking place on April 15.

ARTS Unique collaboration brings Frequencies to life

by Charlie Smith

Normally, a B.C. writer stands atop the Association of Book Publishers of B.C.’s weekly bestsellers list. But as the Straight went to the printer, a novelist from the other side of the country—Halifax’s Francesca Ekwuyasi—held that position for Butter Honey Pig Bread, a phenomenally successful debut novel about three Nigerian women.

Ekwuyasi, who was born in Nigeria, achieved this distinction because Vancouver-based Arsenal Pulp Press was smart enough to publish it, so it qualified as a B.C. book for that list.

That’s not the only accolade for Butter Honey Pig Bread. It’s also part of this year’s CBC Canada Reads series, and it was longlisted for last year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Before Ekwuyasi became coast-tocoast-to-coast famous, she was like any other struggling novelist, ready to accept a writing gig when it was offered. So she eagerly responded to an invitation from Heist theatre cofounder Aaron Collier to help develop a new multimedia storytelling show called Frequencies.

“Aaron had created these sounds,” Ekwuyasi recalled in a recent phone interview with the Straight. “It was pretty wild.”

She and multidisciplinary artist Stewart Legere, were asked to write something in response to these noises, which included the sounds of a forest. In addition, Collier had a series of podcast interviews about his experience of childhood loss following the death of an older brother.

“And, again, he invited us to write in response to that,” Ekwuyasi said. “They were really incredible prompts.”

The overarching storyline was Collier’s, but the show included elements written by Ekwuyasi and Legere in this very unusual collaboration. This month, Vancouver’s Pi Theatre will livestream Frequencies with Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg and Theatre Outré in Lethbridge.

In the version that Ekwuyasi saw in the first iteration, a river and forest were personified, something that’s quite common in Nigerian literature. “It definitely exists in Ibo folk tales and folklore, same as [with] Yoruba folklore,” she said.

Frequencies is part of Pi Theatre’s Provocateurs Presentation Series, which was launched in 2017 to bring innovative and incendiary artists to Vancouver. The company’s artistic and producing director, Richard Wolfe, told the Straight by phone that the pandemic made it impossible to attract touring shows, so he went searching for productions that could be livestreamed. The first two in this year’s series are Heist’s Frequencies and Montreal-based La Fille du Laitier’s Macbeth Muet.

One of the innovations in Frequencies are the different camera angles during the livestream. Viewers have the option to look from the main camera angle, but they can also choose other angles from cameras shooting the production from behind the stage. In addition, Heist has included a virtual-reality component, enabling the audience to see what a character is viewing through a headset. “It’s a very cool company and a very cool project,” Wolfe said. g

Halifax writer Francesca Ekwuyasi’s novel, Butter Honey Pig Bread, has been a B.C. bestseller, but before it was published, she coauthored an innovative theatre project incorporating virtual reality.

Pi Theatre will livestream Macbeth Muet on Thursday and Friday (February 18 and 19) and Frequencies on Saturday and Sunday (February 20 and 21) as part of the Provocateurs Presentation Series.

Digidance ushers performing arts into the home

by Charlie Smith

For decades, Canada’s dance companies have been bringing artists and audiences together for shared experiences. So when the pandemic arrived last spring and people were being told to stay away from one another, it created a conundrum.

How could this cherished art form continue? One response has been various livestreamed solo performances in Vancouver. Then there was the livestreamed Idan Cohen–choreographed duet between real-life partners Brandon Lee Alley and Racheal Prince at the Chutzpah! Festival.

The really big shows, however, have been forbidden due to physical-distancing requirements to prevent the spread of COVID-19. But recently, four of Canada’s most important dance presenters—DanceHouse (Vancouver), Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), the National Arts Centre (Ottawa), and Danse Danse (Montreal)—unveiled a new initiative, Digidance, to bring large-scale productions to a computer screen near you.

“There’s been a lot of discussion about the arts moving into more of a digital form of distribution,” DanceHouse artistic and executive producer Jim Smith told the Straight by phone. “And with Canada Council investments in digital funding, this moment became a catalyst to sort of advance that conversation.”

Digidance’s first show, an 85-minute filmed version of Vancouver choreographer Crystal Pite’s Body and Soul with 36 dancers from Paris Opera Ballet, will be livestreamed from Wednesday (February 17) to next Tuesday (February 23). Smith pointed out that a live show like this—created on the 350th anniversary of the Paris Opera Ballet company in 2019—would never be presented in Vancouver, but the film can be seen in small and large centres across the country.

“I don’t want to sort of speak out of turn in terms of our upcoming programming ideas,” Smith said. “But…there are iconic Canadian choreographers whose work or whose influence has completely informed the current generation of dancemakers.”

Smith acknowledged that this raises questions about whether there’s any chance to present some of these older shows in future presentations. He added that the documentation would have to be of a sufficiently high calibre so the artists themselves would feel that it properly reflected their work.

In addition, Smith noted, there’s a growing Indigenous creative voice in dance as the country comes to terms with historical truth and reconciliation.

“Hopefully, this is a way to broaden out the conversation of bringing some potential iconic historic works in the past,” he said.

After theatres across the country shut down due to the pandemic, Smith said that there was a desire for a “startling innovation” to respond quickly to this situation.

“That all sounds really great, and yet you realize innovation is actually very complicated,” he stated. “It takes time and it takes experimentation and it takes patience.”

He also emphasized that Digidance shows will never replace the experience of going to see a live dance performance and all that this entails. However, he thinks Digidance will introduce a new level of convenience and affordability for dance lovers.

“Showing up to the theatre is a big commitment in itself, because there’s a big ticket price,” Smith said. “But choosing when you can watch something at your leisure in front of your computer—it comes with a lot more flexibility.” g

DanceHouse’s Jim Smith says that innovation can be complicated. Photo by Rebecca Ross.

Hopefully, this is a way to broaden out the conversation…

– DanceHouse’s Jim Smith