Dancing on a Powder Keg

The Intimate Voice of a Young Mother and Author, Her Letters

Composed in the Shadow of Hitler’s Third Reich;

Her Poems from the Theresienstadt Ghetto

By Ilse Weber

Translated and Foreword by Michal Schwartz
Ruth Bondy on Theresienstadt
Afterword by Ulrike Migdal
 
”I have read many accounts, but this account by someone who did not survive… is exceptional.”
- Prof. Yehuda Bauer, Yad Vashem


”This sobering, respectful collection brings a haunting legacy out of the viciousness of the war.”
- Karen Rigby, Foreword
 
“Dancing on a Powder Keg addresses the coming tide of the Holocaust, the heartache of saving a child by sending him away, and the reality and horror of Theresienstadt. This is a haunting and unnerving narrative of one woman’s world being destroyed.”
- Renita Last, Jewish Book Council


When asked, "Who is a heroine of the Holocaust?" most people immediately respond: Anne Frank. With the publication of her diary after war she became THE female icon of the Holocaust, though she was only a child. There were women who were also heroines, and their courageous stories are only now coming to light. "The fate of Jewish women and the specific problems they faced is a topic that has barely been touched upon," says Professor Yehuda Bauer of Yad Vashem and an international authority on the Holocaust. “I have read many accounts, but this one (Dancing on a Powder Keg) by someone who did not survive, and whose story has been reconstructed, is exceptional." he says.

Ilse Weber, from Czechoslovakia, deserves recognition. Dancing on a Powder Keg which contains 100 letters and 63 poems written by Ilse between 1933 and 1944 will endear her to the hearts of American readers. This is the first time Ilse's letters, songs, and poems, originally written in German, have been published in English. The book contains photographs, drawings, and two background essays by leading experts. 

Ilse was a wife and mother, a radio personality, a musician, an author and a published poet. Dancing on a Powder Keg reveals her multi-faceted life living in Prague before the war.  It depicts how her family, career and emotions unraveled as the Nazis gained power.

Ilse, her husband Willy, and her younger son Tommy were imprisoned in the Theresienstadt ghetto from 1942-1944. Ilse worked in the children's infirmary and sang to the young patients. She risked her life writing poetry about the dire circumstances. Language offered a refuge and consolation to Ilse and her fellow inmates benefited from her writing.  Ilse's poems were recited and memorized by thousands of people in the ghetto, and survivors say the poems kept their spirits alive.

In 1944, Ilse volunteered to accompany the sick ghetto children on their transport to Auschwitz. Upon arrival, she sang her beautiful lullaby, Wiegala, to calm the children as they were led to the gas chambers. Both Ilse and her son Tommy perished along with them.  Wiegela has been recorded and performed by singers across Europe. It is currently featured in the Tony nominated Broadway show Indecent. Ilse's poignant poem Letter to My Son is featured on a YouTube video, with Ilse's grandson in the audience. (Ilse's family and the miraculous discovery of the letters provides another layer to her story narrated in Ulrike Migdal's afterword).

It Is Always Summer

By David Helwig

An author’s note to the new edition of It Is Always Summer
 
 
“A novel of relentless sensuality . . . Helwig transforms Kingston into an exotic Venice of the north.”
 
That quotation is taken from a review of one of my early novels. The review was written by my friend, Matt Cohen. Like too many others, Matt is gone now. But a revised edition of the book he reviewed many years ago has recently appeared, and that started me thinking about the day I first conceived a series of novels about Kingston. It Is Always Summer: its history is a sample of the unpredictable development of a writer’s life.
 
It was an autumn evening, in 1974 I think, and I was standing on a Toronto street corner. Davenport and Avenue Road. In that period of my life, I was working for CBC TV Drama, hired by the eminent Hungarian-Canadian theatre director, John Hirsch. I passed five days a week in Toronto and spent my weekends with my family in Kingston.
 
I worked hard in those days, sometimes reading manuscripts long into the evening and then walking the city streets to relax. Publication of The Glass Knight, a novel I’d recently completed, was imminent, and one night, just as I passed the bright lights of the local greengrocer on Avenue Road I suddenly imagined that The Glass Knight might be the first volume of a sequence of fictions about Kingston, Ontario.
 
Four volumes, I thought. A tetralogy someone would called it. Yes, I’d tackle that challenging sequence. Written over the next couple of years, the earliest editions of the Kingston novels were published by two different publishers. Canadian publishing was in a period of growth, and new writers were appearing from new and exciting publishing houses. The final volume of the tetralogy, It Is Always Summer, was published in 1983 by Stoddart, a division of General Publishing.
 
And now, more than forty years later, in a new century, my revision of It Is Always Summer, has appeared as an e-book with a small run in paperback.
 
Here is part of the original cover copy.
 
“Kingston--a nineteenth century Canadian city built at the edge of a Great Lake--displays a life apparently centered on cathedrals and prisons. At the beginning of It Is Always Summer, a number of characters have converged on the old city during a hot summer in the 1970s. Robert Mallen finds himself still obsessed with a lover he hasn’t seen for ten years. Wayne Burtch and his wife Jane discover the complexities of even the happiest of marriages. The beautiful Elizabeth Ross returns to Canada believing she is a free woman but soon enough finds herself implicated in the intricate and dangerous symphony of desire.”
 
 
 
“This sophisticated novel of manners is . . . set in the environs of Kingston . . . Helwig tells his story through his six elegantly drawn major characters – perceptive individuals all, whose pains and pleasures we feel acutely.” Publishers’ Weekly.
 
 
“I . . . enjoyed it immensely. The combination of innocence, lushness and menace held me right through it. It is a fine, true, disturbing book.” Marian Engel
 
 
It Is Always Summer was widely and positively reviewed in both Canada and the USA, but as I read the reviews I noticed one or two discerning critics who remarked that the embittered, dangerous Carl Baines was less subtly portrayed than most of the other characters. I kept this thought in mind, and a decade or so later, when all technologies were new and my electric typewriter was replaced by an adaptable digital laptop, I began a selective revision.
 
 
“Lurking beneath the languor of palmy summer days, there is a continuing sense of menace . . . This is a novel of many textures and contrasting themes . . . adroitly woven together by Helwig’s wonderful imagery – birds, water, fire, food, earth, even the island itself.” The Toronto Star
 
Rapid changes in the world--paperback editions, bankruptcies, the founding of more new presses—had the eventual effect of bringing the rights of several books back to me as the original author. The result of all this is the current, revised edition of It Is Always Summer, which is now available as an e-book and a paperback.
 
 

The Same Old Story

By Ivan Goncharov

Translated by Stephen Pearl

Stephen Pearl’s new translation of Goncharov’s Obyknovennaya Istoriya, will introduce English speakers to a Russian classic that made its author famous, and which is just as amusing and fascinating as Goncharov’s better known Oblomov, which probably owes its greater fame to the fact that the self-indulgence of the eponymous Oblomov became part of the Russian vocabulary. The same psychological insight that makes Oblomov so compelling permeates The Same Old Story with its contrast between Alexander, a young nobleman fresh from the simplicity of country life, and the older uncle, Pyotr. Readers of whatever age and from very milieu will recognize in themselves Alexander’s unreal ambitions and expectations and the sadder but wiser responses of Uncle Pyotr.

     As Nicholas Lezard said, in reviewing this new translation in the British Guardian, Goncharov’s genius lies in his ability to make us root for both: for the young foolish romantic nephew who believes in the “greatness of soul and the imperishability of true love,” and for his uncle, whose ‘job,’ as he sees it, is to ” drive all this rubbish from Alexander’s head.”

Clyde

By: DAVID HELWIG

Distinguished Canadian author David Helwig’s new novel, Clyde, is about contemporary Canada, a fatherless young man's self-definition in the final decades of the 20th century, when ‘all that is solid melts in air.’ His career threatened by his oldest friend's betrayal, he recalls milestones, often on the golf courses that furthered his successes.

Baldwin Street

BY:  ALVIN RAKOFF

Leonard Abelson is one of seven children. He lives above Abelson’s Hardware on Baldwin Street in Kensington Market in Toronto. It’s the 1930s. Leonard’s father, Sam, a former merchant sailor who speaks fourteen languages, does the purchasing for the store; his mother, Pearl, a Ukranian émigré who was a victim of pogroms and marauding Cossacks after WWI, runs the shop floor.

Leonard wants to be a writer. He witnesses the affections, struggles, and meager hopes of his neighbors—fuel for his imagination. Periodically, Leonard has to look after a young philosophy professor from the University of Toronto, Menasha Rifkin, who suffers from fugue states, squatting among the stalls on Baldwin Street reading Spinoza, Kant, and the Globe & Mail.

Halloween 1936. A band of young Italians invades Baldwin Street in search of blood. Marshall McDonald, the Irish cop who failed to quell the famous "Wop” vs. "Yid” riot at Christie Pits six years earlier, now must investigate the death of Bernie Altman, a young boy whose senseless slaughter lingers over the Jewish community like a bad dream.

In the tradition of James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan and Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Alvin Rakoff’s Baldwin Street is literary fiction at its best. This powerful novel presents a vivid mosaic of characters, the rich fabric of a community, and a boy’s coming-of-age on the dusty, rough-and-tumble streets of Toronto.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Alvin Rakoff is a film and television director, screen writer, and novelist. Former President of the Directors Guild of Great Britain, he has directed more than a hundred television dramas as well as a dozen feature films. He is the recipient of two International Emmy Awards and three Banff Film Festival awards, including Best Director and Best in Festival. His previous novel & Gillian (Little Brown) has been translated into ten languages. He was born and raised in Canada and is a graduate of the University of Toronto. He lives in London, England.

REVIEWS:

" Well-written and engaging... foretell[s] the continued intensity of social linkage among Toronto's Jews... Perhaps [their] collective consciousness is founded not only on their common religious identification, but also on the rich lessons of the immigrant experience told in the stories about Baldwin Street and places like it. " - Dr. Morton I. Teicher

" As in works by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Chaim Potok, the novel is much more than a cultural essay, its appeal is as much in universal coming-of-age drama... as in aspects of the immigrant experience. " - Booklist

"With a sure hand... Rakoff presents a parade of colourful portraits... Redolent of the atmosphere of the old market of the prewar era, this package of linked narratives is well made and charming... they make for rewarding reading..." - Canadian Jewish News

"Rakoff captures both the good and the bad that can occur when diverse cultures come together. [It is] full of eclectic characters and situations, and it is a pleasant, easy read." - Jewish Independent

"Calling Alvin Rakoff’s Baldwin Street a novel is a misnomer. Actually it is a series of vignettes, a photograph album filled with snapshots of the people who lived on Baldwin Street in Toronto’s Kensington Market during the Great Depression. Like New York’s Lower East Side, Baldwin Street was home to immigrants, predominantly Jewish, caught in the struggle between assimilating their new home and keeping their traditions alive." - Jewish Book World

"With a sure hand and trademark short sentences that sometimes seem too clipped, Rakoff presents a parade of colourful portraits and vignettes, veering from the unusual to the grotesque. In one well developed and richly painted story, Effie, a Yiddish-speaking black woman, becomes a trusted accountant for a Jewish businessman. In another, Murray Millstein, who lives on Augusta Avenue, is deeply affected by the loss of his wife and starts going to market dressed in her clothing. The Verys focuses on Melvyn and Goldie Rabinowitz, a mismatched husband and wife (respectively very small and very big) who come to Leonard by this time of college age, for advice.
Redolent of the atmosphere of the old market of the prewar era, this package of linked narratives is well made and charming. Although collectively these stories lack sufficient unity to be considered a novel, they make for rewarding reading just the same." - Bill Gladstone, Canadian Jewish News

Our Lady Of Steerage

BY: STEVEN MAYOFF

"The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting.”

This quote by Milan Kundera sets the tone for the story of 19 year old Mariasse Knyszinski, who, in 1923, has run away from her home in Kraków to be with her cousin, Piotr, in Montreal.

Aboard the S. S. Montmartre she meets a young Jewish couple, Shulim and Betye, who have suffered the loss of their 5 year old son. Betye’s grief is such that she ignores their infant daughter, Dvorah, so Mariasse takes care of her for the duration of the voyage.

The Madonna-like image of Mariasse carrying Dvorah around on the ship inspires the other 3rd class passengers to refer to her as Our Lady of Steerage.

This begins a visceral connection between Mariasse and Dvorah and for the next 40 years they wander in and out of each other’s lives, their relationship weathering both fierce devotion and bitter betrayals.

The non-linear narrative and image-driven prose of Our Lady Of Steerage manifests the novel’s chief themes: the vagaries of memory and the struggle for self-reinvention. 
Adult readers who are looking for psychological insight and emotional complexity will be drawn in by Mariasse’s personal journey that takes her from her Catholic upbringing to her eventual conversion to Judaism and ultimate return to Catholicism. 

How this full circle mirrors Dvorah’s lifelong struggle with manic-depression illuminates the shadowy divide between the mind and the soul, only to reveal the beating heart that continually brings together and drives apart these two women. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Steven Mayoff was born and raised in Montreal, lived in Toronto for 17 years and has been writing full time in the bucolic splendour of western Prince Edward Island since 2001. His fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals across Canada and the U.S., as well as in Ireland, France and Algeria.

His story collection, Fatted Calf Blues, won a 2010 PEI Book Award, was short-listed for a 2010 Re-Lit Award and was a Top 5 Finalist for the 2011 CBC Cross-Country Bookshelf (Maritime division). It was praised in the Globe & Mail as showing "a strong imagination at work.”

He has collaborated on short radio plays for CBC and on a stage play, Bully, which was produced at the Theatre Centre in Toronto in 2001. He received a nomination for a Dora Mavor Moore Award as lyricist for the musical, SwingStep, which was staged at the Ford Centre in North York in 1999. 

As a librettist he has written a rock musical, Dorian, with composer Ted Dykstra and a short chamber opera, Milk Bar, with composer Jim O’Leary, which was performed as a student production at Mount Allison University in 2014. He is currently working on a full-length opera, Sikutopia, with Greenlandic composer, Arnannguaq Gerstrøm.

He is also completing a poetry collection, Red Planet Postcards, to be published in 2016. Our Lady Of Steerage is his first novel. His web site is www.stevenmayoff.ca