Stir Cheat Sheet: 5 events to stimulate the heart and mind at the 2024 Jewish Book Festival
Michael Posner’s latest Leonard Cohen: Untold Stories installment, Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist, and more standout conversations at annual event at JCC
Canadian author and journalist Michael Posner talks about wrapping up the final installment of his epic Leonard Cohen: Untold Stories series at the Jewish Book Festival.
AMAZING FEATS of heroism during the Holocaust, true-crime mysteries in old New York and Chicago, and a deep dive into the soul-searching of Leonard Cohen’s final years are just some of the intriguing subjects writers tackle at the Jewish Book Festival, running February 10 to 15.
Here are a few of the highlights at the events held at the Jewish Community Centre:
THE ULTIMATE CANADIAN JEWISH ICON
February 10 at 7:30pm
Michael Posner talks about the latest installment of his epic, three-book oral biography, Leonard Cohen: Untold Stories – That’s How the Light Gets In, in conversation with Cohen scholar Alan Twigg. The Canadian author has conducted 560 interviews for the project, capturing the voices of the Pop Poet Laureate’s closest friends and family members, not to mention rivals, contemporaries, and—of course—lovers. The final volume investigates the last years before Cohen died in 2016, when he immersed himself in Kabbalah and wrestled intellectually with the Creator of the Universe. As for Posner, you may know him better as the bestselling author of the Mordecai Richler biography The Last Honest Man or as a former Washington bureau chief and editor for Maclean’s magazine. Fittingly, the fest opener features a live music performance, by Harriet Frost and Martin Gotfrit on guitar and violin. The talk is sponsored by Yosef Wosk.
OUR LOCAL HERO, RUDOLF VRBA
February 11 at 1 pm
In this free event, author and The Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland talks about The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World onscreen from London, in a talk with Richard Menkis. The book tells the true story of how Vrba, once a prominent UBC professor, successfully fled Auschwitz in 1944, crossing rivers and mountains to get his message out to the world—eventually credited with helping to save more than 200,000 lives. The Escape Artist is a 2023 National Jewish Book Award Winner for Biography and Holocaust.
ART & ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
February 12 at 8 pm, JCC
Mixing graphic novel and memoir, American cartoonist and writer Amy Kurzweil’s Artificial: A Love Story confronts existential questions around her artist-inventor father’s quest to resurrect her grandfather (Fredric, an accomplished conductor and pianist from Vienna who fled the Nazis in 1938) using artificial intelligence. Equally unique, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winner Sean Michaels’s new Do You Remember Being Born? imagines seven days in Silicon Valley with a poet (inspired by the real-life Marianne Moore) and her new collaborator, a digital mind just one month old. Together, the authors talk about their intersecting themes, and art grappling and responding to the coming realities of AI.
SPICY VALENTINE: LGBTQ+ AUTHORS
February 14 at 8 pm
Sex between the covers—book covers, that is—takes the spotlight at the fest’s Valentine’s Day offering. In a talk moderated by Anakana Schofield, Irish-Canadian author Tamara Faith Berger discusses Yara: A Novel, set in the sex-tape-panicked early 2000s—a “reverse cautionary tale” about a teen sent away to Israel when she falls in love with a woman a decade older. Also on hand: Los Angeles-based Rebecca “Bee” Sacks, whose The Lover is a passionate love story about a young Israeli soldier and a Canadian woman, set against a previous invasion of Gaza and amid shifting ideologies and war.
CLOSING NIGHT: JEWISH TRUE CRIME STORIES
February 15 at 8 pm
True-crime fans can hear compelling historic mysteries by authors Allan Levine and David Rabinovitch. The former’s Details Are Unprintable: Wayne Lonergan and the Sensational Café Society Murder weaves in the social history of New York City in the 1940s, starting with the discovery of the body of the 22-year old Patricia Burton Lonergan in the bedroom of her apartment. The investigation touches on the intolerance toward bisexual and gay men in the early 20th century, and the upper echelons of the Big Apple’s ostentatious café society of the time. Meanwhile, Rabinovitch’s Jukebox Empire: The Mob and the Dark Side of the American Dream reaches back to the invention of the jukebox in Chicago, expanding to the casinos of Havana and what the FBI called “the biggest bank robbery in the world”. Wolfe Rabin, Rabinovitch’s uncle, takes a central role. S.M. Freedman moderates the conversation.
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