Toronto Book Launch with author Norman Ravvin

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

Doors open at 7 PM

Talk begins at 7:30 PM

This event is FREE but registration requested due to limited space

A stolen house on a Polish square. A broken pop bottle on Vancouver’s east side. A mystery lurks in these old and new worlds, and Norman Ravvin lovingly recovers the past of both in a tale that moves masterfully between Poland and Canada. The Girl Who Stole Everything is a fresh and telling portrait of the relationship between prewar Polish shtetl life and Jewish lives in Canada today.

Join award-winning, Montreal-based author Norman Ravvin for a conversation with Yoni Goldstein (Editor, The Canadian Jewish News) about the process of writing the book, delving into the complex connection between Jews in Canada with past and present-day Poland.

Presented by Makom: Creative Downtown Judaism and FENTSTER

Ravvin’s books will be available for purchase and signing after the talk.

Books for sale courtesy of Ben McNalley Books

Light refreshments will be served. Kashrut observed.

The Toronto launch forThe Girl Who Stole Everything is presented in conjunction with the current FENTSTER gallery exhibition in Makom’s storefront window, Mezuzah Okno, created by Warsaw-based artists Helena Czernek and Aleksander Prugar.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Norman Ravvin’s books have won prizes in Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec. His novels include The Joyful Child, Café des Westens, andLola by Night, which appeared in Serbian translation. His story collection Sex, Skyscrapers, and Standard Yiddishwon the Ontario Arts Council K. M. Hunter Prize, and his travel essays are collected in Hidden Canada: An Intimate Travelogue. He has traveled many times to Poland, to his family’s prewar home and across the country, and this experience informs his writing. He lives in Montreal where he is a professor at Concordia University. Ravvin was the co-organizer of the first Polish academic conference of Canadian-Jewish literature and culture at the University of Lodz in 2014. His essays on Canadian and American Jewish literature are collected in A House of Words: Jewish Identity and Memory (McGill-Queen's). The essays included in this volume focus on such writers as Eli Mandel, Leonard Cohen, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Mordecai Richler, and Chava Rosenfarb. He is the editor of Not Quite Mainstream: Canadian Jewish Short Stories (2001) and Great Stories of the Sea(1999). Recent articles include a chapter on Canadian Jewish writers in the Oxford Handbook to Canadian Literature (2016); essays on Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, and A.M. Klein in his co-edited volume Failure's Opposite: Listening to A.M. Klein (McGill-Queen's).