Norman Ravvin

Ravvin wrote this book to illustrate the antisemitism in Canada's immigration policy from Sir John A. Macdonald's government to the death of Mackenzie King. Using the experience of his grandfather's experience immigrating to Canada from Poland in 1930 and his struggle to bring his wife and two children to Canada during the following five years. Only the intervention of Mrs. A. J. Freiman with Prime Minister R. B. Bennett brought success to his many pleas for help.

In the Immigration Department were two bureaucrats who fought the immigration of people from eastern Europe, especially from Poland, and Jews from anywhere. F. C. Blair and A. L Joliffe, who influenced who was permitted to enter Canada from the Komagata Maru incident in 1914 to the time of the Great Depression, fought to maintain Canada as a place for white people from British Empire sources.

The book is also a biography of his grandfather, Yehuda Yosef Eisenstein and in doing so, a vivid description of the experience of immigrants who settled and pioneered the Canadian west. The book covers the Great Depression and how settlers were defeated by it and in some cases overcame it. It also explains why every small town in the west had a Chinese restaurant and a Jewish owned store.… (mais)

This catalogue contains artwork, two curatorial studies and scholarly essays from exhibitions and a symposium mounted by Loren Lerner at Montreal's Temple Emanu-El Beth Sholom. Artists under discussion include Marcel Braitstein, Sylvia Safdie, Marion Wagschal, Devora Neumark, Sorel Cohen and Rita Briansky. The volume includes an introduction by Loren Lerner, Chair, Dept. of Fine Arts, Concordia University, and essays by Rabbis Howard Joseph and Leigh Lerner, Norma Joseph and Norman Ravvin. Artists' illustrations in colour. The curatorial essays discuss both the artists and the Judaica collection in the Temple's Aron Museum.

(Abstract source: http://web2.concordia.ca/jchair/en/publications/hungryibooks.htm)… (mais)