Gouged out by the crushing forces of nature during the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago, the ravines of Toronto form an enchanting urban forest in the heart of Canada’s biggest city. More than a century ago, when wilderness areas were usually regarded as expendable, the ravines were ravaged by logging and industrialization. But […]
Author: Sheldon Kirshner
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Hanoi Leaves Vietnam War Behind
When I was a university student in the mid and late 1960s, the war in Vietnam was big news. Rarely a day passed that the local newspaper, the now-defunct Montreal Star, did not carry at least one story about it, sometimes displaying it on the front page. As portrayed in the media, Vietnam was […]
Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida explores a dark and miserable period in Poland’s history: the Holocaust. Polish films have embraced this theme with increasing frequency since the end of the communist era, as scholar Marek Haltof has written. Ida, which was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival this month, is part and parcel of this genre. Filmed […]
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The Railway Man Conveys Deep Emotions
Fifty six years after the appearance of David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, Australian director Jonathan Teplitzky serves up a movie remarkably like it with respect to theme, content, spirit and locale. The Railway Man, screened at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, is based on a true story by Eric Lomax, […]
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Friends From France
A Russian joke from the 1970s: How many Jews are there in Russia? Six to eight million. How many Jews would leave Russia? Twenty to twenty five million. During the communist era, when Russia was known as the Soviet Union, emigration was generally not permitted. Restrictions were loosened in the early 1970s, allowing a trickle […]
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Survival in a Brutal Environment
A camera pans over an expanse of impenetrable jungle before zooming in on the boughs and leaves of a soaring tropical hardwood tree. Birds chirp and trill, and in the distance, an airplane trailing smoke and fire crashes into a body of water in a fiery explosion. It is 1942 and the Japanese army is […]
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The Tragedy and Glory of Nathanael West
Nathanael West (1903-1940) was a promising but under-appreciated novelist during his brief lifetime. His four novels – The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), A Cool Million (1934) and The Day of the Locust (1939) – sold fewer than 5,000 copies, garnered mixed reviews and earned a pittance. Tragically, he did not […]
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Italy and the Holocaust
Fascist Italy, led by Benito Mussolini from 1922 to 1943, was the model of Adolf Hitler’s totalitarian state, as well as Germany’s major European ally before and during World War II. But unlike Hitler, Mussolini was not a rabid antisemite and had Jewish followers and friends. Indeed, Mussolini praised Italian Jews as good citizens and […]
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French culture under Nazi occupation
German armoured divisions rolled into Paris on June 14, 1940, inaugurating Germany’s four-year occupation of France. An armistice, signed eight days later in a forest clearing near Compiegne, where Germany had officially conceded defeat in World War I, carved up France into a patchwork of zones. Despite France’s ignominious capitulation, theatres, cinemas, opera houses, art […]
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Quebec’s Charter Of Values
In unveiling the Charter of Values recently, Quebec Premier Pauline Marois optimistically predicted that it would unite Quebeckers. Much to her distress, it has become a political football, a source of deep division in the province. Judging by a Leger Marketing poll, the charter is supported by only a plurality of Quebeckers, 43% to 42%. […]