Description
Set largely among the Jewish community of inter-war New York City, this is a beautifully-told collection of scenes from Morgenstern's life. The tricky ground of writing the advice column for a provincial Yiddish daily; successes during, and hard times after, the Depression; a position at the top of his craft as a labour specialist in the New York City Yiddish press - these and many more form a portrait of "a fundamentally decent man in morally perplexing situations".
"I've been working on a series of stories about the character I call "my father" - loosely based on my own father - for about 30 years...I wondered if I could use the character in other situations. [One] story had begun with a spark of truth - a story my father had told many times about a foolish man he'd once known - and the spirit of my father.
"All the stories in the series walk that precarious tightrope between memoir and fiction..."I worked hard, with the stories' structure and a sort of old-fashioned expository style, to make them feel like memoir - like truth."
About the author
Dave Margoshes is a poet and fiction writer. Most of his adult life has been spent in western Canada, for 35 years, in Saskatchewan. He began his writing life as a journalist, working as a reporter and editor on a number of daily newspapers in the U.S. and Canada, and has taught journalism and creative writing. He has published twenty books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. His work has appeared widely in literary magazines and anthologies, in Canada and beyond, including six times in the Best Canadian Stories volumes; he's been nominated for the Journey Prize several times and was a finalist in 2009. His Bix's Trumpet and Other Stories won two prizes at the 2007 Saskatchewan Book Awards, including Book of the Year. His collection of linked short stories A Book of Great Worth, was named one of Amazon.ca's Top Hundred Books of 2012. Other prizes include the City of Regina Writing Award, twice; the Stephen Leacock Prize for Poetry in 1996 and the John V. Hicks Award for fiction in 2001. In 2022 he was the recipient of the Lieutenant Governor's Lifetime Achievement Award. Dave lives on an acreage near Saskatoon.
