“Not everyone today will recognize the name Bob Weaver, but the name of his one-time protégé, Alice Munro, will certainly ring some bells. Early in Munro’s career—more than 50 years ago—Weaver, a producer of literary programming at CBC radio, gave her what he gave so many of the people who have become our country’s most respected writers: support, encouragement and a link to the literary world at a time in their lives when they had yet to make their marks….
“Kalman Naves has sussed out a great story in Robert Weaver, and with her self-effacing style, she wisely lets it unfold on its own. The result is a timely, relevant addition to our literary landscape….”
-Anne Chudobiak, The Montreal Gazette. Read the full review.
Robert Weaver: Godfather of Canadian Literature is no standard formal biography, however. Elaine Kalman Naves is a journalist (in the best sense of that rather fluid term), and she has made no attempt to delve deeply into obscure archives. Indeed, her book is the product of extended interviews: with Weaver himself, with many of the surviving writers whose careers he nurtured, and with Eric Friesen, the CBC veteran broadcaster who was Weaver’s youthful boss during his later years with the corporation. What she offers is a multifaceted collage that may be unconventional, but that proves highly appropriate for a presentation of this particular man and the many areas in which he worked.
-W.J. Keith, Literary Review of Canada. Read the full review.
Writing to Robert Weaver at the CBC on 7 May 1975 to advocate for a young writer she wanted to help, Margaret Laurence made her case and, before closing, continued a bit apologetically, “I hope you don’t mind my approaching you about this, Bob, but as you have long been the Writers-Rock-of-Gibraltar, I thought you would not mind. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.” Found among the Robert Weaver Fonds at the National Archives (MG 31, D 162), this letter both encapsulates the central assumption of this book and offers an apt phrasing for Robert Weaver’s relation to Canadian literature. Working from the CBC between 1948-85, Weaver was, in fact, the “Rock-of-Gibraltar” for Canadian writers, something that Laurence knew well when she wrote to him.
-Robert Thacker, Canadian Literature - A Quarterly of Criticism and Review. Read the full review.
I don’t know another person in the CBC who was as loved and as admired and as warmly felt about as Bob Weaver.”
-Eric Friesen
Montreal – an island at the confluence of two rivers, adorned with an unspoiled mountain at its centre has been the inspiration of poets, novelists, playwrights, and memoirists since the time of Cartier and is the only city in the world with a flourishing literary tradition in English and French. Its landscape, history, and cultures have been immortalized by Hugh MacLennan, Gabrielle Roy, Mordecai Richler, Michel Tremblay, Yves Beauchemin, and scores of others; the characters of Duddy Kravitz, Athanase Tallard, Florent Boissonneault, The Fat Woman Next Door, and Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne have rooted themselves in the imagination of countless readers.
Storied Streets is an illustrated celebration of this rich heritage, in which the reader is lead by authors Demchinsky and Naves through the history and literary byways of Montreal’s neighbourhoods, from their beginnings to the present, with evocative passages from favourite books helping to paint the scene. With its arresting and rare archival photographs, Storied Streets is an irresistible treasure for bibliophiles everywhere.
A rich literary heritage in both English and French makes Montreal unique in North America. The Writers of Montreal celebrates the literary heritage of Emile Nelligan, Stephen Leacock, Gabrielle Roy, Hubert Aquin, F.R. Scott, Yves Theriault, and Hugh MacLennan. The Writers of Montreal also celebrates the poets, playwrights, and fiction writers who are actively writing today. Included are Michel Tremblay, Mavis Gallant, Yves Beauchemin, Louis Dudek, Marie-Claire Blais, Irving Layton, Nicole Brossard, and Mordecai Richler. These thirty illustrated biographical essays are an intriguing introduction to a distinguished tradition of Montreal writing, from early colonial times to the present.
Awards
Winner: 1999 QSPELL Mavis Gallant Prize
for Non-Fiction
Immigrant writers who have made their homes in Montreal grapple with difficult questions like reconciling loyalty to their origins and to their own most private selves with the need to find a readership, and their desire to belong to the society where they live. Putting Down Roots follows the author's exploratory journeys among writers of Italian, Haitian, Arab, South Asian, and Chinese origin, as well as those writing in Yiddish, Spanish, and Hungarian.
Awards
Winner: 2005 Canadian Jewish Book Awards Yad Vashem Prize for Holocaust Literature
Winner: 2003 Quebec Writers’ Federation Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction
Named one of the best books of 2003 by the Montreal Gazette
At the end of the Second World War, a survivor of Auschwitz makes her way home to Hungary. Of all her family, only she and one sister have survived the camps; her young officer husband disappeared into Russia years before. Believing herself a widow, Shoshanna falls under the protection of an older man who, like her, lost everything in the Holocaust. She gives birth to this man’s child by the time her beloved soldier returns, and she has to make a choice that will cloud her life – and her daughter’s – ever after.
Elaine Kalman Naves is the daughter whose earliest memories are of growing up with the consequences of that decision. Shoshanna raised Elaine with a torrent of family lore and all-too-vivid memories: the glamorous and eccentric aunts; handsome suitors and faithless husbands; death by order of the state and murder at the hand of a lover.
Shoshanna’s stories, haunting and vivid, were both a gift and a burden to her daughter. This is a lush and exotic family memoir set against momentous events yet timeless in its truth-telling lessons.
Awards
Winner: 1998 Elie Wiesel Prize for Holocaust Literature
Finalist: 1997 QSPELL Prize for Non-Ficition
One woman’s poignant quest for her past.
Part autobiography, part family chronicle, and part immigrant saga, Journey to Vaja tells the story of the Weinbergers over the course of two centuries. From settlement in a Hungarian village in the late eighteenth century to the German occupation of Hungary in the spring of 1944, Elaine Kalman Naves places her family’s triumphs and tribulations against the backdrop of Hungarian history.
Northeastern Hungary was full of places like the village of Vaja, where Jews had farmed for generations. Naves's ancestors had tilled Hungarian soil since the eighteenth century. They had married into similar farming families and maintained a lifestyle at once agricultural, orthodox, and Hungariophile. The Nyirség, a sandy, slightly undulating region wedged between the Great Hungarian Plain and the foothills of the Carpathians, was the centre of their world. But all this changed irrevocably with the holocaust; Naves's generation is the first in two centuries whose roots are severed from the soil that once nurtured them.
Naves's quest for her past began with her father, one of the few members of a vast extended family to survive the Nazi death camps. His stories and memories of ancestors were a well-spring from which he drew strength, and they became an obsession for Naves as she was growing up and when she had children of her own. Journey to Vaja is her attempt to record the lives of these ancestors and reclaim their lives as part of her and her children's birthright. It incorporates myths and stories with family letters and detailed archival research to provide an extraordinary look at the landscape of memory and a testament to the redemptive power of love and family.
Over the course of half a century, as radio producer, editor, talent scout, impresario, and anthologist, Robert Weaver nurtured and sustained three generations of writers. Among those he gave their earliest breaks were Alice Laidlaw (who became Alice Munro), Mordecai Richler, Timothy Findley, and Leonard Cohen. This book is an unbuttoned and colourful biography and an extended riff on the development of modern Canadian literature. It includes archival photographs and interviews with Weaver himself and with Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Alistair MacLeod, Barry Callaghan, Robert Fulford, and Janice Kulyk Keefer.
