Canadian Jewish Literary Awards recognize works on migration, survival

TORONTO — The Canadian Jewish Literary Awards will be presented in Toronto on Oct. 25.

Two of the recognized works explore Jewish histories of migration, displacement and survival.

Danila Botha's graphic novel Vidal imagines the life of a fictional Sephardic Jewish artist whose life takes him from Tiberias to the artistic world of prewar Paris, then into the upheaval of the Second World War and the resistance movement.

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"You could be lyrical on the page and you could write a description," Botha told The Canadian Jewish News. "Or you can use the art to show exactly what it felt like and what he experienced."

Botha said drawing and painting have long been part of her writing process, helping her imagine details like a facial expression or a gesture.

With Vidal, she realized the art could become the story's medium.

She said colour, texture and perspective offered a way to convey not only what the protagonist saw, but how he experienced the world.

Botha's research included material from Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as French antisemitic propaganda, resistance documents and the July 1942 arrests of Jews in Paris known as the Vel d'Hiv roundup.

"It's incredibly heartbreaking to research, but also, it was a beautiful, vibrant, amazing scene, and I hope I captured that," she said of prewar Paris's Jewish artistic community.

Botha was influenced by other artists who use illustration to tell Jewish stories, such as Ken Krimstein's When I Grow Up: The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers and But I Live: Three Stories from Child Survivors of the Holocaust.

Historian Yolande Cohen's companion volumes, Moroccan Jews in France and Canada and Migrations postcoloniales des Juifs du Maroc vers le Canada et la France, won the award in the Scholarship category.

The pair bring together and revisit decades of research into Moroccan Jewish migration.

Cohen's work traces journeys across countries and languages, while intersecting with her own family's path from Morocco to Montreal.

Her research began in the 1980s as a project documenting the experiences of Moroccan Jewish neighbours in Montreal.

She started interviewing older members of the community, including people who spoke Arabic or Judeo-Arabic, hoping to preserve memories that might otherwise be lost.

The project led to a book published in 1987, but the response from some community members surprised Cohen.

"Why are you telling us what we already know?" people asked her.

She told The Canadian Jewish News she saw a gap between what the community knew about its own experience and what had been recorded in published histories.

The challenge, she said, was to keep asking questions and look beyond the familiar account.

Her research expanded from asking why people had left Morocco to examining how they moved.

With files from The Canadian Jewish News