MONTREAL – The Jewish Public Library (5151 Cote St. Catherine) of Montreal is known for its ability to attract high-profile authors, particularly during Jewish Book Month, which continues through Nov. 20.
Deborah Lipstadt, Tatiana de Rosnay and Allie Carter stand out as the undisputed headliners.
Award-winning author Deborah Lipstadt kicked proceedings off last Monday. The distinguished professor at Emory University gave an overview of her book Eichmann’s Trial. It is the story of SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann’s trial and analyzes the dramatic effect of the survivors’ courtroom testimony.
Tatiana de Rosnay, whose sensational book Sarah’s Key was recently made into a motion picture, was on the schedule for Nov. 2.
Ally Carter, author of the best-selling Gallagher Girls and Heist Society series, is this year’s keynote on Nov. 13 (7 p.m.) for the trendy Girl’s Night Out affair.
The closing event will feature Rebecca Margolis, author of Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil: Yiddish Culture in Montreal, 1905-1945.
Lipstadt spoke about the capture of SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann by Israeli agents in Argentina in May of 1960 and how his subsequent trial in Jerusalem by an Israeli court electrified the world.
Eichmann used his organizational gifts and innate brutality to arrange for 1.5 million European Jews to be evicted from their home countries and transported to their deaths at Auschwitz and Treblinka. His trial, conviction and execution sent a message to the world.
The trial’s survivor testimonies, as Lipstadt observes in her story of the proceedings “transformed…the public’s consciousness” of the destruction and devastation of the Holocaust.
Sarah’s Key tells the interlocking stories of Sarah, a 10-year-old girl who locks her brother in a cabinet to hide him during the roundup, and a 45-year-old modern-day journalist named Julia who becomes obsessed with finding out if Sarah is still alive.
The charismatic de Rosnay will share the powerful journey she took while creating her beloved novels, Sarah’s Key and A Secret Kept. Both, which feature themes of love, loss and perseverance, have resonated with readers around the world. Sarah’s Key has sold more than 4 million copies in 39 countries and was the inspiration for the film of the same name.
At her Montreal talk, de Rosnay, the author of 10 novels, will discuss her forthcoming work and divulge insights into her writing process.
Born on Sept. 28, 1961 in the suburbs of Paris, de Rosnay is of English, French and Russian descent. She was raised in Paris and then in Boston, when her father taught at MIT in the ’70s. She moved to England in the early ’80s and obtained a Bachelor’s degree in English literature at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich. Returning to Paris in 1984, she became press attaché for Christie’s and then Paris editor for Vanity Fair magazine until 1993.
The author shared with the Jewish Tribune news that her new project, The House I Loved, will hit shelves on Feb. 14, 2012. Four of her already published books – A Secret Kept, The Neighbour, Spirals and Moka – will be made into motion pictures.
What was her inspiration for Sarah’s Key?
“I have always been interested in places and houses and how places and houses keep memories; how walls can talk,” she said. “Many of my books explore that theme. One of my novels – La Mémoire des Murs, the Memory of Walls – describes the rue Nélaton, in the 15th arrondissement, not far from where I live in Paris. That is where the great Vél d’Hiv roundup took place on July 16, 1942. I realized I didn’t know much about what happened that day. I was not taught about this event at school, during the ’70s. And it seemed to be shrouded by some kind of taboo. So I started reading and researching.
“As I progressed through my research, I was… appalled by what I discovered concerning the Vél d’Hiv roundup, especially about what happened to those 4,000 Jewish children, and I knew I had to write about it,” she added. “But I also knew it could not be a historical novel, it had to have a more contemporary feel to it. And that’s how I imagined Julia’s story taking place today, linked to Sarah’s, back in the ’40s.”
Sarah and her family are not based on any real people.
“Sarah and her family come out of my imagination,” she said. “My daughter Charlotte, who was 11 years old when I wrote this book, was a major source of inspiration for Sarah. Sarah’s brother’s destiny is also an event I imagined, although I do believe it could have happened in real life.”
Ally Carter was born Sarah Leigh Fogleman on Jan. 1, 1974. The name Ally Carter was chosen to separate her from her other work and the last name Carter was selected so that her books would be near her fellow adult fiction novelist Jennifer Crusie.
She graduated from Oklahoma State and Cornell universities, publishing her first book (Cheating at Solitaire), in 2005.
Despite the sound of her birth name, she is not Jewish. “When I went to college there was another girl named Sarah Fogelman, with the last name spelled differently,” she said. “This Sarah was Jewish and we became friends.”
Carter is best known by teens for her two series of books, Heist Society and The Gallagher Girls.
Heist Society is about a girl named Kat, whose family business is thievery.
“I was driving in the car one day listening to a book on tape and it was about a cat burglar,” she told me in a phone call from her Oklahoma base. “I thought, ‘what if I had a lead character name Kat who was a burglar?’ That is how it all got started.”
Next up for her is Gallagher Girls 5: Out of Sight, Out of Mind. Plans call for it to be in stores sometime early in 2012.
The Gallagher Girls series revolves around the students at Gallagher Academy For Exceptional Young Women, a school for ‘very gifted girls,’ but actually one for espionage spies in training.
And how did she come up with that scenario?
“Years ago I was watching an episode of the old Jennifer Garner spy series Alias,” she recalled. “But I was really only watching it out of the corner of my eye. It was a flashback scene and the Garner character was growing up in an orphanage. Because I was not paying close attention, I thought she was in a school for spies. Well she wasn’t, but I loved the concept and this is how the Gallagher Girls were born.”
Margolis, associate professor in the Vered Jewish Canadian Studies Program at the University of Ottawa, explores the lives and work of Yiddish activists, writers, scholars, performers and organizations that fuelled Montreal’s thriving Jewish community during the first half of the 20th century. The author will be introduced by Ira Robinson, professor of Judaic Studies in the Department of Religion at Concordia University, and Chair of the J.I. Segal Committee of the Jewish Public Library.
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