November 13, 2024
Norman Ravvin’s recent memoir Who Gets In: An Immigration Story is told from a personal perspective, relying on extensive archival and scholarly research. Based on the author’s grandfather’s experiences as a newcomer in early thirties Canada, it conveys the experience of departure from Poland in 1930 and the challenge of confronting Canada’s grim immigration regime at the outset of the Depression. In this presentation Ravvin will use photos and documents key to the narrative to convey how telling the story from the ground up – from the perspective of the petitioner, and not the bureaucrats who resist him – shifts many of the stereotypical ideas we have about the period, newcomers’ lives and the national idea Canadians were forming at the time.
Norman Ravvin is a writer of fiction, memoir and literary criticism. His most recent book is the memoirWho Gets In: An Immigration Story. His other books include a novel of Vancouver and Poland,The Girl Who Stole Everything, the story collectionSex, Skyscrapers, and Standard Yiddish, essay collectionsHidden Canada: An Intimate Travelogue and A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity, and Memory. He is co-editor of The Canadian Jewish Studies Reader and of Failure’s Opposite: Listening to A.M. Klein. He has published widely on Canadian and American Jewish literature, on such writers as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Mordecai Richler, Leonard Cohen, Henry Kreisel and Chava Rosenfarb. His recent work has been focused on contemporary Poland, including travel throughout the country. Born in Calgary, he lived in Vancouver in the 1980s, then in Toronto and Fredericton before settling in Montreal with his family, where he teaches at Concordia University in the Department of Religions and Cultures. For 13 years he held the department’s Chair in Canadian Jewish Studies.
This talk is a part of the Gale Collaborative on Jewish Life in the Americas Lecture Series.
Sponsored by:
Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies; Department of History; Department of English; Program in Comparative Literature, Department of American Studies