How does the past shape contemporary Jewish experience in Canada? How does it feel to be Jewish today? These are the questions that inform Volume 1 of The New Spice Box, an aromatic blend of poetry, short stories, and creative non-fiction by writers who probe all matters Jewish.

Nora Gold dares to reconceive the biblical story of Joseph as Yosepha. For Seymour Mayne, an aunt’s comforter transported from Poland to the New World evokes a lost past. Chava Rosenfarb's Bergen Belsen diary takes us back to the almost unimaginable moment of liberation, while Yiddish is a vital force for Karen Shenfeld's father.

Across this collection, the past is given new life and meaning by authors who write from their Canadian experience and sensibility. This is a new window on Canadian Jewish writing: its vista is expansive and the view, unmatched. Come take a look.

Ruth Panofsky is an award-winning poet who lives and writes in Toronto, where she teaches Canadian Literature and Culture at Ryerson University. She is the author of The Force of Vocation: The Literary Career of Adele Wiseman (2006) and The Literary Legacy of the Macmillan Company of Canada: Making Books and Mapping Culture (2012). Her award-winning critical edition of the collected poetry of Miriam Waddington appeared in two volumes in 2014 and, most recently, she edited The Spice Box: Canadian Jewish Writing (2017). Her newest work, Toronto Trailblazers: Women in Canadian Publishing, which focuses on key twentieth-century publishers, editors, and literary agents, was published in 2019. She is also an award-winning poet. She received the Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award for Laike and Nahum: A Poem in Two Voices (2007). Radiant Shards: Hoda's North End Poems, her third volume of verse, received a Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Research Award.

Ruth Panofsky's profile page