From the unbridled creativity of an iconic Canadian multidisciplinary artist, to a story from the old country about light in the darkness — co-authored by a 93-year-old first-time author from Ottawa — the winners of the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards (CJLA) reflect the diversity of Jewish life.

Now in their 11th year, the awards are run by the University of Toronto’s Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies, with support from the Miles Nadal JCC, which will host the celebration of Jewish literature on Oct. 26.

Several of the prize-winning authors, and at least one illustrator, are expected to attend.

The CJN spoke with two of the authors of CJLA’s 2025 winning titles ahead of the awards.

Karen Levine, who co-authored the youth book category winner The Light Keeper, says the book comes during an evidently difficult and “dicey” moment, including for telling Jewish stories, following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel.

The subsequent war against Hamas in Gaza reached a fragile ceasefire earlier this month, which both Hamas and Israel have reportedly broken.

Although the book was finished before the Oct. 7 attacks, the connection to creating light was crucial to putting out the book now, she says.

“Many of the people I know were hungry for anything that had light in it, because things felt so dark,” said Levine in an interview.

“I think for kids to have a hopeful and light-filled Jewish story at a time like this matters, because they’re surrounded, whether they like it or not, by some very tough, ugly things in the world — and this is everything that is not ugly.”

Publishing the “slow, sweet story” was also an important factor in a world and society impacted by “the rise of Trump and Trumpian language,” Levine explains.

“With the terrible things that are going on in the world, a touch of gentleness is very welcome, and it’s slow,” she says of the story. That’s important “for kids who are bombarded by images and screens” filled with digital notifications.

“It’s a degree of light in very dark times, and that’s what we have been in.”

A former CBC Radio documentary editor and producer, Levine’s previous book, the nonfiction work *Hana’s Suitcase, *became an international sensation.

(The CJN was the first news outlet to run the story, Levine notes, about the titular suitcase, containing the personal items of a teenage girl, Hana Brady, who was killed by the Nazis. The case was found years later in Japan by researcher Fumiko lshioka, the curator of a Holocaust education centre in Tokyo, who tracked down Brady’s survivor brother who was living in Canada. Levine’s CBC Radio documentary, then book publication, led to touring presentations around the globe for years with Ishioka and George Brady, who lived in Toronto and died in 2019.)

The new book started with Sheila Baslaw who asked for Levine’s help writing her family’s stories.

Baslaw, 93, who lives in Ottawa and has now presented the book to a number of schools in the area, had been writing stories for her own family, based on her father’s Russian* shtetl *childhood.

In the story, Shmuel, a 10-year-old boy who wants to support his family, must overcome a fear of heights to fix a broken light in one of the town’s new lampposts during a storm.

“With the help of his big sister,” says Levine, Shmuel winds up having “a real impact in his community and [helping] out his impoverished family, which is what motivates him, partly at least.”

Levine says readers “love the warmth of the story” and the message to kids about contributing to their community, “which kids really want.”

She says the recognition means a great deal to her and co-author Baslaw and illustrator Alice Priestley, all of whom plan to attend to receive the award Oct. 26.

“I feel, more strongly than ever, that we need to get both tough and gentle Jewish stories out into the world,” said Levine. “And we need to remember where we come from, in terms of our values and our history. So we’re all just thrilled that this little light is being held up.”

Other winning titles include Israeli-Canadian Ayelet Tsabari’s debut novel, Songs for the Brokenhearted, a vivid and intricately woven tale tackling Israeli-Yemeni Jewish history, love, family intrigue and the Mizrahi experience in Israel, which took the top fiction prize.

Author Ezra Glinter’s Menachem Mendel Schneerson: Becoming the Messiah won the biography prize, and Toronto-based journalist John Lorinc’s No Jews Live Here, which retraces his Hungarian Jewish family’s journey, won the award for memoir.

The CJLA website carries a full list of this year’s winners — including authors of history, Yiddish, and poetry books — and jury members.

Jury chair Edward Trapunski, a writer and broadcaster who founded the annual awards, described the importance of the winning titles.

“While events around the world affect us, these winning books show that many topics engage our interest,” wrote Trapunski in a press release.

The nine winning books include Tsabari’s Songs, “a story centred on Yemeni-Jewish music,” he wrote, along with a biography and a collection of essays, respectively, “celebrating the lives and commitment of two influential figures of the 20th century — Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, spiritual leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, and Mashel Teitelbaum, painter, teacher, and founder of the New School of Art in Toronto.”

This year’s Jewish Thought and Culture book award winner, *Mashel Teitelbaum: Terror & Beauty, *comprises a collection of essays and reproductions of visual artworks in a single tome with more than 20 contributors, edited by Andrew Kear, whose own lengthy essay anchors the comprehensive work.

“Mashel Teitelbaum: Terror & Beauty,” which explores the work, life, and impact of the groundbreaking Canadian artist and writer (seen here in contact sheet images from an undated photo shoot), won the 2025 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for top Jewish Thought and Culture book. (Images via Goose Lane Editions)

The director of programs at Museum London (Ont.), Kear told The CJN that the multiple perspectives, from artists of multiple generations, was key to forging the comprehensive work about an artist many Canadians don’t know or may have forgotten.

Originally from Saskatoon, where his family home was a hub for a small but vibrant Jewish community, Teitelbaum, who created work as a painter, poet, screenwriter, and novelist, died in 1985 at 64.

Kear notes it’s now 40 years since his passing, a fitting moment for the first comprehensive work on Teitelbaum in decades.

“So much time has passed that there’s this opportunity,” he said, to reach people who don’t know his work. The contributors, he found, imbued the book with a “wonderful kind of freshness that these new perspectives brought,” although many of the authors, like Kear himself, brushed up on their subject, learning more about Teitelbaum while writing their responses to his work.

He says “looping in other writers, other curators, artists especially played a key role” in shaping the book.

“They had to kind of wrestle with it in real time as they were introduced to this artist” on another level, for the book’s responses. The essays consider “everything from [Teitelbaum’s] racial, [and] social connections, political involvement, his connections to his Jewish culture, his time during the Second World War, and what that sort of did to him and did to his work,” according to Kear, impacting the artist’s “relationship to family, his endeavours as an art educator — a pedagogically experimental art instructor.”

Kear acknowledges the many facets of Teitelbaum’s life.

“He’s a complicated, very dynamic kind of artist, very dynamic kind of personality, and I don’t just mean that as a euphemism for the fact that he did suffer from mental illness,” he said. “Even apart from that, his creative energy was Herculean.”

Indigenous Canadian poet Duke Redbird contributed a poem about Teitelbaum for the book, titled “Drinking with Mashel,” which Kear says is both a poem and a story about the connection the two shared.

Dating back to his roots in Saskatoon, “Teitelbaum was an early and sincere advocate for Indigenous rights in this country and that really comes through in a lot of the connections he had,” said Kear. “Growing up with Indigenous folks, and culture there… but he was kind of ahead of his time in terms of his sympathies for land rights and negotiations.”

Some of Teitelbaum’s formative visual works reflected his upbringing, steeped in Hebrew school, Yiddish study, and Jewish youth group activities.

“The first illustration he published was actually for Young Israel, and it’s… this drawing of the wandering Jew motif,” said Kear. “So he’s immersed in that very early, [and] he’s also very much meeting kids, and people outside of the Jewish, community proper, and he’s embracing that multiethnic flavour.”

Author

Jonathan Rothman is a reporter for The CJN based in Toronto, covering municipal politics, arts and culture, and security, among other areas impacting the Jewish community locally and around Canada. He has worked in Canadian online newsrooms and on multimedia creative teams at the CBC, Yahoo Canada, and The Walrus. Jonathan’s writing has appeared in Spacing, NOW Toronto (the former weekly), and Exclaim! magazines, and *The Globe and Mail. *He has also contributed arts, music, and culture stories to CBC Radio, including an audio mini-documentary report from Brazil.

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