House on the River: A Summer Journey
By Nessa Rapoport
Harmony Books. 146 pages. $22.

In literature’s most ambitious exploration of the collision between Canada and the Jews, “Solomon Gursky Was Here,” novelist Mordecai Richler conjured Ephraim Gursky, a highly Bronfmanesque patriarch and explorer who so influences Inuit tribes that they don taleisim long after his death. Reading that novel and a couple of Richler’s others, one senses the author marshalling all his creative energies to deliver something richly, and uniquely, Canadian Jewish.

Nessa Rapoport takes an alternate route toward a similar destination in her memoir, “House on the River.” (more…)