Read the Reviews

 

Here is what the reviewers have said about "On Foreign Soil"....

Leah Cohen, Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter:

In 1945, Falk Zolf, a Jewish teacher in the I.L. Peretz school in Winnipeg, published a moving semi-autobiographical novel in Yiddish called Auf Fremder Erd. In a series of 132 vignettes, he vividly described elements of his life from his childhood in Zastavieh until his emigration to Canada. Born in 1898, he offers us a glimpse of a generation whose youth predated the Holocaust, and was compelled to grapple with the forces unleashed during World War I....

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Martin Levin, the Toronto Globe and Mail:

We all know that this is an age of irony. Heaven forbid (and I use the phrase entirely as an idom) that anyone who pretends to an ounce of sophistication should ever feel that they didn't get the joke, that they have been naive, and gullible or, even worse, sincere.

The juxtaposition of two recent books (with their own Web sites) leads me to believe that maybe it's time to start giving a bit more credit to labours of love rather than simply those of laughter.

I'm thinking of The Darwin Awards: Evolution in Action (Dutton, 327 pages, $23.99), a book that plays very amusingly, and finally a bit disturbingly, off human stupidity, and OnForeign Soil, a newly translated novel by the late Falk Zolf...
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Saul Silverman, The Ottawa Jewish Bulletin:

Falik Zolf's autobiography, On Foreign Soil, will, I believe, gain recognition as a classic of the genre produced in Canada and (in its print edition, which is a hybrid of both Yiddish and English) could well become a serious candidate for the Governor General's literary award for translation.... Click here to read more!

 

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