100 books like Search Out the Land

I love books written by multiple authors. Some of the greatness of this multi-author work comes from the fact that 28 different scholars have contributed to it, many of them working in pairs to create new insights they might not have been able to achieve alone.

Some chapters compare an aspect of Canadian Jewish life with that of another religious or ethnic minority in Canada (for example, Chinese, Muslims, and Métis). Other chapters compare an aspect of Canadian Jewish life with that of Jewish communities in other countries (including Australia, France, and the Former Soviet Union).

So, I reaped the benefit of learning about Canadian Jews through various comparative perspectives. I found virtually all of the essays in it to be stimulating, approachable, and punchy-short, so I didn’t feel compelled to read the whole thing cover to cover, uninterrupted by another book. I just went back to it, bit… show more.

This collection of Canadian Jewish fiction gave me 33 different short fiction, personal essays, and poetry windows into the hearts and minds, longings, fears, and dreams of Canadian Jews.

I can’t think of another volume that captures so much life at the intersection of Jewish literary vitality and Canadian content–understood liberally. I think I was most moved by David Bezmozgis’ and Isa Milman’s contributions.

I love this book’s sprawling effort to answer all sorts of basic questions about the living, vibrant Jews of Canada.

The book was so solid and sold so well when it originally came out with a trade publisher it was re-issued. It uses good social science and approachable theories.

I found it highly informative, intuitive, and curiosity-provoking. What’s more, it’s really funny. If you’re a Canadian Jew, you’ll learn something about yourself or some part of the Jewish world of which you’re a part of. And if you’re not both Canadian and Jewish, you’ll get a very good grounding in understanding the world’s fourth-largest Jewish community. 

Ravvin has written excellent works of fiction and literary scholarship. His book is a masterful blend of two genres: family biography and social history.

I found this book to be so engrossing I could barely put it down. It traces the author’s grandfather’s dogged saga to emigrate from Poland to Canada, to find some mooring amidst the precarity of being a new immigrant, a foreigner, and a Jew, and to try desperately to bring over his wife during a time when Canada’s immigration gates were closing.

I love this book’s ability to seamlessly alternate between deep archives-based history (how did the immigration labyrinth actually work and why was it designed that way?) and personal/ancestral memoir (what was it like for one human–of existential consequence for the author–to navigate that labyrinth?).

It's a remarkable story of one immigrant crisscrossing the country in the era that immediately preceded the much more frequently… show more.

By placing the American runaways’ experience in a continental perspective, this well-researched book brings a fresh outlook to the increasingly popular topic of runaways.

Besides the North and Canada, the contributors examine the motivations, lives, and networks of the people who looked for freedom in all directions. Taking their lives into their own hands, they found refuge in Southern cities, the Texas-Mexico borderlands, Mexico, which abolished slavery in 1829, Indian Country, and the Caribbean.

For each destination, the contributors study and evaluate the degree of freedom, formal, semiformal, and informal, which these self-liberated men and women were able to achieve.

I like the way the author weaves a unique tale of a Ukrainian family’s escape at the end of WWII with present-day events. The book demonstrates that WWII’s long-lasting impact on families was not limited to Germans and Jews. Like me and my children, the author had no part in the war, yet we are all impacted by it and its aftermath.

Ayelet Tsabari’s stunning memoir is all about departure, wandering, displacement, identity, and belonging. As a Mizrahi, or non-European Jew, and a minority in Israeli society and culture, she establishes herself as a powerful voice for emigrants and minorities and speaks truth to power.

In the West, Ashkenazi Jewish culture dominates, and most people are ignorant of, and/or quite indifferent to, the myriad Jewish communities of the world and their complex and rich cultures. Her experiences in the Israeli army, her travels, her difficult relationships, her escape from trauma and pain as she enters into different worlds, and how she makes peace with herself. She focuses on those like herself on the margins of Israeli society and exposes the misogyny and discrimination she and other immigrants like herself experience on a daily basis.

Many of the aspects she writes about resonate deeply with me as an Indian immigrant in the US,… show more.

This moving story awakened new empathy in me for my extended Canadian family as they waited for news of us for so many years. It gave me a new understanding of the effects of war on families, even at such great distances. 

A daughter and granddaughter tells the story of her family’s escape from the holocaust in 1939. Safely in Canada, the country we left for Germany, in the same year, they fear for their family in Lithuania as telegrams of desperation arrive and news of events in Germany become known. 

When the deities dedicated to the history of the French and Indian War got together to recommend their own list of the best books on the war that made America, they made Francis Parkman’s multi-volume work required reading. And the good news is that even if they had not, it is worth diving into headfirst.

The French and Indian War is often overshadowed by the American and then French Revolutions that followed on its heels. Yet, neither of them would have ever happened without the completely lopsided British victory in the first. Parkman, writing in the Nineteenth Century, was among the first scholars to shed light on the immense impact wrought by the fight for control over North America in the 1750s. His work is massive as it digs into the very origins of both countries’ humble beginnings and rapid growth in the New World. But fear not! If his… show more.

This novel, published in 2000 by the University Press of New England, has in my opinion never gained the readership it deserves. It’s a rich, funny, deeply humane captivity tale based on the true story of Nathan Blake, who was taken by Algonkian-speaking people from his home in Keene, New Hampshire, in 1746, and brought up to Canada, where he was held for three years as a slave. The novel weaves a defamiliarized but extremely plausible-feeling tapestry of early colonial America that complicates the stereotypes established by Cooper’s influential novel set in the same period, and Hebert’s main character, Caucus-Meteor—an elderly, multilingual Indian and the last survivor of his band—is by my lights one of the great characters in literature.