Beth Kaplan | |
|---|---|
| Born | Elizabeth Kaplan 1 August 1950 |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Occupation(s) | Writer, Teacher |
| Relatives | Jacob Gordin (great-grandfather) |
Beth Kaplan (born 1 August 1950) is a Canadian writer, teacher, and actor.
Beth Kaplan | |
|---|---|
| Born | Elizabeth Kaplan 1 August 1950 |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Occupation(s) | Writer, Teacher |
| Relatives | Jacob Gordin (great-grandfather) |
Beth Kaplan (born 1 August 1950) is a Canadian writer, teacher, and actor.
Kaplan began her professional acting career in 1970, with a school touring production for Toronto's Young People's Theatre. [1] She worked for a decade as an actor, primarily in Vancouver. She appeared in nine tours, including one national tour. She left the stage in 1980 to earn an MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia.
She has taught personal essay and memoir writing at Toronto Metropolitan University (previously Ryerson University) since 1994 and also at the University of Toronto since 2007, wherein 2012 she won U of T's Excellence in Teaching Award. A fellow of the Banff Centre's Literary Journalism program, she produces So True, [2] a twice-yearly reading series for her long-term students and herself, at the Black Swan in Toronto. A board and conference committee member of the Creative Nonfiction Collective, [3] she gave a master class at a recent conference entitled "The Writer as Performer."
Through the nineties, Kaplan had scores of essays published in newspapers and magazines and on CBC radio. [4] Her first book,Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin, a biography of her great-grandfather, was published in 2006 and reissued in paperback in 2012. [5] It was called "a witty, shrewd, elegant book which tells a story of vital importance" by Tony Kushner. [6] She spoke about the book across Canada, four times in New York including at the 92nd Street Y, [7] in other American cities, in French in Paris, [8] and at Oxford University. [9] In 2008 she delivered the annual Wexler Lecture in Jewish History in Washington, D.C.
Her memoir All My Loving: Coming of Age with Paul McCartney in Paris, and her textbook on creative writing True to Life: 50 Steps to Help You Tell Your Story, appeared in 2014. [10] [11]
Her memoir Loose Woman, published in 2020, is the story of her fraught years as an actress through the seventies and particularly the year 1979, when living and working with men with disabilities in France changed her life. [12]
Kaplan is the great-granddaughter of the Yiddish playwright Jacob Gordin, [5] the daughter of Canadian scientist and activist Dr. J. Gordin Kaplan, [13] and the niece of the American bridge champion, Edgar Kaplan.
Mendele Mocher Sforim, born Sholem Yankev Abramovich or S. J. Abramowitch, was a Jewish author and one of the founders of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature.
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Yiddish literature encompasses all those belles-lettres written in Yiddish, the language of Ashkenazic Jewry which is related to Middle High German. The history of Yiddish, with its roots in central Europe and locus for centuries in Eastern Europe, is evident in its literature.
Itzhak Katzenelson (Hebrew: יצחק קצנלסון, Yiddish: (יצחק קאַצ נעלסאָן was a Polish Jewish teacher, poet and dramatist. He was born in 1886 in Karelichy near Minsk, and was murdered on 1 May 1944 in Auschwitz.
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Mary Dunlop Maclean was a writer, journalist, and first managing editor of The Crisis from 1909 until her death.
David Ignatoff, born David Ignatovski, was a Russian-born American Yiddish author and playwright. A member of the Di Yunge literary movement, Ignatoff wrote short stories, novels, plays, and children's stories.
Lili Berger was a Yiddish writer, antifascist militant and literary critic.
Vivian Felsen is a Canadian translator from French and Yiddish into English, and a visual artist of Jewish origin. She is the recipient of the Canadian Jewish Book Award (2001) and J. I. Segal Award for her translations dealing with Canadian Jewish history and Holocaust memoirs.
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