2004 short list:
The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky
by Karen X. Tulchinsky
Polestar, An Imprint of Raincoast Books
The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky
Set in Toronto during the 1930s through the 1950s, the core of the novel explores prejudice and violence alongside possibility and hope, and all their volatile effects on generations of a close-knit Jewish immigrant family.
The main character Sonny Lapinsky is a womanizing, world-champion boxer whose life unfolds against the backdrop of the Depression, the Christie Pits riot of 1933 and the SecondWorld War.The trademark Tulchinsky warmth and humour are in evidence here too, only richer and fuller than her earlier work, as she details the lives and events of this rich saga.
Karen X. Tulchinsky
Karen X. Tulchinsky is a recent graduate of the Canadian Film Centre's Writer's Lab and Professional Screenwriting Program, where she wrote the feature length screenplay Love Ruins Everything, based on her award-winning novel of the same name.
This summer, Karen was chosen for a B.C. Film Screenwriter's Fellowship to write a new screenplay, under the mentorship of veteran screenwriter Peggy Thompson (Better Than Chocolate). Set in Vancouver, One Thousand Cranes is the story of a young Japanese Canadian woman, whose carefully constructed world begins to unravel after the unexpected death of her father. Her short film Straight In The Face was screened in the Toronto International Film Festival, the Montreal World Film Festival and in Germany, at the Verzaubert Film Festival.
Tulchinsky's novel Love Ruins Everything was named one of the top ten books of 1998 by the Bay Area Reporter. In Her Nature won the 1996 VanCity Book Prize. She is the editor of ten anthologies of contemporary fiction, publishes short stories and writes for numerous newspapers and magazines, including The Vancouver Sun, The Georgia Straight and Writer's Digest.
Excerpt from The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky
Notes on a biography of Sonny Lapinsky
By Moses Nino Lapinsky, Ph.D.
April 1, 2003, Vancouver, B.C.
My father was a prizefighter. Perhaps you've heard of him? Sonny “The Charger” Lapinsky. He won the World Middleweight Title in 1948, lost it to the British fighter Tommy Foster in 1953, won it back in '54, then retired from boxing forever, when his body began to give out. He was thirty-one years old. Throughout his career, Sonny fought the top middleweight boxers of his day: Jake La Motta, Rocky Graziano, Sugar Ray Robinson, Tippy Larkin, Jimmy Doyle and Marty Servo, just to name a few.
In many ways, I am not my father's son. Where he was tough and athletic, I am sensitive and intellectual. He was extrovert, vivacious with life, whereas I am rather quiet and calm. He dropped out of high school the moment he turned sixteen, partway through the tenth grade. I lived the first third of my life in the proverbial ivory tower, earning a B.A. in Liberal Arts from the newly built York University in 1965. I completed my Masters in History in '67 and earned my Ph.D. in 1974—after a three-year absence from academia to, as we called it at the time, “find myself.”
Since completing my thesis on the History of Eastern European Immigrants to Canada in the First Half of the Twentieth Century, I have not felt compelled to write. Until now. I suppose the urge has been brewing inside of me for the past couple of years, circumstances edging my writing ambitions to the forefront. In the fall of 2001 a journalist by the name of Roderick Matthews, a sports writer for the Toronto Star, published an unauthorized biography of my father. At first I was amused. Then I read the book, and I became enraged, not an emotion I regularly feel. I am a mild-mannered man, not given to erratic emotions. But the book, you see, is complete, unadulterated trash, three hundred and twenty-three pages of half-truths and speculation, based on sketchy interviews with people who barely knew my father, and inadequate, sloppy research—if you can even call it that. The book, which is titled Below the Belt, characterizes my father as a womanizing wife beater who neglected his children, brought disgrace to his community and won the middleweight championship on questionable terms.
I'd be the first to acknowledge that my father's parenting skills were inconsistent at best. And yes, it's true, my mother left him when she could no longer live within the confines of their tumultuous marriage. But there are two things I know for sure. That he won the World Middleweight Title fair and square, and that despite tumultuous his personal failings, Sonny Lapinsky brought nothing but honour to the fledgling Jewish community that was just beginning to establish itself in Toronto when he was a boy. Therefore, I find myself strangely compelled to set the record straight, as it were, and to write my own biography of my father, Sonny Lapinsky, the Jewish Canadian prizefighter.
From The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky by Karen X. Tulchinsky. Published by Polestar, An Imprint of Raincoast Books. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
