Naves, Elaine Kalman 1947-

PERSONAL:

Born November 9, 1947, in Budapest, Hungary; daughter of Gusztav (an agronomist and bookkeeper) and Anna (a teacher) Kalman; married Gary Naves, June 9, 1968 (divorced, February, 2003); married Archie Fineberg (in business), August 24, 2003; children: (first marriage) Jessica Naves Gladman, Rebecca. Education: McGill University, B.A. (with first-class honors), 1967; Bishop's University, teaching certificate, 1968. Politics: New Democrat. Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—Daphne Hart, Helen Heller Agency, 509 Logan Ave., Toronto, Ontario M4K 3B2, Canada. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer. Writer in residence at secondary schools, libraries, and other institutions in Canada; workshop presenter; gives readings from her works; public speaker; jury member for literary awards. Appeared in "Paradise Lost: Journey to Vaja" (documentary film), broadcast on the television series War Stories, History Channel, 2001.

MEMBER:

Writers' Union of Canada, Quebec Writers' Federation.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Grants from Canadian Department of Heritage, 1995, 1997, and Quebec Arts Council, 1998; Canadian Literary Award, personal essay category, 1998, for "Hair"; Elie Wiesel Prize for Holocaust Literature, Jewish Book Awards, 1998; Mavis Gallant Prize for Nonfiction, Quebec Society for Promotion of English-Language Literature, 1999, for Putting Down Roots: Montreal's Immigrant Writers; Canada Council grant, 2000; citation among best books of the year, Montreal Gazette, and Mavis Gallant Prize for Nonfiction, Quebec Writers' Federation, both 2003, for Shoshanna's Story; Quebec Arts Council grant, 2003; Yad Vashem Prize for Holocaust Literature, Canadian Jewish Book Awards, 2005.

WRITINGS:

The Writers of Montreal, Véhicule Press (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 1993.

Journey to Vaja: Reconstructing the World of a Hungarian-Jewish Family, McGill-Queen's University Press (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 1996.

Putting Down Roots: Montreal's Immigrant Writers, Véhicule Press (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 1998.

(With Bryan Demchinsky) Storied Streets: Montreal in the Literary Imagination, Macfarlane Walter & Ross (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2000.

(And narrator) The Tree of Life: A Portrait of Chava Rosenfarb (radio script), first broadcast by Canadian Broadcasting Corp., 2001.

Shoshanna's Story: A Mother, a Daughter, and the Shadows of History, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2003, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 2006.

Author (and narrator) of "Journey to Vaja," a radio script, first broadcast in the series Ideas, Canadian Broadcasting Corp., 1996. Work represented in anthologies, including The Matrix Interviews, edited by R.E.N. Allen and Angela Carr, DC Press, 2001; Not Quite Mainstream: Canadian Jewish Short Stories, edited by Norman Ravvin, Red Deer Press, 2001; and Telling Stories: New English Stories from Quebec, edited by Claude Lalumiere, Véhicule Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2002. Columnist for Montreal Gazette. Contributor of more than 350 articles, short stories, and reviews to periodicals, including Queen's Quarterly, Quill & Quire, Prairie Fire, Matrix, Canadian Children's Literature, Canadian Living, Canadian Jewish News, Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), and Saturday Night.

SIDELIGHTS:

Elaine Kalman Naves told CA: "I came to writing relatively late, in my mid-thirties, not because I wanted to be a writer, but because I had a story to tell. This story, which was eventually published in 1996 some fifteen years after I'd begun it, was the memoir Journey to Vaja: Reconstructing the World of a Hungarian-Jewish Family. I had studied history in university and had developed a great interest in the impact of huge historical events on the lives of ordinary people, a theme most clearly explored in Journey to Vaja, Putting Down Roots: Montreal's Immigrant Writers, and Shoshanna's Story: A Mother, a Daughter, and the Shadows of History.

"When Journey to Vaja didn't find a home for six years (it was rejected sixty-seven times, including by McGill-Queen's University Press, which eventually did publish it), I began writing book reviews and through the back door became a literary journalist and in short order a columnist for the Montreal Gazette. My first published book was a set of profiles of Montreal writers that originally appeared in the Gazette.

"Both Journey to Vaja and Shoshanna's Story are partially set against the backdrop of the Holocaust and have won prizes for Holocaust literature. But I hadn't intended to write about the Holocaust at all (actually, I thought in Journey to Vaja that I could avoid the subject completely). What I was trying to do was find my grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and halfsister, whose faces surrounded me in photographs as I was growing up and about whom my parents spoke frequently from my youngest years. I yearned to know these people and to bring them to life on the page. Critics have commended me for my honesty. I didn't want to idealize my relatives because of the terrible fate they met. I set out to recreate them with their warts and foibles intact. I wanted them real—for me, at least as much as for the reading public.

"My literary influences are eclectic: Jane Austen, Doris Lessing, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Alice Munro, and Amitav Ghosh have all been important to me in different ways and for different reasons. Because I review a great deal of contemporary writing—both fiction and nonfiction—I am constantly reading to see how other writers ‘do it.’ I think all writers have a streak of the magpie in them. Questions of culture and identity— religious, ethnic, racial, and national—continue to fascinate me, whether I'm writing about my own family or exploring a broader canvas."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Naves, Elaine Kalman, Journey to Vaja: Reconstructing the World of a Hungarian-Jewish Family, McGill-Queen's University Press (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 1996.

Naves, Elaine Kalman, Shoshanna's Story: A Mother, a Daughter, and the Shadows of History, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2003.

PERIODICALS

Gazette (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), October 5, 1996, Libby Scheier, review of Journey to Vaja: Reconstructing the World of a Hungarian-Jewish Family, p. I6; February 6, 1999, Christl Verduyn, review of Putting Down Roots: Montreal's Immigrant Writers; May 14, 2000, Matt Radz, review of Storied Streets: Montreal in the Literary Imagination; September 6, 2003, Anna Fuerstenberg, review of Shoshanna's Story.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), October 25, 2003, Nancy Richler, review of Shoshanna's Story, p. D19.

National Post, June 26, 1999, Donna Bailey Nurse, review of Putting Down Roots; September 27, 2003, Karen X. Tulchinsky, review of Shoshanna's Story.

Ottawa Citizen, February 2, 1997, Greg McGillis, review of Journey to Vaja, p. C10.

Toronto Star, November 16, 1996, Richard Teleky, review of Journey to Vaja; August 6, 2000, Elizabeth Johnston, review of Storied Streets; December 2, 2003, Judy Stoffman, review of Shoshanna's Story, p. J25.