DAVE MARGOSHES & DAVID SPANER

JEWISH FICTION FROM WESTERN CANADA

DAVE MARGOSHES / A Simple Carpenter

DAVID SPANER / Keefer Street

MODERATOR: TOM WAYMAN

Set in Middle Eastern “Holy Land” in the early ‘80s, against the backdrop of the civil war in neighboring Lebanon, the novel’s protagonist is a Christ-like character trying to live a low-key life in contemporary Israel/Palestine. Part biblical fable, part magic realism, and part thriller, “Dave Margoshes’s A Simple Carpenter is many things: a meditation on memory and identity, on religious faith and doubt, on the yearning for a messiah, and on the perennially tangled, fraught state of Arab-Israeli relations. This is a novel as beguiling as it is ambitious.” — Guy Vanderhaeghe
DAVE MARGOSHES is a poet and fiction writer. He has published twenty books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry and his work has appeared widely in literary magazines and anthologies. He is the recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Dave lives near Saskatoon, SK.

DAVID SPANER / Keefer Street

Jake Feldman grows up in the working-class immigrant neighborhood of Strathcona in Depression-era Vancouver. Jake’s left-wing, rabble-rousing street politics eventually lead him to join the international volunteers fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Fifty years later, he recaptures the passion of his youth during a reunion of civil war volunteers in Spain.
This is the first novel to bring to life the vibrancy of Strathcona and its largely Jewish Keefer Street and explores how to preserve your idealism in order to live a life of purpose.
DAVID SPANER has been a feature writer, movie critic, reporter, and editor for numerous newspapers and magazines. His most recent book, Solidarity: Canada’s Unknown Revolution of 1983, was nominated for the George Ryga Prize for Social Awareness in Literature.