Singing From The Darktime

Singing from the Darktime is a compelling picture of a rural childhood in Germany at a time when the world was about to change. By 1937 Hitler's power was beginning to penetrate the peaceful agricultural village in the Rhine Valley where S. Weilbach lived with her family. Without warning, her carefree life became a scene of bewildering racial abuse, followed by the violent invasion of her home, the arrest of her father, and the disappearance of her beloved grandmother. Weilbach's story of her eventual flight and concealment reveals how children in crisis retreat into imagination, reliving past happiness. Escaping Germany, Weilbach describes her surreal experience aboard the luxury refugee ship the St Louis, refused the right to land first by Cuba and then by the United States and Canada and finally forced to turn back to Europe, where England and other countries eventually provided some sanctuary. She recalls her experiences in London - loneliness, confusion, and an incomprehensible language but also the healing acceptance of classmates and teachers. With the approach of World War Two, the mass evacuation of her school to the countryside brings a return to village life, with surprising happiness and the hint of a better future, despite the immediate chaos of war. Singing from the Darktime presents a voice of innocence and resilience in a cruel and frightening world. An afterword by renowned Holocaust scholar Doris Bergen provides historical context.

Escaping Germany, Weilbach describes her surreal experience aboard the luxury refugee ship the St Louis, refused the right to land first by Cuba and then by the United States and Canada and finally forced to turn back to Europe, where England and other countries eventually provided some sanctuary. She recalls her experiences in London - loneliness, confusion, and an incomprehensible language but also the healing acceptance of classmates and teachers. With the approach of World War Two, the mass evacuation of her school to the countryside brings a return to village life, with surprising happiness and the hint of a better future, despite the immediate chaos of war. Singing from the Darktime presents a voice of innocence and resilience in a cruel and frightening world. An afterword by renowned Holocaust scholar Doris Bergen provides historical context.

It has been thirty years since the publication of Irving Abella and Harold Troper's seminal work None is Too Many, which documented the official barriers that kept Jewish immigrants and refugees out of Canada in the shadow of the Second World War. The book won critical acclaim, but a haunting question remained: Why did Canada act as it did in the 1930s and 1940s? Answering this question requires a deeper understanding of the attitudes, ideas, and information that circulated in Canadian society during this period. How much did Canadians know at the time about the horrors unfolding against the Jews of Europe? Where did their information come from? And how did they respond, on both public and institutional levels, to the events that marked Hitler's march to power: the 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws, the 1936 Olympics, Kristallnacht, and the crisis of the MS St Louis? The contributors to this collection - scholars of international repute - turn to the wider public sphere for answers: to the media, the world of literature, the university campus, the realm of international sport, and networks of community activism. Their findings reveal that the persecutions and atrocities taking place in Nazi Germany inspired a range of responses from ordinary Canadians, from indifference to outrage to quiet acquiescence. It is challenging to recreate the mindset of more than seventy years ago. Yet this collection takes up that challenge, digging deeper into archives, records, and testimonies that can offer fresh interpretations of this dark period. The answer to the question "why?" begins here. Contributors include: Doris Bergen, Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Chair in Holocaust Studies, University of Toronto, Richard Menkis, Department of History, University of British Columbia; Harold Troper, Department of Theory and Policy Studies in Education, OISE/University of Toronto; Amanda Grzyb, Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario; Rebecca Margolis, Centre for Canadian Jewish Studies, University of Ottawa; Michael Brown, Department of Languages, Literatures and Lingustics, York University; Norman Ravvin, Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies, Concordia University; and James Walker, Department of History, University of Waterloo.

In Love in a Dark Time, Colm Tóibín looks at the life and work of some of the greatest and most influential artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His subjects range from figures such as Oscar Wilde, born in the 1850s, to Pedro Almodóvar, born nearly a hundred years later. Tóibín studies how a changing world impacted on the lives of people who, on the whole, kept their homosexuality hidden, and reveals that the laws of desire changed everything for them, both in their private lives and in the spirit of their work.

This groundbreaking handbook is a resource for artists, community activists and anyone wishing to reach beyond the facts and figures of science and technology to harness their creativity to make change in the world. This timely book explores the pivotal role artists play in re-thinking the future; re-inventing and re-imagining our world at a time of systemic change and uncertainty. Playing for Time identifies collaborative arts practices emerging in response to planetary challenges, reclaiming a traditional role for artists in the community as truth-tellers and agents of change. Sixty experienced artists and activists give voice to a new narrative – shifting society’s rules and values away from consumerism and commodity towards community and collaboration with imagination, humour, ingenuity, empathy and skill. Inspired by the grass-roots Transition movement, modelling change in communities worldwide, Playing for Time joins the dots between key drivers of change – in energy, finance, climate change, food and community resilience – and ‘recipes for action’ for readers to take and try. Praise for Playing for Time... ‘This book is full of wings – wings that are ancient practices, that are community, arts, modernity, wings of global learning for local concerns. Lucy Neal’s anthology of possibility offers a salmagundi of thought,knowledge, options and hope. It’s all here. An almanac to dip into and then create – in the kitchen and the window box and the garden, locally, in community, regionally, nationally, globally. The seeds of change are in us. This is a book to help us grow.’ Stella Duffy, author and founder of Fun Palaces ‘It’s so important that the role of artists in making change is being systematically and beautifully addressed. Playing for Time, holds the keys to the possibility of transformative action.’ Bill McKibben, environmentalist and founder of 350.org ‘A remarkable book that pulls no punches. It’s most enduring image is the poignant flock of passenger pigeons, drawn in sand on Llangrannog beach in 2014, the 100th anniversary of their extinction. It’s an image that will not leave my mind: a message of loss, but also of hope, from which we must, and can, learn.’ Dame Fiona Reynolds, Chair of the Green Alliance ‘“Barren art”, Kandinsky wrote, “is the child of its age”. But prophetic, powerful art is the “mother ofthe future”. A better world will be born of such art, and Lucy Neal’s wonderful cornucopia should beat the elbow of everyone helping in its midwifery.’ Tom Crompton, Common Cause Foundation WWF ‘A total delight’ Rob Hopkins, Co-founder Transition Movement ‘A hand-book for life’ Rose Fenton, Director Free Word. ‘A remarkable achievement’ Neil Darlison, Arts Council England ‘Beautiful from the first sentence’ Laura Williams ‘Deeply nourishing’ Mike Grenville ‘A beauty of a book’ James Marriott, Platform

From the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference there was a concerted international effort to stop climate change. Yet greenhouse gas emissions increased, atmospheric concentrations grew, and global warming became an observable fact of life. In this book, philosopher Dale Jamieson explains what climate change is, why we have failed to stop it, and why it still matters what we do. Centered in philosophy, the volume also treats the scientific, historical, economic, and political dimensions of climate change. Our failure to prevent or even to respond significantly to climate change, Jamieson argues, reflects the impoverishment of our systems of practical reason, the paralysis of our politics, and the limits of our cognitive and affective capacities. The climate change that is underway is remaking the world in such a way that familiar comforts, places, and ways of life will disappear in years or decades rather than centuries. Climate change also threatens our sense of meaning, since it is difficult to believe that our individual actions matter. The challenges that climate change presents go beyond the resources of common sense morality -- it can be hard to view such everyday acts as driving and flying as presenting moral problems. Yet there is much that we can do to slow climate change, to adapt to it and restore a sense of agency while living meaningful lives in a changing world.

Colm Tóibín knows the languages of the outsider, the secret keeper, the gay man or woman. He knows the covert and overt language of homosexuality in literature. In Love in a Dark Time, he also describes the solace of finding like-minded companions through reading. Colm Tóibín examines the life and work of some of the greatest and most influential writers of the past two centuries, figures whose homosexuality remained hidden or oblique for much of their lives, either by choice or necessity. The larger world couldn't know about their sexuality, but in their private lives, and in the spirit of their work, the laws of desire defined their expression. This is an intimate encounter with Mann, Baldwin, Bishop, and with the contemporary poets Thom Gunn and Mark Doty. Through their work, Tóibín is able to come to terms with his own inner desires—his interest in secret erotic energy, his admiration for courageous figures, and his abiding fascination with sadness and tragedy. Tóibín looks both at writers forced to disguise their true experience on the page and at readers who find solace and sexual identity by reading between the lines.