The Meaning of Children wins 2012 J.I. Segal Award

Beverly Akerman’s The Meaning of Children and Stuart Ross’s Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew have co-won the 2012 J.I. Segal Award for English Fiction and Poetry on a Jewish Theme. The nine prizes will be awarded at a public ceremony on Wednesday, November 14, 2012 at 7:30 p.m. in the Gelber Conference Centre, 1 Cummings Square (5151 Côte Ste-Catherine Road), Montreal.

Rhea Tregebov’s debut novel The Knife Sharpener’s Bell won the 2010 award. Previous award winners include Irving Layton, Naim Kattan, Adele Wiseman, Prof. Ruth Wisse, Yehoshua Rabinovitch,Yehuda Elberg, Yaacov Zipper, Dora Wasserman, David Homel, Rabbi Leib Kramer, Professor Gershon Hundert, Edeet Ravel, Leonard Cohen, and Ina Fichman.

For the complete list of 2012 winners, please see the event invitation.

About the J.I. Segal Awards:

"The J.I. Segal Awards of the Jewish Public Library are made possible by the J.I. Segal Cultural Foundation, founded by the late Dr. Hirsh Rosenfeld and Mrs. Dvora Rosenfeld. They were established in 1968 to honour and perpetuate the memory of the great Yiddish-Canadian poet, J.I. Segal, and to foster Jewish cultural creativity in Canada.

 

"The purpose of the awards, presented every two years, is to encourage and reward creative works on Jewish themes and to recognize contributions in Jewish education, both formal and informal. 

"J.I. Segal (1896-1954) is acknowledged as one of the most respected Yiddish poets. His work is characterized by its deep lyrical expression and evocation of the dignity of Jewish life in the Eastern European shtetl and in Canada. Segal strove to show that “a people and its culture are inseparable.” His poetry lives on in Yiddish and in translation."
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Hear Bev interviewed, by Mutsumi Takahashi, about The Meaning of Children, also available as an e-book on Amazon.com: