Features
Marcus Spiegel’s writing career continuing to blossom
Last June we had a story about Marcus Spiegel, a young writer originally from Winnipeg whose parents are Esther and Jeff Spiegel, and whose in-laws are Neta and Yair Bourlas. At the time Marcus had just had one of his short stories published in the very prestigious “Pushcart Book of Short Stories.”
The story, which is titled “A Tale of Two Trolls” was first published in the Santa Monica Review, which is a national literary journal sponsored by Santa Monica College.
As we noted in that June article, Marcus’s story tells the story of two misfits named Yuri and Winch, who are both college dropouts. They have a YouTube show and podcast, and they purport to be “alt-right” activists, but their primary ambition in the story is to exact retribution on a former professor of Yuri’s by the name of Baendorf. It’s all quite mindless – and hilarious, especially when Winch dresses up as a frog wielding a samurai sword as he prepares to attack Professor Baendorf.
After talking recently with Marcus’s mother Esther, we asked her whether Marcus has published anything of interest since we wrote that article in June? We asked specifically whether Marcus had finished writing a piece about wrestling which, when we spoke with him last year, he said he was working on. Esther said that Marcus has indeed been busy and suggested we get in touch with him to find out what he’s been up to.
Here’s what Marcus wrote back after we asked him how his writing career has been going:
Hi Bernie,
Hope you’re doing well. Thanks for your interest again. So, yes, I have continued making some progress since we last talked. I’ll just clarify that I don’t have a full book out yet, but my wrestling piece, which is published in a book or journal alongside work from other writers appeared a couple months ago, and that is the piece from Boulevard, which publishes out of St. Louis, Missouri. The piece is called “The Inferno on Prime Time: Reflections on Vince McMahon and the WWE” and is available for print or online (though you need a digital subscription). Anyway, if you’d like to check it out a link can be found on my website (marcusspiegel.com), which will also give you a summary of my forthcoming publications. There are three others upcoming that I’ll mention here.
The first is a nonfiction piece that is set to come out in March at Sycamore Review from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. This piece is called “The Inglorious Beatitude of the Mall Cop.” I think of it as a kind of suburban picaresque. It recounts my misadventures as a mall security guard while I lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Mostly, as you will see in the piece, if you read it, I spent little time reprimanding troublemakers in the mall and more time trying to sneak off and pursue my literary education. But I also became addicted to Scratch and Win lotto cards for a period.
The second is also a nonfiction piece, entitled “Portrait of a Flat Earther,” that is supposed to come out in the late spring from Pembroke Magazine out of the University of North Carolina. This piece recounts how an old friend of mine, a Winnipegger who I’d become estranged from, reemerged into my life in recent years, as a dialogue sparring partner on the telephone. Even though we shared many of the same ideas as youths, I discovered that my old friend had deviated drastically since I’d last spoken with him. He’d become Far Right, and had become absorbed in various conspiracy theories, the most absurd of these being Flat Earthism. This little piece of comic and psychological memoir concerns my attempts to reason him out of Flat Earthism and when that plan fails, to try to figure what could be attracting him to his strange beliefs in the first place.
Lastly, Santa Monica Review, where my Pushcart Prize winning story, “A Tale of Two Trolls” first appeared, will be publishing a new piece of fiction called “The Corporate Jester” though not until the fall, or perhaps in spring of 2024. This short story involves the Californian television mogul Wayne Vortman’s attempt to keep producing a reality game show during the pandemic. In order to do this, he enlists his three sons and daughter, as well as servants into the cast. His daughter, though, not exactly pleased about her father’s dedication to creating lurid forms of spectacle, disobeys, prompting a weird family initiative to draft her into the Vortman army, as it were. All of this leads up to a surreal dialogue at four a.m. at one of the Vortman mansion’s jacuzzis between daughter and Dad.
On the writing side, I’m continuing to split my time between short fiction and nonfiction. Some of my nonfiction has involved me traveling to Pennsylvania and Arizona for research. Recent themes of my writing have dealt with the metaverse, country music, internet dating apps, historical anachronism societies, scuba diving, and an organization that seeks to prepare its members for the afterlife.
Thanks again for your interest at the Jewish Post.
Best wishes to you and your family,
Marcus Spiegel
Features
100-year-old Lil Duboff still taking life one day at a time
By MYRON LOVE Last march, Lil Duboff celebrated her 100th birthday in a low key manner.
“I have always been a laid back kind of person,” says the Shaftesbury retirement home resident. “I just celebrated with my family.”
Lil Duboff’s life journey began in Russia in 1925. “I was six months old when we came to Winnipeg,” she says. “Most of my extended family had come before. We were supposed to leave Russia at the same time, but my mother was pregnant with me and my parents waited until after I was born.”
The former Lil Portnoy, the daughter of Hy and Pessie, grew up the youngest of five siblings in a large and loving family in the old north end Jewish community. Upon his arrival in Winnipeg, her father, Hy, joined his father, Jack, and his brothers, Nathan and Percy, in the family business, Perth’s Cleaners, which was established in 1914.
Following the education path of most Jewish Winnipeggers in the period between the wars and into the 1950s, Duboff started her schooling at Peretz School – although she attended William Whyte School for most of her elementary schooling, supplemented by evening classes at Peretz School – followed by Aberdeen School and St. John’s Tech for high school.
The family, she recalls, belonged to the Beth Jacob Synagogue on Selkirk Avenue.
After completing high school, Duboff took a business course and joined the workforce. She first worked at Perth’s, then Stall’s, and lastly, Silpit Industries – which was owned by Harry Silverberg. (Harry Silverberg was one of the wealthier individuals in our community and a community leader who contributed generously to our communal institutions.)
It was while working at Silpit Industries that Lil Portnoy met Nathan Duboff. “Nathan worked in the shipping department,” she recalls. “We dated for three or four years before getting married.”
They wed in 1953 at the Hebrew Sick Hall on Selkirk Avenue. The bride was pregnant soon after and quit work to look after her family. The couple had three children: Chuck, Neil and Cynthia.
The family lived in the Garden City area. While Nathan continued to work for Harry Silverberg for a time – at his Brown and Rutherford lumber business, he later moved to Portage Lumber as sales manager, and then Dominion Lumber, finally retiring as sales manager for McDermot Lumber in 1995.
During those years Lil did what many married Jewish women did and put her time in as a volunteer with different Jewish organizations. She served as president of the Chevra Mishnayes Congregation sisterhood and the ORT chapter to which she belonged. She also volunteered with B’nai B’rith Women and Jewish Child and Family Service.
Her leisure activities included playing mahjong with friends and enjoying – with Nathan – the ballet and the symphony. There were also all the holiday gatherings with the extended family and summers spent at the family cottage in Gimli.
In the mid-1980s, Lil and Nathan sold their Garden City home and moved to a condo on Cambridge in the south end. After Nathan’s sudden passing in 2003, Lil continued living at Cambridge Towers until three years ago when her declining physical health required her to move into assisted living at the Shaftesbury.
While Lil Duboff suffers from many of the complaints of old age, such as limited eyesight and hearing, and other health issues, she retains a clear and positive frame of mind. She appreciates that her children all still live in Winnipeg and visit frequently. She happily reports that she also has five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
“It’s different living here (at the Shaftesbury),” she observes. “I don’t see as many people as I used to. But I am accepting my limitations and take life one day at a time. You never know what tomorrow might bring.”
Features
The First Time: A Memoir
By DAVID R. TOPPER Nearly every life has a series of “first times,” no matter how long or short one lives. The first day of school, or the first bicycle – these quickly come to mind. Probably because of the deep and wide reading I’ve been doing for a story I wrote, I recalled another “first” in my life. It came to me with the same chill up my spine as on the day it happened. And that was long ago.
I’m now into my early 80s and this event is from the late 1960s when I was finishing my PhD, which required that I pass a second language test. It was the last essential test, since I was finishing up my dissertation. In the early 1960s, as an undergraduate, I had taken German for the language requirement and naturally I opted for German for the graduate requirement too. Relevant here is the fact that of all the undergraduate courses I took, the only subject for which I had poor grades was – you guessed it? – German, where I got less than As and Bs.
On the day appointed, I walked across campus to the German department and took the test. The task was to translate a page of text. I can’t recall the content or anything about it. But the result was sent to me and – I suppose not surprisingly – I didn’t pass. I was informed that I could make an appointment with a member of the department to go over the test and to get some tutoring to help me prepare for another try.
But where is the “first in my life” that this memoir is all about? As said above, I only recently recalled this “first.” The trigger was a newscast that Yale University professor Timothy Snyder was moving to the University of Toronto because of the recent presidential elections in the USA. This caught my attention because his monumental book, Black Earth, on the Holocaust in the shtetls of Eastern Europe during World War II, was so crucial to that story I wrote. Thus, my subconscious kicked in and that newscast led me back to when I met the tutor.
Frankly, I don’t remember much about that day. Not the time of year, or the weather. Except that I again walked across campus, this time to meet my German tutor. Even so, I only remember three things about the tutor – beyond the fact that it was woman. She was much older than me and she spoke with a thick accent.
We sat at a table, she to my left, and in front of us on the table was my translation sheet covered with corrections in red; the original German text was beside it, to the right. Slowly she went over my translation, pointing out my mistakes. I sat, focusing on what I did wrong and listening to her suggestions for what I should have done – when, for a brief moment, she reached across my sheet to point to a German word in the original text. With her left hand and her bare arm right in front of me – I saw something on the underside of that arm.
At the time, I knew about this. I had read about it. But back in the late 1960s I had never seen it for real – in the flesh. Really. Yes, “in the flesh” isn’t a metaphor. Indeed, I’m getting the same chill now just thinking about it, as I did when I saw it – for the first time.
On the inside of that arm, she had a tattoo – a very simple tattoo – just a five-digit number. Nothing else.
I was so rattled by this that I couldn’t focus on what she was saying anymore. The tattoo blurred out much of everything else for the rest of the day.
Fortunately, this happened near the end of our meeting, and I apparently absorbed enough of her help so that when I did take the test the second time – I passed. And here I am: a retired professor after many years of teaching.
Even today, that first tattoo is still seared in my mind. Oh, and that’s the third thing I’ll always remember about the tutor who helped me pass that key test on the road to my PhD.
Features
Japanese Straightening/Hair Rebonding at SETS on Corydon
Japanese Straightening is a hair straightening process invented in Japan that has swept America.
