Features
Rosie Sharp: wife of Four Seasons Hotels founder Issy Sharp lays it all out in her memoir
By BERNIE BELLAN I’m not much for reading autobiographies; I prefer to read someone else’s account of a person’s life because I figure you’re much more likely to find out what someone’s life was truly like when it was written by someone else – warts and all.
However, when I was asked whether I might like to receive an advance copy of the memoir of Rosalie Sharp whose name, to be honest, was unfamiliar to me – but who, I was informed, was the wife of Four Seasons Hotel founder Isadore Sharp – I thought: Sure, it’s always interesting to read of the lives of the rich and famous – and when they’re Jewish and Canadian to boot, let’s go for it.
Now, to be even more honest, as much as I’ve heard plenty about Four Seasons hotels – that they set the standard for service and luxury when it comes to hotels, I had never read much about Isadore Sharp. How much would his wife want to talk about her husband in her memoir, I wondered? And how good a writer would she be?
The answer to the first question is: Quite a bit, while the answer to the second question is that Rosalie Sharp is an excellent writer. No doubt she received quite a bit of help in putting together this very interesting book but, as she explains early on, she has written quite a few books previously, mostly having to do with interior design – which is one of her two utmost passions – the other being painting.
What surprised me most about Rosalie Sharp though is how much her formative years as a young girl in Toronto still leave a strong imprint on her, even today, as she must now be 87. (She completed the book in 2021 when she was 86, she explains.) Isadore, by the way, is 91. They’re both as healthy as one could hope two seniors in their dotage could be expected to be. As a matter of fact, “Rosie”, as she prefers to be known, is quite candid in describing her own health situation. At one point she tells a funny story about having a colonoscopy recently, but while she is driving home in Issie’s fancy Mercedes, she can’t hold it in. She goes on to tell how she hid her accident from Issie when she came home, stripping off her dress without him seeing and running out to the car with a pail of soap and water and cleaning up.
The book is full of interesting stories. Rosie (née Wise) grew up in a very poor household in the 1930s – where there was no telephone, but where the phone book served as a substitute for toilet paper. Her parents lived in a non-Jewish area of Toronto, where they ran a dry goods store. Mr. Wise was also an excellent tailor. As for Mrs. Wise, however, Rosie still has an aversion to soup, she explains, after having grown up smelling her mother’s absolutely horrible broth – which she could never bring herself to taste.
Although the book devotes a certain amount of space to describing Issy Sharp’s much more comfortable upbringing – which Rosie writes about in an early chapter, prior to going into detail about her own much more difficult childhood, the lesson that one takes from reading about young Issy is how brimming with confidence he was, even at a very young age. Not only that, he was extremely good looking – as the very many photographs interspersed throughout the book illustrate.
He was also a terrific athlete. Issy was gifted in so many sports, while Rosie never had the opportunity to take piano lessons, which she so desperately wanted to take as a youngster. She also never learned to swim, she admits, but that didn’t stop her from being a sport and donning a life jacket while going on a canoe trip with the family once – or even waterskiing.
The story how Issy and Rosie met at a wedding makes for a great romantic tale. But Rosie admits that she knew of Issy’s reputation as a consummate ladies’ man – and she honestly doubted that he would remain true to her once they became a couple. There are quite a few instances in the book when Rosie describes her own naiveté about sex – something with which Issy was extremely well versed. (He was 22 when they met; she was 17.) Yet, he was always extremely considerate toward Rosie when it came to the physical side of their relationship. She does reveal though that she became pregnant when she was only 19 and did have an abortion because neither she nor Issy were ready to start a family at that point.
While the book does a good job of delving into how Issy Sharp was an absolute genius when it came to building – not just hotels, but apartment blocks as well, to the point where, as of the date of publication of the book, there are now 134 Four Seasons hotels throughout the world, it wasn’t the pursuit of riches that drove Issy, according to Rosie. They have certainly led very comfortable lives, but the first five years of their marriage were spent living in a very humble apartment, she says, and although they’ve moved several times during their lifetime together, it’s been the building and decorating of homes that has been the attraction for them, rather than the accumulation of “toys.”
In fact, Rosie never cared much about things like cars, she says. In one amusing anecdote she describes her driving in what she thought was a Toyota Land Cruiser for years, only to discover that it had a Volvo logo in it. As a collector though, Rosie has been obsessed with the accumulation of ceramic figures, along with a certain number of paintings, she notes – but it’s her ceramic figure collection, which extends into the thousands, of which she’s proudest.
Early on in life Rosie exhibited true artistic talent. She tells of drawing hand lettered signs for her parents’ dry good store that were so well done that people seeing them thought they had been printed by a machine. Later she parlayed her artistic eye into a love for interior design. Even while she was raising four young boys, Issy encouraged her to acquire a formal education in interior design, which she did. She eventually opened her own interior design firm. Much of her work, as one might expect, was for Four Seasons hotels, but she wasn’t given the work simply because she was married to the boss. Issy pays full credit to the many innovations Rosie introduced into the hotels over the years.
At times though, I must admit I was somewhat bored reading Rosie’s quite detailed descriptions of her projects. While she is certainly extremely descriptive, I’m not sure how much readers really care to read about design – whether it be interior design or the design of ceramic objects. Of course, those are both two of Rosie’s passions – and she is allowed to indulge herself as much as she likes. It’s her memoir, after all.
Where I think Jewish readers of a certain age will find this book most resonating though is when Rosie writes about the many relatives she lost in the Holocaust. There is a great amount of time spent exploring the lives of her predecessors in Poland. Rosie can trace her family roots back to the 1700s. (She also does quite a bit of the same for the Sharp family.)
Both she and Issy grew up in Yiddish-speaking households and Rosie harbours a great deal of nostalgia for those early years. Like most Jews growing up in the 1930s the Wise household was an observant home. (She tells a hilarious story about being sent to a butcher a long way off to buy a chicken for the Friday night dinner, but having the bloody chicken, freshly slaughtered, ooze all over her on the bus ride home.) She also emphasizes how important having regular Shabbat dinners with their family has been for both her and Issy throughout their lives – only to see that disrupted when Covid hit. (As a matter of fact, it was Covid that led to her writing this book, as she found that she had quite a bit more time on her hands than would normally have been the course.) In a departure from her observant upbringing though, Rosie says the only time she sets foot in a synagogue nowadays is during Yom Kippur – and that she doesn’t believe in God.
Interestingly, while Rosie acknowledges the role she’s played for years as the wife of a charming and brilliantly successful businessman, accompanying him on many trips to far off lands where it was her duty to sit through endless dinners with some of the world’s most powerful figures (including one ghastly dinner in Japan where she says the fish that was served was still wriggling!), Rosie hardly sees herself as a society maven. She did her duty – and often contributed to the success of Four Seasons on her own, both as a designer and as the gracious wife of a very powerful man, yet she notes over and over again that she feels most at home in her own house – and there have been many different ones over the years, including a home that they rebuilt from scratch in Palm Springs.
Here’s a description of Issie and Rosie’s harmonious relationship, as given by their son Tony on the occasion of their 62nd wedding anniversary:
“She paints. He promotes. They are full-fledged partners in life.
“Partners in bridge: she is the one who takes the risks and swings for the fences, and he plays more by the book and the percentages, yet rarely an argument, and they regularly place near the top.
“Partners in design…not the least of which is their new bungalow, where our dad concerned himself with light, views, and land assembly, and our mom, the architecture, interior design…Partners in dance. and, can they dance! Partners in fitness – still following Jane Fonda’s Advanced Workout from 1985…
“Partners in philanthropy. Including what our mother considers one of our father’s best achievements: establishing the Terry Fox Run. Proposed in a telegram from our dad to Terry, the run is now the largest single-day fundraising event in the world, having raised $750 million for cancer research.
“And of course, partners as parents. Sharing and living the values that have guided us as a family, and for which we are grateful.”
By this time, if you’ve read this far, you must be thinking: What a perfect couple – and I’m sure they are, but if I could ask two questions of Rosie, they would be this:
You had a son named Chris who died tragically at only age 17 when a melanoma was improperly diagnosed by a doctor. You write so eloquently of what that loss meant to the two of you – as I’m sure it would to any other parents who have lost a child.
But – why “Chris?” I know that it’s not totally unheard of for a Jewish child to be named Chris or Kristina, although from what I’ve read, it’s often when one of the parents isn’t Jewish. But both you and Issy came from traditional Jewish upbringings. Was there a particular reason that you chose to name your youngest son “Chris?”
And, my second question: I had to do some research to see that you and Issy have contributed substantially to many different causes, including the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. But nowhere in your book do I see any evidence that you took a particular interest in philanthropy yourself, especially as it relates to Jewish causes. I would imagine that someone of your renown would have been asked many times to lend their name to a particular Jewish fund-raiser. Perhaps it wasn’t of sufficient interest for you to write about that – or maybe it just wasn’t your thing. But, as someone who espouses the importance of Jewish values so strongly, wouldn’t “tzedakkah” have been one of the most important values? I’m not saying this as a criticism because I see that when you do a search of all the causes to which you and Issy have contributed, the list is a lengthy one. But I’m somewhat puzzled that, other than the Terry Fox Run, there’s no mention of any other cause to which you might have attached yourselves. After all, Issy is worth over $500 million from what I’ve read (while the Four Season hotel chain, which is now owned primarily by Bill Gates – is valued at over $10 billion).
Still, let’ s not let these fairly petty questions detract from what is, on the whole, quite the entertaining read.
“Me & Issy – A Four Seasons Romance”
By Rosalie Wise Sharp
Published by ECW Press, Toronto, 2022
274 pages
Available in both print and Kindle editions
Features
A People and a Pulse: Jewish Voices in Jazz and Modern Music
By MARTIN ZEILIG Jazz history is usually told through its most iconic names — Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Davis — yet running alongside that familiar story is another, often under‑acknowledged one: the deep and enduring contribution of Jewish musicians, bandleaders, composers, and cultural intermediaries.
From the moment jazz emerged at the turn of the 20th century, Jews were not simply observers but active shapers of the music and the industry around it. Their influence — artistic, entrepreneurial, and cultural — has been both significant and, in many respects, disproportionately large. Jews and Jazz (171 pg. $18.75 US) a self‑published work by Laurence Seeff, brings this parallel narrative into sharp, affectionate focus.
Seeff is an ideal guide.
Born in London in 1951, he built a career that moved from statistics to energy policy in Paris, from financial markets at Bloomberg to corporate training in the City of London, all while writing poetry, songs, and humorous verse. Today he lives in Israel, where he continues to write, perform, learn Ivrit, and enjoy life with his large family. Through all these chapters runs a constant passion for jazz — a passion sparked more than fifty‑five years ago when he first heard Terry Lightfoot’s Jazzmen in a Bournemouth pub.
His writing blends clarity, humour, and genuine love for the music and the people who made it.
The musicians he profiles often came from immigrant families who brought with them the musical DNA of Eastern Europe — the cadences of synagogue chant, the urgency of klezmer, the cultural instinct for learning and artistic expression. When these sensibilities met the African American genius of early jazz, the result was a remarkable creative fusion.
Some figures, like Chico Marx, are better known for comedy than musicianship, yet Seeff reminds us that Chico was a serious pianist whose jazz‑inflected playing appeared in every Marx Brothers film and whose orchestra launched young talents like Mel Tormé. Others — Abe Lyman, Lew Stone, and Oscar Rabin — shaped the dance‑band era on both sides of the Atlantic.
Canadian readers will be pleased to find Morris “Moe” Koffman included as well: the Toronto‑born flautist and saxophonist whose “Swinging Shepherd Blues” became an international hit and whose long career at the CBC helped define Canadian jazz.
Seeff also highlights artists whose connection to jazz is more tangential but culturally revealing. Barbra Streisand, for example — a classmate and choir‑mate of Neil Diamond at Erasmus Hall High School — was never a natural jazz singer, yet her versatility allowed her to step into the idiom when she chose.
She opened for Miles Davis at the Village Vanguard in 1961 and, nearly half a century later, returned to the same club to promote Love Is the Answer, her collaboration with jazz pianist Diana Krall. Her contribution to jazz may be limited, but her stature as one of the greatest singers of all time is unquestioned.
Neil Diamond, too, appears in these pages.
Though not a jazz artist, he starred — with gusto, if not great acting finesse — in the 1980 remake of The Jazz Singer, 53 years after Al Jolson’s original. The film was not a success, nor was it truly a jazz picture, but its title and its star’s Jewish identity make it part of the cultural tapestry Seeff explores.
Diamond and Streisand recorded together only once, in 1978, on “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” a reminder of the long‑standing artistic ties between them.
Mel Tormé, by contrast, was deeply rooted in jazz. Nicknamed “The Velvet Fog,” he was a prodigy who sang professionally at age four, wrote his first hit at sixteen, drummed for Chico Marx, and recorded with Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. Ethel Waters once said he was “the only white man who sings with the soul of a black man.” His story exemplifies the porous, collaborative nature of jazz.
Seeff also includes non‑Jewish figures whose lives intersected meaningfully with Jewish culture. Frank Sinatra — perhaps the greatest crooner of them all — was a steadfast supporter of Jewish causes, from protesting during the Holocaust to raising funds for Israel Bonds and the Hebrew University. His multiple visits to Israel, including a major concert in Jerusalem in 1975, underscore the depth of his connection.
Danny Kaye earns his place through his close work with Louis Armstrong, his pitch‑perfect scat singing, and his starring role in The Five Pennies, the biopic of jazz cornetist Red Nichols. Though not a jazz musician per se, his performances radiated a genuine feel for the music.
A later generation is represented by Harry Connick Jr., whose Jewish mother and New Orleans upbringing placed him at the crossroads of cultures. A prodigy who played publicly at age five, he went on to become one of the most successful jazz‑influenced vocalists of his era, with ten number‑one jazz albums.
Even Bob Dylan appears in Seeff’s mosaic — another reminder that Jewish creativity has touched every corner of modern music, sometimes directly through jazz, sometimes through the broader cultural currents that surround it.
Taken together, the concise portraits in Jews and Jazz form a lively, engaging mosaic — a celebration of creativity, resilience, and cross‑cultural exchange. They show how Jewish musicians helped carry jazz from vaudeville and dance halls into swing, bebop, cool jazz, pop, rock, and film music.
They remind us that jazz, at its heart, is a meeting place: a space where people of different backgrounds listen to one another, learn from one another, and create something larger than themselves.
For further information, contact the author at the following email address: laurenceseeff@yahoo.co.uk
Features
Jews in Strange Places
By DAVID TOPPER The Jewish contribution to 20th century popular music is well known. From Jerome Kern through to Stephen Sondheim, Jews played major roles as both composers and lyricists in the so-called Great American Songbook. (An exception is Cole Porter.) It continued in Musical Theatre throughout the rest of the century.
One very small piece of this story involves what Time magazine in the December 1999 issue called “the tune of the century.” First recorded sixty years before that, it is the powerful and haunting tune called “Strange Fruit,” which is about the lynching of black people in the southern USA. First sung by Billie Holiday in 1939, it became her signature tune.
So, why do I bring this up? Because there is a multi-layered Jewish connection to this song that is worth recalling, which may not be known to many readers.
Let’s start with the lyrics to “Strange Fruit,” which are the essence of this powerful piece:
Southern trees bear strange fruit,Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.Pastoral scene of the gallant south,The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,Here is a strange and bitter crop.
Before becoming lyrics in a song, this poem stood alone as a potent statement about the lynchings still taking place throughout the American South at the time. The strong metaphorical imagery never explicitly mentions the lynching, which adds to the poetic power of this poem. Standing alone, I believe it’s an important protest verse from the 20th century.
Searching it on the internet, you may find the author listed as Lewis Allan. But that’s not his real name. “Lewis Allen” is the often-used pen name of Abel Meeropol, a Jewish High School teacher from the Bronx in New York. He and his wife, Anne (nee Shaffer), had two stillborn children with those names – a fact that adds a poignant element to this story.
The origin of the poem for Abel was a photograph he had seen of a lynching of black men in the South. I have seen such images, possibly even the one Abel saw: for example, a sepia photograph of two black men hanging from a long tree limb, and a large crowd of white people below (men, women and even children!), most seeming dressed in their Sunday best (some men with straw hats) looking up and gawking at the sight, some with smiles on their faces – as if attending a festive spectacle. Like Abel, I felt repelled by the picture: it turned my stomach. This communal display of horrific cruelty gave me a glimpse into Abel’s mind, and I understood how it compelled him to write about it. He thus wrote the poem, and it was published in a teacher’s magazine in 1937.
Being a songwriter too, in 1938 Abel added a melody and played it in a New York club he often attended. But here’s where this story’s documentation gets contradictory, depending upon who is recalling the events. The club owner knew Billie Holiday, and he showed the song to her. What her initial response was, we cannot know for sure. But we do know that in a relatively short time, she added it to her repertoire. It eventually became her signature tune. She initially sang it in public, but because of its popularity among her fans, there was pressure to record it too.
There were initial rejections from recording companies because of the controversial content. But Commodore Records took a chance and pressed the first recording in April 1939. This was the same year the movie “Gone with the Wind” came out; it was steeped in racial stereotyping. It was also sixteen years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
As a record, the song obviously reached a large audience. Since the content was about racism, the song was seen as politically radical; not surprisingly, many radio stations banned it from the airwaves.
Furthermore, it’s also not surprising that Abel, a schoolteacher, was called to appear before a committee of New York lawmakers who were looking for communists in the schools. Possibly they were surprised to find that the poem and the song were written by a white man – and a Jew to boot. In particular, they wanted to know if he was paid by the Communist Party to write this song. He was not. And, in the end, they let him go. But shortly thereafter he quit his teaching job.
This took place in 1941 and was a precursor to the continued American obsession with communism into the 1950s, under Senator Joe McCarthy.
Indeed, that episode had an impact on Abel and Anne too. In 1953 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of giving information about nuclear science to the Soviet Union, and they were the first married couple to be executed in the electric chair. They left two sons, Michael (age 10) and Robert (age 6). Apparently, immediate family members were reticent to get involved with the boys, possibly afraid of being accused of sympathizing with communism.
Enter Abel and Anne. Without a moment’s hesitation they stepped in, taking and raising the boys. As Michael and Robert Meeropol they eventually went on to become college professors – and naturally were active in social issues. Anne died in 1973. Abel died in 1986 in a Jewish nursing home in Massachusetts, after a slow decline into dementia. Long before that, Billie Holiday died in 1959, ravaged by the drug addition that took her life at forty-four years of age.
See why I called this a multi-layered Jewish story that’s worth telling?
To hear Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit” click here: Strange Fruit
Features
Is This the End of Jewish Life in Western Countries?
By HENRY SREBRNIK “Globalize the Intifada” has been the chant echoing through streets since October 7th, 2023. It was never a metaphor, and we now see the gruesome results across the western world, from Australia to Canada: the rise of groups of large, active networks of Islamist and anti-Zionist organizations.
Jews in the West are discovering that the nations they defended, enriched, and profoundly shaped have become increasingly inhospitable. After the Holocaust, explicit Jew-hatred became unfashionable in polite society, but the impulse never disappeared. The workaround was simple: separate Zionism from Judaism in name, then recycle every old anti-Jewish trope and pin it on “the Zionists.”
We have seen the full legitimization of genocidal anti-Zionism and its enthusiastic adoption by large segments of the public. The protests themselves, as they began immediately on October 7th, were celebrations of the Hamas massacres. The encampments, the building occupations, the harassment campaigns against Jewish students, the open calls for intifada, the attacks on Jews and Jewish places have become our new norm. History shows us that antisemitism does not respond to reason, incentive or the honest appeals of the Jewish community.
Outside the United States, there is no Western political establishment with either the will or the capability to address this problem, let alone reverse its growth. I’m sorry to say this, but the future of Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand is likely to be increasingly Jew-free.
Today, police stand and watch mobs chant for Israel’s destruction, call for the genocide of its people, harass visibly Jewish citizens, and drive antisemitic intimidation deep into urban life. They now believe their job is to enforce the law only if it does not risk upsetting violent constituencies. This makes Jews expendable, because defending them risks confrontation. This was very clear in the Bondi Beach massacre.
Jews are again donning caps instead of kippot, dressing generically with no cultural markers, and avoiding even a tote bag with Hebrew on it. A corrosive creep toward informal segregation in retail and service sectors is occurring, as Jewish customers report being refused service. A mezuzah hanging from a rideshare mirror leads to cancellations. When Jews express frustration, they are accused of exaggeration or attempting to suppress criticism of Israel. Jewish fear is not treated as a real problem.
“Jews Are Being Sent Back into Hiding,” the title of a Dec. 15 article in the New York Free Press by David Wolpe and Deborah Lipstadt, asserts that the attacks on Jews, including physical assaults, social media campaigns and, most tragically, the recent murders in Australia, are part of a purposive campaign designed to make Jews think twice about gathering with other Jews, entering a synagogue, going to kosher restaurants, putting a mezuzah on the doorpost of their apartments or dorm rooms, or wearing a Jewish star around their necks.
“We know of no one who would consider giving a niece, nephew, grandchild, or young friend a Jewish star without first asking permission of their parents,” they write. The unspoken, and sometimes spoken, question is: “Might wearing a star endanger your child’s well-being?”
Recently, a prominent American rabbi was entering a Target store in Chicago with her grandson, whom she had picked up from his Jewish day school. As they walked into the store the 10-year-old reached up and automatically took off his kippah and put it in his pocket. Seeing his grandmother’s quizzical look, he explained: “Mommy wants me to do that.”
Borrowing a phrase from another form of bigotry, they contend that Jews are going “back into the closet.” No public celebration of Hanukkah took place in 2025 without a significant police presence. Some people chose to stay home.
Lipstadt and Wolpe know whereof they speak. They are respectively a professor of history and Holocaust studies who served as the Biden administration’s ambassador tasked with combating antisemitism, the other a rabbi who travels to Jewish communities throughout the world, and who served on Harvard’s antisemitism task force in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 pogrom.
What the world has seen over the past two years is a continual, often systematic attempt to terrorize Jews. When political leaders fail to condemn rather than merely “discourage” chants of “globalize the intifada,” we are seeding the ground for massacres like the Hannukah one in Sydney.
If each Jewish holiday will now be seen by antisemites as an opportunity for terror, then the prognosis for diaspora Jewry is bleak. There will be fewer public events, more alarms, more bag checks at doors; there will have to be more security and more police. Unless things change, Jewish life in the diaspora will become more sealed off from the larger society.
Why has this failure come about? Confronting antisemitism, stopping the mobs, challenging the activists, and disciplining antisemitic bureaucrats all carry electoral risk for politicians; Jews are demographically irrelevant, especially compared with Muslim voters, with the U.S. being the only partial exception.
There are those who suggest Jews stop donating funds to educational and other institutions that have turned against us. At this point, I doubt very much that withdrawing dollars will have an impact. For every dollar withdrawn, there will be 100 from Qatar and other sources in its place.
Throughout history, the way a society treats its Jews predicts its future with unerring accuracy. If Jews leave, it will be because a civilization that will not defend its Jews will also defend next to nothing and may itself not survive.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island