Family’s archive holds subtle secrets

Text of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s ‘Forward Guidance’ video

Transcript of Prime Minister Mark Carney's remarks in a video released Tuesday after retaliatory tariffs on the United States came into effect.

All that glitters … could work here

Sometimes, it’s hard to even suggest a change, because it seems there is always a plethora of people ready to tell you that your idea just won’t work.

For newcomer pizza purveyors, it’s all about crafting solid foundations

A recent poll conducted by an Internet-based market-research firm determined that close to 20 per cent of people eschew their leftover pizza crust.

Some argued that the residual crust lacks flavour. Others submitted that it’s too hard or crunchy to enjoy sans toppings. Given that information, what are we to make of Crusty Craft Pizza, a five-month-old takeout spot whose owners are so confident in their European-style pizza crust that they’ve chosen to highlight it in their business moniker?

Whenever somebody informs them they don’t like pizza crust, their response is, well, they haven’t tried theirs, says Oleksii Samokvhal, who together with his wife, Iryna Mehedyn, opened Crusty Craft Pizza in early April, at 1311 Day St. in Transcona.

“It’s thin in the middle, with raised edges we hand-form ourselves,” says Mehedyn, a native of Ukraine who, like her Kyiv-born husband, relocated to Winnipeg to escape the conflict in their home country.

Pointing fingers at Tories three years after election tiresome, accomplishes nothing

There is a point in every government’s life when blaming the previous government stops being an explanation and starts becoming an excuse.

For Manitoba’s NDP government, that point has arrived.

Justice Minister Matt Wiebe was asked last week about a grievance filed by Crown attorneys over excessive workloads and a government attempt to keep a report documenting those workloads out of an upcoming arbitration hearing.

Wiebe said he couldn’t discuss the arbitration case.

Shtetl story: Rainbow Stage, WJT stage classic Yiddish tale

Reb Lazar Wolf (Dov Mickelson) marched down Selkirk Avenue last Friday afternoon to collect sustenance for his Fiddler on the Roof castmates, who’ve spent the past two weeks rehearsing at the Ukrainian National Federation Hall.

“Rugelach?” Mickelson offered after making a quick stop for a bag of sweet pastries at the 89-year-old Gunn’s Bakery, following in the footsteps of his parents’ and grandparents’ generations, those Jews who sought refuge in this neighbourhood after the world they once knew in Eastern Europe was obliterated by continental campaigns of anti-semitism which ultimately led to the Holocaust.

The pre- and post-war focal point of Winnipeg’s Jewish community, the North End became for thousands of refugees and immigrants a stand-in for shtetls — the small, yet sprawling communities that existed under tenuous and ever-threatened autonomy as satellite communities across the Pale of Settlement, the region within the Russian Empire where Jewish people were allowed to reside.

Under the rule of the Tsar — pheh — opportunity was scarce and any expression of Jewish joy or celebration — a bar mitzvah morning, a wedding night or a bris for a newborn boy — could occasion brutal suppression by either the ruling class or by the villagers at the gate.

Family’s archive holds subtle secrets

Every family has its stories, secrets and unconventional relatives. Catherine’s Mennonite, rural Alberta family is no different.

Catherine is the narrator of Dora Dueck’s new novel, All That Belongs. Dueck, who lived in Winnipeg for years but now lives and writes in British Columbia, is a former McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award winner for her novel, 2010’s This Hidden Thing.

In the opening chapter of Dueck’s new novel, Catherine has just retired from the regional archives in Winnipeg where she has spent decades conserving history. Planning to spend her post-employment days volunteering, walking, reading books and trying new recipes, she quickly becomes restless and decides instead to finally turn her attention to her own unexamined family history. As her husband Jim had told her, as an archivist, “she ought to be at home with her past.”

Catherine is particularly interested in finding out more about the events and unspoken emotions surrounding the deaths of her beloved and charismatic older brother Darrell and her eccentric Uncle Must. Uncle Must had farmed with Catherine’s father and lived with Catherine’s family during much of her youth. Strange, foreboding, judgmental and reticent, he had always been a source of embarrassment for her.