Mendel's Children: A Family Chronicle

"Ms. Smith has struck a balance between anecdotes and remarkably readable history. Mendel's Children brings rural Jewish life in Canada into a vivid new light." -- The Western Jewish Bulletin

"Mendel's Children is an unforgettable, multigenerational story. The stuff of which family legends and television miniseries are made!" -- The Midwest Book Review

"Early-century life in Prairie town portrayed with wit and feeling." -- Elaine Kalman Naves in The Montreal Gazette

"Cherie Smith's family chronicle is written with such storytelling skill, with such an honest and compassionate clarity, that the reader turns page after page with growing fascination. Against the epic Russian turmoil of pogroms and injustices, and against the blatant anti-Semitism of an earlier Canada, Ms. Smith emphasizes above all, the mortal dimensions of Mendel's children. In these too brief pages, she, remarkably, and in very human terms too, sustains the drama of one hundred years of a family history. It should inspire readers to pick up their pens and consider their own family histories." -- Wayson Choy, author of The Jade Peony and Trillium Award winner

"Cherie Smith does not pretend to teach history but no historian or general reader will doubt the authenticity of her portrayal of life in small Canadian towns, or regret coming across such a work." -- Haim Avni, Professor of Jewish Contemporary History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

"Cherie Smith possesses a gift of being able to investigate the past with freshness, insight, and humour, but entirely without pretense. The people of whom Smith writes may not have been powerful shapers of human affairs on a national scale, but they contributed enormously to the indestructible fabric of Jewish life in a country whose citizenry, economy, and climate were often inhospitable. Saints and sinners, Mendel's children have one thing in common: they are folks you would have enjoyed meeting." -- Morley Torgov, author of The Outside Chance of Maximilian Glick and winner of the 1983 Leacock Medal for Humour