Back from Canada

After a few wonderful days of communing with the ghost of Saul Bellow and the spirit of Rufus Wainwright, I am back in New York. Little-known fact: I am part Canadian. Although I’d barely ever seen the place, much of my family is from Montreal, so all the old-time Jewish delis/tourist traps ought to trigger unconscious memories for me. Apparently my great-grandmother liked smoked-meat sandwiches (Montreal’s pastrami-like “delicacy”), but tasting one brought back memories mainly of why I don’t go to delicatessens in New York. That said, I thought Montreal was pretty great. To give this post a Jewlicious angle, I should mention that a used bookstore on St. Laurent may no longer have a Jewish history section, now that I bought just about every book on French-Jewish-Israeli topics I could find. And to give this post a fluffy, utter-nonsense angle, I am now obsessed with the designer Denis Gagnon, whose minimalist yet beautiful clothes are the best possible reason I could think of to become an i-banker, Olsen twin, or similar.