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Monda Halpern’s Alice in Shandehland was reviewed in the Ottawa Citizen this past weekend. The following is an excerpt from Bernie Farber’s review.
Halpern spent years tracking down a story that no one wanted to talk about. Pouring over newspaper accounts of the sensational three day trial, interviewing surviving family members — many reluctant to talk, searching through archives and walking the streets of Lowertown and Sandy Hill where the Jewish community lived and where the shooting took place, Halpern helps us enter a beautifully constructed time machine.
She whisks us back to the years prior to the killing describing Ottawa and its Jewish denizens with such skill and beauty you feel as though you are part of the story.
The events leading up to the shooting are recounted with such clarity you feel yourself walking with Alice Edelson as she was heading to her rendezvous with husband Ben and lover Jack.
The trial, as recounted, is as gripping as any John Grisham novel and the outcome as breathtaking.
Real characters are shaped not through the imagination of the author but through a careful dissection of family history, Jewish community archival works, old and tattered photographs and the personal stories of the people who were present at the time.
(…)
For me, who knew the tale but never the details, it unraveled long held furtive secrets. For those only learning of this story for the first time, it is a page-turner, sociological study and insight into the complexities of a new immigrant community, its hopes and fears. Either way it is a compelling read.
ALICE IN SHANDEHLAND: Scandal and Scorn in the Edelson/Horwitz Murder Case
By Monda Halpern
Why a Jewish jeweller who shot and killed his wife’s lover was acquitted after his sensational 1932 murder trial.
By 1931, Ben and Alice Edelson had been married for two decades and had seven children, but for years Alice had been having an affair with the married Jack Horwitz. On the night of 24 November, Ben, Alice, and Jack met at Edelson Jewellers to “settle the thing.” Words flew, a brawl erupted, and Jack was shot and killed. The tragedy marked the start of a sensational legal case that captured Ottawa headlines, with the prominent jeweller facing the gallows.
Through a detailed examination of newspaper coverage, interviews with family and community members, and evocative archival photographs, Monda Halpern’s Alice in Shandehland reconstructs a long-silenced murder case in Depression-era Canada. Halpern contends that despite his crime, Ben Edelson was the object of far less contempt than his adulterous wife whose shandeh – Yiddish for shame or disgrace – seemed indefensible. While Alice endured the censure of both the Jewish community and the courtroom, Ben’s middle-class respectability and the betrayal he suffered earned him favoured standing and, ultimately, legal exoneration.
Revealing the tensions around ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and class, Alice in Shandehland explores the divergent reputations of Ben and Alice Edelson within a growing but insular and tenuous Jewish community, and within a dominant culture that embraced male success and valour during the emasculating 1930s.
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