bio
Beth Kaplan graduated at the age of twenty-two from one of the foremost British theatre schools, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. She worked for a decade as a professional actress, then enrolled at the University of British Columbia to earn a Master’s of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. Since 1994 scores of her articles have appeared in the Globe and Mail and other newspapers and magazines and on CBC radio; a play of hers won the 1994 Canadian Jewish Playwriting Competition. She has taught memoir and personal essay writing at Ryerson University in Toronto since 1995, and now also teaches at the University of Toronto. Her book about her great-grandfather Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: the Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin was published by Syracuse University Press in 2007.
A bit about my life …
I am an example of what my father called “hybrid vigour” - both American and Canadian, Jewish and not Jewish, my mother a British WASP and my father a New York Jew. I was born in 1950 in Manhattan and grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with two childhood years in London, England and one in Paris. In Paris I was so desperate to talk to my classmates in a French high school that I went from no French to fluent French in two weeks. The Beatles played there in 1965 and I saw them twice in one day, a multi-orgasmic experience.
During my twenties, which I spent as a professional actress in B.C., I performed in nine tours. One went right across Canada - a country-western musical based on Othello in which I played the pivotal role of Debbie-Lou Belinsky the barmaid. I was lucky enough in those years to work with fine, unknown Canadian actors like Dan Ackroyd, Bruce Greenwood and Michael J. Fox. In 1980, pregnant with my first child, I left the stage to go back to school and prepare for a new career as a writer.
In my forties, while raising two children, I began to publish articles and personal essays in magazines and newspapers. One article, about a mother overcoming her reluctance to smoke weed with her adult children, now appears on a number of hemp-related websites, and my daughter and I were asked to speak on television about the inter-generational marijuana experience.
In 1996, I went back on stage for the first time in fifteen years, playing the eldest sister in The Sisters Rosenzweig at the Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver.
I’ve taught creative non-fiction writing at Ryerson since 1995 and at the University of Toronto since 2007, and work from home as a writing coach and editor as well as a writer.
My MFA thesis about my father’s grandfather, the famous Yiddish playwright Jacob Gordin, led me into further research for a full-scale biography, which was also a memoir of the family’s connection to him, or lack of it. More than twenty years after the journey began, I finally let the book out of my grasp, and Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: the life and legacy of Jacob Gordin was published in 2007.
