Wayne Hoffman
"The End of Her"

Thursday, Ferbuary 23, 2023 | 7 PM

Via Zoom

 

Part mem­oir and part mys­tery is how to best describe Wayne Hoffman’s book, The End of Her: Rac­ing Against Alzheimer’s to Solve a Mur­der. Hoff­man recounts his quest to solve the mur­der of his great-grand­moth­er, killed in her sleep in Win­nipeg in 1913, and to share his find­ings with his moth­er before her mind is rav­aged by Alzheimer’s Dis­ease. In the process, the author’s search for truth explores issues of Jew­ish iden­ti­ty, the immi­grant expe­ri­ence, famil­ial oblig­a­tion, love, and loss.

As The End of Her con­tin­ues, Hoff­man weaves chap­ters about his mother’s decline and his fam­i­ly his­to­ry into a sin­gle nar­ra­tive. He unrav­els fam­i­ly mys­ter­ies and paints a vivid pic­ture of life in Winnipeg’s thriv­ing Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in the peri­ods before and after World War One and the influen­za out­break of 1918. He also explores the rela­tion­ship between the immi­grant com­mu­ni­ties of Win­nipeg and the dis­trust, anti­semitism, and bias­es that per­sist­ed among the groups that set­tled in Canada.