Novelist and art historian. Brookner’s novels have been described as “gloomy. ” Already in her 50’s when her first novel was published, she won the prestigious Brooker literary prize for her fourth, Hotel du Lac, published in 1984.

Her parents were Jewish immigrants to Britain, who changed their name from Bruckner.  She once told the Paris Review, “My family were Polish Jews, and we lived with my grandmother, with uncles and aunts and cousins all around, and I thought everybody lived like that. They were transplanted and fragile people, an unhappy brood…” During WWII, her family tried to help refugees from war-torn Europe.

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President of the World Jewish Congress from 1981 until 2007, Bronfman was the son of Samuel Bronfman (1891-1971), one of Canada’s leading Jewish industrialists and communal leaders. Edgar Bronfman developed the Seagram Company founded by his father, and became an international Jewish leader as president of the Congress. Under his leadership, the Congress exerted influence on Jewish affairs around the world, mostly notably championing the plight of the Jews of the Soviet Union,  exposing of Austria’s president, Kurt Waldheim, as an ex-Nazi, and the discovery of bank accounts in Switzerland with funds belonging to Jewish victims of the Nazis.

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