Novelist and short-story writer Norman Levine is best known for his autobiographical work, Canada Made Me (1958). A critical account of a 1956 visit to Canada during a thirty-one-year exile in England (1949-1980), Canada Made Me remains an important and provocative account of social life, cultural values, and personal reassessment. "To be a writer I had to be an exile," Levine has stated, and this condition of displacement and rootlessness has shaped his entire body of writing. Because of his foreign residence, Levine's popularity has been primarily in Europe, with his largest readership in Germany, where his translator has been, Heinrich Böll, the 1972 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. In Canada where Levine has lived since 1980, his works have achieved only modest recognition.

Norman Levine was born to Moses Mordecai and Annie Gurevich Levine in Ottawa and grew up in the Jewish section known as Lower Town...