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“Rifke is written with ease and elegance by Rosalie Wise Sharp, a born storyteller.”
“What makes Rifke so powerful (is) the no-holding-back drama and Rosalie’s winning humor.”
Rifke is written with ease and elegance by Rosalie Wise Sharp, a born storyteller, an acclaimed author and interior designer for the luxurious Four Seasons Hotels, which husband Isadore (Issy) Sharp founded and serves as CEO. Not long ago, he sold the hotel chain to Bill Gates and Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talai for $3.65billion. Rosalie recalls her life growing up as Rifke with her Jewish family in North Toronto, where they lived behind her father’s dry good store.
“She divulges secrets that would make most society matrons want to slip silently beneath the starched linen cloth of the luncheon table,” assesses the critic from Canada’s Globe and Mail. Indeed, this is what makes Rifke so powerful. The no-holding-back drama and Rosalie’s winning humor. Published by ECW Press in Toronto, Rifke is available on Amazon.com.
“Books were my escape, and I read book after book from the library, rather than going out on dates. I dreamed of living the life I read about in books. We spoke Yiddish, wore handme-downs and one bathroom served many.” No Pollyanna she, Rosalie discourses unflinchingly of her past, and also with humor about her parents, the shtetl menus of the kosher “no name animal parts,” falling in love with Issy, when all they had was a Volkswagon, and now they traverse the world in their Challenger 604. “Ridiculously extravagant,” she says, adding that at this point in Issy’s career, “it makes good business sense for someone of his acumen. In the same day, he can do a breakfast meeting in Budapest, a luncheon in Lisbon, and a dinner in Dublin.
”She describes her and Issy’s courtship, Issy’s coaxing her into sex before marriage, which Jewish girls at that time denied, and how they handled a tragic consequence. Their love for their four sons and the heartbreaking loss of their 17-year old to cancer. “I wrote Rifketo honor the vanished way of life that I grew up in,” she says, and quotes Roger Cukierman. “Whoever cannot know his grandparents, nor the faces, places, sounds and smells of where they lived is memory’s orphan.”
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