Siminovitch (Elinor et Lou Siminovitch)
Un article de la La Mémoire du Québec (2022).
- Notes biographiques sur le couple Siminovitch.
Publiées pour situer l'implication du couple dans le domaine culturel canadien.
Nous avons préféré les citer en anglais, la langue de la source décrivant le parcours du couple afin de ne pas trahir cette source.
Elinore Siminovitch :
Elinore Siminovitch was born in Poland and immigrated to Montreal at age five. She studied languages in Montreal and Paris and, following the birth of her three daughters, started to write short stories.
Her first short stories were sold to CBC Radio and one of her earliest plays was produced on the Montreal television program Telecast. Although never abandoning short stories, she decided to concentrate on plays when her editor suggested that her excellent dialogue would be better suited to the stage. Her writing career spanned 1962 to 1994 and included over 30 plays with productions or readings of twelve in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. Her themes included feminism and sexual stereotyping as illustrated by Big X Little Y, which won the Ottawa Little Theatre's Playwriting Competition, and was produced at Glendon College, at Montreal's Playwrights' Workshop Theatre and in numerous high schools across the country. One of Toronto's early feminist theatre companies, Redlight Theatre, opened its 1975 season with her Strange Games. In Little White Lies, part of Toronto Free Theatre's Playreading Series, she tackled the political values and moral dilemma of Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx's daughter.
Her script for A Man in the House, a winner in Theatre Ontario's first Playwrights Festival, garnered a cheque for $5,000, a certificate presented to her by Pauline McGibbon and a production of her work at Harbourfront. Set in Montreal during the Depression, A Man in the House, concerns a woman struggling with the political pressures of the times.
Jewish themes were central to some of her works. A Matter of Survival, commissioned by B'nai B'rith, drew on Holocaust themes; The Answer, told the story of a young scientist who joins the Communist Party and eventually defects to Russia; and Hannah, was the story of the life of Hungarian resistance leader Hannah Senesh. Hannah was the first winner of the Canadian Jewish Playwriting Contest and was produced posthumously by the Jewish Theatre Committee of Toronto.
Elinore Siminovitch died in Toronto in 1995.
Louis (dit Lou) Siminovitch :
Louis (Lou) Siminovitch was born in Montreal in 1920 to parents who had emigrated from eastern Europe. As a student he excelled in mathematics, and won a scholarship in chemistry to McGill University, earning a doctorate in 1944. He simultaneously studied literature and credits his English courses with the development of a love of language and writing. After a period with the National Research Council's atomic energy project in Ottawa and Chalk River, he chose to switch his studies to biology, and locale to Paris, a city selected as much for its vibrant cultural life as the academic challenge of the Pasteur Institute. Collaborating with some of the greatest biologists of the century, he began his pioneering studies on the regulation, structure and function of viruses that grow in bacteria; this work contributed an essential building block in the understanding and treatment of cancer. During this period Lou discovered the power and fascination of genetics that would guide his future career.
Returning to Canada in 1953 to join Toronto's Connaught Medical Research Laboratories, he cultivated a new interest in mammalian cell biology. By 1956 he was attracted to the team at the newly created Ontario Cancer Institute at the University of Toronto, dedicated to a multidisciplinary approach to cancer research. He then became a staff member of the Department of Medical Biophysics, serving as its first Chair from 1969 to1972. He remained at the University as a Professor from 1976 to 1985, teaching and mentoring two generations of biomedical researchers in Canada.
From this foundation, Dr. Siminovitch assumed a key leadership position as one of Canada's most renowned medical scientists and scientific builders. He played seminal roles in building research medical capacities, particularly in genetics, at important institutions; the Hospital for Sick Children from 1970 to 1985, and the Samuel Lunenfield Institute at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital from 1983 to 1994, and at the Rotman Research Institute at the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, where he continues as an advisor.
During his career, Dr. Siminovitch served on both public and private medical boards, received numerous honorary degrees, edited many professional journals and was a founding member of five international journals. During his remarkable five-decade career, he published over 200 papers, reflecting his pioneering work in the fields of virology, stem cell differentiation and haemopoiesis, somatic cell and molecular genetics and cancer. His awards and achievements include a Royal Society Fellowship (England), 1991; the Izaak Walton Killam Prize, 1981; the Gairdner Foundation Wrightman Award, 1981; the Flavelle Gold Medal for the Royal Society, 1978; Officer and Companion of the Order of Canada, 1980, 1989. He was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, 1997 and named a foreign associate, and the only Canadian, to the National Academy of Sciences in 1999.
Lou Siminovitch died in Toronto in 2021.
