David SOBELMAN

1950 - 2022

DAVID SOBELMAN 1950-2022 It is with sadness that we share the news that our admired and dear friend, David Sobelman, died at his home in Oakville on November 7, 2022, while recuperating from surgery. David was predeceased by his beloved wife, poet and professor, Rishma Dunlop. Born in Haifa of an old French Jewish family, David was the son of Rivka Aboutboul and Izhak Sobelman. His brother, Nadav Sivan (Rena Kahn) of Atlanta survives him. David's early years were spent living and studying across Europe, in Holland, Germany, France, and England. In 1972, he immigrated to Canada to study film and literature at York University. David enjoyed a dynamic career in Toronto, not only as a screenwriter and editor, translator and poet (After The End), but as a writer-producer and independent director of film and television feature-length documentaries: Runaways: 24 Hours On The Streets, McLuhan's Wake, and Samuel Bak: Painter Of Questions. His television series included Marshall McLuhan's ABC, The Shuttle Years, and The Space Symphony. For this creative work he received a Gemini Award and a Prix Anik, and was awarded The Media Ecology's Praxis Award, and the Governor General's Michener Award for Broadcast Journalism. In a profound sense, David - from his beginnings - had set out to create himself, becoming a bon but melancholy vivant and scholar (he once taught courses in Thomas Aquinas at the University of Toronto); a kind of Baudelairean flaneur who was deeply rooted in isolation, an intellectual of acute philosophical awareness and unflinching integrity, who was open to thought-provoking shenanigans. In other words, he was a complicated, singular fellow.