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  • More Than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics by Richard Menkis and Harold Troper
  • Brad J. Congelio
Menkis, Richard and Harold Troper. More Than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Pp. 281. $20.96, pb.

In regard to academic treatments of the Olympic Games, maybe a dozen or so books should be considered “staples” on any Olympic historian’s bookshelf. More Than Just Games, authored by Richard Menkis and Harold Troper, is likely to become one of those books. The 1936 Nazi Olympics are arguably the most researched and written about Olympic Games ever, with the connotation being that there is little new information to discover or write about. More Than Just Games does not fall into that category. What Menkis and Troper have presented in their book is a refreshing and deeply intriguing study on the diverging political and social interests in Canada in the lead-up to the 1936 Nazi Olympic Games.

The general thrust of More Than Just Games focuses on the decision that the Canadian Olympic Committee, just like many other Olympic committees, had to make shortly after the 1936 Olympics were awarded to Berlin: should the country send athletes to the Olympics despite Hitler’s determination to push “ahead with an aggressive policy of rearmament and, on the home front, pressing ahead with legalized persecutions of minorities and political opponents” (206–7)? The depiction of the battling interests within Canada is where More Than Just Games truly shines. On one side, Menkis and Troper display how the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) largely turned a blind eye to the atrocities taking place in Germany, theorizing that Canada’s strong connection to Britain was too strong for the Jewish and political-Left opposition to overcome—meaning once the British opted to go to Berlin, the COC followed. As well, the authors place a strong focus on the Canadian athletes who traveled to Berlin, arguing that, having earned the right to participate in the Olympics, the athletes had little to nothing for which to apologize. The Canadian press largely shared this viewpoint, with many newspaper columnists agreeing with The Globe’s Dunc MacDonald that it was worth sending a Canadian contingent to the Berlin Olympics.

On the other side of the Canadian participation conflict, the authors present a vividly detailed account regarding how the Left and the Jewish community had “each separately championed an Olympic boycott and came away empty” (211). One of the most interesting stories within the narrative is that of the Toronto Daily Star’s Matthew H. Halton. One of the country’s most respected and read international affairs reporters, Halton visited Germany twice in 1933. After his second visit, his position as one of the few mass media proboycott advocates became clear, publishing first-hand accounts of Germany where he witnessed “a parade of hundreds of children, between the ages of seven and sixteen, carrying the swastika and shouting at intervals, ‘the Jews must be destroyed’” (35). While Canada attending the Olympics is a foregone conclusion during the reading of the book, Menkis and Troper do an outstanding job of piecing together an intricate puzzle of dissenting voices into a highly enjoyable narrative.

A significant reason More Than Just Games is an outstanding addition to Olympic history is in no small part due to the stunning amount of primary resource research completed by Menkis and Troper. The book’s foundation is built upon research completed at what seems to be nearly every archive pertinent to the topic. For example, to build their [End Page 360] narrative regarding the Jewish community and the advocacy for an Olympic boycott, the authors visited the Canadian Jewish Congress Charities Committee Archives, the Jewish Historical Society of British Columbia, the Montreal Jewish Public Library Archives, the Jewish Historical Society of British Columbia, the Jewish Historical Society of Western Canada, and the list goes on. In total, the authors visited twenty separate archives to craft a convincing narrative. The authors also collected pertinent photographs from many of the archives that assist in providing some familiarity with the many central figures in the book.

More Than Just...

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