Delayed Impact: The Holocaust and the Canadian Jewish Community by Franklin Bialystok, and: Unauthorized Entry: The Truth about Nazi War Criminals in Canada, 1946–1956 by Howard Margolian (review)

HUMANITIES 329 alone, this collection of essays has resonance for today. Despite some oddly out-of-place contributions, The Holocaust=s Ghost is highly recommended reading for anyone interested in learning about the conditions that made the Holocaust possible and how the event continues to effect our lives today. (HILARY C. EARL) Franklin Bialystok. Delayed Impact: The Holocaust and the Canadian Jewish Community McGill-Queen=s University Press. xiv, 328. $39.95 Howard Margolian. Unauthorized Entry: The Truth about Nazi War Criminals in Canada, 1946B1956. University of Toronto Press. viii, 328. $39.95 >Readers expecting a familiar tale of government duplicity and incompetence will not find it here.= Contrary even to his own expectations, Howard Margolian ends up defending the immigration screening policies of Canadian officials in the aftermath of the Second World War. In so doing, he challenges earlier studies, most notably the Deschenes Commission=s >Nazi War Criminals in Canada: The Historical and Policy Setting from the 1940s to the Present= (1987) and Reg Whitaker=s Double Standard: The Secret History of Canadian Immigration (1987). The plausible assumption has been that lingering anti-Semitic attitudes and a renewal of anti-Communism in the postwar era resulted in porous borders. Yet, argues Margolian, the record shows otherwise. If Nazis or Nazi collaborators gained entry into Canada, they did so without authorization. Margolian examines the involvement of non-governmental agencies as well, finding that >just as it is possible to underestimate the effectiveness of the system of immigration screening, it is also possible to overestimate the ability of the immigration lobby to subvert it.= He notes that lobby groups representing various ethnic and religious constituencies were far from successful in their appeals to loosen up on-the-ground restrictions as the RCMP=s Special Branch applied them in the European theatre. The numbers are suggestive. Of the 999,000 postwar European arrivals to Canada, there were among them >perhaps two thousand Nazi war criminals and collaborators.= >The degree of responsibility of Western intelligence agencies is less clear,= Margolian admits. Scholarly scrutiny in this area is made almost impossible by the fact that >the vast majority of [RCMP Special Branch] documents are classified [under the aegis of CSIS], and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.= In the meantime, Margolian=s is a bracing corrective to what he calls >cast-of-mind= interpretations. Like Peter Novick=s The Holocaust in American Life (1999), Bialystok=s book is a welcome entry in the growing literature on Holocaust remem- 330 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 brance. Relying mainly on materials from the archives of the Canadian Jewish Congress and B=nai Brith Canada, and on interviews with Jewish public spokespersons, Bialystok has delved into provocative territory. >Interest in the Holocaust was late in coming,= he tells us, and then proceeds, in a sensitive and contextually attuned manner, to explain how and why amnesia gave way to a memory so strong it has become a >pillar of selfidentification .= He focuses on three periods: 1945B60; 1960B73; 1973B85. In the first, >the Holocaust was a low-priority item on the [Canadian Jewish] community agenda= because, while it was recognized as monstrous, the Holocaust was viewed as a European tragedy and most Canadian Jews were breaking away from their Old World roots. Survivors, meanwhile, were reluctant to tell their story. This was to change in the second period, by which time survivors made up 15 per cent of the nation=s Jewish population. With the rise of neo-Nazism in Germany B and in Ontario, Alberta, and Manitoba B their voices began to be heard. It was the strength of this sub-community=s not-always-welcome influence that distinguished the Canadian development of Holocaust consciousness from the American instance. Whereas the Six Day War in 1967 was the catalytic moment for American Jews, Bialystok maintains that for the Canadian community concern over Israel=s security >was only one factor in a series of events.= The third period saw the institutionalization of Holocaust remembrance, brought about in part by the publication of Abella and Troper=s None Is Too Many and the Deschenes Commission=s report, and by the notoriety of the Keegstra and Zundel affairs...