Coming to Gold Mountain

In Auschwitz there stood a building that housed all the valuables confiscated from the inmates. Inmates and prison guards alike referred to the building as “Kanada.” Early Chinese immigrants to this country felt they were bound for “Gold Mountain.” Josef Škvorecký, the Czech-Canadian novelist, once told me that, “when my wife and I escaped to Canada, we soon realized we’d come to a country without issues. Not entirely, of course—there is no such thing—but as close as you can get.” My father often said that, if he and my mother did nothing else for my brothers and me, they did bring us to Canada. We had fled Hungary during the 1956 revolution, and we had come from a prosperous family, “but never in the history of the world,” he said, “has there been a country as comfortable and accepting and open-minded and prosperous as this one—not for everyone, not for absolutely everyone, but for the less fortunate we have programs.”

What is it about this best of all possible...