With Jackie

It was the early 1980s. “There’s somebody you must meet,” rumbled the voice on the phone. It was Barry Callaghan — poet, writer, and man of letters extraordinaire — deploying his best imperious growl. “Yes, Barry!” I said, snapping to attention.

So it was that, a few hours later in a back-­alley hole-in-the-wall Roman restaurant, I met Jacqueline Park, the little Jewish woman who could.

Jackie was part of the remarkable Jewish diaspora that fanned out from Winnipeg in the 1940s and ’50s, and as we sat there forking up spaghetti and drinking Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, her life story unspooled. As a teenager, she danced and sang for the airmen who would soon be fighting, and dying, in the Second World War. Later, she was hired by the great John Grierson, founder of the Canadian National Film Board. “He was drunk at the time,” she recalled. “When I arrived at the office, he’d forgotten he’d hired me. ‘Who are you, girlie?’ ”

Never...