To Lüneburg

This past July, the Jewish historian and activist Irving Abella died. His obituary reminded me of None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933–1948, the ground-breaking book he co-wrote with Harold Troper, and especially of Ottawa’s abysmal history of exclusionary immigration policies. Before, during, and directly after the Holocaust — even when Hitler’s intention to annihilate European Jewry was known — the country accepted fewer than 13,000 Jewish refugees, a legacy that Abella described as “arguably the worst of all possible refugee-receiving states.” For the writer Judith Kalman, that record’s underlying message was never far from mind; in countless ways, it shaped her family members’ relationships to institutions, religion, education, and friends — and to one another.

Called to Testify: The Big Story in My Small Life is the first-hand account of how Kalman, the child of Holocaust survivors and refugees from the 1956 Hungarian revolution...