Outward Bound

For narrative historians and biographers, primary sources are gold dust, particularly if the writer uses an attention-grabbing metaphor. So the following lines, taken from a forty-year-old letter, immediately sparked my interest: “My coming to this country was like a drowning man grabbing at a straw. I did not wish for anything, just threw my future to destiny. Well, eventually and ultimately this ‘straw’ was a sturdy log that had drifted to the harbour of my existence.”

The writer was Jack Forsell, from near Thunder Bay, Ontario, and the sentences could have popped straight out of a well-worn genre in this country: the successful immigrant’s tale. There’s the desperation to flee a wretched homeland; the metamorphosis from straw-like fragility to self-reliant strength; the slow but steady move to calling a new place “home.” Yet Forsell was writing not about his arrival in Canada but...