A Lifetime Preoccupation

The girl from Toronto’s Forest Hill Public School was the daughter of a “compulsively curious” chartered accountant and a mother who was partial to Beethoven’s piano sonatas. She went to Jewish summer camp and to the University of Toronto, where she took an honours degree in English and philosophy. There was nothing in her pleasant, even complacent background that prepared her for what was to come. “In retrospect I was laughably ill-equipped for life ‘elsewhere,’ ” Erna Paris comments in her posthumously published memoir. She found that elsewhere in French cafés in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in the Balata Palestinian refugee camp, in a Croat village where she was surrounded by a clutch of angry men pointing guns at her head.

But these venues, and others around the globe, became the natural habitat of a woman whose dogged research and discerning reportage — fuelled by audacious courage and dauntless determination — stripped away the stereotypes of world affairs for tens of thousands of readers even as she shed the comfortable preconceptions and sturdy orthodoxies of her youth. Her dispatches and books — you might think of them as broadsides against blarney — came periodically over the years. In Hunting History: A Writer’s Odyssey, they are recounted briskly and poignantly in a sustained display of insight and introspection.

Along with the customary agreeable elements of an upper-middle-class childhood, she was shaped — maybe reshaped — by a series of random, destiny-tinged encounters. At sixteen, while a counsellor-in-training at Camp Ogama on Fox Lake, a slapshot north of Huntsville, Ontario, she came under the sway of Alan Borovoy, the future founder of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and was friends with Stephen Lewis, the future leader of the Ontario NDP and diplomat. Later, while a student at the Sorbonne, she would visit the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp and a nearby war monument depicting grieving women and children. “I was seized by a visceral hatred of war and violence that never left me,” she declares of a life-shifting epiphany. “From that day I felt compelled to hunt down how it was possible for ordinary-seeming human beings to commit atrocities.” For this emerging big-game hunter, there would be a surfeit of targets.

Along the way, she would join French street protests over the war in Algeria — which exposed her to the legacy of colonialism and the perfidy of government. She would take lessons from serving as a juror in a rape case — which would open her eyes to the mortifying stereotypes of women. She would find inspiration in Marcel Ophuls’s landmark film The Sorrow and the Pity — which prompted her look at French collaborators in the Second World War. She would examine the position of Black people in the United States and South Africa and the plight of minorities in the former Yugoslavia — which would fire her with passion and rage about entrenched racism. She would re-examine her thoughts about Israel and challenge the assumptions with which she was reared. Her seven lauded works of literary non-fiction stand as — to cadge a phrase from T. E. Lawrence — seven pillars of wisdom.

What she saw, the people she met, the questions she asked, the answers she got, the answers she rejected . . . All these experiences prove that an open mind can change minds, that the open doors of mentors like Robert Fulford, the storied editor of Saturday Night, and Doris Anderson, the crusading editor of Chatelaine, can change a young person’s life. They also prove that the financial support of magazines and book publishers can transform a career — one that can, in turn, transform the perspectives of innumerable readers.

Not that there weren’t frustrations, stumbles, and even sheer stupidity along the way. Consider her tenure as an editor at Maclean’s, which ended abruptly when she added the word “Guess” to every reference in a piece that Roy MacGregor had submitted on the British rock group the Who.

One of the greatest albums of the Who — not the Guess Who — is titled Who’s Next, and what was next for Paris was tackling the sensitive topic that took form in Jews: An Account of Their Experience in Canada, from 1980. Her first book illuminated, among other themes, the difference between Montreal’s “downtown Jews” and “uptown Jews,” a distinction that survives today. It also dealt with the ambiguities that surround assimilation. In writing it, Paris probed her own identity, even as she discovered obstacles to colonial-era inclusion such as Louis XIV’s order barring Jews (and Huguenots) from settlement in Canada.

Her investigations into the presence, and ultimately the frustration, of early Jewish settlers, along with what she learned about tensions between Quebec majorities and minorities, provided a foretaste of Paris’s career. “I hadn’t set out to explore xenophobia, but discovering its presence in early Canada made me think I was on track to something important,” she recalls. “It had already become apparent to me that discriminatory attitudes to women were like exclusion on grounds of religion, in that both women and non-Christians were seen as ‘other,’ and I was beginning to think that I might be looking at a single, deep-rooted human impulse expressing itself in a variety of situations.”

Although best known for her work abroad, Paris found ample areas in her native land that outraged her. Having witnessed the French government’s response to dissent during the Algerian conflict, for example, she had a strong reaction to Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s use of the War Measures Act in 1970: “I thought that state-sponsored violence might be warranted on a battlefield, but government-sanctioned violence on civilian streets was a frightening demonstration of how easily democratic rights can be overturned.” She was, to be sure, exhilarated by “the heady atmosphere of those Quebec days — the excitement, the idealism, the rebellion against the old ways, including the heavy hand of the Catholic Church, the potent scent of danger, the thrill of trespassing boundaries.” But she was skeptical about Bill 21, which banned public sector employees from wearing religious garb in 2019: “The temptation to discriminate against ‘the other’ is both perennial and dangerous, especially in an ethnically diverse country such as Canada.” Paris was also disappointed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s inability to assess responsibility for the injuries and tragedies foisted on Indigenous people: “What is undeniable is that Canada sought to silence the vibrant voices of those who originated not elsewhere, but here.”

Her interests ranged from medieval Spain to modern Japan, but hers really was a life of looking at how atrocities, injustices, and other public tragedies are remembered, and misremembered, and how they are distorted by and serve the interests of powerful groups and leaders. These insights animated perhaps her best-known book, Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History, from 2000, which this magazine named, six years later, as one of the 100 most important Canadian books. “I became aware that an underlying subject of my work was accountability in its broadest sense,” she reveals in Hunting History. “Justice, in other words — justice for the victims of atrocities and other flagrant misdeeds, justice as respect for the rule of law, justice as a balancing of a historical pendulum.”

Justice delayed but not justice denied was the theme of her reporting on the life and trial of Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo leader known as the Butcher of Lyon, who had survived for decades in La Paz, Bolivia. Twice convicted in absentia, Barbie — whom Paris describes artfully as a fugitive “whose name continued to burn on an unfinished page of history”— was responsible for sending Jews and members of the wartime Resistance to Auschwitz. She describes the episode, the focus of her Unhealed Wounds: France and the Klaus Barbie Affair, from 1986, as a “metaphor for the past, present, and future of France.” Paris unearthed long-dormant but still festering divisions among members of the Resistance even as she contributed to the demythologizing of it.

Although her pursuit of “pieces of hidden history” and what she called the “daily diet of war trauma” was affecting her emotionally, she nonetheless was determined to “continue this pursuit of the origins of extreme human behaviour.” She did so by following the 1997–98 trial of Maurice Papon, charged with deporting 1,560 Jews from southwest France. In the courtroom, it became clear that “the ‘mud’ of war memory that was supposed never to be stirred was also flying about the room: the stark allegations of who did what to whom during the years of the Collaboration a half-century earlier — of who had been lying for five decades, of what myths and falsehoods about the Resistance had been taught to school children.”

It was those kinds of complexities — the irony and burden of history, the multi-dimensional elements of contemporary life, the collision of myth and reality — that besieged her when she turned to the difficult issues, then as now, of Israel and Zionism: “To accept the policies of the State of Israel as they had evolved challenged my most deeply held convictions of ethics and justice, both concepts I had — ironically — learnt early in my life from Judaism.”

It was while writing The End of Days: Tolerance, Tyranny and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, published in 1995, that she realized her work may have ranged widely geographically but, taken as a whole, it constituted an examination of “the ambiguities of historical memory, cultural identity, and the fragility inherent in majority-minority relations; the uses of political propaganda; and the origins of racism, all of them seen through the lens of repeated human experience.” The long-ago era had shown her that “policies of mandatory assimilation are a misguided means to achieving national unity.”

The story of how this memoir came to be published is testimony to how gritty determination — the natural resource of writers with an inquisitive bent and a distaste for convention — can be inherited.

Paris died in 2022 of breast cancer at the age of eighty-three, but in her last months she completed this memoir, which she passed on to her children. Roland and Michelle Paris, along with Erna’s second husband, the former University of Toronto professor Thomas M. Robinson, who himself died in 2023, were committed to the publication of her last work. Their effort, the siblings explain in a foreword, “reminded us of our mother’s extraordinary journey of discovery, her humour and compassion, her resilience and drive, and her rare ability to tell stories that are at once deeply personal and profound reflections on the best and worst of humanity.”

In this moment, when foreign correspondents are ever more rare, when international investigatory journalism is in decline except at a few well-financed outlets, and when concern for minorities and for rights denied is in eclipse, it is refreshing to join what Roland and Michelle Paris recall as a lifetime of yeasty dinner table conversations. They thought they were doing their mother a final favour. In truth — and truth was the lifetime preoccupation, even the obsession, of Erna Paris — it is a favour to us all.