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...