Book Notes: Scott McIntyre and Erna Paris

I've been reading two recent books about the history of Canadian writing and publishing in the last half-century or so: Scott McIntyre's A Precarious Enterprise: Making a Life in Canadian Publishing and Erna Paris's Hunting History: A Writer's Odyssey (and with Richard Stursburg's Lament for a Literature: The Collapse of Canadian Publishing, previously noted here, in the background.)

Scott McIntyre had a remarkable career as a publisher, from holding a senior executive position at McClelland & Stewart at the age of 25, to building Douglas & McIntyre, one of Canada's best and biggest trade publisher, and having a lot of fun all the way through. Also he published one book by me and one by my father -- a good experience for each of us.

But looming over his story is 2012, when Douglas & McIntyre went into receivership -- a defining moment in the collapse of Canadian publishing in the "free trade era" when all the promises of cultural exemptions proved hollow. And when several writer friends of mine were left with royalties never to be received. Stursburg's book is the big picture; McIntyre's is the lived experience.

Erna Paris's memoir is not about a failing publisher. From a very early age, Erna Paris developed a profound involvement with justice, human rights, and how societies deal with the horrors of their past. She did it entirely as a journalist and a writer, always outside academia, but well supported by publishers. Her memoir does take readers into her life experience, but the book is structured by her books, one after another, to reveal her remarkable lifelong continuity of interests and concerns. 

As a Jew (from a relatively privileged beginning in Toronto), she began with painful questions of how to confront the Holocaust. After studying in France and marrying a Frenchman, she wrote Unhealed Wounds, using the trial of Klaus Barbie to interrogate how France denied and dealt with its collaborationist past.  

In The End of Days, she went back to how early modern Spain went from multi-cultural tolerance to the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews.  

She studied Israel and Palestine in The Garden and The Gun. Long before Gaza loomed over all, she concluded, "The policies of the State of Israel as they had evolved challenged my most deeply held convictions of ethics and justice."  

In Long Shadows, perhaps her best and most original work, she travelled the world to explore the much-contested rise of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions as a way for conflicted societies to confront their past.* (I'm proud to say I was part of the jury that awarded Long Shadows the Writers' Trust prize in nonfiction.) In The Sun Climbs Slow, she moved on the International Criminal Court and its possibilities for redress and judgement. 

I knew and admired Erna Paris, but before reading Hunting History, I really had not grasped the magnificent scope of her achievement. Nor had I had known how much of an international audience, and worldwide translations, and even political influence and respect she had earned over the years

So maybe she was sheltered somewhat from the travails of Canadian publishing.  But this memoir -- lovingly completed by her children and published after her death in 2022  -- is published (quite beautifully) by the ominously named At Bay Press, a small Winnipeg publishing house I had never heard of before, when it deserved to come out triumphally to national acclaim from a major Canadian house with the resources to give it the attention it deserves. Those days have ended too. 

Will Erna Paris be remembered in Canada as she deserves? We will need a Canadian literature and a Canadian culture to make it so. 

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* Long Shadows was published in 2000. Erna Paris was already living with cancer as Canada's own Truth and Reconciliation Commission transformed how we discuss Indigenous and settler-colonial issues in Canada. Her brief closing remarks on that matter in Hunting History are sensitive to the topic, but not what she might have given us had she lived longer.