by Anna Porter
Since we had taken on L&OD, we were now publishing fiction. We started with Tim Wynveen’s Angel Falls (winner of the Commonwealth Prize), and Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place (short-listed for the Booker), Joan Barfoot’s witty yet profoundly moving novels Getting over Edgar and Critical Injuries, Erika Ritter’s Hidden Life of Humans, and Sylvia Fraser’s The Ancestral Suitcase.
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IN 1992 WE launched Lester Publishing with Malcolm Lester. I had always admired his talent and I knew that he would add a new perspective to our list.
From the beginning, Key Porter had been the little company that could do what other companies could not. We were nationalistic, opportunistic, and by the 1990s stable, having managed the three legs of our finances: local books with subjects of interest to the Canadian public, international books tailor-made for the world, and books designed for non-returnable sales, such as the door-to-door market, mass-market merchants, and Costco and Price Clubs. Malcolm was going to bring a different, more erudite, more scholarly perspective.
Lester Publishing’s first books would help define the company: new editions of The Illustrated History of Canada, civil liberties champion Alan Borovoy’s Uncivil Disobedience, George Jonas’s aptly named Politically Incorrect, and reissues of Irving Abella and Harold Troper’s None Is Too Many and Modris Eksteins’s Rites of Spring. Some were books about the history of the country; others tackled political and moral issues that I cared about.
The Illustrated History of Canada was the first comprehensive, one-volume illustrated history of the country, written by leading historians yet readable, featuring hundreds of engravings, cartoons, and photographs.
Alan Borovoy’s book about civil disobedience and its consequences is still relevant today as neo-Nazis and black-balaclava’d groups fight it out with each other and police. Borovoy himself was charming, persuasive, and even funny when recounting his tales of “a democratic agitator.”
I was friends with George Jonas and had published him at Seal. While we often disagreed, his was a voice I understood.
The reissue of None Is Too Many was particularly significant for me. As far back as I remember, I had been a student of Holocaust history, because the country of my birth had joined Nazi Germany early in the Second World War and more than half a million of its Jewish citizens had been murdered in Auschwitz Birkenau. It was a story I first heard from my grandfather, who had saved a few people by hiding them in our cellar.II Years later I returned to this terrible subject with the writing of Kasztner’s Train. The story haunts me still.
None Is Too Many shattered the myth of Canada as a kind, accepting country. It has, according to its authors, “arguably, the worst record of any Western country in trying to save the doomed Jews of Europe.” The authors have a deep and broad knowledge of the persecution of Jews.
I had known both Irving and Rosalie Abella for some years. A member of the Supreme Court, Justice Abella, Rosie to her friends, is the most interesting, serious, funny, committed judge in the country. She is also an affectionate, brilliant, thoughtful friend and a hilariously eclectic collector of memorabilia. The child of Holocaust survivors, she has great respect for life and the rights of ordinary Canadians. Her father, a Jew, had to stand at the back of the classroom in Krakow to study law. Rosie is determined that no one should ever be singled out for punishment because of race, colour, religion, or sex. Irving has been the love of her life.
We reissued June Callwood’s moving book Twelve Weeks in Spring. It describes how a group of people helped nurse a friend who was dying of cancer. When Sylvia Fraser asked June whether she could foresee a time when she herself would need or want such help, June snorted. “Would you want your friends to spoon-feed you and empty your bedpan?”III
When June herself was first diagnosed with inoperable cancer, her first reaction was delight that her illness could be used as a fundraiser. “Don’t worry,” she told Sylvia, “this will work out for everybody.”
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MODRIS EKSTEINS’S BRILLIANT Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age is a highly original cultural history of the first half of the twentieth century—from Stravinsky’s revolutionary ballet to Hitler’s death. Meeting Modris was one of the bonus moments of being part of Lester Publishing.
Later, Key Porter published his evocative Walking Since Daybreak, a manuscript I understood viscerally. The subtitle is A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of Our Century. Its opening lines are unforgettable: “Shattered cities. Smoldering ovens. Stacked corpses. Steeples like cigar stubs. Such are the images of Europe in 1945, images of a civilization in ruins.”
The city of my birth had become such a place during the 1945 siege of Budapest, when the Soviet armies encircled and bombarded the civilian population. The German army blew up its historic bridges, and roaming gangs of Arrow Cross men murdered Jewish citizens. I was a baby in a cellar during that time, but I heard the stories, and as afterwards we endured a Communist dictatorship under Soviet occupation, the ruins of prewar Budapest were left untended during my Hungarian childhood.
Modris, too, returned to the country of his birth. After many years of absence, he found his sojourn in Latvia “fraught with emotion.”
As Modris had been fascinated by the turbulent tales of his family, so had I been fascinated with my own family’s distant past in Transylvania and in southern Hungary, now part of Serbia. My grandfather had been a hussar in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, the one that ended with the Treaty of Trianon. As he never tired of saying, that treaty had been victors’ justice. It had cut off more than half of our country, including the part where my family had thrived for centuries.
Walking Since Daybreak won the Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize in 1999. My own quasi-non-fiction book, The Storyteller: Memory, Secrets, Magic and Lies, appeared a year later. It was a story I had been writing in my head for most of my life, but I think reading Modris’s story helped me decide where to end the tale.
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I. Two more Coyote books followed, all edited by Linda Pruessen. I had been a Thomas King fan since I’d read Green Grass, Running Water, and I was really happy that he won the BC Writers’ Award for The Inconvenient Indian in 2012, the year I was on the jury.
II. Had he known his name would be among the “Righteous” in Jerusalem, he would have been appalled. He was ashamed he hadn’t done more.
III. See Sylvia Fraser’s essay “Hurricane June,” Toronto Life, 2005.
Basil Johnston’s Ojibway Heritage
CANADA HAD ITS own tortured history. When I read the published findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, my mind went back to my friend Basil Johnston and all that he managed to teach me during the years that we knew each other.
We first met in 1975 when he was working at the Royal Ontario Museum’s Ethnography Department. He delighted in showing me the rooms where his “finds” were housed. Those days he used to dress quite formally in grey pants and jacket, but as time went on, he started to wear a traditional embroidered vest and an elaborate string-tie pin that looked like a silver wheel. We often went across the street to the Roof Lounge of the Park Plaza Hotel, and Basil would tell me stories about life for the Anishinaabe, bits of history, legends, the sources of the legends. He’d talk about his friends and about his own funny escapades before he was captured by “the system.”
Basil was only ten when he was taken to the residential school in Spanish, Ontario. More like a threat than a place name, Spanish had loomed large in the imaginations of children on reserves. Teachers and sometimes parents would threaten that if kids didn’t behave, they would end up in Spanish. Basil’s little sister, only four years old, was taken along by the dreaded “Indian agent” only because the man needed to complete his form—the one that called for two children from the same family. She was too young to understand what was happening, and Basil was just old enough not to explain.
Located 130 kilometres west o
f Sudbury and 200 kilometres from Sault Ste. Marie, Spanish was a no-industry town, half emptied by the Great Depression, relying for its subsistence and entertainment on the St. Peter Claver school, where the children put on performances of baseball, hockey, and plays selected by the Jesuit priests.
For Basil and the other boys, aged four to sixteen, “the school” meant “reformatory, penitentiary, hunger, exile, dungeon, whippings, kicks and slaps.” It’s the life Basil recounted with both humour and sadness in his childhood memoir, Indian School Days.
The priests, who ran that school and other schools like it in Canada, assumed that “Indian culture was inferior.” One boasted that “not a word of Indian is heard from our boys after six months. This was achieved through strict discipline and rigorous punishment.”
In addition to strict discipline and hard work, the purpose of the school was to foster religious vocation. Yet, as Basil pointed out, the school produced no priests. It was not lost on the boys that while they starved, eating only barley soup with chunks of gristle, the Fathers dined on meat and potatoes.
Basil painted a heart-breaking picture of the youngest crying and whimpering all day and night, wretchedly clinging to each other and to the knees of the indifferent priest who was in charge of them. Basil’s conclusion was that the Jesuits had taken an oath upon entering the order to repudiate all feelings.
The system continued through the 1950s and into the ’60s. The children were “wards of the Crown,” not citizens of their own country. It was not until 1960 that First Nations people were allowed to vote without losing their status.
Though I had some understanding of Indigenous issues from reading Maria Campbell’s Half-Breed, Basil’s Indian School Days was the first I had heard of the horrific fate of children in government-sponsored religious schools in Canada. I didn’t know that children were forcibly removed from their homes, that they were separated from friends and family, and I had no sense of the widespread abuse, the cultural genocide rooted in the Indian Act of 1876. What is just as surprising: few people knew of the “Sixties Scoop,” a federal government policy that removed First Nations children from their homes in the 1960s and placed them in foster homes or put them up for adoption elsewhere. The press did not deem this worth reporting, and Canadians either didn’t know or didn’t care about what was done in their name.
Basil had relearned the Anishinaabe language. He taught me a few words, all of which I have now forgotten. He thought it was quite amusing that I was born in Hungary, a country with no colonizing ambitions. I remember telling him that even had there been world conquerors among us, we were unlikely to have chosen such an inhospitable land as the one inhabited—quite happily—by his own ancestors. He laughed.
I was puzzled when Basil told me about his return to Spanish for a stint of high school when he could have stayed with his family. He was not very good at menial labour, he explained, and that was all the work he could find on the Parry Island Indian Reserve. He excelled at school, went to Loyola College on a scholarship, became a teacher, an avid hockey fan, married, and raised a family.
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AT M&S I had fought for the publication of Basil’s books Ojibway Heritage and Moose Meat and Wild Rice, the latter a series of very funny stories without the pain that pervades Indian School Days. At Key Porter, I didn’t have to fight to publish Basil.
I think his most challenging book was The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway, published in 1995.
It is the first comprehensive collection and explanation of the sacred stories that inspired and informed the life of the Ojibway before that life was subsumed by contact with the white people. In some ways, this is Basil’s vindication of his heritage that the government and the priests had failed to erase.
The last of Basil’s books that we published was Crazy Dave, a beautifully told tale of Basil’s uncle Dave, born with Down syndrome yet always trying to fit in with the people on the Cape Croker reserve, struggling to be one of the guys. In our promotion of the book, reaching for a catch-all metaphor, we held him up as some sort of reflection of the Ojibways’ struggle to fit into a world not eager to accept them on any—least of all their own—terms.
Basil, for me, was the kind of writer who made our entire publishing enterprise worth the effort. His unique voice, his immense knowledge, his patient perseverance have added immeasurably to our knowledge of who we all are.
The Canadian Way of Death and of Living
WHEN ROB BUCKMAN first came into the offices, he was looking at the ceiling, wondering whether it was safe to take a breath. Rob was a medical doctor, an oncologist, but most important for us, he was also a comedian, a performer, and an author, a most unusual combination for a most unusual man. He had produced and hosted, with a pleasantly unaffected British accent, a TV series called Magic or Medicine, which debunked many of the alternative medicine cures popular in the last few decades. He was very thin with rounded shoulders, a mop of unruly grey-brown hair, a long face, bushy eyebrows that he could move up and down to express delight or consternation. My bedraggled no-longer-white couch elicited the latter, as did the billowing dust that greeted his arrival in the boardroom.
Born in England, he had begun his acting career at thirteen. Medicine came later.
His first book at Key Porter was I Don’t Know What to Say—How to Help and Support Someone Who Is Dying. Rob had an understanding both of the progress of disease and of the jarringly awkward ways in which medical professionals and family members try to communicate with someone who is dying. Having been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease—dermatomyositis—that was doing its best to kill him, he understood the patient’s view of the medical profession, and the need for frank talk that could give a dying person a chance to say what he or she felt he/she wanted to say.
Rob had tried to demonstrate the effects of his own disease to me by pretending to choke, much to the horror of the uptight maître d’ in the stylish Yonge Street restaurant where we celebrated the publication of his fourth book with Key Porter: Magic or Medicine, based on his TV series.
He said that he was astonished at his own longevity. The prognosis had buried him years ago.
His What You Really Need to Know about Cancer: A Comprehensive Guide for Patients and Their Families answers myriad questions that are obscured behind taboos and misconceptions that keep the cancer sufferer from understanding his own diagnosis. When I told him that Julian’s father had been expected to keep the fact of his cancer a secret from his family, he was not surprised. Cancer was thought not to be a topic for polite conversation. Nor was dying.
Later Rob produced a series of medical information videos with his old Cambridge friend, Monty Python’s John Cleese, and hoped we could cooperate on a series of books based on the videos, but Key Porter was already publishing medical information books for people interested in their own diagnosis. Health guides had become one of our steady, dependable publishing fields, one that even our skeptical bankers understood. I had made a deal with the Canadian Medical Association to endorse our books on arthritis, migraines, eating disorders, epilepsy, Crohn’s disease, and other common ailments. There were similar American series, but I believed that our system, medications, and medical advice were different. That was our reason for commissioning books on women’s health and a large fundraiser for the Hospital for Sick Children on childhood health.
Always the comedian, in his almost-memoir, Not Dead Yet: The Unauthorised Autobiography of Dr. Robert Buckman, Complete with Map, Many Photographs and Irritating Footnotes, Rob predicted that “At my funeral they’re going to play a recording of me saying, ‘Thank you so much for coming. Unlike the rest of you, I don’t have to get up in the morning.’ ”
The Witness
I HAD ALWAYS admired Josef Skvorecky but had not met him until we inherited his books from Lester & Orpen Dennys. Josef, who had been used to Louise Dennys’s gentle ways, handled the transition with some suspicion. Not only were we a very different publishing
house, but relations between Czechs and Hungarians had not been particularly amicable during the past several centuries. After a long conversation about Central European history, we decided on a new entente that would ignore both their Masaryk and our Kossuth and we got down to trying to decipher his international contracts, an exhausting effort cheered along by the arrival of some late funds from various agents and sub-agents who had imagined Josef had vanished with L&OD and were delighted to find him with us.
I already knew his formidable career as a dissident writer. His first book, The Cowards, published in 1958, was judged “decadent” and “reactionary” by the Czechoslovak censors. He was one of several writers the regime thought were dangerous.
He and his wife, Zdena Salivarova, came to Canada in 1969, shortly after the Soviet army put an end to Alexander Dubček’s “Communism with a human face.” His books banned, the jazz he loved prohibited, some of his friends jailed, Josef could not have continued to live and write in Czechoslovakia, though he was published all over the world. The New Yorker named him “one of the major literary figures of our time.” The Bass Saxophone, his first book translated into English, was a modern classic. “Superb, masterly,” wrote Graham Greene. It was Greene who had first told his niece, the barely twenty-four-year-old Louise Dennys, about Skvorecky and suggested she should try to help him get published in English. Since she couldn’t interest any of the established houses in publishing a Czech émigré writer with no track record in English, Louise ended up creating her own small press with antiquarian bookseller Hugh Anson-Cartwright to publish Skvorecky. After she joined Lester & Orpen, adding Dennys to the marquee, Josef followed.
