Afterword

My father, whose Yiddish name was Aaron, was born in Nesvicz, Belarus, and his stories about the Red Cavalry galloping into that village during the Russian Revolution have reverberated with me throughout my entire life. After arriving in Canada, Aaron joined the Communist Party, where he worked as a labour organizer in the Montreal garment factories until revelations about Stalin’s reign of terror filtered into Canada.

My father never recovered from the disappointment of learning how Stalin and the secret police treated the Jewish population in the Soviet Union. He left the Party in 1947. Many of my relatives remained stalwart members until their deaths. The demise of Fred Rose was a much-debated topic of conversation at family gatherings, and the one which planted the seed for this novel.

Members of our family who remained in Nesvicz after the revolutionary war were murdered by the Nazis in July 1942 when the liquidation of the Nesvicz ghetto began. During the 1920s, my father’s older sister, Dvora, moved to Moscow after he and most of the family immigrated to Canada. Dvora endured physical hardship, starvation and religious persecution. Her husband was executed during Stalin’s reign of terror, and her children and grandchildren, who were living in Kiev at the time of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, were exposed to the radioactive fallout from the reactor.

At times when writing this book, I’ve allowed oral testimony and storytelling to take precedence over historical record. My intention has always been to be true to the fictional narrative of this particular story.

In my book, John Grierson is portrayed as an operative for Soviet military intelligence, and I do believe he was under the influence of the Soviets during World War II. Igor Gouzenko’s cache of documents, stolen from the Russian Embassy in Ottawa, implicated Grierson, and that is why he left Canada after testifying at the Kellock—Taschereau Commission (officially the Royal Commission to Investigate the Facts Relating to and the Circumstances Surrounding the Communication, by Public Officials and Other Persons in Positions of Trust, of Secret and Confidential Information to Agents of a Foreign Power). Grierson was, of course, the founder of the National Film Board of Canada.

More information about the illusive Freda Linton can be culled from FBI and MI6 files. I recall my father describing her as a great beauty and the bravest of women.