IN 1992, AFTER I disengaged from Bertelsmann, I hired Susan Renouf (formerly of Key Porter, later at Doubleday Book Clubs) as KP’s editor-in-chief. This move was not unlike Jack’s hiring of me some twenty years earlier: going through tough times needed fresh thinking. Perhaps because Susan had, by then, two growing children and a third one still to come, she had a passion for children’s books. She started kpk, a children’s line, with a series of classics retold for children, for example, Tim Wynne-Jones’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, illustrated by Bill Slavin. Tim’s novel, Odd’s End, had been an early winner of the Seal First Novel Award, and he has gone on to be one of Canada’s most beloved YA novelists. The Hunchback was sold to Orchard Books at Bologna, the world’s most enjoyable book fair. Several foreign language publishers partnered with us for his Dracula, illustrated by Laszlo Gal. Laszlo, who had been a famous illustrator and graphic designer in Hungary, had settled in Toronto after the ’56 Revolution. His art was dark, brooding, very detailed and painterly. In another century, I think, Laszlo would have been painting murals in cathedrals and palaces.
Later Susan added, among others, The Last Straw, a wonderful Christmas story by Fredrick Thury and Vlasta van Kampen, Thomas King’s Coyote Sings to the Moon (illustrated by Johnny Wales),I and my grandchildren’s beloved The Deep Cold River Story by Tabatha Southey, who became a popular columnist at The Globe and Mail and Maclean’s. Susan also commissioned my daughter Julia and Patricia Pearsall to produce Before I Say Goodnight, with royalties going to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Julia had been working with children living with blood-related illnesses. She went on to work for the Hole in the Wall Camps, Right To Play, and Jays Care. She has an uncanny ability to empathize with kids in pain.
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.
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.