Who Gets In

“In the commonly held narrative regarding Jewish immigration to Canada before the Second World War, men and women (children too) like my grandfather rarely exist,” writes Norman Ravvin in Who Gets In. With his deeply researched, enjoyably readable book, Ravvin addresses this shortcoming, weaving his grandfather’s story with the realities of Canada’s immigration history to expand that narrative.

A writer of both fiction and non-fiction, Ravvin teaches in the Department of Religions and Cultures at Montreal’s Concordia University. His grandfather, Yehuda Yosef Eisenstein, by contrast, settled in tiny Dysart, Saskatchewan, in 1930. Ravvin spotlights the poorly documented life of Jewish immigrants outside of Canada’s big cities, noting that there were enough Jews even in Depression-era rural Saskatchewan to keep Eisenstein occupied as a shoichet (ritual animal slaughterer), teacher, and leader of synagogue services.

Like many men from what were deemed “non-preferred” countries, Eisenstein claimed to be single, assuming that he could bring his wife and children from Poland soon after he arrived. Yet his years-long battle to be reunited with his family in the face of bureaucratic discrimination and disdain reminds us that the path to Canada’s multicultural present is littered with the debris of religious and racial intolerance.