Kevin Annett in Montreal: March 21, 2011

I first heard of Kevin Annett back in 2003 when I was researching the story of Cold War experiments on children. Writer Max Wallace asked me if I knew about the former United Church minister out west, who had compiled affidavits from former residential school inmates who claimed to have witnessed experiments conducted by German doctors on native children.

Three years later, I was in Vancouver and called Kevin Annett. We met in a downtown cafe. Since then we've stayed in touch. Getting to know this heroic man marked a turning point in my life. Kevin Annett is one of those rare Canadians who, when confronted with blatant, systemic evil, absolutely refused to make a deal with the devil, and paid a high price for his integrity. That's why I think his remarkable story needs to be told and retold, and taught to school children, as well as in universities -- because we have so few examples, in our history and literature, of people like Kevin Annett.

Back in 2001, I'd lived in Kamloops, a town of cowboys and Indians - real cowboys and real Indians -- divided by a bridge that, among other things, separates the whiter, south side of town from the reserve on the north shore. I'd had a few First Nations students, a brilliant boy from up north who was hearing-impaired and dropped out of my class. And a girl called Crystal Narcisse. whose brother Bobby was accused of killing a white boy on the bridge in a drug deal. She attended one class, and never returned. This was standard, I was told. “They’ll show up at the beginning of the semester, but most will just disappear by mid-term.” It was a mystery, why they vanished like that – my colleague shrugged – like Mohicans. Perhaps they felt more at home in their own territory, the forests and mountains.

I'd attended a powwow in a high school gym, an amazing event that included a closed-door meeting of residential school survivors who were being encouraged to speak up about their memories of abuse. But my fellow teachers at the college, and my neighbours, who were white, told me not to put too much stake in the "rumours" -- First Nations people were always trying to take advantage of the system. "Why should they always get special treatment?” asked one woman.

There was Harry, the native man whom I met at the home of a student, who once or twice called my office, sounding drunk, wanting to come over and tell me something that he couldn’t bring himself to talk about. I didn't understand why he was prone to weeping on the phone, but the rigidity of the white community shocked me more. Kamloops was redneck city, with stunning scenery and two-stepping couples in cowboy hats and boots whirling around the dance floor at Cactus Jack's bar downtown.

I left when my contract ended, in 2002. Scenes remained frozen in my memory, just below my horizon of understanding.

Looking back, I realize the figure of Kevin Annett hovered in the background of those days. He was the one that broke the silence and took the heat – more than most white men face in a life time.

In 2002, he had just published Hidden From History: the Canadian Holocaust, and copies were circulating around the native communities.

In 2006, I finally met him at Blenz on Davie Street in Vancouver, a rainy afternoon. He walked in and my first impression was that he looked and acted like a hunted fugitive. He wore a long green raincoat and a battered hat. I had some money then. I bought his book for $40. It was filled with documents and photos and testimonies proving that Canada had been the scene of some horrific crimes against humanity.

I’m sure he wondered if I were an agent, but we hit it off. Later, we would meet in public places where he felt comfortable, like the downtown library. He spent part of the week in the downtown east side, where he a radio show at Coop Radio. I learned that some of the most interesting people in Canada hang out in that neighbourhood.

One of them is Kevin Annett.


His story defies commentary. It is so obviously the naked truth told by a naked man, stripped of everything but his story.

There are people who sell horror as entertainment and they work together with the ones who sell advice on how to “quiet the mind” and “become one with God.” This is called “brainwashing” –

Then there are people who tell the horrible truth, not for profit, but to make us aware and capable of resisting. These are called “whistleblowers” – they are often close cousins of “scapegoats.”

Canadians need to pay more attention to what is being done in their name.


The year 1995 seems to have been a critical time for our elite. Across the country, stories of atrocities were starting to surface. Duplessis Orphans in Quebec, residential school survivors in the west, and south of the border, the Clinton Commission had unleashed a flood of testimony from former children who had been tortured in the ultra-top-secret MKULTRA “mind control” program.

Child abuse on a colossal scale was becoming a national obsession.
A huge story was brewing, one that our mainstream media had been ignoring for decades. Our institutions, our faith in our leaders, and the whole structure of our political system would have been shaken by news of hidden crimes against humanity, headquartered in Canada.

That same year, Canada’s newspaper publishing empires began tightening the screws on independent journalists – who would have been the obvious messengers and interpreters of these unprecedented revelations.

That same year, the United Church of Canada began the process that would lead to the defrocking of Kevin Annett, the man who brought the residential schools abuse scandal to light.

It’s a story that speaks volumes and guarantees Annett legendary status – not that it helps him in the short run, but better a living legend than a sacrificial victim. The chain of victimization and human sacrifice does not end with him – his supporters have been targeted, even killed, in recent months in what would seem to be a stepped up effort to crack down on his movement. Kevin has his detractors, but many more supporters – witness the string of birthday messages on his Facebook page recently (and Kevin does not even like Facebook!). His enemies seem to realize that.

Ultimately, Canadian society needs to answer for the deaths and disappearances amounting to decades of genocidal treatment of aboriginal populations. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a step in that direction, does little to heal the wounds of survivors, but it bandages them with rhetoric. Has Canada really changed, and is it capable of delving into its own past and naming the perpetrators? Probably not, because the perpetrators are still in charge.

Ann Diamond Writing Workshop - Lac Selby Writers' Retreat - February 26-28, 2011

Ann Diamond Writing Workshop - Lac Selby Writers' Retreat - February 26-28, 2011



Unforgettable 2-day writing experience in a warm country environment. Regenerate your creativity, connect with other writers, and get fresh perspectives for 2011 -- and beyond. Bring your writing and a sleeping bag.

We offer: comfortable sleeping quarters, vegetarian cuisine, gorgeous lake views, unlimited snow, hot tub, walks in the woods, cozy wood fires, private consultations with a published writer, group sessions.


HOW TO GET THERE:

We'll meet you at the bus stop near Bromont, and drive you to Lac Selby. You will discover a special region of south eastern Quebec, along with its wines and delicious cheeses.

Register now: $200

Ann (workshop leader): 514 974 1116 or Gay (owner): 450 295 2865

MISSING LYNX and Ho Ho Ho...

I get sooo little time to blog, but if I don't write this, my head will explode... and I don't want that to happen right before Christmas.

Those of us who have never depended on the Montreal Gazette to do our thinking for us, have always suspected that the FLQ crisis was not as it appeared -- even though it was forbidden (in polite society) to ask obvious questions.

All that has changed in the past few months, but as usual, English Montreal slumbers on, reading Rover Arts, and waiting for Barney's Version to hit the theatres.

I, too, will be seeing Barney's Version, although I don't expect it to be as revealing as Louis Hamelin's amazing novel -- this season's real literary event, and possibly the most important book by a Quebec writer that I've read in my lifetime.

I know most Montreal anglos will never open, let alone read, this 600-page "brick" (as translator Sheila Fischman calls it) -- couched in dense witty joual, and packed with characters rescued from the freezer chest of news and police reports of 40 years ago.

I can't think of an English publisher that would pay to have it translated, either, or who would attempt to dump it into Canada's shrinking book-buying market, which still prefers reassuring Canadiana -- like How The Scots Invented Canada -- they certainly did -- and coffee table books that foster the Grand Delusion that we really are a great country intrepidly crawling on our hands and knees towards independence from the Queen,

That's a pity, because it shows us up as the nation of card-carrying schizophrenics we really are.

Therefore Louis Hamelin's stunning masterpiece of investigation and reflection will probably only be read in Quebec, where its message will only be partially heard. That's not surprising because -- as some may recall -- soon after the October crisis, Pierre Vallières proposed the shocking theory that the events that brought on the War Measures Act and changed our history forever, were really an elaborate police operation designed to devastate and demonize the legitimate nationalist movement in Quebec --

Vallières' theory was naturally ridiculed and demonized in its turn, most loudly in the Montreal Gazette by writers like MNA William Tetley (remember him?) in editorials that claimed the facts of the case absolutely proved otherwise.

Well, it turns out, Tetley was a windbag, all along -- something I somehow sensed at the time even though I didn't read the Gazette. The facts of the case tell a different story, after all, something much closer to Vallières' Version.

Which we will not be seeing in the theatres this Christmas.

So here it is: The expanding case for the RCMP and military being behind the murder of the cabinet minister. Some of these little nuggets (coated in suspicion and ready for deep frying) will give some people indigestion. Many were gathered from reading Louis Hamelin's brilliant novel, LA CONSTELLATION DU LYNX. Others come from my own perusal of timelines and reports, dating back to those days in October, when I was a young woman, fresh from the suburbs, exploring the fleshpots of rue Panet in Montreal's east end where I roomed with a friend whose left-wing Jewish boyfriend only dreamed of getting arrested and locked up in Parthenais Prison. He had spent the previous summer hitching around Quebec, and had ended up at the Maison des Pêcheurs in Gaspésie where the Rose brothers began their exciting adventure. Everyone turned up there that summer -- even nice Jewish boys, along with undercover agents of the SQ, the RCMP and those whose livelihood depended on being able to blend in with the hippies.


Here are the highlights of the case that ought to fire anyone's imagination -- if anyone still has an imagination, that is:

Let's take them one by one, in no particular order (at least for now: this is a blog, after all, and a work in progress):

Try this one:

Canadian troops were already in place in Quebec and on full alert a week before James Cross was kidnapped on October 5, 1970. I want you to think about that for a minute or two before you read the rest of this. An 'invasion' of Quebec was apparently planned -- by at least certain elements in English Canada, or its armed forces -- days before the triggering event, the kidnap of the British Trade Commissioner, had even occurred.

Have you got that? Are you wondering why you didn't know that? So am I --

Do read on. And Happy Holidays to you all!



HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHY:

A news leak during the crisis revealed that the RCMP was aware of the whereabouts of the FLQ kidnappers and was keeping track of them

Mysterious tenants living next door to the hideout where Pierre Laporte was held on Armstrong Street, at St Hubert military base, were likely police informers or others carrying out surveillance of the kidnappers.

The RCMP fumbled the ball, big time, when it failed to pass on the communique from the Liberation cell calling on the Chénier cell to refrain from killing Laporte. These and other strange discrepancies in the official story have festered in the back of our minds since October 1970, and the inquiries that followed, including the one into Organized Crime, and RCMP's use of "dirty tricks" that often blurred the boundaries between it and the criminal underworld.

Many of us have been mystified by the strange suddenness with which the authorities gave into some FLQ cell members request to go into exile -- definitely a win-win solution for b oth sides, since it added to Canadians' rage at Quebec while preventing journalists from accessing them for their version of the events, the true nature of their involvement, past histories -- all of which would have shed light on the secret behaviour of our intelligence agencies...

Some of us also recall the inquiry into RCMP dirty tricks which revealed the extent of police use of a network of informers and agents provocateurs in controlling (and even creating) FLQ cells before and after October 1970

But to me the most telling, bizarre detail of this whole dark mystery was the decision by the Cheney cell to hide out with their captive, Pierre Laporte, in a house they had recently rented right next door to Saint Hubert Air Force base, a few kms south of Montreal. Of course, if I were a kidnapper being sought by the police and armed forces, the first place I'd choose to lay low would be an area patrolled by radar and crawling with soldiers. Not just any military base but one of two NORAD centres for North America, one which had been the site of MKULTRA mind control experiments on children going back to the early 1950s...

Is an imagine beginning to form at the bottom of the sink of chemicals in the dark room of your mind, O Sixties Child?

How about the fact that all three members of the Cheney cell -- Paul and Jacques Rose, and their crony Francis Simard, had grown up in the general neighbourhood of the base, which could perhaps explain why the area they called home seemed like a "safe" place to hide.

Another odd detail that struck me when I read this, is that kidnapper Francis Simard happened to be exactly the right age for the MKULTRA mind control experiments done on children -- at Saint Hubert base.

Francis Simard was 6 years old in 1953, the same age as a friend of mine whose AF father enrolled her in first grade in that special class at Saint Hubert AF base, a few months after MKULTRA came into existence. It was Cameron's friend Allen Dulles who signed it into operation -- Allen Dulles who sometimes summered on Lake Massawippi, in the eastern townships. Allen Dulles, the CIA director who helped mastermind Operation Paperclip, which brought former Nazi scientists to North America and set them to work for the military in projects like the one at Saint Hubert base.

I also find it fascinating that the very first FLQ bombs exploding in Westmount coincided with the collapse of the MKULTRA project at McGill in 1963. Just when a smokescreen was needed to cover up a huge program of criminal research which harmed literally thousands of unwitting Montrealers, and others, BANG! BANG! Bombs start going off in mailboxes and the evil terrorist organization known as the Front de Libération du Québec suddenly grabs all the headlines.

When have we seen this before?

It's also fascinating that the supposed creator of the FLQ, was not even Quebecois - but a Belgian "resistance fighter" and probable police spy...

I find it fascinating that the fledgling FLQ, a ragtag band of confused druggies and longhaired student revolutionaries, some barely out of high school, were able to carry out a series of extremely successful raids on military armouries and other heavily guarded targets -- almost makes you think they had some inside help.

And that years later, such a fuss was made and continues to be made over De Gaulle's famous "Vive le Quebec libre" remark -- although he followed it up with a less audible "Vive le Canada" -- which didn't stop the Anglo establishment from manufacturing a diplomatic incident to justify a crackdown on "separatists" -- but really, who are the real separatists? The people of Quebec who cheered the speech, or the masters of Divide and Rule?

Finally, I am astonished that most of my peers who did not leave Quebec in the stampede to escape a new Nazi Germany controlled by Péquiste madmen (and women), still seem to accept the official story although when you look at it under a microscope it's crawling with bugs.

Given what I know about the MKULTRA program, I see a high likelihood the FLQ was an intelligence creation, a false flag operation modelled on so many others that came out of the fertile minds of military strategists, and that CIA-funded psychiatrists like Dr. Ewen Cameron played a role in getting it up and running.

In a declassified 1956 MKULTRA memo, Dr. Cameron mentions his rewarding work with 'POWS' for the Air Force -- the closest AF base to Cameron was St Hubert, and then there's Plattsburgh, up the road from his residence in Albany.

What are the odds that Cameron was involved in the secret US military electronic warfare experiments on French Canadian children enrolled in classes on the base?

I'd say, quite high.

Especially considering these secret experiments, according to my sources, aimed at scrambling the children's brainwaves and eventually controlling their behaviour.


It amazes me that no one knows this, but it amazes me less that writing a book about it can get one in trouble with the people who run our publishing scene here in Canada, the world's largest human laboratory (after Siberia).

But once you peruse the documents and read the wealth of material available on MKULTRA, the events of our recent history begin to make a whole new, horrible kind of sense.

I really wish it were possible to bring this material into the light of public debate -- while I also realize it would provoke a collective nervous breakdown for many of my colleagues, not unlike the collective shock we all received when Pierre Laporte died.

I don't know a remedy for the shock of realizing your career, relationships, politicial beliefs, and network of social connections is built on a massive fabrication, designed by the military and intelligence services to divide and control us all.

If I were one of the people who have, for decades, found employment and "meaning" by acting as agents of the same Canadian government (and its secretive organizations) that implemented the false flag terrorist event known as the October Crisis -- I would not be reading this blog. I would be trying to rid my mind of the parasitic fear that has fuelled so many of my personal initiatives over the years, as I carried out my functions.

Hey, it happens to the best of us -- right? We can all be unwitting police informers, agents provocateurs -- the financial pressures and ambitions that motivate all of us, not to mention the techniques, have been in use for decades, if not milennia. We can all be mind controlled and inducted into activities that, when you lift up the cover or unfurl the curtain, turn out to be not in the best interests of the majority --

That's putting it mildly.

When you have an entire minority indoctrinated in the belief that the Canadian government and military saved us from French Canadian Nazis, when in reality the provable Nazis take their orders from Ottawa, Washington and London -- you have a recipe for social stagnation and collective incoherence.

And that's what we have, here in Montreal, after four decades of living in the aftermath in one of the great deceptions of modern history.

Military Secrets

In the same month that I read Louis Hamelin's stunning new novel, LA CONSTELLATION DU LYNX, whose plot dissects the layers of disinformation like bandages wrapping the mummified corpse of Labor Minister Pierre Laporte -- I also learned something else that didn't exactly shock me (I'm much too old for that) although it confirmed what I already sensed:

The RCMP is in charge of vetting judges for the annual Governor General's literary awards.

That's right. Before you can be chosen to decide which Canadians books and authors are deserving of the coveted $20,000 prize,you have to be "liked" by the men and women in funny red uniforms who always get their man ... and who have been implicated in numerous scandals since their early days

Nor was I surprised, because a while back I learned (accidentally, while browsing the Foreword to a novel by Ray Smith) that some of Canada's most powerful literary editors come from military backgrounds, ie the US army, Black Watch Regiment, and RAF.

I find this funny -- not "funny" as in "ROFLMAO" but funny as in "Whoah" -- is there a country in the free world which puts the police and military in charge of culture? Isn't this a policy we would expect from a dictatorship rather than a democracy? Are artists and writers made from the same material as soldiers? And if so, why wasn't I told that back in university when I signed up for my first creative writing seminar in fiction with Malcolm Foster?

Ray Smith's list was only partial, because it was a list of his personal friends who happened to all be ex-military men, as he is himself. I am sure there are plenty of other movers and shakers in the small, small world of Canadian publishing that have clearance from the police and military to mould our thinking. They may not be military types,exactly, but people like Anne Collins of Harper Collins (who played a fairy tale princess in a movie before she worked for Saturday Night and went on to head one of Canada's largest branch plant publishing firms) are clearly also involved in the selection process that ensures the book-buying public reads and knows mainly what our leaders want us to read and know.

I was reminded of the time, back in 1989, when I was asked to give a workshop in Kingston, Ontario, the home of the Governor General's awards and also of an important military base.

In 1989, a Kingston publisher, Quarry Press, had just brought out my first novel, and I was invited to speak at a "fiction conference" they had organized late in November. The conference itself turned out to be a fiction. Four people paid the hefty $900 fee to attend -- they were the "audience." The rest of us -- writers and editors -- were paid to be there. There were so few people in the room, I can name almost all of them: John Metcalf, Leon Rooke, Kent Thompson, Bob Hilderley, Geof Hancock, Charles Foran, David Helwig and his daughter Maggie, Douglas Glover, Diane Schoemperlein, Marilyn Mohr, Wayne Grady, and a few others including Robert Richard who was then head of Writing and Publishing at the Canada Council.

I was asked to talk about the Canadian Urban Novel, and because I am no academic, and had little time to prepare, I decided to improvise on Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen. My talk was rambling and wide-ranging. I was not sure it made much sense. I focused on certain "visionary" passages, like the speech by the Old Indian Chief who advises Canadians to "dream their future." No critic that I know of has ever been able to make much sense of Beautiful Losers, so I was in good company. I talked about the effect the book had had on me, in my early twenties in Montreal, because it described a hallucinatory city populated by mental patients, deranged psychiatrists, abused orphans and aboriginal ghosts, lurking under the potholed pavement and decaying financial facades. It was contemporary, aimed at my generation, and long passages from it stuck in my mind as a call to awaken, rise up, take up arms against a secretive enemy. As I explained all this, I watched the faces of my audience, especially of the editors, and noticed they did not look pleased.

Later, some of them actually moved to Montreal -- it was hard not to notice this sudden influx, as they also took up the few positions available in Anglo journalism -- and over the next 5 to 10 years, it was clear they were very busy, networking at the Gazette, gradually turning Montreal's marginal literary scene into a depressing extension of the one in Toronto. Some people like being colonized, and they definitely had their supporters in high places. Soon, Montreal's Anglo elite were throwing their weight behind a literary scene they had ignored back in the days when it was just local, and more authentic.

All that happened 20 years ago - ancient history.

While the official Can Lit scene has moved into town and flourished in the sunlight, those of us who found ourselves more marginalized than ever, went deeper underground and took up research. And what we have learned from all this digging turns out to be very interesting.

One thing we know, that everyone needs to know, is the central role played by military intelligence in the creation of the cultural phenomenon known as Can Lit:
a topic that wold take some time to elaborate.

One thing we know about the military: they don't waste their time on trivia. If they're involved in our national publishing scene, to the point of even vetting competitions, there is a need for them to be there.

There has to be something to hide. And it has to be something big.

Hmm. Let me guess.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Who dunnit? October 1970

During the recent commemoration of fortieth anniversary of the October Crisis (1970-2010) and the death of Liberal cabinet minister Pierre Laporte, I got to wondering what really happened, way back then...

So when I learned there was a new novel, by Quebec writer Louis Hamelin, that explored the same questions I have been asking, I ran out and bought it. I haven't finished it yet, but it has already triggered a whirlwind of questions. Some of them I have been asking for a long time, and some are altogether new -- and pretty alarming, I think, to anyone who really cares about this country, the one called Canada, the one we live in and think of as 'home.'

I can see scandals looming like thunderclouds,nebulously at the moment.

The question that haunts me the most is: What if what we think happened in October 1970, when the Front de Liberation du Quebec kidnapped two men, one of whom ended up dead - is actually a lie?

How many people would be forced to look back at their most deeply held beliefs, loyalties, and actions of the past 40 years, in the light of new information that suggests we have all been duped?

How's that for an indigestible irony worthy of a Russian novel?



La Constellation du lynx by Louis Hamelin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Without a doubt, this novel has saved my life. I was 19 during the October Crisis, a passive spectator in a national drama that never quite made sense, not at the time, and not in retrospect. Louis Hamelin has changed the past by going back and, like a good journalist, resurrecting the ghosts, especially of Pierre Laporte (alias Paul Lavoie) who haunts these pages. What will keep most of the anglophones away is the thick Quebecois dialect, the multi-layered plot, the sheer length. It took me three weeks, but I made it. I never lost interest, could barely bring myself to put it down, and when I reached the end, I felt like a satisfied tourist returning from an extended crawl through the Great Pyramid.



I plan to write more about this elsewhere. (Just watch me.) It is the book of the year. It is a massive achievements not just of research and reflection, but redemption. How long will it take for the truth to penetrate the public consciousness, which has been poisoned by decades of disinformation? Is it too late for Canada to face its own colonial darkness? Can this epic even be translated into English, without bringing down another War Measures act? I have my doubts about that, too...



In the meantime, this novel should be given as a Christmas present to every Quebecer. It's as if the dead child at the end of Claude Jutra's film Mon Oncle Antoine had suddenly resurrected from his coffin and walked back into our lives. Now we can all grow up.



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Dying to read...

Making a list, checking it thrice

Books that caught my eye recently and if I don't write down the titles...

Francis Simard, Pour finir avec Octobre (translated into English by David Homel)
Peter Dubé, Subtle Bodies
Michel Thien, Ils riaient avec leur bouche
Ken McGoogan, How the Scots Invented Canada
Louis Hamelin, La Constellation du Lynx
Kathleen Winter, Annabel
Joanna Skibsrud, The Sentimentalists
Rawi Hage, Cockroach

The Holocaust as Cliché

Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Parts of this are riveting -- the story of Sarah's childhood and her family's deportation from Paris to Drancy, and Auschwitz. Unfortunately, much of it is badly written Holocaust kitsch.



I was ambivalent from the beginning about the way the story alternated, almost mechanically at times, between France 1942 (told by an omniscient third-person narrator) and Paris in 2002 (in the first-person voice of an American woman who lives in France). At times I forgot this device and admired de Rosnay's ability to imagine the world of Sarah and her family, but for me, the story ended, or fell apart when the little girl arrived home at her family's abandoned apartment, found the new family living there, and discovered her brother's body in the cupboard.

This was the shock we had been dreading from the first scenes, with a sense of its inevitability, but also hope that some miracle might avert, not just tragedy, but the blank predictability of the boy's death. Surely, the writer could have found a way to keep him, and the story, alive: such as the concierge creeping into the apartment and hearing the boy's cries from his hiding place. Sarah's story might have continued, in that distant time and place, and perhaps even grown magical, managing to convey some deeper message about childhood/war/loss/survival.



It's almost insulting not just to our intelligence as readers, because we saw it coming all along, but to the craft of storytelling that this moment is presented as a climax when it's actually more of a sudden letdown -- a major bummer, and a lousy plot decision from any writing point of view. Not only does Sarah's journey fizzle when she finds the body, so does the story and most of our interest in it.

Now it's Julia's turn to become the heroine, as her narration takes over in all its breathless triviality and false naivete. Julia seems to have emerged from a box labeled Typical American Woman. Tall, blonde, with a model's looks, she works for a Paris-based magazine but has never heard of Vel' D'Hiv or Drancy, or thought too deeply about the holocaust until Sarah's story suddenly takes hold of her life. For that matter, she hasn't even given much thought to why she married her arrogant French husband, except that he's good in bed.)




Cliches about 'the French' spill from the narrator's innocent lips and pen: their coldness and hypocrisy, their grating refusal to acknowledge their role in the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz. Coming from an American -- whose country came into the war late and ever since has supported dictators, invaded countries and murdered millions in the name of "freedom" -- all this has a familiar, hollow ring -- and it obviously sells books. Sarah's Key made the New York Times Bestseller list, and has been widely praised.



A few years ago, a poll showed that French students led the world in awareness of the holocaust. France also saved more Jews, per capita, from the Nazis than any other European country. But Tatiana de Rosnay seems not to care about complexities, and does not bother to delve behind the stylized, diffident facade her Parisian characters present.



Perhaps Sarah's Key could have been a great book, but it almost seems some American editor got hold of an early draft and saved it for Hollywood by not offending Americans' taste for casting themselves in the role of rescuers of the Jews and all humanity.







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