TV documentary explores anti-Semitism in Quebec during the 1930s

DON MACPHERSON
Montreal Gazette
Saturday, February 09, 2002

In a new documentary to premiere on television next month, political scientist Esther Delisle compares French Quebec to a family with a crazy aunt.

Everyone in the family is aware of the crazy aunt, Delisle says, but no one mentions her. And no one in the family wants her talked about, by outsiders or especially by family members.

In this case, the crazy aunt represents the anti-Semitism and pro-fascist sympathies that were common among this province's French-speaking elite in the 1930s.

And Delisle is the family member who has been ostracized for a decade since she chose the crazy aunt as the subject of her doctoral thesis at Quebec City's Universit? Laval.

The crazy aunt is being talked about in public again, this time outside the family. Eric Scott, an English-speaking Jewish filmmaker from Montreal, has produced a 47-minute documentary titled Je Me Souviens on the subject of Delisle's thesis and the reaction to it.

The major French-language networks that regularly show documentaries, Radio-Canada and the provincial government's Télé-Québec, have rejected the film. But it has been scheduled for showing on the cable specialty channel Canal D on April 28 at 9 p.m. It is also to be shown on CFCF-12 and the Vision TV cable channel, on dates yet to be confirmed, and in France on La Cha?ne Histoire.

The province's motto makes an ironic title for the documentary, since one of the points of the film is that French Quebec wishes very much to forget that of which Delisle reminded it. Part of the film deals with the hostile reaction at Laval and elsewhere, first to her choice of subject and then to her thesis and other published writings on it.

But the emphasis of the film is on the subject and content of her thesis rather than the reaction to it. And even for someone familiar with the subject, the archival material as well as the new interviews it contains are often fascinating.

Scott takes pains in the film to point out that prewar anti-Semitism in Canada was by no means exclusive to French Quebec, noting anglophones discriminated against Jews and Prime Minister Mackenzie King was an anti-Semite whose government turned away Jewish refugees trying to flee the Nazi Holocaust.

The film also says the anti-Semitism of the French Quebec elite did not seem to filter down to the masses, who nodded obediently at the admonitions of priests to boycott Jewish-owned businesses, then went ahead and patronized them anyway.

And Scott has tried very hard not to offend francophone sensibilities. He dedicated his film to French-Canadians who died fighting against fascism in World War II. And at the first public showing of his film this week, Scott declared he feels "perfectly at home here" and his intention was not to "provoke or insult Quebec society as a whole."

But some francophones might take the film that way. After all, this is a film with a point of view, and its subject is not anti-Semitism and fascist sympathies across Canada as a whole. As a minority in Canada and North America, French-speaking Quebecers are as sensitive as other minorities to how they are portrayed by and to outsiders. And as comfortable as Scott says he is here, he remains outside the family to which Delisle alluded.

Some viewers might see the film as suggesting the province whose motto it takes for its title remains shaped by attitudes that were discredited and went out of fashion more than a half-century ago.

The opening sequence of the film consists of an off-camera reading of a lengthy passage urging ostracism of Jews from Lionel Groulx, the historian and cleric sometimes described as the father of Quebec nationalism, over footage recently shot in the M?tro station that bears his name.

Similarly, readings from Le Devoir are illustrated with a recent ad for the newspaper, and quotes from prominent fascist sympathizers with street signs with their names on them.

It would have been just as easy for Scott to illustrate the part of his film on the subject of King by showing the Canadian $50 bill bearing his portrait.

- Don Macpherson is The Gazette's Quebec-affairs columnist, based in Montreal. His E-mail address is dmacpher@thegazette.southam.ca.