by Norman Ravvin
UNIVERSITY OF REGINA PRESS
2023/$29.95/320 pp.
Both of my parents arrived in Canada as children during the 1930s. Their two Jewish families together contributed nine new Canadians during that decade. After reading None is Too Many, by Irving Abella and Harold Troper, which documents efforts by Canadian officialdom to keep all Jews out of the country in the interwar period, I was thankful that my parents counted among the lucky few to gain entry. Norman Ravvin’s masterful archival-based account, Who Gets In, made me realize that luck likely explains little about how my family members managed to squeeze in despite clear policies to keep them out.
Jews were formally labelled a “non-preferred” group for immigration by a Liberal government in 1923, and Depression policies that limited even “preferred” group entrants hardened limitations on non-preferred applicants. To get a Canadian visa in 1930, Polish Jew Yehuda Yosef Eisenstein, who was Norman Ravvin’s grandfather, claimed to be a single male with sponsorship by his brother. In fact, he had a wife and two children. Eisenstein became the kosher butcher, Jewish teacher and all-but-rabbi in first one and then another small rural Saskatchewan community where Jews had been farming since early in the century. But despite the danger of being deported for having lied about being single, he began a three-year campaign in 1932 to have his wife and children granted the right to join him in Canada. By that year the number of Jews the authorities allowed to enter Canada was about a fifth of the count in 1930. Repeatedly rebuffed by immigration officials, Eisenstein involved lawyers, politicians and Jews with important social and political connections in his eventually successful effort to get special permits that exempted his immediate family from the strict anti-Semitic immigration policy. While both leading political parties opposed Jewish immigration, Eisenstein eventually managed, through intermediaries, to gain support from Jimmy Gardiner, the Liberal Saskatchewan premier, and R.B. Bennett, the Conservative prime minister. Gardiner had been a teacher in Hirsch, a Jewish agricultural colony established by the Jewish Colonization Association, many years earlier and disagreed with the political consensus that Jews were unassimilable. He could identify with Eisenstein, who by then was a Jewish teacher in Hirsch. Bennett appeared to take an interest in Eisenstein’s case because of lobbying by Lillian Freiman, wife of an Ottawa department store owner and a long-time political influencer in the area of Jewish immigration to Canada.
Ravvin’s painstaking efforts uncover times when Eisenstein’s apparently doomed cause was revived. The author attempts in each case to determine whose influence produced a reversal. A.L. Jolliffe, the lifetime immigration bureaucrat who helped turn back the Indian would-be immigrants of the Komagata Maru in 1914, did his best in early 1935 to shut down Eisenstein and his supporters. He produced a scathing rebuke of their arguments. But within a month the office of the prime minister had forced him to change his tune, and on March 18 Eisenstein had the permits he needed in hand.
Ravvin demonstrates that no matter how clear a government policy may appear, it is important to examine whether practice sometimes diverges from formal policy. But the well-told story of Eisenstein’s dogged efforts to find people of influence who could allow his family to be united hardly disproves the claims of Abella and Troper regarding anti-Semitic policies. Eisenstein’s victory does, however, suggest that Leonard Cohen was right in saying: “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
Alvin Finkel is professor emeritus of history at Athabasca University, and the author of Compassion: A Global History.
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