What a shock it was, in 1976, to read Myra Paperny’s The Wooden People. It smacked me up against the sudden realization that I had never before read about a Jewish family unself-consciously depicted as a natural element in Canadian life. Worse, I had unthinkingly accepted this exclusion as perfectly normal – a legacy of my marginalized Jewish childhood in wartime Toronto.

In The Wooden People, set in the 1920s, the lively and contentious Stein family moves from town to town across the western provinces at the whim of a loving but tyrannical father, a shopkeeper whose restlessness springs from his claustrophobic shtetl youth in Eastern Europe. Torn away from their friends time and again, the four Stein children take refuge in secretly creating a marvellous world of marionettes, in scary defiance of their father’s prohibitions against frivolity. The climax of the story melds their artistic and social triumph with a hard-earned reconciliation with their father.

As Professor Judith Saltman shows, in an astute essay in the fall-winter 2004 issue of Canadian Children’s Literature, Jews were either completely absent from our children’s literature in the first half of the 20th century or present only as marginalized and negative stereotypes. Later still, even Jewish authors like Mordecai Richler and Dayal Kaur Khalsa scrupulously excised their characters’ Jewishness from their children’s fiction. Not only did Calgary author Paperny boldly defy this habit of invisibility, but she depicted the Steins as thoroughly comfortable with their Jewish identity and (perhaps unrealistically) equally at home in the wider non-Jewish world.

The Wooden People won the 1976 Canada Council Prize for Children’s Literature (later known as the Governor General’s Award), but Paperny’s output in subsequent years was restrained. Only two more young-adult novels followed (in 1977 and in 1988), but neither of them focused on Jewish life.

Now, surprisingly, Paperny returns with The Greenies, in which she tackles one of the painful and difficult eras in Canadian Jewish history – the immediate postwar period, when deep silence, incomprehension, and tortured memories were the lot of Canadian Jews and their new compatriots, the concentration camp survivors.

In 1947, the Canadian government relaxed its notoriously anti-Semitic immigration policies and allowed 1,000 Jewish war orphans under the age of 18 to enter the country. It was to be many years before the word “Holocaust” entered common parlance. In fact, the traumatic revelations of Nazi atrocities had struck most Canadian Jews into panicked silence. The survivors, arriving in this polite and mostly monocultural country, could find neither the words nor the strength to explain their recent past.

That poses a problem for Paperny, who traces the (barely) fictional stories of six young survivors fostered by middle-class Vancouver Jewish families, none of whom were ready to hear what these haunted children had endured. First the author has to convey the backstories of the orphans as they struggle to surmount Canada’s obstacles to immigration. Then she must somehow make her young readers feel the nearly unbridgeable emotional gulf between the newly arrived “greenies” (greenhorns) and their well-meaning hosts. “Don’t ask and don’t tell” about the past was the rule of the day.

How to write about an utterly horrific history that must serve as mere background to the story, and how to evoke a suffocating silence? These are perplexing challenges for any author. Paperny wisely avoids the most common pitfalls of trying to inject false heroism, affirmation, or happy endings into a true story of overwhelming loss. But in trying to teach so much history to young readers, Paperny unintentionally understates the horror – especially in the early chapters – by the way each orphan recites his or her story, in artificially coherent, terse, emotionally distanced paragraphs that lack the literary power to move us. The condensed factual data about the Second World War, shoehorned into the spaces in the orphans’ tales, also muffle the impact of the Nazi genocide
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Not until chapter five, when the six protagonists are safely in Vancouver, does the story start to percolate. The narrative focus shifts from the 17-year-old boys we met at the beginning to the bright and prickly 14- year-old survivor Lilli. It is Lilli who breathes life into this narrative with her defiance, her toughness, her struggles to cope with cultural bafflements. She angrily misinterprets the friendly gestures of her one sympathetic schoolmate, and a first encounter with her foster parents’ giant and slobbering dog terrifies Lilli into screaming hysteria.

By zooming in on Lilli, Paperny is able to show the clash of a bright and traumatized European child with the stifling conformity, narrow-minded gender roles, and shallow consumerism of postwar Canada. Lilli’s eventual acceptance into a loving and generous family is all the more satisfying after her early loneliness.

Although the sheer density of period research sometimes makes the prose a bit lumpy – we get a ton of detail, from Brylcreem to Peter Pan collars – the story gradually gathers force and conviction and the characters’ personal struggles become more vividly compelling as we see them living out their conflicts in their contemporary setting.

Paperny based her protagonists on the true-life accounts given by survivors to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. Her fidelity to fact is admirable, but I wonder if her novel might have been more powerful if she had chosen fewer protagonists, jettisoned much of the prosy history lesson, and given free rein to her real strength: the empathetic portrayal of youths fully engaged with life.

Still, Canada’s meagre postwar opening to Jewish war orphans is an important and little-known part of our past. Paperny’s honest depiction of the bewildered Canadian Jewish community and of the war-scarred children who found the courage to start again deserves a wide readership and a lasting place on library shelves.