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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
none is too many, Nov 25 2005
By A Customer
To the "customer from Portsmouth": "None is Too Many" is specifically about the JEWISH EXPERIENCE. If you want to read about the experiences of other groups, go ahead. But don't criticize this great book for not covering every single group's experience when it was not geared towards that.
I highly recommend this book-it was very informative and extrememly well-researched.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
This book gains in relevance over the years, Sep 5 2009
I first read None Is Too Many twenty years ago. Just recently I have reread this magnificent work of history and I am even more impressed. Magnificent ? Yes, truly so. Nowhere have I found a more accurate discourse of this subject. This book is a world class document for the ages ahead. May our childrens children weep for the folly of mankind in its blindness and inhumanity. The authors describe on a day to day basis the Nazi horror and the indifference of the Canadian Government and the Canadian people of that terrible time. I excerpt one page so that you may judge the quality of the writing and the horror of the times:
The Line Must Be Drawn Somewhere/53
like if my son's talent would not be wasted. . . . You would save the future of the grandchild of a rabbi." A seventeen- year-old boy, the son of "respectable parents of the Jewish middle class," wrote from Berlin on behalf of himself. As a Jew, he said, he could neither work nor survive in Germany. He had to leave, and was therefore begging for admission to Canada. From Czechoslovakia a group of two hundred farm families, "with a total of one million dollars in capital," begged for entry visas. They were aware that "the Canadian government dislikes ... to get any Jews into the country," yet had no other choice but to leave their homeland before the Nazis arrived. For the twelve members of the Zuckermann family of Austria, the situation was almost hopeless. As Samuel Zuckermann wrote to the Jewish Colonization Association, "In great distress and desperation a whole family directs itself to you with an appeal for help. ... We have here no possibility whatsoever to maintain ourselves. If no assistance will come to us forth- with, we shall all go under. Please help us and save us. You are our last hope." Even more poignant was the position of Leopold Kluger and his family.
A wealthy Jewish merchant, Kluger had been imprisoned in Vienna on Kristallnacht and was released only on condition that he leave Austria by April 1939. Canada was his last hope; he was, he said, in a "state of despondency beyond description" and would soon be dead if he could not find refuge. Similarly, Professor Maximilian Low, a renowned linguist, asked Jewish officials in Canada if they could find a way to admit him and his family. "We have lost," he wrote, 'all rights of existence and life as human beings. To each of these letters the response of Jewish organizations was the same: "Though we sympathize . . . with your plight, ... the Canadian government is not yet admitting Jewish refugees. ... try some other country." But for the Steins, Zuckermanns, Klugers and Lows, for the thousands of Jews trying to get into Canada, there were no other countries.
Of course the cries of these Jews were also heard by the Canadian government, through letters or Jewish Immigrant Aid Society and Congress intermediaries. "We are almost inundated," Blair complained to Conservative opposition leader Robert Minion, "with applications for the admission of Jewish people from the whole Continent of Europe. In all the years I have been connected with Immigration, I have never seen anything like it.
Thus the authors take us through Kristallnacht, the terror in Poland, the aftermath of the war and the refugee camps. "None is too Many" has become a standard reference and has been cited hundreds of times in WWII literature. If you have tears to shed, prepare to shed them now.
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1 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Special Pleading, Oct 22 2003
By A Customer
An important study of the discriminatory immigration policies Canada had in the interwar period this book is nevertheless flawed for advocating, very effectively but not very historically, that only Jews suffered from racist attitudes against their immigration. Many other communities, before, during and after the Second World War, were victims of racial profiling and stereotypical attitudes that resulted in their exclusion or limitations being placed on the numbers admitted. And after the war, despite the apparent biases of a very small minority of Canadian officials, Jews were actually given preferential treatment in coming to Canada, a trend that has continued to the present day (we are still getting Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, some claiming to be "refugees"). This is a valuable contribution to Canadian immigration history and certainly presents a pro-Jewish position forcefully, but it is only a partial and somewhat polemical account of a subject that is far more complex than here presented.
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by Gerald Tulchinsky
by Alan Davies
by Kate Morton
