I have been thinking a lot about history lately. That is not unusual for me. I have been a student of history all my life. I do not mean that I have a degree hanging on a wall. I mean I read it, I follow it, I argue with it. I go backward and forward through it trying to understand why people did what they did, what they saw, what they missed and, most of all, when they knew it was time to act.

Since I announced that I am leaving Montreal and making Aliyah, people have asked me why now.

My answer is that there is no single “now.” There are a hundred little things. There is what I see around me and what I hear from other Jews. There is the feeling that something has changed in Canada, and particularly in the way many Jews experience public life here. There is Israel. There is my age. There is the knowledge that if I keep waiting for the perfect moment, I may eventually discover that I waited for the rest of my life.

And there is history.

My father was born in Canada in 1916. My mother was born here in 1923.

Think about those dates. My parents belonged to a generation of Canadian Jews who could look across the Atlantic and watch Europe change in ways that, at first, must have seemed almost impossible. On my mother’s side, the family had come out of the world of Eastern Europe — the Pale, Vienna, the upheavals surrounding the end of the Russian Empire and the years that followed. The stories handed down to me were not stories about catastrophe. They were stories about decisions made before catastrophe fully revealed itself: children sent away, education obtained, lives redirected, people separated by ships, borders and timing.

Some of those details blur across generations. I have learned enough as a researcher to distinguish between what a family remembers and what a document can prove. But the larger truth does not blur.........

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