Chapter 1: Val David; 1942
Memories of summers past flooded Izzy's head as he approached the old, decaying, wooden train station. It had stood proudly in Val David atop a hillock, which sloped gently toward the gravel country road winding alongside the white-water rapids and the dilapidated sawmill. The buzz-saws had been silenced years ago, their whine now replaced by the rapid-fire thuds of carpenters' hammers. They were boarding up the station. They were also closing out a chapter in Izzy's life.
As his pulse quickened, Izzy fought the urge to cry out. He would stop them if he could, but it was all beyond his control. He was consumed by memories of that scene, almost 50 years earlier, during the early stages of World War 11.
Out of the chill of that August night came the cars, driven by the draft-dodging denizens who were native to the Laurentian Mountains. Jew-haters all; the woodcutters, the truck drivers, the laborers, the farmers.
The line of cars stretched all the way back to the train station and continued to Le Chateau David, their staging area, the "No Jews or Dogs" sign displayed prominently over the portico.
On came the cars, more than a dozen, down the dirt road from the station, alongside the river and rapids next to the old sawmill. They turned off at Boris Yaroslavsky's house and barnyard and made their way across Boris' rickety wooden bridge.
At the head of the column was Monsignor Romeo Benoit, a Jew-hating, black-coated, Catholic cleric. He claimed for his parish all the loyal sheep between Val Morin and Ste. Agathe.
Benoit was always in the lead, against Jews or Jehovah's Witnesses. The Quebec Provincial Police always gave him the honor of clamping the padlocks across the doors to the meeting halls of the Jehovah's Witnesses. It was some kind of demented war he waged against the J.W.s, with the blessings of Le General, who had already been in power for six years as the Premier of the Province of Quebec.
Le General was the granddaddy of Quebec fascism. There had always been some sort of unholy alliance between the Government of Quebec and the Catholic Church. Le General fine-tuned and perfected this church connection. However, it could not survive the death of Le General.
"Yaroslavsky!" boomed Benoit over the bullhorn, his black robes silhouetted against the headlights. "Yaroslavsky, we want your Jewish tenants out of here by Sunday! I want them gone by Sunday's mass!"
Yaroslavsky had 40 Russian winters under his grizzled skin by the time he had escaped from Czarist Russia and emigrated to Canada in 1914. By now, he had 28 more winters etched into his face, each of them a bastardly cold Laurentian winter.
--This text refers to the paperback edition.
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