This week’s news of grade eight students in a Toronto public school raising their arms in a Hitler salute in their classroom – in front of their teacher, the daughter of Holocaust survivors – brought to mind the work and spirit of the late Erna Paris, who died on February 3.

Erna had an unerring ear and eye. At times like this she would respond with an essay, almost sure to be published on the op-ed pages of The Globe and Mail. Whenever it appeared that anti-Semitism or fascism was on the rise, Erna could be relied upon to tackle the situation with a depth of historical understanding, informed by her profound humanity.

I miss her measured response, with her personal perspective and historical context.

Erna first came to my attention in 1990, when her essay “The Boat People” was published by Fifth House Press in Best Canadian Essays. Five years later, Lester Publishing released The End of Days: Tolerance, Tyranny and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, which won the Canadian Jewish Book Award and was named a book of the year by Quill & Quire.

Subsequently, she would win several National Magazine Awards before she published Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History (Knopf Canada) in 2000, which won both the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. In 2008 she published The Sun Climbs Slow: Justice in the Age of Imperial America (Knopf Canada), which itself received many accolades.

In the following years, she was appointed Honorary Council to the Canadian Centre for International Justice in Ottawa (2009), elected chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada (2009–2010), and named to the Order of Canada (2015).

In 2013, Erna approached me with the suggestion that Cormorant Books re-issue The End of Days. Up to that point, we hadn’t published political or historical nonfiction. I read the book again and suggested that she write a new introduction and that we change the title. Erna agreed, and for a solid month we worked together on the new edition, eventually publishing From Tolerance to Tyranny: A Cautionary Tale from Fifteen Century Spain in January 2015.

Working with Erna was a joy. I learned a lot – not just about the historical particulars of how Aragon and Castile came together in the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella to form Spain, arguably the world’s first superpower, but how they laid down a pattern for latter-day fascists: the establishment of one religion, one language, one crown, to form one state.

Erna was deeply concerned about contemporary resistance to multiculturalism, pluralism, and diversity. She believed that publishing From Tolerance to Tyranny was a cultural imperative: it was a distant mirror to what she feared was happening in our own times.

It turns out that the resistance that in 2013 motivated Erna to put her work back into print became a full-force push against the tolerant liberal democracies of the early 21st-century with the rise of the autocratic political leaders in Turkey, Syria, Hungary, and the U.S.

I do wonder what Erna would be writing today. What would she have written about the Freedom Convoy 2022? About Putin’s creeping re-absorption of former Soviet republics into Russia? About the misguided, misinformed students at the Toronto school? I very much miss her clear and careful prose, through which she would gently untie any Gordian knot of politics, explaining the underlying ethics, and shining her particularly bright, but never harsh, humane light.

Erna Paris was born on May 6, 1938, and died on February 3, 2022.

Marc Côté is the president and publisher of Cormorant Books.