National Post from Toronto, Ontario, Canada • 52

1 READ 1 I JULIE ENFIELD MAY 24, 2008 WEEKEND POST AVAILABLE WP15 The Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Awards, celebrating their 20th anniversary, will be presented at the Leah Posluns Theatre on June 4. Michael Wex, best-selling author of Born to Kvetch and Just Say Nu, is guest speaker. The awards honour excellence in Canadian writing that reflects Jewish themes and subjects. The winners are Anna Porter for Kastner's Train, James Diamond for Converts, Heretics and Lepers: Maimonides and the Outsider, Marc BOOKS DANIEL ACKER BLOOMBERG NEWS Deborah Slier received letters written by a young Jewish cousin at the height of the Second World War. A DUTCH YOUTH TELLS A WAR STORY BIOGRAPHY Hidden Letters By Philip Slier, edited by Deborah Slier and Ian Shine Star Bright Books 200 $35 BY ROBIN D.

SCHATZ HIDDEN LETTERS demolition expert found two bundles of longhidden mail in the bathroom ceiling of a home in East Amsterdam. There were 86 letters, one postcard and a telegram, all written over a five-month period in 1942 by Philip Slier, a Jewish teen, to his parents in Amsterdam. Like many other healthy young men, he had been sent to Moolengoot, a forced labour camp, in Nazi-occupied Holland. Flip's letters are now published for the first time in a haunting new volume called Hidden Letters. The book is extensively illustrated and annotated with more than 300 photographs, maps and other historical material to provide full context for the experiences of Flip and his family, Entrusted by the demolitions expert to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, Flip's letters eventually made their way in 1999 to Flip's first cousin, Deborah Slier.

A New York-based children's book publisher, she grew up in South Africa and never knew Flip, who was 18 when he went to Moolengoot. Slier, 76, was amazed when she got the call. "I thought, 'I need to do these letters in English, I need to publish them," she said in an interview in New York. "And, as I read them, I realized that I knew virtually In 1997, a Dutch BEST COPY NATIONAL POST, SATURDAY, Miller for Representing the Immigrant Experience: Morris Rosenfeld and the Emergence of Yiddish Literature in America, Ruth Panofsky for Laike and Naum: A Poem in Two Voices, Tina Grimberg for Out of Line: Growing up Soviet, John Miller for A Sharp Intake of Breath, Henia Reinhartz for Bits and Pieces and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett for They Called Me Meyer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust. Weekend Post Ottawa is no prison for a loyal acolyte Asylum By Alexis McClelland Stewart 496 $34.99 BY FRANK MOHER Andre Alexis fecting, that it may asylum just change the way you view Ottawa.

No longer will you see it as a burg filled with soulless bureaucrats and politicians; instead it will be for you a burg filled with confused and striving dreamers, well-meaning and well-placed, who happen to have lost track of their souls but really mean, one day, to try to get them back. If that sounds like a stretch, Alexis intends it to be. Asylum makes feints at satire but at core it's a morality tale, in which the good are rewarded and the venal lost to padded pensions and ennui. It isn't interested in the cheap shot; instead, Alexis treats each of his characters to a full measure of understanding laced with sympathy, deserved or not. Take, for instance, the book's central figure, Franklin Dupuis, a Tory acolyte in the 1980s.

Having come up into the political ranks under Diefenbaker, Franklin has ended up as an assistant to the Honourable Member from Calgary West, Albert Rundstedt. (In fact, the book is a little confused on this point; toward the end, Rundstedt has somehow morphed into the Member for Calgary South, but those of us who live west of the Lakehead understand: When it comes to anything beyond Winnipeg, what's the diff?) Franklin is infused with the idealism that follows Brian Mulroney into office in 1984; and yes, Asylum does take Mulroney's notion of uniting the country at face value. Once his boss is promoted to cabinet, Franklin is charged with guiding the creation of a new federal penitentiary from drawing board to realization. Stuffed with highflown notions gathered at meetings of something called the Fortnightly Club, a sort of chat-group for philosophers he gives the design job to a floridly eccentric artist acquaintance who, naturally enough, comes up with something more like a 15th-century Italian piazza than a prison. Meanwhile, back at the salon, the other members of the Fortnightly Club also deal with the gap between the ideal life and life as she is lived.

Their unsuccessful attempts to bridge it are Alexis's real subject. Walter, a professor of sociology, is beaten up by another member of the group who suspects him (rightly) of having an affair with his wife. His wife ends the marriage, only to have Alexis's new novel, Asylum, is so constantly surprising, so rich and af- her husband, perhaps not coincidentally named Paul, experience a conversion on the road to ruin and become a monk. (The book is narrated by one of his fellow brothers at the monastery, another refugee from the Rideau.) Those characters who manage to claw their way through to some sort of authentic emotion, amid all the talk of Thomas Aquinas and redemption via art, are Asylum's true winners, election results and multimillion-dollar contracts notwithstanding. For others, such as Franklin, Ottawa itself becomes a prison.

When his minister is felled by scandal, and his own equivocations and political sleights-of-hand become too much for even the office secretary to take, the good Tory is reduced to wandering alone on the site of his much-diminished penitentiary, "undisturbed by the cold, listening to the river, walking around and among the pallets of marble, as happy as he had ever been, at home in a world of his own imagining." Alexis gets the portrait of the Calgary MP, Rundstedt, wrong here; simple-minded and indefatigable in his principles, he has more to do with the rural Reformers of the '90s than the urban Tories who followed Joe Clark out of the West in the late '70s. The author also has the idea Eugene Whelan was from Alberta; he wasn't. But this isn't, in the end, a work of political acumen, nor is The novel makes feints at satire but at core it's a morality tale nothing about Holland during the war and so set about to find out what had happened." The book is annotated by Slier and her husband, Ian Shine, 75, a physician and author. It's translated from the Dutch into English by Marion van Binsbergen-Pritchard. Flip's first letter is dated April 25, 1942: "Have arrived in the camp.

Fairly comfortable. Reasonable bed, 3 blankets. Clean. Good atmosphere, decent people. We have very little freedom." As in many of the letters, he asks his family to send basic provisions: a windbreaker, clogs and a camp knife." About of Holland's Jewish population, some 100,000 people, were killed during the Nazi occupation, Slier would learn in the course of her research.

Flip's character emerges little by little from the letters. "He is a generous and kind and thoughtful person. I don't know many 18-year-olds who would write almost daily to their parents. He's concerned about them," Slier said. Frequently, he seeks to quell their fears about his health and safety: "Please don't worry about me being here.

I don't," he writes at the end of his letter of May 24. But as the weeks and months go on, and the war shows no sign of ending, he writes of fellow inmates escaping and his own plans to do so if the Nazis close Moolengoot and ship the men off to the death camps. He worries, too, that the Germans will soon take his father. "I am glad Pa has not left yet," he writes on Aug. 2, 1942.

"As long as there is hope there's life." Flip struggles to remains upbeat, even as conditions grow worse at the camp. "I think it never occurred to Flip that he wouldn't survive," Slier said. "He talks about escaping to Switzerland. In fact, he runs away from the camp." After hiding out with one of the farm families, Flip sneaks back to Amsterdam with false papers and dyes his hair. He works surreptitiously in a restaurant, but he never makes it to Switzerland.

"He was arrested for not wearing his yellow star," Slier said. "We know that he must have fought when we was arrested because his arrest papers say he had a wound on his mouth." The letters, like a good novel, are hard to put down. You find yourself secretly hoping, against all logic, that Flip and his family and friends will survive. Flip's last letter home is Sept. 14, 1942.

"Today I got work in another place. I now have to walk almost an hour in the morning and then cut sods of turf. Dirty rotten work. It is getting to me more and more." After his arrest, Flip was sent to Sobibor, a death camp in Poland, where he most likely was murdered. Most people were gassed within several hours of their arrival.

Flip's circle of family and friends fared no better: At least 20 of them died in Auschwitz during September, 1942. Flip's letters will invariably be compared with Anne Frank's diary. Yet they are very different, Slier noted. "Anne Frank is essentially the story of one girl confined to an apartment and doesn't tell what's happening to the rest of Holland. What happened to Flip and his family and the documentation, I think, gives a picture of Holland during the war.

Lots of Dutch people besides Jews died." Slier and Shine have dedicated the book to "all victims of genocide." Bloomberg Netos it meant to be. Instead, it's a sort of Hansard of the city's heart, of the quiet dramas playing out in the old homes of the Glebe, or i in apartments off Elgin Street, or on bridges late at night, when otherwise rational men consider jumping. Its imaginative reach is thrilling; even the old drunk who interrupts Walter's suicide attempt is rendered so gently and vividly that the novel becomes, for half a page, his novel, before he totters off into the dark, never to be seen again. Even Brian Mulroney is treated with dignity here, and these days, that's about as compassionate as one can get. Asylum is unfashionable, in its rejection of cynicism, in its carefully wrought language, in its soulfulness.

But Ottawa is itself a pretty clear-eyed city, not easily turned by fashion. In Alexis's wise and expansive novel, it has genuinely met i its match. 1 Frank Moher is a playwright and editor of the online magazine backofthebook.ca. Weekend Post Believe it or not: Alexis paints Ottawa as a place where fair and decent people set out to de for us all..