New Beginnings by Eric Koch

Author:Eric Koch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771610599
Publisher: Mosaic Press
Published: 2014-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

SHEILA BLANDFORD was aghast when Frank Roncarelli told her he was going to fight for the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

“Why would you do such a thing?” she asked.

“They need me. It’s as simple as that.”

“But they are so uncouth,” she exclaimed. “And they talk such drivel.”

“One has to learn not to listen.”

Sheila had told him the moment she found out he was involved with the sect that she was appalled. She knew it had little to do with religion. He had other reasons.

The time was late October 1946, the place the front room in Sheila’s haute couture dress shop on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal, near the corner of Crescent Street.

Sheila had arrived in Canada from England in 1935. She was good looking, brisk and business-like, and she spoke perfect French, which she had learned at a finishing school in Switzerland. But, as it happened, she did not need it in Montreal since most of her wealthy customers lived in English-speaking Westmount. She was now pondering whether to take the adventurous step to open a second shop in Quebec City, a different world. She liked the French in Europe and the French in Canada.

For six years after September 1939 Sheila spent nearly half her time doing war work for the Red Cross.

Frank was born in Italy and came over with his family when he was five. An engineer by training, he had made a great deal of money in highway construction. But he got tired of it and found it more satisfying to be the owner of the excellent Italian restaurant at 1429 Crescent, not far from Sheila’s shop, just north of St. Catherine Street. His father had run it for thirty-four years. That is where he met Sheila during the war.

They were an incongruous couple. Both were articulate and enterprising and in spite of—or perhaps because of—the difference in their backgrounds they enjoyed each other’s company enormously. Frank’s generous wife did not seem to mind, and Sheila had managed to avoid marriage so far.

Frank was a lapsed Catholic. Religion played no role in his life until he became aware of the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses by the premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis. That awareness had to do with political morality rather than with religion.

The sect had been conducting a successful campaign proselytizing Catholics. Its members believed there should be no mediating agency between the individual and God and were therefore the enemies of all churches. Quebec was eighty-five percent Catholic.

Duplessis’s Padlock Law, passed in 1937 was designed to prevent the dissemination of communist propaganda. He now declared a “war without mercy” on the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The municipality of Montreal had on its books a number of by-laws that could easily be made to serve the same purpose.

Frank’s lifestyle was more North American than Québécois, let alone Italian, and he identified himself with the non-Catholic communities in Montreal. But even if that had not been the case, Duplessis’ repression deeply offended his sense of justice, as it did that of a number of tolerant French Canadians.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.