bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1992) — Summer 1992 // Été 1992, pp. 44–45
A Man of Big Heart: The Memoirs of
Maurice Mitchell edited by Bernard Brodie
and Gerry van Kessel. The Canadian Immi-
gration Historical Society, P.O. Box 9502,
Terminal, Ottawa, Ontario K1G 3V2, 1988,
79 pp.
The Canadian Immigration Historical Society is to be applauded for its decision to publish the diaries and memoirs of civil servants who have been on the front lines of Canadian immigration. Without such a publication program, many such documents might never emerge from their authors’ desk drawers. That would be a pity because these works can provide valuable insights into past developments in our history and make dry official files come alive.
A Man of Big Heart does just that. This is the title given to the edited memoirs of the late Maurice Mitchell, whose career in “Immigration” spanned over forty years from 1934, when he began working on a temporary basis in Antwerp, Belgium until his retirement in 1976. These memoirs are the first in a projected series of monographs to be published by the Canadian Immigration Historical Society. This is an Ottawa-based organization that supports research in Canadian immigration and strives to stimulate appreciation for the role played by immigration in shaping Canadian society.
Maurice Mitchell, the son of an Immigration agent father, was seventy-five when he sat down to compose his memoirs. Drawing entirely upon a prodigious memory, he recounts developments reaching as far back as the horrendous influenza epidemic of 1918-1919. Among its victims was his mother, who rallied from her sick bed in the Mitchell family home in St. Lambert, Quebec to nurse a stricken Maurice. Following her death, he and his two sisters spent five years in boarding school, rejoining their father only after he had remarried and gone overseas as a Canadian Immigration agent.
Maurice Mitchell’s first “real” immigration experience was acquired at a young age in the Free State of Danzig, where his father was in charge of the Canadian Immigration office in the early 1920s. There the author watched hundreds of barely literate Polish and Romanian farm workers being processed for emigration to Canada. As he remembers it, the men trooped naked into a large room, forty to fifty at a time, to be inspected by a local doctor, who examined each individual’s private parts with a magnifying glass. Later every applicant was required to demonstrate literacy by reading passages from a religious book and a newspaper, which probably few Canadians understood either.
In those days, Canadian immigration selection techniques were primitive, to say the least. But so was assistance to Canadian civil servants serving overseas. Among other shortcomings, there were no living or rental allowances. Home leave was also a figment of the imagination. Mitchell’s father, for example, worked overseas from 1922-1948, and during that period he returned to Canada only twice, and even then, it was at his own expense.
The author’s first overseas posting as an adult came in 1949, when he reported briefly to London and then went on to Paris. Before retiring in 1976, he would also serve in Italy, Belgium, Canada (where he eventually became Director of Operations for the Foreign Service of Manpower and Immigration), the United States and West Germany. Throughout his account of these years, Maurice Mitchell does not hesitate to speak his mind — in unvarnished prose without literary pretension.
He deeply regrets, for instance, the deportation of thousands of East European farm hands from Canada during the Great Depression and the official Canadian government attitude toward Jewish immigration in those years. But he also finds time to recall the funny incidents that made an impression on him, such as the time in 1962 when he travelled from Rome to Cairo to examine hundreds of Armenians whose entry to Canada was sponsored by the Canadian Armenian Congress. The repetitious work was easily conducted, so that after 5 p.m. each day he and his colleagues would have a few drinks before proceeding to the hotel dining room for dinner. Not surprisingly, the question of who should pay for the drinks excited a lot of discussion. Finally a creative solution was found. Whoever had the most cockroaches in his hotel room would foot the bill for the pre-dinner drinks!
For anyone interested in the subject of Canadian immigration and administrative changes in “Immigration, “ this monograph will make for fascinating reading. Incidentally, the title is taken from a description of Maurice Mitchell written hv Jacaues Hovsèpian in an article in La Presse after Mitchell’s death. In that column, Mr. Hovsèpian refers to the man with the big heart and expresses his appreciation for all the kindness that Mitchell showed to him and his mother at their visa examination in Cairo in 1962..
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1992) — Summer 1992 // Été 1992, pp. 44–45. Read the rest of this issue →
