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“Edgia’s Revenge” is ostensibly the story of a symbiotic relationship between Rella and Edgia, two women who were inmates in Auschwitz during World War II. The narrative is written in retrospective, a kind of suicide note that the protagonist prepares before taking the coloured pills on her bedside. It is the telling of the story of an unrepentant female kapo, the term for Jewish guards who supervised the forced labour of other Jews in the heinous concentration and forced labour camps. The reader serves as listening witness as Rella remorselessly absolves herself of her own behaviour, refusing responsibility even for the act of taking her own life. “Edgia’s Revenge” is an unsettling short story; its disquieting tone is created in no small part by the use of unreliability in the narrative voice and Rella’s unrepentant account of her life. Her self-centredness and twisted perception is chilling, particularly as it is dressed in the beautiful clothes of kindness and culture; this outward beauty covers, hides, a Jew who participated in carrying out the activities of the death camps. “Edgia’s Revenge” presents the undressing, the revealing, of a woman who, because she survived, was forced, ultimately unbearably, to live with herself and her own behaviour.

This article is based on Our Canada: Jewish-Canadian Women Writers, a federally funded research project exploring the literary output of more than one hundred women authors in this country, together with the body of commentary on their work. Elucidating themes of immigration, tradition, identity, family, hope, and strengthening connections, the prose and poetry of these authors prods us to think about what Canada means and what these authors have contributed to our shared cultural imaginary. This literature serves to deepen our understanding of broadly diverse nations-both Jewish and Canadian. It is timely in terms of current reflection, examination and questioning of the multicultural paradigm that has shaped Canadian identity for over thirty years. Nothing is more challenging than grasping, or attempting to grasp, the mindset of others with radically different understandings and beliefs. Part of this challenge are the social and political implications of how particular individuals within particular communities have understood themselves and their place in the Canadian mosaic-often over generations. The contributions of Jewish women writers to Canadian literature respond to this challenge, beginning in the late nineteenth century in Montréal, developing in key centres across the country, and continuing in the twenty-first century.