I am the grandchild of four immigrants. On one side, southern Italian peasants from small, scorched villages where life was bitter and short. They came to Canada with no English, no status and no illusions. They worked, they scraped, they built.
On the other side was a family that was expelled from Egypt — cast out, humiliated and dispossessed by the country they called home. They arrived here not to be celebrated but to be left alone, to rebuild in peace, far from the politics that ruined their lives. That is the blood that runs through me. And I will not let it be used as a cudgel against my reason.
