Us and Them

As a young woman in Montreal looking for an apartment, my mother encountered signs that read “No dogs, no cats, no Jews.”
This is the world I was raised in, where people stuck with their own kind and erected walls and signs to keep others out. Where kids threw insults and rocks at each other, not as bad as their fathers and grandfathers who fought with fists and teeth and left blood—and body parts—on the street.
Us and Them is a family memoir written for anyone who ever feared or mistrusted a...