A10 N THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONALMONDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2020
LONDON — The family of
Roald Dahl has apologized for
“the lasting and understanding
hurt” caused by anti-Semitic com-
ments the author made during his
lifetime.
Mr. Dahl, the writer of classic
children’s books such as “Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory” and
“The BFG,” made several dispar-
aging comments about Jewish
people in interviews and in his
writing, and made no secret of his
anti-Semitism.
“Those prejudiced remarks are
incomprehensible to us and stand
in marked contrast to the man we
knew and to the values at the
heart of Roald Dahl’s stories,” the
Dahl family and the Roald Dahl
Story Company wrote in the on-
line statement.
“We hope that, just as he did at
his best, at his absolute worst,
Roald Dahl can help remind us of
the lasting impact of words,” the
statement added.
The apology was in such an ob-
scure part of the author’s website
that it was unclear how long it had
been there. The Sunday Times, a
British newspaper, drew attention
to the statement in an article on
Sunday.
Mr. Dahl, who died in 1990 at 74,
has a complicated legacy.
His many imaginative tales —
including “Matilda,” “Fantastic
Mr. Fox,” and “The Witches,” as
well as the Charlie books and “The
BFG” — have endured through
the years and have been adapted
into films and musicals. This year
alone has seen a new take on “The
Witches,” starring Anne Hath-
away and Octavia Spencer, and
news of a “Charlie and the Choco-
late Factory” remake by Taika
Waititi for Netflix, which said in
2018 that it had acquired the rights
to adapt some of Mr. Dahl’s books.
But Mr. Dahl’s self-avowed anti-
Semitism has cast a shadow over
his work.
“There is a trait in the Jewish
character that does provoke ani-
mosity,” Mr. Dahl said in a 1983 in-
terview with The New Statesman.
He reinforced his views in an-
other interview months before his
death in 1990: “I am certainly anti-
Israel, and I have become anti-Se-
mitic,” he said, according to The
Independent, a British newspa-
per.
Upon Mr. Dahl’s death, Abra-ham Foxman, then the national di-
rector of the Anti-Defamation
League in the United States,
called him a “blatant and admitted
anti-Semite” in a letter to The New
York Times, pointing out that in a
1983 book review the author had
referred to “those powerful Amer-
ican Jewish bankers” and claimed
that the U.S. government was “ut-
terly dominated by the great Jew-
ish financial institutions over
there.”
“Praise for Mr. Dahl as a writer
must not obscure the fact that he
was also a bigot,” Mr. Foxman
added.
In response to a further request
for comment on Sunday, the Roald
Dahl Story Company, which man-
ages the copyrights and trade-
marks for the author, said, “Apolo-
gizing for the words of a much-
loved grandparent is a challeng-
ing thing to do, but made more dif-
ficult when the words are sohurtful to an entire community.”
“These comments do not reflect
what we see in his work — a desire
for the acceptance of everyone
equally — and were entirely unac-
ceptable,” the company added.
“We are truly sorry.”
Other elements of Mr. Dahl’s
work have attracted criticism.
The Oompa Loompa workers in
Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory,who were first depicted as African
pygmies, were recast in later edi-
tions as fictional creatures from
Loompaland.
The Royal Mint, which
produces currency in Britain, re-
jected plans to honor Mr. Dahl
with a commemorative coin in
2016, the centenary of his birth,
citing his anti-Semitic comments.
His views also led to questionsabout how, or even if, his work
should be viewed and consumed.
In an interview with The New
York Times in 2016 about his re-
make of “The BFG,” the director
Steven Spielberg said statements
attributed to the author were “a
paradox,” adding that many of his
books “do the opposite, embracing
the differences between races and
cultures and sizes and language.”
“I just admire ‘The BFG’ and I
admire his values in that, and it’s
hard even for me to even believe
that somebody who could write
something like that could say the
terrible things that had been re-
ported,” Mr. Spielberg said.
Mr. Dahl’s widow, Felicity Dahl,
and his biographer, Donald Stur-
rock, revealed in a BBC interview
in 2017 that Charlie Bucket, the
central character in “Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory,” was origi-
nally supposed to be Black. Mr.
Sturrock said that Mr. Dahl’s
agent, whom he did not name, had
discouraged the idea.
Apart from his children’s books,
Mr. Dahl also wrote several books
for adults and screenplays, includ-
ing “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” and
a James Bond film, “You Only Live
Twice.”Dahl Left a Legacy of Anti-Semitic Comments. ‘We Are Truly Sorry,’ His Family Says.
By ISABELLA KWAIRoald Dahl in 1971. The Roald Dahl Story Company called his
remarks “unacceptable” and “hurtful to an entire community.”RONALD DUMONT/HULTON ARCHIVE, VIA GETTY IMAGESApologizing for the
bigotry of a writer
who died in 1990.
MONTREAL — Félix Rose was
7 years old when he realized that
the gentle father he idolized had a
secret past. “Your daddy killed
someone,” his cousin told him dur-
ing a family celebration, he re-
called recently.
His father, Paul Rose had been a
leader of a violent extremist
group, the Front de Libération du
Québec, or F.L.Q., that agitated for
Quebec’s independence from An-
glophone-dominated Canada. The
elder Mr. Rose was convicted in
1971 of the group’s most notorious
crime: the kidnapping and mur-
der in October 1970 of a Quebec
cabinet minister, Pierre Laporte.
It was the first political assassina-
tion in Canada in more than a cen-
tury.
Now, half a century later, the
younger Mr. Rose, 33, has
produced a documentary film
about his family, “Les Rose,” that
has been a surprise hit and sensa-
tion in Quebec, underlining how
sensitive the events of that time
remain, even decades later.
In making the film, Mr. Rose
said, he was trying to understand
what drove his father and uncle to
violence. But some critics accused
Mr. Rose of hagiography and his-
torical revisionism, turning mur-
derers into heroes.
“Every son wants to see their
father as a hero, but ‘Les Rose’ is a
whitewashing of history,” said
Marc Cassivi, cultural commenta-
tor for La Presse, Canada’s lead-
ing French-language newspaper.
“My fear is that young people will
accept it as historic truth.”
From 1963 to 1970, the F.L.Q. un-
leashed more than 200 bombs and
robberies, most of them in Mont-
real, including a bomb that tore
through the Montreal Stock Ex-
change in 1969, injuring 27 people.
At least nine people died in the
group’s attacks, among them a 64-
year-old secretary and a 15-year-
old militant killed by his own ex-
plosive.
Violence escalated in October
1970, a period that became known
as the “October crisis.” Days be-
fore it took Mr. Laporte hostage,
the F.L.Q. kidnapped James Cross,
a British diplomat, who was held
for two months before being re-
leased.
Prime Minister Pierre Elliott
Trudeau invoked the War Meas-
ures Act — the only time in Cana-
dian history it was applied in
peacetime. Armed soldiers pa-
trolled the streets of Montreal,
and hundreds of people were ar-
rested without charges.Le Devoir, a leading Franco-
phone newspaper, said the film
could allow “a whole generation to
rediscover a part of its history,”
while others lauded its lyrical evo-
cation of a working-class Quebec
family.
The debate over the film comes
at a moment of cultural reckoning
stirred up by the 50th anniversary
of the October crisis. There are
newly published memoirs by
F.L.Q. militants, books, podcasts
and heated television discussions.
And, at a time when Quebec’s
independence movement is in
abeyance, Mr. Cassivi, the cultural
commentator, said some national-
ists appeared drawn by the film’s
romantic portrayal of the mili-
tants, eager to revive historical
grievances and give their flagging
cause a “spark.”
During the film’s Quebec City
premiere, Catherine Dorion, a left-leaning member of Quebec’s Na-
tional Assembly, raised her fist in
the air in front of a poster of the
film, mimicking a defiant gesture
by Paul Rose in front of a Montreal
courthouse in 1971.
Yves-François Blanchet, the
leader of a Quebec nationalist
party in Canada’s Parliament,
called on Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau to apologize formally for
what he said was excessive use of
force during the crisis by the elder
Mr. Trudeau, his father.
Félix Rose said he had not
wished to reopen old wounds with
this film but to understand why
his father, who was a teacher, and
his uncle, a mechanic, were radi-
calized and took up arms. His fa-
ther, sentenced to life in prison,
served 12 years before being par-
oled in 1982, and his uncle
Jacques, convicted of being an ac-
complice to the murder of Mr. La-porte, spent seven years in prison.
Paul Rose died in 2013 at 69 of a
stroke.
To make the movie, the film-
maker excavated old family film
footage and interviewed his uncle,
his aunts and his mother.
“I didn’t set out to make a film
purporting to be the only truth,
but to find my truth,” he said from
a park near the home where he
lives with his partner and young
daughter. “Being the child of
someone who committed a crime
is like having a phantom that
haunts you, and I made this film to
try to exorcise those demons.”
After his release from prison,
the elder Mr. Rose rebuilt his life,
working as a trade unionist and
marrying Félix’s mother, Andrée
Bergeron, a criminology student
who was doing outreach at his
prison. The October crisis was not
brought up at family dinners.But as the filmmaker grew old-
er, he said, his desire for answers
ate away at him. When his father
fell ill, Félix, then in his 20s, finally
confronted him. He said his father
told him he had been a pacifist and
had turned to violence after tak-
ing to the street was no longer an
option.
“My father told me that kidnap-
ping a man was a way to be heard
because he no longer had a voice,”
he said.
While researching his film, Mr.
Rose said he had been struck by
how generations of Québécois
men in his family had been trau-
matized by their social exclusion
in Ville Jacques-Cartier, a Montre-
al slum, while being subjugated by
English-speaking bosses at work.
In one scene, Jacques Rose ex-
plains that his Anglophone man-
ager chastised him after he hung a
sign in French warning about
safety hazards at his train repair
plant.
But the film also glosses over
the fact that by October 1970,
Francophone Quebecers had at-
tained new rights, including bet-
ter access to education, during a
period known as the Quiet Revolu-
tion.
“There is no statue of Paul Rose
in a square in Quebec, no street or
school in his name,” said Louise
Harel, a former interim leader of
the Parti Québécois, a pro-inde-
pendence party that led Quebec
from 1976 to 1985 and passed laws
protecting the French language.
The film ignored that hard-won
rights had been achieved through
the ballot box rather than by
blood, she said.
“Québécois do not support vio-
lence,” she said.
Others have criticized Félix
Rose as having failed to hold his
father and uncle accountable for
their crimes.
The film does not adequately
challenge Jacques Rose’s con-
tention that the F.L.Q. “never
wanted to kill anyone,” even
though the group claimed to have
executed Mr. Laporte when the
government refused to meet its
demands.
Nor does it directly confront
Jacques Rose about his role in
killing Mr. Laporte, whose body
was left in a car’s trunk near
Montreal’s airport.
The film posits that Mr. Laporte
was seriously injured when he
tried to escape. A coroner’s report
showed that he was strangled.
Mr. Rose said that his father and
uncle had vowed a pact of col-
lective responsibility for the
killing and that pressing his uncle
could have silenced him.
He also unequivocally con-
demned the killing, though he said
he believes it was “an accident.”
He said his father was absent dur-
ing the act but accepted responsi-
bility for it.
Geoff Turner, the host of a re-
cent podcast about the October
crisis, said the memory of those
events underlined the vast chasm
that remained between Quebec
and the rest of the country.
“My generation grew up with
an ideal of a harmonious, bilingual
Canada, and the October crisis
gets little consideration outside of
Quebec,” he said. “But in Quebec
the feelings about it remain raw.”UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONALNASUNA STUART-ULIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESPaul Rose, a leader of a group
agitating for Quebec’s inde-
pendence, being led from a
Montreal court in 1971. He was
convicted of the murder of a
Quebec cabinet minister.Félix Rose, top, made a documentary in which he tried to learn
what drove his father, Paul, and an uncle to violence. Above, he
and his father are in the two center photos from family albums.
NASUNA STUART-ULIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESWounds in Quebec
Reopen Over Film
About a Bloody Era
Polarizing View of Violent Extremists
By DAN BILEFSKYBring the world with you.
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