Journalist, novelist, poet was ‘clever, unafraid’
George Jonas, who died Sunday, Jan. 10 aged 80, was a journalist, novelist and poet who fled the brutal Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian revolution for a new life in the West, where he became one of Canada’s best loved and most controversial opinion makers on issues from criminal law, war and politics to Islamism and multiculturalism.
The cause of death was not specified; he had been ill for the past several years with Parkinsonism.
Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1935, Jonas was an avid motorcyclist and pilot, who flew, as did the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery, to release his mind from the “tyranny of petty things.”
And though he grappled in print with the most fearsome ideologies of modern history, having been born into the mid-century European tension between fascism and communism, he was at heart a newsman, reacting to fast-breaking facts on the ground, and viewing them through the crystalline lens of his pithy wit.
“He was a wit, which is a higher art than being a jokester,” said Mark Steyn, a longtime friend and colleague. “His elegance had a magnificent compression to it, which I think comes in part from writing poetry or writing opera libretti, in both disciplines of which you have to say it in a very short space of time.”
On Jonas’s investiture to the Order of Canada in 2014, Gov. Gen. David Johnston praised his “clever, unafraid and compelling” writing.
For all his interest in and experience with war, hatred and the ugliness of global affairs, though, he acknowledged that his most popular column was about a squirrel stealing a bagel from a bag left by a friend on his front porch, and his conversation with the rodent, which was first terrified, then seemed to understand and accept Jonas’s offer to just keep the damn thing, possession being nine-tenths of the law. Plus, as he put it, memorably, “You can’t wash a bagel.”
As a 21-year-old reporter with Radio Budapest in 1956, he was the right age for a revolution — old enough to understand, remember and be intellectually formed by it, yet young enough to run from the Soviet counterattack, and survive to share the lessons.
In recent years, he was best known as a columnist for the National Post, but he made his name in Canadian media as a producer with the CBC, parlaying his friendship with the late great defence lawyer Eddie Greenspan into a popular radio program, then television series, called Scales of Justice, which retold famous crimes.
His book Vengeance, about the Israeli hit squad sent after the terrorists of the 1972 Munich Olympics, was the basis of the Steven Spielberg movie Munich. He wrote 16 books, two operas and a play. His latest volume of poetry is newly published.
As the great Canadian poet Al Purdy once put it, “Jonas is Jonas and he’s very good.”