Naomi’s Road; music by Ramona Luengen, lbretto by Anne Hodges, has been around as an opera for ten years or so and it got its Toronto premier last night at St. David’s Anglican Church in a production directed by Michael Mori for Tapestry Opera.  It’s based on Joy Kogawa’s novel for children of the same name which tells the story of Naomi and her brother Stephen; Japanese-Canadian children torn from a comfortable middle class Vancouver home by the WW2 era Canadian government’s policy of interning Canadians of Japanese descent as “enemy aliens”.  It’s a shameful story and one that Canadians need to know about in an era when fear of the “other” is being stoked on all sides.  Perhaps we like to look down our noses at the antics of our neighbours to the south but our own history has its dark side and we need to remember.

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