George Jonas

George Jonas, author, journalist (born 15 June 1935 in Budapest, Hungary; died 10 January 2016 in Toronto, ON). Coming to Canada in 1956, Jonas became a producer of radio and TV programs for the CBC. His writing career started with poetry. In later years, he concentrated on prose, principally nonfiction, though he wrote a novel, Final Decree (1982), a narrative that examines the wayward slowness of the legal system. This interest in the law began with his painstaking account, co-authored with Barbara Amiel, of a Canadian crime in By Persons Unknown: The Strange Death of Christine Demeter (1977).

He also wrote an examination of the plans by Israeli investigators to track down the terrorists responsible for the shootings at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games — Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team (1984), used as the basis for the feature movie Sword of Gideon. Jonas penned libretti for two operas by Tibor Polgar: The European Lover (1966) and The Glove (1973), and his play Pushkin was produced by Theatre Plus in Toronto (1978). Crocodiles in the Bathtub and Other Perils (1987) is a collection of his newspaper articles. He wrote Politically Incorrect in 1991 and co-authored a biography of E.L. Greenspan in 1987.