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Searching For Place : Ukrainian Displaced Persons, Canada, and the Migration of Memory

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I grew up knowing that I was a Canadian "of Ukrainian descent" but all through my childhood, I didn't quite know what that meant. I did know that my father was born in the prairies, and I'd heard stories about my grandfather escaping serfdom in the old country only to be unjustly imprisoned once he came to Canada.

As a young adult, I searched vainly for books that would tell me a bit about my ancestry, but the closest I could get was to read books that skirted around Ukrainian history: those written by Polish, Jewish, Russian and German authors. All I could find about Ukrainian Canadians dealt with food, embroidery, dance. Not history.

The first fragment of light on this topic was a newspaper article printed in the mid-1980s in the Globe & Mail. This op-ed piece was written by Professor Lubomyr Luciuk and it detailed the fact that 8,000 Eastern European Canadians (5,000 of whom were Ukrainian Canadians) had been interned during World War I as "enemy aliens". I had never heard of such a thing. The Japanese in World War II, yes. But Ukrainians? I asked by father if he had ever heard of such an incident, and he looked at me sternly and said, "Of course I have. How many times have I told you about how your grandfather was imprisoned unjustly?"

What a revelation. This professor was writing about my own history. I went to the library and found that this Professor Luciuk had written a number of books, all dealing with aspects of Ukrainian Canadian history and geography. I checked them out and read them. And then I wrote Silver Threads, a folk tale loosely based on my grandfather's internment experience.

I didn't really feel that I was qualified to write such a book. What if I got the history wrong? So I got up my nerve and tracked down Professor Luciuk's phone number. I left a message on his answering machine, and a few weeks later, he called me. When I told him what I had done, he agreed to read the story. I mailed it to him, and he corrected the history.

Silver Threads is now taught in schools across Canada, and the internment of Ukrainians is a well-known fact, but if it hadn't been for Professor Luciuk's research, this small but significant fragment of Canadian history would have been lost.

Searching for Place is filled with such gems. For example, how many Canadians of Ukrainian descent realize that they are not one homogenous group? The first, second and third waves are as different as different can be: in politics, geographic origin, and religion.

In the 1930s, while Canada suffered from the Depression, many Canadians of Ukrainian descent were sympathetic Communism. Across the ocean, their compatriots were being killed en masse by that very same ideology. When political refugees fleeing Communism came to Canada and met up with those whom they had assumed would be sympathetic, friction was inevitable.

Similarly, how many Canadians of Ukrainian descent realize just how hostile Canada was to their arrival? Myth has it that these early settlers in their sheepskin coats were welcomed with open arms as they covered the prairies with wheat fields and train tracks. But Professor Luciuk's book points out the dismay government officials felt when they realized that these immigrants did not easily forget their origins. They tended to settle all together and speak only Ukrainian. In the government's mind, a "good Canadian" was one who would change his unpronounceable name to something simpler, marry an Englishwoman, be content to farm, and above all, forget his homeland.

This book will be of interest to all Canadians who would like to know more about why Ukrainians came to Canada and what is was they were forced to abandon. While the first and second immigration waves are covered, the third wave, which happened after World War II, is given special emphasis. Life in the DP camps is an intriguing chapter, as is the chapter dealing with shock and horror of Ukrainian Canadian soldiers in World War II who meet Ukrainian displaced persons.

I found it fascinating to read about the origins of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress: a "surgical intervention" on the part of the Canadian government, who forcibly took property away from one faction of Ukrainian Canadians and handed it over to another.

The most intriguing part of this book has to be the end notes, which make up more than half the whole book. I found myself reading Searching for Place with two bookmarks on the go: one for the chapters and the other for the inside story contained in the notes. I recommend this book highly.

I could hardly put this book down. I am a Canadian of distant Ukrainian heritage and was not sure that I would find this new study of the Ukrainian experience in Canada all that different from others I have looked at over the years. Was I wrong! Professor Luciuk has re-interpreted the entire breadth of this ethnic minority's history in Canada, and emphasized the multiple interventions made into Ukrainian Canadian society by the federal government, from jailing innocent immigrants as "enemy aliens" during Canada's first national internment operations of 1914-2920, to creating the Ukrainian Canadian Committee in 1940, to exploiting the postwar immgirants (the DPs, or Displaced Persons) for anti-communist purposes at home and propaganda abroad while, at the most senior levels of officialdom, being utterly indifferent or even against independence for Ukraine, public pronouncements to the contrary! This book is extensively footnoted, which, at first, I wondered about, but then I got into these materials and found almost another book, rich in additional evidence about the themes this author covers in the main text. Some readers won't like Professor Luciuk's forthright style, or how he explodes some of the persistent myths and stereotypes about this community (eg the canard that thousands of Nazis hid in North America after the war is a fiction)but for anyone interested in Ukrainians in the diaspora, or 20th century immigration and ethnic history, this is a must have book. Highly recommended.