Between Two Worlds

Myroslav Shkandrij is an associate professor of Slavic studies at the
University of Manitoba.

Between Two Worlds is an autobiography edited from personal papers,
articles, and tape-recorded interviews made in the 1980s. It describes
the life of a prominent Ukrainian-Canadian.

Born in Alberta, Frolick moved to Western Ukraine in 1932 at age 12. He
participated in the nationalist underground before World War II. In 1941
he returned to Canada and witnessed the political mobilization of the
community in this country, and the creation of the Ukrainian Canadian
Congress. With the cessation of hostilities, he found himself working in
England for the Canadian Ukrainian Relief Bureau, a body charged with
aiding hundreds of thousands of displaced persons. The story breaks off
after describing Frolick’s efforts to enter mainstream Canadian
political life by running as a Conservative Party candidate in the
1950s.

The materials covering the war years provide drama fit for a spy novel.
The terse, matter-of-fact reportage reveals a hard-nosed political man.
His dual identity and multiple perspective provide a degree of skeptical
distance, and add poignancy to the narrative. This dimension provides
the book with surprises.

Frolick is devastatingly critical of some figures in Ukrainian
political life: the Reverend Wasyl Kushnir and the ucc leadership, for
example. His anticlericalism, his disenchantment with oun’s postwar
methods, his bitterness about narrow-minded partisan politics, and his
impatience with the inferiority complex of many countrymen all come
through strongly in the last chapter. In fact, the need for a critical
assessment of Ukrainian-Canadian history that goes beyond pious myths is
a leitmotif of the entire account. One sentence in particular reads like
the testament of a generation: “One of the greatest sins that I
ascribe to the ucc leaders is that by retaining power for two
generations they have denied a role in the mainstream of Ukrainian
affairs to the dedicated and idealistic generation that served in the
Canadian armed forces in the last war and proved itself to be composed
of doers and achievers.”

This is a lucid, thoughtful, and well-composed book.