Leaving Shadows: Literature in English by Canada's Ukrainians

Myroslav Shkandrij is head of the Department of German and Slavic
Studies at the University of Manitoba. He is the editor of The Cultural
Renaissance in Ukraine: Polemical Pamphlets, 1925–1926.

From the appearance of Vera Lysenko’s Men in Sheepskin Coats (1947)
and Yellow Boots (1954), through the ethnic revival of the 1970s, to the
current rediscovery of Eastern Europe, Canada’s Ukrainians have
produced a significant body of fiction in English. Grekul’s account
offers a kind of synthetic treatment that has rarely been provided. She
focuses on Lysenko, Maara Haas, George Ryga, Andrew Suknaski, Janice
Kulyk Keefer, and Myrna Kostash, but also contextualizes their writings
by providing a chapter on the first Anglo-Canadian novels dealing with
Ukrainians. It is in reaction to portrayals in books like Ralph
Connor’s Foreigner (1909), Sinclair Ross’s As For Me and My House
(1941), and Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God (1966) that Ukrainians
produced their own fiction. The evolution Grekul traces begins with the
early reaction to the Anglo-Canadian colonizing practices and the desire
to be accepted and recognized, through a dissatisfaction with the
discourse around multiculturalism, to a struggle for the acceptance of
ethnic, regional, and gendered diversity.

The discussion of issues like multiculturalism and contemporary
return-to-the-homeland writing is nuanced and bold, and offers new
approaches and methods of analysis. Grekul points to the psychological
and cultural insecurities that underpin the drive to make ethnicity
meaningful, the complex dialogue with non-Ukrainian Canadians, and the
varied responses to globalization and the emergence of an independent
Ukraine. She lauds the idea of reinvention as the key to maintaining
ties to ethnic roots, stressing the open-ended nature of the perpetual
search for home. At the same time, she emphasizes that this literature
has been ignored or undervalued in accounts of Canadian writing. It
requires reincorporating into the mainstream discourse without losing
sight of the manner in which it has continually subverted widely held
assumptions, values, and beliefs. An exploration of sameness and
difference is the literature’s contribution to the Canadian discourse
of identity. Unfortunately, argues the author, the heavy focus on race
in recent discussions around multiculturalism and diversity has obscured
the substantial contributions that other ethnic minority writers have
made to the issues of assimilation, multiculturalism, and
transculturalism; the intersection of ethnicity, class, gender, and
sexuality; and nationalism, transnationalism, and diaspora.

Sensitively written (even when it is iconoclastic in its readings of
individual authors), the book provides an excellent historical overview
of the Ukrainian-Canadian experience. It should be considered essential
reading for anyone dealing with the subject, and can profitably be used
as a text for a number of courses, particularly those dealing with
ethnicity, national identity, and Canadian literature.