The Finnish Baker's Daughters

Edith Fowke is a professor emeritus at York University and author of the
recently published Canadian Folklore: Perspectives on Canadian Culture.

This book is a hybrid: part autobiography and part fiction. The author, a Finnish immigrant woman, who spent much of her life in northern Ontario, recounts her story as a romance and adventure — the incidents of her life embellished and expanded with fictional inserts.

In 1920 Aili with her mother and sisters emigrated to Canada. After long and tiresome sea and train journeys, they reached Timmins where her father ran a bakery. She describes how they bought and furnished a house; and how they bought a horse to make the bakery deliveries, which was followed in time by a van. She gives details of how they coped with the problems of getting food and other supplies in an area far from the major urban and agricultural centres, and includes some humorous anecdotes about misadventures with shops and orders from Eaton’s catalogue. Other stories recount how Matti, the man who made the bakery deliveries, acquired a mail-order bride from Finland; and how Hilda, their laundress, insisted on having all her teeth pulled out so she could have dentures that would not give her any trouble. As time passed, Aili and her sisters began to take an interest inyoung men of the region, were courted, and finally married.

The book is written in a lively anecdotal style that makes for easy reading. The combination of autobiography and fiction, however, tends to make it rather less valuable for historians and folklorists. The details of the problems and customs described seem to be authentic, and the result is a very fine picture of Finnish immigrant life in Ontario.