Foreigners

Nora Robson was a writer living in Montreal.

It has been said that each one of us harbors within himself one novel. It has also been said that an author’s first novel is almost always autobiographical. Perhaps that is the raison d’être behind Barbara Sapergia’s Foreigners. Sapergia has been fortunate in that she has received encouragement from both the Saskatchewan Arts Board and the Canada Council. Two chapters of Foreigners have been published already in Canadian Ethnic Studies (Spring 1982) in a somewhat different form.

Foreigners opens in November 1912 with violence — an obvious premonition of World War I. Upon the death of his son, Trian, following a simple tonsillectomy, Stefan sets out to avenge the deed by attacking the doctor responsible. This tragedy sets the scene for Sapergia to relate more misfortunes heaped on the Romanian immigrants of southern Saskatchewan. All the incidents are sad; some are poignant. The reader feels sympathy for the disadvantaged farmer who must sell his lamb at a loss; for Stefan, who throws away his hard-come-by money on beer and prostitutes for his friend, Musca; and for Sofie, who lives in a world of the past. As I read Foreigners, I was put in touch with the author’s emotions. For her, the events related obviously seemed different from those that other immigrants to Canada might have endured. Nevertheless, Sofie brought strongly to mind a dance performed by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet that depicts a young immigrant mother going insane. Nicu’s and Luba’s trials at the local school reminded me of “The Day of the Butterfly,” in Alice Munro’s short story collection, Dance of the Happy Shades. Somehow, Foreigners fails to make its events distinctive.

The love story (perhaps “sexual infatuation” would better describe the relationship) of Nicu and Margaret Chisholm is charmingly told and, of course, the reader hopes that William Rowlands, the boss’s son, won’t be awarded Margaret. The scenes featuring the stallion and the fire are written with passion and realism, but the book’s strongest point is made through the contrasting attitudes toward war expressed by Rowlands and by the immigrants. The scions of the “old country” volunteer to go and fight for the “Motherland.” The immigrants remain on the prairie.