The Icing on the Cake

June M. Blurton is a retired speech pathologist.

Elfreida Read is an Estonian by birth. When she was three years old, her
parents escaped the Russian Communists by fleeing to Shanghai, where she
grew up and was married. Then came the Japanese and a period of
internment in a concentration camp. Following her release, she and her
husband and infant daughter fled the Communists again, arriving in
Vancouver in the late 1940s. There she has remained, raising two
children, overcoming tuberculosis, fighting to bring her Russian family
to Canada, and integrating herself into Canadian society.

This book, the fifth and last in an autobiographical series, hinges on
the 1992 Reunion of Old China Hands, the remnants of the large European
community who lived and worked in China in the 1930s. Her meeting with
old friends awakens memories of the distant and not-so-distant past. It
is essentially a retrospective of how Canada and an extended west-coast
family negotiated the happenings of the last 40 years—the prosperity
and hope of the 1950s and 1960s; the pervading fear during the Cold War
and the Cuban Missile crisis; the ups and downs of family relationships
and health problems; and the changes in social customs.

Read does not convey the drama of the large and small events that make
up her story, nor does she engage the reader emotionally. She does,
however, make one realize how long it takes for an immigrant to become
more than a legal Canadian—to actually feel like a Canadian.