Rybalski’s Son (review)

Rybalski’s Son is the first novel by retired Alberta physician Orest S. Talpash. It spans over one hundred years of fictional Rybalski family history. The story follows various family members both in Ukraine and in Canada. The novel is multi-perspectival, and each chapter takes place ten years after the previous one. Thus, characters we first meet as babies in one section may appear as grown men in others. While the characters and events are fictional, the places, transnational immigrant and diaspora experiences, and political realities are all based in fact.

Because of its factual basis in various particular moments of a one hundred and twelve year span of history (1896 to 2008), the novel reads as a fictionalized tour through the main points of Ukrainian Canadian history. Through the Rybalski family’s experiences, the reader is guided through the vagaries of Ukrainian experiences in Canada. Some of the Rybalskis form part of the 170,000 first wave of immigrants from Ukrainian provinces of the Austro-Hungarian empire between 1896 and 1914. Their experiences with homesteading on poor soil and grappling to maintain links to their culture, while facing increased pressure to learn English and assimilate into mainstream society, are typical of Ukrainian immigrant experiences of this era. Similarly, the branch of the family that immigrates with the 32,000 post-World War II Ukrainians who came to Canada, rather than be repatriated to Soviet Ukraine after the upheavals of war, face a different set of integration problems. Not only do these characters struggle to make their new life in Canada, but the distinctions between Ukrainians of the first wave and these latter post-War Ukrainian immigrants are narrativized in a way that draws out the differences between the two groups. As well, the novel sets one of its excerpts in 1976, which provides Talpash with the opportunity to dramatize the Ukrainian Canadians’ involvement with the institution of federal multiculturalism. Further, Talpash portrays Ukrainian Canadians travelling “back” to Ukraine in the latter part of the twentieth century and even after the 2005 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. By touching on these key issues both in Ukraine and in Canada, the novel offers a sensitive survey of many of the dynamics that inform Ukrainian Canadian experiences over the last hundred odd years.

Not only does the novel offer a survey through the social realities of over a century of Ukrainian Canadian-ness in its many guises, but it also touches on many of the key themes raised in over fifty years of Ukrainian Canadian English-language literature. For instance, Stefan Rybalski’s name is spelled as Rybolski, Rybofski, Rybalsky, and Rybofti in various contexts (66), recalling Andrew Suknaski’s poetry that evokes the original spelling of his father’s surname, Suknnatskyj, or George Ryga’s play A Letter to My Son (first performed in 1978), in which the Ukrainian Canadian protagonist laments the wholesale change of immigrant names upon arrival in Halifax. Similarly, the history of horse trading in nineteenth-century Ukraine that forms the backdrop of the first installment of Talpash’s story could be taken right from Yuri Kupchenko’s 1989 novel The Horseman of Shandro Crossing that transplants a Ukrainian horsemaster to the Canadian prairie. The e-mail that Mark Rybalski sends back to Canada in 2008 on his first visit “home” to Kyiv echoes parts of Janice Kulyk Keefer’s 1996 novel The Green Library. Mark writes to his parents that he visited Babyn Yar and that “[e]veryone knows that before the Germans withdrew from Kyiv[sic] from 1941 to 1943, [sic] they had executed 100,000 people there. 30,000 [sic] were Jews, but who were the other 70,000?” In Kulyk Keefer’s novel one of the characters makes this very same point. As well, as the awkward adolescent, Jason Rybalski, sits uncomfortably at a 1996 family wedding, not only does his character recall Colleen Lutzak from Lisa Grekul’s debut novel Kalyna’s Song (2003), but the girl with crutches sitting next to Jason is an injured...