Searching for Place: Ukrainian Displaced Persons, Canada, and the Migration of Memory by Lubomyr Luciuk (review)

448 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 mission des monuments historiques du Québec ? Quelle place occupe en fait la dimension montréalaise dans l=imagerie historique de ses habitants ? En soulignant l=adhésion populaire à la mémoire proposée par les élites et en s=interrogeant sur les mécanismes conduisant à cette adhésion, Alan Gordon ouvre quelques-unes des pistes que la recherche sur les usages sociaux de la mémoire devrait emprunter à l=avenir. Le cas montréalais montre que les élites socioculturelles issues des classes moyennes sont à la source des récits collectifs sur le passé et que ces récits s=emboîtent les uns dans les autres, passant du local à l=universel. Les filières par lesquelles ces producteurs se rattachent aux détenteurs du pouvoir restent à mieux cerner, de même que les canaux par lesquels ils transforment la matière diffuse du passé en totalités identitaires. Alan Gordon le signale bien dans la postface : la mémoire publique est un enjeu civique actuel. (PATRICE GROULX) Lubomyr Luciuk. Searching for Place: Ukrainian Displaced Persons, Canada, and the Migration of Memory University of Toronto Press 2000. xxx, 576. $70.00, $29.95 Although it touches upon aspects of Ukrainian Canadian history from its 1891 beginnings to the very recent past, Lubomyr Luciuk=s powerful and moving book focuses on the period from the end of the Second World War into the 1950s when more than thirty thousand Ukrainian displaced persons arrived in Canada. He tells this story largely through the archives of two native-born Canadian Ukrainian activists of contrasting ideologies, Gordon Richard Bohdan Panchuk and Stanley Frolick, and the organizations through which they worked. The first, without being an assimilationist , believed that Ukrainian Canadians, new and old, should concentrate on matters Canadian, while the second served as the secret Canadian rezident for the Munich-based Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Luciuk illuminates their stories by showing what officialdom in London, Ottawa, and, to a much lesser degree, Washington thought about their separate activities and the Ukrainian question generally. He shows that, to a considerable degree, the Western powers saw the displaced persons situation as a tool in the incipient and later developed Cold War. But the book is also about the special diasporic sorrows of Ukrainian Canadians, who, it seems to me, were treated as badly as any European ethnic group in North American history. It illuminates a particular variety of diaspora: one of a people without a state and whose very existence is denied by authorities. And it is also, in part, a personal testament by the Canadian-born son of two of the displaced persons, who, as a group, are the focus of this book, although few of them, as individuals, have a major place in it. And, finally, it provides one kind of answer to the eternal question of settler societies: >What is an American/Australian/South African/or, in this case, Canadian?= humanities 449 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Although lively, the book is a thick narrative, buttressed by the kind of long, meandering endnotes that few publishers will permit. There are 280 pages of text and 212 pages of notes; since the latter are in smaller type, the two parts are roughly equal in wordage. Another 33 pages are devoted to sources. Obviously this book is must reading for anyone interested in Ukrainian Canadians and it would be fascinating for some scholar to tell us how Ukrainian Americans and their organizations B which have walk-on parts here B coped with some of the same kinds of problems in relation to displaced persons. What may not be so obvious is how important this book is to the study of ethnic acculturation in twentieth-century North America. It seems to me, on the basis of Luciuk=s and other work, that the Ukrainian Canadian case B or certain aspects of it B is an extreme one. Different communities react to oppression in different ways. In some cases such as that of early twentieth-century Chinese Americans, oppression created a...