Re-Imagining Ukrainian Canadians: History, Politics, and Identity (review)

Ethnic identity in Canada has always been a contested area. Of late, even the term ‘ethnicity’ has sparked both academic and popular debate. The current preference is ‘diasporic communities.’ This work is an important study of one such diasporic community, whose history in Canada goes back 120 years. The editors point out that there is a new generation of revisionist historians who seek to challenge previous accounts of the Ukrainian-Canadian community, and these are the historians they feature.

The book has five sections and thirteen contributors, whose major focus is the Ukrainian left in the 20th century. The book is very much a study of diasporic institutions and their leaders – how they came about, what ideologies they espoused, how they operated, and how they came to meet their end. The editors argue that “ethnic, hyphenated histories should be viewed as major currents in what collectively constitutes the mainstream of Canadian history.” (i) This is a bold proposition, which the articles are meant to support. A corollary of this thesis is their claim that they are carrying on the second wave of Ukrainian-Canadian scholarship, which was developed in the past few decades. This generation of scholars is no longer bound up in the Cold War conflicts of their predecessors, allowing its practitioners to explore the nuances of various topics and to offer new interpretations of past developments. This review tries to answer whether or not they have succeeded in both propositions.

The first section begins with co-editor Rhonda Hinther describing the Ukrainian left as creating “one of the most dynamic working-class movements in Canadian history.” (26) With a peak membership of 15,000 and a base of 87 Ukrainian Labour Temples across the country, this movement paralleled the main labour movements and parties in the country. She considered this history to be marginalized in the mainstream Ukrainian-Canadian narrative. The section concludes with a cultural study by Lindy Ledohowski of the problematic equation between Aboriginality and ethnicity in certain literary works.

In the second section, dealing with major figures in the community, the articles on Albertans Paul Rudyk and Illia Kiriak are contrasting studies. Rudyk was an icon of socio-economic success, while Kiriak achieved his stature through his epic trilogy, Syny zemli (1939–45) that was translated in abridged form as Sons of the Soil (1959). Jars Balan provides an engaging portrait of the peripatetic journalist and writer, whose work has yet to receive its literary due.

The third section contains the most provocative article in the book. Orest Martynowych’s “Sympathy for the Devil” is a study of two ultraconservative organizations in the inter-war years and their connections to nationalist organizations in Ukraine, whose leaders he describes as “fugitives,” and the organizations themselves as “terrorist.” The reader would have been helped in assessing these claims if the article had contained a bit more historical context, which has to be gleaned from other articles. Matynowych’s analysis of the Ukrainian-Canadian press allied with the nationalist cause concludes that anti-Semitism was a minor topic for this press, especially when compared to such vicious publications as Le Fasciste Canadien. He also points out that this limited anti-Semitism was allowed to stand by the non-communist Ukrainian community.

The third section moves from a history of the right to the history of the left with three articles on Ukrainian-Canadian relations with the Soviet Union after 1918. Since this diaspora was the third-largest immigrant group in Canada in the mid-20th century, this topic is worthy of research, especially since it touches on relations among an ethnic community, Canadian government policy, and the efforts of the Soviet Union. The most interesting of the three articles is Jennifer Anderson’s “Polishing the Soviet Image,” a detailed account of the Canadian-Soviet Friendship Society and its grass-roots operations. It is an excellent study of how the USSR related to its expatriates, as well as of the responses of...