According to Baba: A Collaborative Oral History of Sudbury’s Ukrainian Community by Stacey Zembrzycki (review)

According to Baba is not the usual oral history of a community where one researcher or a team goes into the neighborhoods to interview residents or an outsider begins a project by having a member of the community accompany him or her on early interviews. In this social history of Ukrainian Canadians in Sudbury, Canada, Baba (Olga Zembrzycki), a grandmother and an insider, and Stacey Zembrzycki, her granddaughter and an outsider, carry out an oral history project together. The tensions arising between these two people are honestly presented, especially disagreements that puzzled and hurt each of them, their different political views, and their ideas about who gets to ask the questions. At times their interactions are funny and touching. A growing mutual respect develops.

Sudbury is a working-class town in northern Ontario, where the nickel and copper mines dominated the economy. Ukrainians were a minority. Stacey was born in Sudbury but she had lived part of her life in other places. To understand the history of the Ukrainian Canadian community that had nurtured her, she returned to conduct an oral history project for her doctoral dissertation—Baba was to be just one of her narrators. But no one answered her advertisements for people willing to talk about Sudbury’s history. Baba took responsibility for identifying people who had lived in the community a long time, called them and demanded that they talk to her granddaughter. Then she insisted on going with Stacey to the interviews.

When the pair arrived at a potential narrator’s front door, immediately Baba and the narrator began to reminisce, talking about school days, memorable events, or mutual friends. She knew almost everyone since she had been active in the community for many years, especially in the Ukrainian Catholic Church. Stacey remained quiet, seeing the advantage of having Baba there to create a convivial atmosphere. But from then on, it was a struggle for Stacey to get her questions voiced, to explore topics of interest to her and to record. For example, she had to listen quietly while Baba told a story that contradicted the narrator’s or interrupted what the narrator was saying. As Stacey noted, “When [Baba] interrupted them, I would cringe, shuffle in my seat, and glare at her before trying politely and subtly to get the conversation back on track” (5). But she admitted that sometimes when Baba interjected comments or her own stories, this encouraged the narrator to elaborate. Sharing authority at first felt to Stacey like giving up authority to a non-oral historian—“an often frightening and disconcerting process” (3). She tried to negotiate with Baba about the roles each would play. But she also looked at the situation from another point of view: “Ukrainian grandmothers have been characterized as stubborn, highly individualistic, opinionated, and at times slightly irreverent beings, and certainly Baba was guilty of possessing all these attributes” (13). Baba would say that she understood that rules are important to Stacey and that she would adhere to them, and then proceed to do what she thought best. Stacey realized that Baba was “a good conversationalist and a skilled storyteller, so she seamlessly transformed uncomfortable silences and digressions into new threads that enabled us to move past awkward moments” (13). And in the end their shared experiences changed both grandmother and granddaughter. Meanwhile, their honest discussions and Stacey’s searching questions about their research process compel us, the readers, to ask questions about our own research.

The story begins in 1901 and ends in 1949 and was an especially challenging study. Sudbury’s Ukrainians were deeply divided between Roman Catholics and the advocates of social justice, called “the progressives.” These two groups of Ukrainians did not interact, nor did they socialize with other ethnic groups. Ukrainian children did not play with French Canadian children. English Canadians did not let their children play with either group. Because...