Gathering a Heritage: Ukrainian, Slavonic, and Ethnic Canada and the USA by Thomas M. Prymak (review)

Thomas M. Prymak presents Gathering a Heritage as a vehicle to organize thirty-plus years of writing cultural history about Slavonic peoples in North America and Europe. This is often an intensely personal work, as Prymak is of Ukrainian stock but learned the language and history of his people through formal education. Rather than making a concise thesis, the collection is organized under the theme that “heritage gathering never ends” (11).

Arguably, the process of constructing a Ukrainian identity stretches back to ninth-century Kiev, but, like many European poli-ties, disunity was the norm. The peoples that first claimed Ukrainian ethnicity in Canada arrived from multicultural empires in Austria, Hungary, Russia, and Germany. They came in four distinct waves: the “Great Economic Immigration” that began about 1880 and lasted until 1914; the interwar-era immigration; post–World War II displaced persons movements; and, again for economic reasons, during the post-Soviet years. The label “Ukrainian” was not used in Canada until the 1920s, but the saliency of this identity increased as European ethnic spaces clamored for statehood.

Although Canada is by definition a “multicultural” space, most of its history is written by eastern Anglophones and Francophones. Ukrainians were either ignored or disparaged in many of these narratives even though they comprise the fourth-largest ethnic group in the confederation and the third-largest group in the Prairie Provinces. Indeed, it was colleges and universities in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta that were first responsible for promoting Ukrainian scholarship.

Prymak makes good use of his language skills throughout the volume’s four sections as he illustrates shifting meanings of being Ukrainian. The four essays in “Emigration Studies” focus on Old World intellectuals such as Ivan Franko of Austrian Galicia. “History, Historians, and Others” concentrates on Canadian scholars, including George W. Simpson, who brought Slavic studies into the Canadian academy. The three essays in “Library Studies and Reference Works” highlight scholarship in the post–World War II era, and this section includes a poignant essay on Prymak’s coming of age as a scholar. Finally, the one essay in “Ukrainian Canadians and Ukrainian Americans” is broadly comparative but a bit misleading. The larger Polish movement into the United States serves as a better foil than the migration of Ukrainians.

In total, this well-written volume is worthwhile for those interested in emigration and immigration history. It is also a good window into the ethnic dynamics of Canada’s Prairie Provinces.