Ukrainian Otherlands: Diaspora, Homeland, and Folk Imagination in the Twentieth Century by Natalia Khanenko-Friesen (review)

Natalia Khanenko-Friesen’s Ukrainian Otherlands presents an overview of the diasporic other in the folk imagination among Ukrainian nationals and Ukrainian Canadians. While the work’s title implies that the author will consider the entire century, the book focuses on the “short” twentieth century from the end of World War I to the collapse of the USSR in 1991 (p. 18). The book consists of seven chapters plus an introduction and an epilogue. Each chapter is dedicated to a particular phenomenon associated with the view of the “other Ukrainians,” for example, those in the diaspora or in the motherland. Khanenko-Friesen alternates between a consideration of the views of Ukrainians in western Ukraine (chapters 2, 4) and Ukrainian Canadians, primarily in the Canadian prairies (chapters 1, 3, 5), from the 1920s to the 1990s. Chapter 6 addresses both sides of this divide, with a slight emphasis on the Ukrainian Canadian point of view, while chapter 7 turns to the diaspora in Southern Europe, primarily in Italy and Portugal after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Each chapter is dedicated to a particular vernacular phenomenon that emerged from the separation between Ukrainian immigrants and those who stayed behind. Khanenko-Friesen’s goal is to illustrate how the folkloric imagination and a variety of vernacular narrative resources served to maintain ties, cope with the crisis resulting from leaving one’s home and kin, and foster the folk imagination of the Ukrainian others in distant lands. Chapter 1 deals with the songs produced by early immigrants to Canada in the post-World War I years. She contextualizes these songs within the tradition of songs of separation in Ukrainian culture for weddings, funerals, and the departures of soldiers and seasonal laborers from their home villages. Khanenko-Friesen presents an analysis of the songs using the Proppian system designed for magic tales (and similar analyses occur in chapters 4 and 5 in regard to letters and family histories) that many will find to be untenable. It detracts from her argument that the songs of separation, many of which were sent back to Ukraine and became popular there, served to internalize the “sense of a split . . . in the lives of many individuals and many communities” in western Ukraine (p. 31).

Chapter 2 turns to the mediation of the absence of kin and coping with the split in the homeland in the early years, when ongoing connections, return, and communication among immigrants and those left behind were still possible and commonplace. While the Ukrainian social networks may have been defined by the split, they worked around the rupture to create a coherent community. Khanenko-Friesen focuses on the rituals that kept kin connected and served to foster a sense of community. The sense of one’s own people vs. outsiders, even if physically absent, was highlighted in daily life in the villages she studied. Thus while loved ones were absent, they maintained a ritual presence in one’s daily life, and lore (both narrative and rite) served to “resolve the ambiguity” (p. 54). In particular, the author focuses on new rituals of departure patterned after traditional funeral rites that arose in this period. In my view, one could make a case that these rites of departure could also have been based on the wedding cycle, in which the bride was mourned as she left her family, never to return. While there may be evidence that the funeral is more appropriate, I wish that the author had provided a clearer explanation of this argument.

Chapters 3–5 focus on the period after World War II, when this part of Ukraine became part of the USSR, through the 1980s. The political annexation of western Ukraine fundamentally changed the vernacular resources that both immigrants and Ukrainian nationals could rely on to maintain ties. It enhanced the sense of division between them and fostered the romanticizing...