Czech Refugees in Cold War Canada by Jan Raska (review)

Jan Raska has ultimately contributed to a gap in the research literature identified more recently by compendiums such as Steven Kirkwood and colleague's The Language of Asylum: Refugees and Discourse (2015), where the oral history of the refugee population is situated alongside questions of integration and assimilation. Raska successfully employs this methodology regarding the Czech refugee population in Canada from a historical perspective. In this endeavour, the author has made use of an abundant and telling range of oral histories in tandem with an impressive archival excavation. Throughout the book, Raska successfully links three distinct waves of immigration to the benchmark upheavals in communist Czechoslovakia: the February coup in 1948, the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968, and the after-effects of normalization in the 1970s and 1980s. This temporally framed account of migration is situated consistently within a Canadian Cold War context and enhanced through in-depth analyses of domestic politics and the experiences of the refugees themselves.

Situating the Czech population in Canada as refugees rather than as immigrants or émigrés is one of the more nuanced delineations. The book makes clear why that distinction is in place, citing the particular grouping of Czechs as refugees because they fit the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention's classification, owing to the nature of political persecution during and after 1948 and 1968 (retrospectively in the case of 1948). However, Raska does mention that some Czechs utilized the term "émigré" by choice precisely to denote more agency. This component is left somewhat underdeveloped. Similarly, although the author explains the emphasis on "Czech" rather than Slovak, the substantiation for this is rooted in two studies and does not fully succeed in explaining the premise that Czechs were simply more "institutionally assimilated" as the reason for focusing on Czech populations exclusively. There would have been those who identified as Czechoslovak, and little discussion is dedicated in the book to nuance these perspectives. The book's explanation is therefore only partially complete for why the title and the discussion is not "Czechoslovak Refugees in Cold War Canada," for example.

Czech Refugees juxtaposes the Cold War integration policies of the Canadian government with Czech Canadian institutions promoting settlement and other aspects, including varied forms of assistance from local communities, thus highlighting that the process of integration was in fact multidimensional and facilitated by different actors. This an essential point from the broader perspective of refugee studies because it offers an example that illuminates the role of structural frameworks of integration and not simply the narrative of "adaptability" of refugee populations. The narrative regarding integration consistently emphasizes this complexity further by analysing divisions within Czech Canadian communities along political lines between 1948 and 1989 – a process that Raska highlights as being underscored by domestic political discourse in Canada as well as by internal tensions (like the role of Jozef Tiso, for example).

One of the most significant contributions that the book makes is to focus on the expectations meeting Eastern European refugees in Cold War Canada regarding sociocultural and political norms. The myth of the Eastern European anti-communist "freedom fighter" is unpacked by the author in terms of the impact it had on Czech refugees in Canada, while the analysis speaks more broadly to post-war narrative patterns significantly assessed in vast scope by the late Tony Judt in Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (2005). These frameworks have played an essential role in establishing acceptable post-war identities for political refugees and, hence, have shaped the frameworks of identities that have emerged among the Czech communities in Canada. This discussion surrounding ideological cleavages and their maintenance both internally and externally contribute to making this study both timely and valuable. Although the author does not engage directly with wider Eastern European immigration pattern studies or frameworks of displacement and trauma, Raska's detailed analysis serves as an important addition for texts such as Mihaela Robila's Eastern European Immigrant Families (2010), Tara Zahra's The Great Departure: Mass Migration...