Leaving Shadows: Literature in English by Canada's Ukrainians (review)

Leaving Shadows was written, according to its cover copy, from a 'fervent desire for fresher, sexier images of Ukrainian culture in Canada.' 'Fresher' and 'sexier,' however, mean tendentious and skewed when it comes to Lisa Grekul's interpretations of concepts of ethnicity supposedly endorsed by the writers she considers, and to her actual reading of many of the texts she treats. Though her study gives a good account of who-wrote-what-when, and of how approaches to ethnicity and belonging among Ukrainian-Canadian writers have altered through the advent of multiculturalism and beyond, Leaving Shadows is not so much a gallop through an important field of Canada's literary history as the riding of a blinkered hobbyhorse.

Grekul's chosen texts range from treatments of Slavic otherness by writers such as Sinclair Ross and Margaret Laurence to selected poetry by Andrew Suknaski and the travel writing of Myrna Kostash. To achieve her clearly stated goals – making Ukrainian-Canadian literature visible and preventing the 'passing away' of the ethnicity it foregrounds – Grekul champions writers whose exploratory approach to language and form allow them to serve as mentors and even literary 'mothers' to silent 'sixth-generation Ukrainian Canadians who are sitting these days in Canadian literature classrooms.' The texts of Suknaski and Kostash, she argues, permit the 'bridging [of] gaps between Canada and Ukraine' as well as the 'reconciling' of 'ethnic and national identity.' She reproves George Ryga and Maara Haas for their 'inability to re-invent the experience of ethnicity in texts that transcend the generic limitations of realism' and she chastises what she views as the neat and easy closure of my own Ukrainian-based works. Yet Grekul's penchant for reconciliatory works by authors 'empowered ... to transcend' the 'brute facts of history' appears inconsistent with her desire to privilege what she understands as unfixed and open-ended negotiations of ethnic identity.

Grekul's capacity for skewed readings is exemplified by her treatment of Vera Lysenko's novel Yellow Boots. Discounting the agency of Lysenko's heroine, Lilli, who rejects the brutal restrictions of pioneer life in an arch-patriarchal household, Grekul accuses Lilli of abandoning her ethnicity in order to 'make a successful transition to the dominant culture of Canadian society.' Ignoring Lilli's decision not to sing lieder on the metropolitan concert stages, but to seek out the community halls of small, isolated towns, in order to perform the folksongs of all immigrant groups, she derides Lilli's vocation as 'a superficial mimicry of [her] rich and complex Old World culture.' As for Grekul's dismissal of the novel's conclusion as 'pat,' surely the engagement of a Ukrainian-Canadian woman to a Jewish-Austrian refugee on the eve of the Second World War is no recipe for pie in the sky.

While Grekul is to be applauded for championing the work of Suknaski and Kostash, she shows herself ill equipped to deal with the problematic aspects of these writers' Ukrainian-based work. (The fact that she ignores the interplay, in any of her chosen writers' oeuvres, between their ethnically themed work and the rest of their literary production is telling.) Thus she refuses to engage with the complex ethical questions raised by Kostash's blurring of boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, especially regarding her 'love affair' with the dissident writer Vasyl Stus. And when Grekul examines the all-important Ukrainian chapter in Bloodlines, she omits a passage of the greatest significance for its author's negotiation of her Ukrainianness: Kostash's confession of the culpable inadequacy of her past response to the forced famine of 1932–33. Asserting that 'the future of Ukraine springs from its rich black loam,' Grekul allows her desire for a 'symbol of hope' to negate awareness of the lasting, horrific impact upon Ukraine of the dead zone round Chornobyl.

In her postscript to Leaving Shadows Grekul expresses solidarity with those who have erected such monumental forms of kitsch as the giant coil of...