Searching For Place: Ukrainian Displaced Persons, Canada, and the Migration of Memory

by Lubomyr Y. Luciuk

Canada was not in a welcoming mood when Ukrainian and other refugees began arriving in Canada after the second world war. In this book Lubomyr Luciuk delineates the efforts of the established Ukrainian-Canadian community to rescue and resettle Ukrainian refugees, despite the indifference and even hostility of the Canadian government. He shows how this triangular relationship coloured federal attitudes to both the resident old-guard Ukrainian population...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080208088X
• ISBN13: 9780802080882
• Release Date: November 2000
• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Length: 616 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A must read for Ukrainian diaspora

I grew up knowing that I was a Canadian "of Ukrainian descent" but all through my childhood, I didn't quite know what that meant. I did know that my father was born in the prairies, and I'd heard stories about my grandfather escaping serfdom in the old country only to be unjustly imprisoned once he came to Canada.As a young adult, I searched vainly for books that would tell me a bit about my ancestry, but the closest I could get was to read books that skirted around Ukrainian history: those written by Polish, Jewish, Russian and German authors. All I could find about Ukrainian Canadians dealt with food, embroidery, dance. Not history.The first fragment of light on this topic was a newspaper article printed in the mid-1980s in the Globe & Mail. This op-ed piece was written by Professor Lubomyr Luciuk and it detailed the fact that 8,000 Eastern European Canadians (5,000 of whom were Ukrainian Canadians) had been interned during World War I as "enemy aliens". I had never heard of such a thing. The Japanese in World War II, yes. But Ukrainians? I asked by father if he had ever heard of such an incident, and he looked at me sternly and said, "Of course I have. How many times have I told you about how your grandfather was imprisoned unjustly?"What a revelation. This professor was writing about my own history. I went to the library and found that this Professor Luciuk had written a number of books, all dealing with aspects of Ukrainian Canadian history and geography. I checked them out and read them. And then I wrote Silver Threads, a folk tale loosely based on my grandfather's internment experience. I didn't really feel that I was qualified to write such a book. What if I got the history wrong? So I got up my nerve and tracked down Professor Luciuk's phone number. I left a message on his answering machine, and a few weeks later, he called me. When I told him what I had done, he agreed to read the story. I mailed it to him, and he corrected the history.Silver Threads is now taught in schools across Canada, and the internment of Ukrainians is a well-known fact, but if it hadn't been for Professor Luciuk's research, this small but significant fragment of Canadian history would have been lost.Searching for Place is filled with such gems. For example, how many Canadians of Ukrainian descent realize that they are not one homogenous group? The first, second and third waves are as different as different can be: in politics, geographic origin, and religion. In the 1930s, while Canada suffered from the Depression, many Canadians of Ukrainian descent were sympathetic Communism. Across the ocean, their compatriots were being killed en masse by that very same ideology. When political refugees fleeing Communism came to Canada and met up with those whom they had assumed would be sympathetic, friction was inevitable.Similarly, how many Canadians of Ukrainian descent realize just how hostile Canada was to their arrival? Myth has it that these early settlers in their

Controversial Interpretation of Ukrainian Canadian Society

I could hardly put this book down. I am a Canadian of distant Ukrainian heritage and was not sure that I would find this new study of the Ukrainian experience in Canada all that different from others I have looked at over the years. Was I wrong! Professor Luciuk has re-interpreted the entire breadth of this ethnic minority's history in Canada, and emphasized the multiple interventions made into Ukrainian Canadian society by the federal government, from jailing innocent immigrants as "enemy aliens" during Canada's first national internment operations of 1914-2920, to creating the Ukrainian Canadian Committee in 1940, to exploiting the postwar immgirants (the DPs, or Displaced Persons) for anti-communist purposes at home and propaganda abroad while, at the most senior levels of officialdom, being utterly indifferent or even against independence for Ukraine, public pronouncements to the contrary! This book is extensively footnoted, which, at first, I wondered about, but then I got into these materials and found almost another book, rich in additional evidence about the themes this author covers in the main text. Some readers won't like Professor Luciuk's forthright style, or how he explodes some of the persistent myths and stereotypes about this community (eg the canard that thousands of Nazis hid in North America after the war is a fiction)but for anyone interested in Ukrainians in the diaspora, or 20th century immigration and ethnic history, this is a must have book. Highly recommended.