Ukrainian-Canadian writer Janice Kulyk Keefer had a story to tell.
It was the story of the Old Place, a locale where women worked the fields while their men toiled in foreign lands to earn enough money to buy a tiny bit of property back home.
It was also a place where – after years of backbreaking work – invading communist regimes confiscated that hard-earned property, forcing its owners to flee and carve out new lives somewhere else.
When Kulyk Keefer’s story of the Old Place was published to high acclaim in 1998 as “Honey and Ashes: A Story of Family,” it struck a chord with many Canadian readers.
While the setting of her tale was pre-World War II Ukraine, it was in many ways the universal Canadian immigrant narrative: It was the story of new beginnings, of those generations that followed the ones which left places like the Old Place.
It was also the story of conflicting identities, of a yearning to fit into a new world while also making sense of that which defined one’s past.
“It is both an intensively Ukrainian and Canadian book. It speaks to anybody who has this double identity,” Kulyk Keefer told the Kyiv Post in a telephone interview from her home in Canada. “With ‘Honey and Ashes,’ I also wanted write out of, and about, the Canadian experience of having roots in another country and culture…In America, there is a strong myth of what it is to be American. It’s so quintessentially Canadian to be the uncertain child of immigrants.”
They had all kinds of stories dealing with suffering and hardship and extraordinary beauty. But I also came to realize that there were stories concerning things I hadn’t asked about as a child: things about others that I needed to know, however painful or difficult it might be to tell or hear them.
– Janice Kulyk Keefer, about her family.
Considered one of Canada’s leading writers, memory and the immigrant experience have been important themes in Kulyk Keefer’s works. The author of over a dozen books, she was born in Toronto to immigrant parents.
She studied literature in England and France, and currently teaches at the University of Guelph, some 100 kilometers west of Toronto.
Although Kulyk Keefer grew within the Ukrainian diaspora, she moved away from that community later in life, both emotionally and physically. It was “the pressure of time and of wanting to pay homage to my parents and grandparents” that finally led to her writing “Honey and Ashes,” she said.
“They had all kinds of stories dealing with suffering and hardship and extraordinary beauty,” Kulyk Keefer said of her family. “But I also came to realize that there were stories concerning things I hadn’t asked about as a child: things about others that I needed to know, however painful or difficult it might be to tell or hear them.”
Along with painstaking research, she took a trip back to her grandparents’ village, Staromischyna, which means Old Place in Ukrainian, located in Ternopil oblast.
It was a journey that took her full circle, and allowed her to explore Ukraine as it was, rather than through the myth often created by Ukrainian immigrants, which forbids critique.
“To say anything that contests or conflicts with the [reigning] wisdom is seen to be disloyal or to betray the ethnos.”
Having looked west to the land of her ancestors, Kulyk Keefer is now looking toward Ukraine’s east as inspiration for her next undertaking.
I find it very interesting that in our multicultural Canadian state, Ukraine seems to be very, very much off stage. It’s been extremely difficult for a critical mass of writers or artists dealing with their connection to Ukraine to come into voice.
She just returned to Canada after spending several months in Europe lecturing and researching a book on Halyna Kuzmenko, a long-time partner and aide to Nestor Makhno, the Ukrainian anarchist who led an independent army in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War. “I’m interested in her as a reluctant political heroine,” Kulyk Keefer said.
Despite its sizable community, the Ukrainian experience – or Ukrainian themes as such – still have not been adequately described in Canada, she said. That, however, is slowly beginning to change.
“I find it very interesting that in our multicultural Canadian state, Ukraine seems to be very, very much off stage,” she said. “It’s been extremely difficult for a critical mass of writers or artists dealing with their connection to Ukraine to come into voice. It’s finally beginning to take an interesting shape now, thanks to the efforts of artists, critics, scholars.”
In part, that is because Ukraine itself is changing and becoming more open to a larger world.
“I know there are all kinds of problems politically, but what a fiercely interesting place Ukraine is today,” she said.
“For a long time nobody in the West seemed to know about it. It was a place that you went to with an ambiguous mission if you were a Ukrainian-American or Ukrainian-Canadian: to keep the diaspora faith, but also to encounter a world the diaspora couldn’t or wouldn’t recognize as authentic…Now you can go to Kyiv or Lviv the way you might go to Prague or Warsaw: as a compelling tourist destination.”
While Ukraine may still be “wrestling with the traumas of Russian imperialism and severe economic hardship, for us, ethno-tourists, it is now open and alive – free – in a way that we’ve never known it to be,” she said.
Kyiv Post staff writer Natalia A. Feduschak can be reached at [email protected]
