INTERVIEW: Governor General's Award nominee Janice Kulyk Keefer (11/10/96)

INTERVIEW: Governor General's Award nominee Janice Kulyk Keefer

by Oksana Zakydalsky

TORONTO - "I am starting to deal with my own background, which I didn't want to touch for the longest time," said Janice Kulyk Keefer in an interview last year before the publication of her latest novel, "The Green Library." That novel has now been nominated for the 1996 Governor General's Award for fiction. The Governor General's Awards, Canada's most prestigious book awards, will be announced in Montreal on November 12.

Janice Kulyk Keefer is a novelist, poet, literary essayist and academic. Author of two best-selling and critically acclaimed novels, "Constellations" (published in 1988) and "Rest Harrow" (1992), she has also published several collections of poetry, literary essays and short stories in Canada. Her collection of short fiction, "Travelling Ladies," was also published and widely reviewed in the United States.

Born in Toronto and a graduate of the University of Toronto with a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Sussex, England, Ms. Kulyk Keefer is a full professor of English literature at the University of Guelph, where she has taught since 1990.

"The Green Library," published in the spring of this year, tells the story of Eva Chown, a 43-year-old Canadian woman leading an unremarkable life in Toronto. One day an unmarked envelope, containing fragments of a 1930s photograph, slips through Eva's mailbox and explodes her carefully constructed world. She embarks on a journey deep into memory, into the unknown history of her family and the painful history of her ancestors.

Her quest to claim the past leads her from Toronto to Kyiv, to a man she has never forgotten as the moving novel spins a tale of love, betrayal and the profound need to belong to a place and a people.

This interview was held in Toronto in June before Ms. Kulyk Keefer left for a sabbatical in Europe.

Q: Many people who have read your book "The Green Library" have remarked that it is really "packed" - it deals with the history of Ukraine, the history of Ukrainians in Canada, the DP experience, Ukraine in the 1920s and 30s, World War II. It is really full of stories. Was this a conscious approach on your part, to tell as much as you could?

A: Absolutely. I wanted to tell many stories. We all have stories to tell. That is how we know who we are, that is how we get to know each other - by telling our own stories and listening to other peoples' stories, imagining ourselves in the place of other people. I am fascinated with the interaction between history, the brute events that just happen to people and history, and personal history, family history - that gets passed from one generation to another. I wanted to find a form for this novel in which people could exchange stories. The whole book became a chain of stories.

I knew that I was writing a book that was going to be read not only by Ukrainians, but hopefully by all Canadians. I knew I would have to write about Ukraine in a way that would make it comprehensible to your average Canadian reader who knew nothing about Ukraine. The main character in the book, Eva, discovers she is Ukrainian when she is a grown woman. I had to spell things out to an audience who would not know things that, to me, were very basic. We cannot assume that people know the very basic things about Ukraine, so I had the task of conveying the information in such a way that it wouldn't sound as if the story had stopped with: here is your lesson for today.

When I was talking with my publisher during stages of this novel he would say things like, "when Eva goes to Russia," and I had to explain to him the difference between Russia and Ukraine. And I thought: if my publisher isn't getting it, then obviously I have to go to great pains to make it crystal clear to any reader of this book that it is about Ukraine and not Russia, that Ukraine is now a post-colonial country and has to deal with a lot of problems. All these things I had to bring into the story of the novel and risk weighing down the narrative.

I was somewhat fearful: What if I don't get it right? What if I make some terrible mistake? I wanted to do justice to a people, a history and a culture, yet I wanted to stress not only what makes Ukrainian a unique and a very definitive culture but what makes the Ukrainian experience speak to other people. I wanted to deal with the whole idea of displacement: getting the boot of history coming down on you and suddenly finding yourself a whole lifetime away from your roots, your language and the graves of your family. The shock of displacement and how people actually survive was one of my main themes.

Q: The main character, Eva's partner, Dan, is Jewish. Did you consider the topic of Ukrainian-Jewish relations important for your book?

A: Sometimes the stories people have are problematic because they deal with stereotypes. In the case of Ukrainians and Jews, both sides have them. I tried to make Dan a sympathetic character: he works on a voluntry basis for a group trying to prevent the deportation of immigrants for unfair reasons, he puts up with Eva who is emotionally dead. He is a complement to Eva, more active and engaged. Yet when Dan learns that Eva is Ukrainian, immediately what springs to his mind are the stories he was told by his grandparents about Ukrainians.

I deal with some topics in the book which I consider part of the continuum of the tragic side of Ukrainian history, such as Chornobyl and Babyn Yar. In the case of the latter, what I wanted to do was not to displace what happened to the Jews, because they did suffer the most, but I also wanted to bring into the novel the fact that Ukrainians were murdered there as well. The incident in the book is based on the story of poet Olena Teliha who was murdered at Babyn Yar. I also wanted to bring out some points of Ukrainian history - such as, more Ukrainians perished in World War II than any other people; more Dutchmen belonged to the Waffen SS than Ukrainians - such facts, if they are talked about, that will change the stereotypes. These stereotypes desperately need to be changed, but they won't be until we have the will and take the responsibility.

One of the things I am interested in doing is forming a relationship with Jewish-Canadian writers. I spoke at a Jewish women's conference held in Toronto in January on Jewish-Ukrainian relations. We need to pursue constructing situations, where we can confront the stereotypes and some of the bad stories. We need to discover what similarities and links there are between us within the culture. When I hear some of the stories circulated in the Ukrainian community - and heaven knows what kind of stories are going around in the Jewish community - I am appalled. In our baggage there are still these stereotypes and prejudices that should not exist in a country like Canada.

Q: This is your first novel which is in any way related to your Ukrainian background - a topic that you said you did not want to touch for the longest time. Why was that?

A: This happens to a lot of artists who grow up in a particular milieu that is both fascinating and problematic, as was my Ukrainian milieu in Toronto. My mother's family came to Toronto in 1936 from the village of Staromishchena on the river Zbruch near Pidvolochyske. My father was born in Canada in 1914. He became a dentist and had a dental practice above the Arka bookstore in Toronto.

I went to Ukrainian school at the Orthodox church but, from the beginning, I was aware of the religious and political differences among the various Ukrainian groups in Toronto. My parents did not speak Ukrainian with me at home, although they spoke Ukrainian with my sister who was two years older. I think they got frightened by the McCarthyite atmosphere of the 1950s. For example, my father was not allowed to enter the U.S. to attend a dental convention. It might have been because he had played the violin at a Labor Temple, but he played the violin at various organizations.

Growing up I had a sense that the community was very fractured and that there was something preventing the community from being as cohesive and as strong as it could have been. There were ghettos within ghettos within ghettos. I was frustrated that people did not want to talk about it; these divisions were just accepted.

When I went to "Ridna Shkola" I was taught by people for whom Ukrainian was their maternal language. They had been teachers or professional people in Ukraine and, coming to Canada, they had to start all over again in very humble circumstances. My Ukrainian was kitchen table Ukrainian. They believed that, if I was of Ukrainian parentage, I should have been born speaking Ukrainian and they refused to teach Ukrainian as a second language. Although I can understand why, as a kid I was very frustrated. They assumed that I was being stubborn, that it was my fault and, if I really wanted to, I could speak Ukrainian.

I always felt a sense of shame that I couldn't speak Ukrainian. The only way you can learn a language is to have no hang-ups and to wander into it - you make mistakes and people correct you and this is how you learn to speak it - that is how I learned French and German. But with Ukrainian I always felt that there was a measuring tape on my tongue. To make a mistake was to betray a whole culture - the stakes were enormously high.

As a young woman growing up, I felt that there was a very restricted horizon if I stayed within the community that valued, first of all, the preservation of its culture in its traditional forms as opposed to a culture that acknowledged change. Partly due to my ignorance and partly because the community was so fractured, I did not meet other people who shared my interests, particularly young men and women who were interested in intellectual pursuits. I definitely wanted to do more than fetch beer for the boys when they played poker at our parties.

I desperately wanted to get away from Canada, to live abroad. I didn't want anything that would keep me in a box. Don't forget that this was pre-multicultural Canada, where to be ethnic was to be very much boxed in. But now, ironically, I am meeting all kinds of people who grew up Ukrainian at the same time I did - there are artists, musicians, media people - who form part of the community about us and who were in a different church, belonged to a different organization, went to a different summer camp.

There is the problem of perspective. When you are right up against something, it is not the time to be writing about it. A lot of resentment comes in and a lot of egocentricity - my story, my struggles. Now when I feel fairly confident about myself and the place I have made in my profession - as a fiction writer, as a teacher - I have the distance and I can look back and understand without the clouding that comes with resentment, frustration or just ignorance and immaturity. I did repress my Ukrainianness, I wanted no baggage. What I am discovering, as a writer, is that that baggage is immeasurably rich and fascinating.

I felt that I had to establish myself just as a Canadian writer before I identified myself with an ethnic group. In some ways it was a liberation to write this book. I was trying to comment on Ukrainian culture from a perspective that was more open than it could have been. That is one reason why the main character is only half-Ukrainian.

Q: Are you a Ukrainian writer?

A: That brings up the whole question of language and my feeling of being disinherited because I do not know the language. I see myself as a Canadian-Ukrainian writer, and I see myself as inescapably hyphenated and split. In the past this has had some painful and negative aspects but, to me, increasingly, it is now a richness. I always think of complexity as an advantage because there is so much more to explore. But I think all Canadian writers are hyphenated in some way or other - Margaret Atwood is an Anglo-Canadian writer, Rohintan Mistry is an Indian-Canadian writer - you can go on and on. There are two backgrounds and they're always connecting in different ways.

But then I think of my own kids - they're 19 and 14 - and I see that they're not Ukrainian-Canadian but just Canadian. They've had Ukrainian storybooks in translation, they've done projects on Ukraine. But because they did not grow up in this split way, they don't feel the same about things I feel strongly about.

I am always one foot in each world, always straddling the border. To me this has become a very positive thing, really exciting. That is why I want to move more and more into this area in the future, to explore the other side of the border. One of my regrets is that my parents did not give me a Ukrainian name.

As my parents get older, I don't want their lives to fall into silence. I want to make something of their stories - these amazing stories about their lives and the truly astounding shifts they had to make: to adjust overnight from feudal conditions to a new language, a new culture and an economy that was completely different. I think they had tremendous courage, and there was excitement about what they were able to do.

I made certain life decisions - I did not marry a Ukrainian, I don't belong to Ukrainian organizations or church groups - so I'm not perpetuating the culture in that way. What I want to do, what speaks to me emotionally, is to try to use my writing to bring out of the silence some of their stories and some aspects of the culture that are unknown in the larger North American (and European) context.

I found myself profoundly moved by the fact that Ukraine is an independent country. I hadn't thought about Ukraine on a day-to-day basis for the longest time. Yet, when the Soviet Union was collapsing and there was a chance for the independence of Ukraine, I found myself very much caught up in the drama. In my own way, I wanted to have some connection with it. I wanted to go to Ukraine. So far, I have only been to Kyiv and it was a very circumscribed experience.

I am going to be spending two months in western Ukraine and Poland in the spring and summer of 1997 because I'm writing a book about my family's life. It's going to be this weird genre called creative non-fiction, something like Michael Ondaatje's book "Running in the Family," where he tells family stories while also reconstructing episodes in his parents' lives before he was born. He is inventing, yet has to be true to certain facts. I want to go into the intersection of history and my family's personal history - such as Pilsudki's pacification campaign, when the Polish militia rode into my mother's village and confiscated Ukrainian embroidery and books and beat the young men.

I also want to get a sense of the landscape. I grew up hearing all these stories of the beautiful country where my mother came from, which I have never seen except in photographs. I want to actually set foot on that soil, no matter how much it has all changed. I've been to many places - all over Europe, Israel, Australia - and now, finally, it is possible to travel in Ukraine, to talk to the people and to see what you want to see.