BOOK REVIEW

A new memoir by Ukrainian Canadian Kulyk Keefer

"Honey and Ashes: A Story of Family," by Janice Kulyk Keefer; Harper Flamingo, Canada; 338 pp.

by Yuriy Diakunchak

"I grew up with stories that made me realize I came from a place steeped in history," Ukrainian Canadian writer and scholar Janice Kulyk Keefer told an audience at the Ukrainian National Federation's downtown Toronto library recently. She was promoting her latest book, "Honey and Ashes," her first non-fiction book - a memoir that is a direct result of her fascination with the place her family called home.

The narrative begins in 1900 with the birth of her grandfather Tomasz Solowski, progresses through the travails of five generations of her family and ends in the present with the author's 1997 trip to visit her family in Ukraine and Poland. "I write about the story of a family ... but also how the story of a family is intertwined with public history," she said at her UNF appearance.

The book is billed by publisher Harper Flamingo as "an immigrant experience common to many Canadians." While this is true, Ms. Kulyk Keefer personalizes this experience with fascinating anecdotes of the daily life of her family, both in Ukraine and later in Canada.

The story that unfolds is one of cruelty and brutality, of the basic unfairness that characterized the lives of the peasantry of Halychyna, one of the poorest, most overpopulated regions of Europe. The name of Ms. Kulyk Keefer's ancestral village in western Ukraine is rich in connotation - Staromishchyna, "the Old Place." It suffered not only from inter-ethnic strife between the Poles and Ukrainians, but also from the barbarism inherent in the daily struggle to simply survive. Less than 100 years ago, life in this area of the world was so venal it is barely imaginable.

The author reconstructs a story told by her mother Natalia (née Solowska) of a neighboring boy whose father beat him until the boy's back snapped, leaving him crippled for life. She tells us of the beekeeping uncle who wouldn't spare even a taste of honey for Natalia and her sister Vira. She describes the deprivations endured by the residents of Staromishchyna caused by two world wars, and the ethnic hatred between Ukrainians and Poles that set cousin against cousin. Staromishchyna was among the many staging grounds for all manner of vicious crimes perpetrated by authoritarian Polish, Nazi and Soviet regimes.

The villagers themselves, caught up in this seemingly endless flow of conflict, commit atrocity upon atrocity against each other. Family ties no longer count. Only ethnic identification determines on who will set upon whom, although ethnic identity in that world was far from clear cut, as Ms. Kulyk Keefer's own part-Ukrainian, part-Polish family can attest.

The reader experiences the sadness that overcame the author as she researched the book. "I was filled with sorrow that people in such a potentially rich country live with such hardship, that I can barely imagine surviving for one day," she told her audience.

The banality of history's evils is brought home in Ms. Kulyk Keefer's account of her visit to the town in 1997, where she tries to elicit memories of the turbulent past from the inhabitants. A distant relative tells her that Natalia's uncle Vlodko was arrested by the Soviets in 1944, and later died in the gulag. "Why?" asks Ms. Kulyk Keefer. The relative shrugs as if to say "what a stupid question." Why did anyone - Ukrainian, Pole, Jew - have to die in those days? What reason did conquering armies need to victimize the conquered?

And yet in the midst all of this inhumanity, Ms. Kulyk Keefer's immediate family appears to have managed to maintain their basic humanity. Although some were driven from their home by economic necessity and others by history's horrors, they rose above their troubles and forged a successful life in the New World. Unfairness doggedly followed them across the ocean - the family's ethnicity is a drawback in an English world - but thankfully it did not prove to be an insurmountable barrier.

At times her family's nobility seems a bit too perfect. "We keep something back even in the most urgent confession" the author wrote in the introduction to the book. "Every family has its mythology, and every member of the family has different ways of interpreting them," she explained at her talk. Readers are to understand that she is relating history as she has come to understand it.

There is, however, a striking imbalance in "Honey and Ashes." In Ms. Kulyk Keefer's specific references to deaths in the two world wars, on page 77, the author writes that 35,000-50,000 Jews were killed in pogroms in Ukraine in World War I; on page 185 she relates that 60,000-80,000 Polish men, women and children were massacred in Volhynia by Ukrainians in the 1940s. Yet no numbers appear for similar losses of Ukrainian lives, especially since these losses were on an intrinsic part of the lives and even though Ms. Kulyk Keefer provides a bibliography of reference works used in her research for the book.

However, the memoir's narrative power carries the reader along. The author's voice floats from past to present, demanding some extra concentration, but this creates a heightened sense of realism and involvement - of being there.

Ms. Kulyk Keefer effectively juxtaposes different people's reactions to events and perceptions of reality. While her mother tells of a river so strong it could sweep away a team of horses, this river, the Zbruch, which demarcated the border between Soviet Ukraine and Poland in the interwar period, is but a trickling rivulet when the author sees it in 1997. Could it be that her mother's perception as a child made the river seem larger than it really was? Ms. Kulyk Keefer makes her disappointment plain, yet she subsequently learns that her mother's account is probably accurate. In the 1950s, grandiose Soviet projects diverted most of the river's water.

Few memoirs of the period Ms. Kulyk Keefer covers approach the naked brutality of everyday life in backwater Ukraine as does "Honey and Ashes." Her book is a useful reminder that the "Old Place," indeed the past in general, is usually not as nice as we like to think.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, February 28, 1999, No. 9, Vol. LXVII

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