BOOK NOTES
A look at Ukrainian immigrants to Brazil, 1891-1914
"Under the Southern Cross: A Collection of Accounts and Reminiscences about the Ukrainian Immigration in Brazil, 1891-1914," by Jeffrey Picknicki Morski. Winnipeg: Watson & Dwyer publishing, 2000. 96 pp., $24.95 (paper).
Jeffrey Picknicki Morski is a Ukrainian Canadian who has spent the past 15 years researching and writing about the Ukrainian immigration to Brazil. He wanted to know what their journey was like. What were their first thoughts and impressions as they arrived in Brazil? How did they adjust to an environment and social structure so different from their own? Mr. Picknicki's new book, "Under the Southern Cross: A Collection of Accounts and Reminiscences about the Ukrainian Immigration in Brazil, 1891-1914," answers these questions.
Beginning in 1891 until 1914, the so-called "First Wave" of Ukrainian immigration to Brazil brought some 45,00 pioneers to settle the country's sparsely populated southern frontier regions. As with the movement to Canada, it was the search for a better life for themselves and those who would come after them that led to this mass migration to the New World.
Mr. Picknicki searched in forgotten archives, libraries, scrapbooks and pages of the Ukrainian Brazilian press to find immigrants' stories in their own words, told as only they could tell them with all the color, flavor and emotion that first-hand accounts provide. Presented here for the first time in English translation, they offer the reader the ability to further understand and appreciate the collective courage, sacrifice and determination that was the pioneer experience.
Mr. Picknicki Morski (Picknicki after his Polish father, Morski for his Ukrainian mother) is a graduate of the University of Manitoba and was awarded the position of research scholar by the University of Winnipeg in 1999.
The book may be ordered through J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing Inc. at (204) 779-6967.
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, April 29, 2001, No. 17, Vol. LXIX
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