Ukrainian Canadian's musical dramatizes Winnipeg General Strike (06/05/05)

Ukrainian Canadian's musical dramatizes Winnipeg General Strike

by Christopher Guly
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

OTTAWA - In Canadian history, June 21, 1919, is known as "Bloody Saturday."

That day - more than a month after the country's most-famous labor disruption involving more than 30,000 people broke out in Winnipeg - the Royal North-West Mounted Police and military forces charged into a crowd of strikers.

About 150 shots were fired, and an estimated 30 people were sent to the hospital.

One person - Ukrainian-born Mike Sokolowski - who allegedly threw a brick at police, died after being shot through the heart on Main Street, directly in front of today's city hall.

No family member claimed his body. Sokolowski, believed to be 40 years old at the time, was buried in obscurity in the pauper's section of a Winnipeg cemetery.

Now, almost 86 years after his death, Sokolowski's name will be remembered in a musical conceived by a fellow Ukrainian Canadian about the famous Winnipeg General Strike.

But "Strike! - The Musical" (strikemusical.com), which runs from May 26 to June 14 at Theatre in the Park in Winnipeg's Kildonan Park, won't necessarily tell the real story about Mike Sokolowski's life.

"He was not a left-wing member of the [pro-socialist] Ukrainian Labor Temple in Winnipeg," explained Danny Schur, who wrote the music and lyrics, and co-wrote the script for "Strike!"

"He might have sympathized with the need to go on strike, but could never have for fear of being deported - and indeed might have been a strike breaker."

Mr. Schur says that during his research he discovered that Sokolowski was reportedly wearing an employee badge from the Winnipeg health department and likely had a job - perhaps sweeping streets - that was typically handed out to "poor immigrants."

Furthermore, Mr. Schur found an eyewitness account that suggests Sokolowski might not have even been the one who threw the fateful brick and was in fact standing on the opposite side of the street.

And while it was left to a stranger to drag his bloodied corpse to a nearby funeral parlor, Sokolowski did have family in Winnipeg. He was married and had three children.

But Mr. Schur explains that Sokolowski's wife, Kasha, "may have been too scared" to come forward and identify her husband's body. "Had she shown up and it was determined she no longer had a husband to support her, maybe she would have been deported since she and Mike were considered to be enemy aliens at the time.

"Another theory was that their third child had yet to be born and she was in labor at the time of Mike's death. But who knows why she wasn't there."

However, Mr. Schur says that Kasha's daughter-in-law from her second marriage, Corrine Siddon, told him the family never talked about Sokolowski.

"There was absolute shame dying in that way, and you can see that in the tone of the writing in the Winnipeg newspapers at the time of his death. Immigrants like him were considered disposable," explained 38-year-old, Manitoba-born Mr. Schur, whose first musical, "The Bridge," presented in 2000, told the story of a famous rock band whose members have Ukrainian roots.

But all of the facts surrounding Sokolowski's life don't figure in telling the story of Mike Sokolowski, the character played by Winnipeg-born Jay Brazeau in "Strike!"

In the musical, his wife and kids live in Ukraine and Sokolowski is trying to bring them to Canada.

Mr. Schur has also substituted Sokolowski's name for a real person who had a role in events leading up to Bloody Saturday.

Four days earlier, the Canadian government ordered the arrest of a group of men identified as leaders of the strike. However, not all of them were legitimate organizers, including Moishe (Moses) Almazoff, who later moved to New York and became a leading member of that city's Jewish community.

Almazoff got caught up in the raid after his Ukrainian Canadian neighbor, Harry Damaschuk, fabricated evidence that incriminated Almazoff as a Bolshevik revolutionary.

"He was charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government of the Dominion of Canada," Mr. Schur explained. "He spent 60 days in prison before his self-defense resulted in his release."

Almazoff appears as a character, portrayed by Israeli-born actor David Friedman, in "Strike!" But Damaschuk is fictionalized to become Mike Sokolowski. Mr. Schur says he did that to help illustrate the virulent anti-Semitism present in early 20th century Winnipeg.

"I'm mining the Ukrainian-Jewish divide," he added.

"At the time, Ukrainians would have been from the peasant class in Galicia" - very much anti-Bolshevik. "In the mind of my character, Mike Sokolowski, Bolshevism was a Jewish movement." Thus, Mike Sokolowski is portrayed as being anti-Semitic - at least at the beginning of the musical.

But he turns against Almazoff, in part, to prevent his Ukrainian-born godson, Myron Dudar (a fictionalized character, yet based on Myron Didur, a Ukrainian immigrant who was hospitalized with injuries on Bloody Saturday) from marrying Almazoff's sister, Rebecca, played by Broadway star Catherine Wreford, a Winnipeg-born actress set to marry film actor Jeff Goldblum this summer.

"To Mike, if his godson gets in with the radicals, he and Myron are going to be deported and that will prevent Mike from getting enough money together to bring his wife and children over from Ukraine," Mr. Schur said.

Without revealing the story's conclusion, it can be noted that Mike eventually warms to Myron's relationship with Rebecca - and in the process, emerges as the play's tragic hero.

In addition to paying tribute to Sokolowski in the $575,000 (about $461,000 U.S.) production, Mr. Schur has also made a personal gesture to remember the man who died tragically during the Winnipeg General Strike. Two years ago, Mr. Schur arranged to have a headstone donated from a Winnipeg company and be placed on Sokolowski's previously unmarked grave at Brookside Cemetery.

The Bloody Saturday victim is remembered on the three-foot-wide monument as the "forgotten immigrant."

Also inscribed on the headstone is a message for the ages, which reads, in part: "The Winnipeg General Strike was one of the watershed events of 20th century Canadian history ... [that] lasted for six weeks, but divided the city along ethnic and class lines for decades thereafter. While today viewed as a struggle for better wages and collective bargaining, the strike had an anti-immigrant undercurrent, and culminated in riot and bloodshed."

A memorial in honor of Mr. Sokolowski was held on May 14 at his gravesite - an annual event that also coincides with the anniversary that marks the start of the Winnipeg General Strike.

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