All the World's a Mall

All the World's a Mall / Rinny Gremaud
trans. from the French by Luise von Flotow
Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2023, c2018.
152 p.

I picked up this slim book at my library, thinking it was an interesting premise -- the author travels to five cities, Edmonton, Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, and Casablanca, to visit five of the largest malls in the world. 

I was intrigued by the inclusion of the West Edmonton Mall, since I have been there myself.  That is mainly why I wanted to read it. The book began in Edmonton & I enjoyed seeing her explore places I recognized. 

The concept is that these malls are almost like cities into themselves, but she finds that they are sterile, centered on commerce & transactional relationships, lacking any real sense of life. I think that is a common response to megamalls.

She pushes herself to rapidly visit these five shopping centres, interviewing shop owners and executives. Interspersed with this, she talks about her own life & family, how tired she is, how much she misses them. 

Even though this is a short book, it felt repetitive by the end. The malls are indeed all very much alike & that sameness means she doesn't have a lot to add by the fifth one. Also, having her conclusion laid out in the first chapter means that there isn't too much discovery going on. It just felt depressing by halfway through, with the reader wondering why she was bothering to complete this project.  

So while there were some good points, especially in the first half, I did feel like the book kind of petered out. Perhaps it would have been more effective as a magazine article in a condensed form. 

The House With the Stained-Glass Window

The House with the Stained Glass Window / Zanna Sloniowska
trans. from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
London: MacLehose Press, 2019, c2015
240 p.

This beautiful cover was one reason that this book has been on my TBR for a while. Also, the fact that it's about Lviv, and the interplay of history in that changeable city. 

It's also the story of three women, grandmother, mother and daughter, living in an apartment with a large stained glass window in the stairwell, which plays a part in the story. They are a Polish family, who have lived in Lviv since it was Lvov, and even Lemberg. But Marianna, the mother in this trinity, is drawn to the Ukrainian cause. 

Marianna is a beautiful opera singer, well known and adored by many, but she becomes part of the demonstrations against Soviet governance in the late 1980s. And as she's speaking at one in 1988, she's shot dead. 

This event shakes the family of women, and the unnamed daughter takes over the story. She recollects her mother, the interactions in their household, and the mysterious life her mother had outside the family circle. She meets a Polish man who has come to look at the stained glass window; it's a notable one that he's trying to save. It turns out that this melancholy man is one of Marianna's former lovers, and somehow he and the daughter fall into an affair despite his being so much older than her. 

The story relates a lot of history, takes us on a tour of Lviv in all its incarnations, and has some intriguing elements. However, I found the choice of narrator underwhelming. The daughter is boring, frankly -- her mother, grandmother (and even the frail great grandmother) are women who have all done something, who have opinions and backstories, so this contemporary story of the daughter in an affair with her mother's former lover just feels a little banal. 

I had great hopes for this novel, and it wasn't bad. There are many elements that I enjoyed, like the history, the setting, the stories of the past. But it didn't seem to go anywhere in the end, I was disappointed in the limp conclusion that felt like the story just stopped, rather than tied up. I liked it for many reasons, but found it didn't quite reach the heights I'd hoped for. 
 

Ghosts in a Photograph

 

Ghosts in a Photograph / Myrna Kostash
Edmonton: NeWest Press, c2022.
304 p.

Myrna Kostash has written many books exploring both her Ukrainian heritage and wider issues of travel, identity, and immigration. This latest one looks at her own family history, starting with some family mementos, and tracing back the stories of her recent ancestors as best as she could. But it's not just about her own family, it's about wider patterns of immigration, Ukrainian history, the unsolved murder of a Ukrainian ancestor, the interaction of Ukrainian settlers and the Indigenous peoples who were on the Alberta lands they settled, and more. 

The writing is orderly but compelling. It begins by looking at each one of her grandparents separately - they had immigrated from Galicia (Ukraine) and started the Kostash family legacy. It's an interesting setup, as one half of her family were homesteaders and farmers, what you'd think of as the 'typical' Ukrainian immigran experience, but the other half were urban working-class socialists, who had settled in Edmonton. She is able to discuss many elements of the Ukrainian Canadian community, from newspapers and organizations to traditions and expectations, through this perspective. 

There is also a fair bit about her travels to Ukraine to meet with some of her distant cousins and relatives from the home village, many of whom she had barely known about. It's here that she hears family stories from previous generations, of her grandparents' siblings and parents, including that uncle who had disappeared in one of the many wars that have affected Ukraine. All of this was informative, and a fascinating personal story that feels more universal. 

The last chapter discusses the displacement of the Indigenous peoples which resulted from her family's immigration (and the much wider flood of immigration in those early years). She has written a couple of books on Indigenous history/themes, and this concern shows in this chapter as well. This chapter doesn't have the same feeling of personal resonance as the rest of the book, but it is a vital element to acknowledge and discuss. 

This is an important book from a prolific recorder of Ukrainian Canadian social history, and I'm glad to have read it. 

This book was also the winner of this year's Kobzar Book Award. Check out all the nominees and past winners for lots of fabulous Ukrainian Canadian reading. 

Blossoming of a Ukrainian Canadian: Savella Stechishin

Blossoming of a Ukrainian Canadian: Savella Stechishin
by Natalie Ostryzniuk
Bloomington, IN: Trafford, c2009.
236 p.

I decided to read this biography, fortunately available through interlibrary loan, as part of my Ukrainian Canadian reading. Savella Stechishin Savella Stechishin is best known for her comprehensive cookbook Traditional Ukrainian Cookery (now very hard to find at a reasonable price!) But she was active in a lot of other areas as well, and this bio, written as a master's thesis, covers much of her life and work in Saskatchewan. 

As she was such a big part of the Ukrainian Canadian community, particularly in Saskatchewan, I was hoping I might find some mention of some of my relatives or people I knew in this. No such luck! Not a peep. That could be because she was solidly planted in the Ukrainian Orthodox tradition, and none of my family was religious at all. Nonetheless, this book was fascinating; her life was unusual and so busy. She immigrated to Canada at age 9 with her family, in 1913. And she was the first woman to graduate from the University of Saskatchewan, with a degree in home economics. She wanted to make life easier for women, so spent a lot of time travelling around the province teaching women better domestic skills to improve their lot. This is while she was married herself, with 3 children. Her husband Julian was rector of the Petro Mohyla Institute in Saskatoon, and a writer himself, but also did his share of childcare and more while she was working. 

She founded the Ukrainian Women's Association of Canada in 1926, and the Ukrainian Museum of Canada in 1936. Both are still running, nationwide. She travelled to women's conferences across the country, in the US and in Ukraine, meeting some of her more famous contemporaries. But she always stayed committed to the work she was doing in Saskatchewan. Savella Stechishin had a lot more to her than I'd known before reading this book - I'm so glad someone wrote about her while she was still around to interview. My degree was in Canadian History, but no mention of people like her back then. I'm happy to rectify that by reading history like this now. 

Five Stalks of Grain

 

Five Stalks of Grain / Adrian Lysenko;
illus. by Ivanka Theodosia Galadza
Calgary: U of C Press, c2022.
152 p.

This is a hard hitting graphic history -- a story set during the Holodomor in Ukraine. This was an artificial famine, one created by Stalin's policies in the 30s, as part of the ongoing attempts at genocide of the Ukrainian nation. There are in-depth histories of this, one of the best known being Anne Appelbaum's Red Famine, if you want an in-depth study of this horrendous time. However, here we have a personal story being shared, to introduce people to this event in a way that will be striking and unforgettable. 

The illustrations are simple and realistic, all in black and white. We follow Nadia and Taras, two young children who strike out on their own when both of their parents are arrested and killed. They try to walk to somewhere safer where there will be food. They encounter dangerous situations with other starving people, and with soldiers looking for 'enemies of the state'. At one point they are separated, and despite the guilt Nadia tries to keep going. 

This isn't a book about overcoming trauma as much as about explaining and illuminating the trauma. The finale of the book is a scene in contemporary times, in which a couple of Canadian young people are visiting Ukraine, trying to find the home of their relatives lost in the famine. 

It's sad, and stark, but also very necessary to keep these stories alive. The Holodomor was one in a long line of Russian attacks on the existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians, which is still going on. This book gives a glimpse into how it affected one family, in a story that will not be quickly forgotten. 

Enemy Alien: a true story of life behind barbed wire

 

Enemy Alien / Kassandra Luciuk; illus. by Nicole Marie Burton
TO: Between the Lines, c2020.
140 p.

This is an interesting read -- it is based on the memoir of a Ukrainian man, but the authors note that it's not clear who exactly the author was. They've given the main character the name John Boychuk, partly because he's the most likely candidate for author, and because the name is a kind of "John Smith" name.

In any case, it is based in the first person, contemporary account of the experience of Ukrainians in Canadian internment camps during WWI. There were a number of these camps across Canada, with many new Canadians locked up because they'd come from Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. And in this book, it's also shown that other men, even some Americans, were randomly caught up in the sweep to intern anyone "foreign". The illustrations are straightforward, black and white, and clearly representative of the people and the camps.

For those of us who like to think that Canadians are wonderful, kind, sweet etc., we just need to take a look at our history (both older and recent) to see how that's a false narrative. These camps resulted in the expected behaviour that crops up when some men are put into a position of power over others - lots of sadism, abuse and everyday bullying by guards, including withholding food, or making men undress in the middle of winter and run around on a frozen lake until they agree to camp demands. There were men who died due to untreated illness, or who were shot trying to escape. This book focuses on the camp at Kapuskasing, which was full of only men, but there were also other camps like the one at Spirit Lake which interned whole families. The book also shows that once they left the camp, they were sent to factories and industries far away from their homes, as forced labour -- and the end of the war was not the end of this practice. 

If you didn't know about the internment of Ukrainians during WWI already, this is a good introduction to the topic. There is an introductory essay that is a few pages long, which situates the story and provides historical background to the issue and to the specific source for this story. There is also a page long bibliography at the end if you then want to read more on this subject. I would also recommend Barbara Sapergia's novel Blood & Salt, for a fictional look at Ukrainian internment in Western Canada. 

The Fight of Our Lives

The Fight of Our Lives / Iuliaa Mendel
trans. by Madeline G. Levine
NY: Atria/One Signal, c2022
208 p.

This is a fantastic read, one that hits the current moment perfectly. It's an engaging read, a mix of general politics, a closer look at Zelenskyy's character, and the author's own life. She combines them to create an informative and easy-to-read political memoir. 

Her story is pretty fascinating - she worked as Zelenskyy's press secretary for two years, after winning a competition for the role. From her inside vantage point, she talks about how Zelenskyy's election was a turning point, a rejection of the Russian focused oligarchs and a loud call for a European government. And she shares the hard work required to change entrenched corrupt practices, including things like hiring the right people, making processes more transparent, and the huge shift in digital access to government services (right now it's easier to access government services online in Ukraine than in most of North America, for example). 

Her own life was disrupted by the war, as her fiancé went to the front lines in the beginning of the invasion. Her view as a young professional woman who was directly involved in the Ukrainian government is fascinating and thorough. She isn't speaking on anyone else's behalf; she is clear about the positives and the flaws involved in such a huge turnaround effort. But you can also feel the respect she has for Zelenskyy's leadership and the care he puts into every interaction.

It's a great read if you're interested in current events and how Zelenskyy came to power, and where the country wants to go. It's also very useful in getting a feel for the realities of Ukrainian life now and in recent decades. I feel that reading this will enlighten and inform anyone who is trying to understand Ukraine more clearly now. And it's also well written, with a narrative that flows and carries you forward. Recommended!

The Ukrainian Night

The Ukrainian Night / Marci Shore
New Haven, CT: Yale UP, c2018.
350 p.

And now for some history reading. I listened to this one as an audiobook (well read by Callie Beaulieu), and I really liked it. Shore is associate professor of history at Yale University and an award-winning author, and her expertise in this part of the world really shows here. This is a thoughtful and sympathetic overview of people who were involved in the Euromaidan uprising in 2014. She interviews and follows up with many participants to get their views of why it happened, how they got involved, and what the aftereffects were and are. 

Of course it was published in 2018 so misses out on the latest events; however, the people she speaks to -- from across Ukraine, both West and East, do talk frankly about the war in the Donbas which started in 2014 and just got bigger this year. The people range from professors to young students, men and women, who all participated in the revolution in different ways. From a young man who was on the frontlines and experienced violence and fear to a woman in Lviv who worked logistics, each has their own reflections on the events. 

I felt that the pace and development of her storytelling was excellent. It laid out the foundations of the story -- the facts of the events and some background -- and continued to build by weaving in the statements from the Ukrainians living the events. She found a good balance of stories as well, they don't all repeat one another but come from differing backgrounds and have varied reasons for why and when they got involved. 

And she follows up with discussions of how people were now living with the war in the Donbas, started by Russia in 2014 shortly after the Euromaidan revolution occurred. It shows a clear line from the revolution to the war of today. And it gives vital background to help understand the lengthy history of Ukraine and why it will never give in to Russia. I was absorbed in this book and learned so much from it, in such a natural and engrossing way. An excellent read. 

Daughter of Black Lake

Daughter of Black Lake / Cathy Marie Buchanan

Toronto: Harper Collins, c2020

306 p.

Cathy Marie Buchanan keeps moving backwards in time; from her first novel set in Canada at the turn of the 20th century, to Degas' era in Paris, now we arrive in Boadicea's England. 

We meet Devout, a young girl growing up in a tiny village in harsh times. She's in love with another working boy, but is being courted by the youngest son of the Smith, a much more advantageous marriage. She makes choices that have repercussions for decades. 

We jump between her youthful years and seventeen years on, when we focus on Devout's daughter Hobble, who is lame and thus at risk in their hard world. Hobble also has the sight, however, which comes in useful during a time that Romans are attacking the countryside and Druids are travelling widely, trying to stir up a peasant resistance to the Romans to protect their own ascendancy. The Druid who comes to stay in their village doesn't endear himself to anyone, least of all Hobble's family. In fact, the Druidic tradition in general doesn't come off well in this book. Rather than holy and mystical, these druids are like any other religious organization full of men: power hungry and self concerned above all. It's quite an ominous set-up. 

I thought it was really well done. The setting is viscerally presented, with the sounds and smells and physical experience of hard work and hunger clearly shown. Both Devout and Hobble are complicated women, and so is their relationship. The Celtic world-view, of the meaning of life and the existence of an afterlife or other realm, plays a constant role as well, immersing you into this community and family in a fully imagined way. 

There were interesting characters making difficult choices that felt realistic, and not always expected. We encounter love, anger, friendship, grief, complicated marriages, loyalties tested, and concerns about survival in both physical and financial ways -- this covers so many areas of life, even ranging to social niceties and work satisfaction, but all in ways that felt congruent with the story and the era in which it's set. No clanging anachronisms to be found. 

This was an unexpected and unusual read, but one that caught me. I was concerned about both the main characters, wanted to know how the Roman/Druid feud was going to play out, and enjoyed the evocation of this settlement in a time so long ago. Another rich reading experience from Cathy Marie Buchanan. 

The Rarest Blue

 

The Rarest Blue / Baruch Sterman & Judy Taubes Sterman
Guildford, CT: Lyons Press, c2012
305 p.

This book is a mix of ancient history tracing the path of Murex dyes across the centuries, a scientific treatise of dye and colour perception, and specific tiny points of Jewish law and history. It works, to a point.

It looks at the search for tekhelet, a specific sky blue dye that is required in Jewish law to dye threads to attach to one's prayer shawl. Sterman goes into what the dye was, why it was important to Hasidic Jews, how it was made in ancient days (discovered by the Minoans, traded by Phoenicians, worn by Roman elites, used in Jewish religious tradition), and the effort by Hasidic rabbis over the last two centuries to recover the secrets of how this dye was made. 

The search for how Murex dyeing works was fascinating, even though it's also quite disturbing, being dependent on mutilating live sea snails and discarding them after the one precious gland is harvested. There was no real discussion about the ethics of this practice or any moves toward a more sustainable method of harvesting the important chemical, just a mention near the end of more sustainable options being desirable.

The history of blue and purple dyes is interesting and exciting; I recall Lydia, the seller of purple, in the bible and how that mention always intrigued me as a child. And of course the history of Minoan and Phoenician culture is always fascinating, at least to me. The details of how the dye is made is both compelling and disgusting -- who knew that the smell was so bad that a woman whose husband became a dyer after they were married was entitled to a divorce if she wanted one! I found these parts great reading and very informative. 

However, there didn't seem to be strong organization in this book, it talks about a lot of different things and sometimes themes and timelines get mixed up, at least for this reader. It also feels like it goes on a little too long; the chapter on the physics of colour perception could have easily been dropped without being missed. And some of the finer points of Talmudic interpretations of the use of tekhelet are lost on a more general audience.

If you are interested in dyes and their cultural relevance, this is a good read. Keep in mind that the authors are also head of the Ptil Tekhelet Association, an organization dedicated to selling this rediscovered tekhelet dye and the threads required by this obscure biblical directive, so they might not be as objective about its importance as another person would. But they do know what they're talking about when it comes to how this dye was recovered from the mists of history and put back into production. 

(this review first appeared at FollowingTheThread)

Dressed in Dreams

Dressed in Dreams: a Black Girl's love letter to the power of Fashion / Tanisha C. Ford
NY: St Martins, c2019.
246 p.

I really enjoyed this book by Dr. Tanisha Ford, who I first heard about when I put her award-winning  academic study Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul on my to-read list.

But I was able to get my hands on this particular book first, and it is much more conversational and chatty than academic; I found it a quick, entertaining and enlightening read. It's a mix of memoir and fashion history -- Ford takes a specific item of fashion as the theme for each chapter, then talks about whatever it is, ie: dashikis in the first chapter, sharing information about that fashion moment and why it is important or culturally relevant, and then how it plays out in her own life.

I found this mix really interesting. From dashikis to baggy jeans, tennis shoes to knee high boot, and Jheri curls to Afro puffs, Ford takes on elements of fashion that she explored in a search for her own identity as a Black woman coming of age in the 80s and 90s in a Midwestern factory town. She explores how fashion reflected her own growth as she reached out for an identity beyond just an Indiana girl. And she reveals how pop culture trends, in both clothing and hair and makeup, are strongly related to racial identity, as Black styles are adopted by the (white) mainstream and only appreciated after that.

Each chapter has a sketch of the item in question at the opening, done by Veronica Miller Jamison, and they are charming. And the subtitle of the book is perfectly descriptive; you can tell that Ford loves fashion. She says:

Our garments are archives of memories- individual and collective, material and emotional- that tell these rich, textured stories of our lives. To make it plain: our clothes makes us feel things. All the things.

This isn't an autobiography -- more a set of personal essays on a theme. In telling her life story, Ford skims over some years and highlights others. It's organized around memories of the fashions, in clothing and hairstyles, that defined parts of her life from the 80s to the current day -- a final chapter talks about the hoodie and the start of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. It's not explicitly shown how Ford moves through some of the challenges she discusses, but it's clear that her love of fashion as expression is essential to her life. The stories of her parents and her relatives, and some of her school friends, add depth to her stories and create an engaging and wide-ranging look at style and life as a Black woman in these years, and how dress was politically charged even if she didn't want it to be.

All of her stories highlight the importance of various fashions in African American life, from the dashiki to things like nametag jewelry and bamboo earrings. Each one is tied to her life experience and the black society she found in the different places she lived while going to college and beyond. As expected from a history professor and pop culture specialist, her knowledge is wide and here it is sprinkled in among the personal stories to create a warmly informative, fascinating, sincerely told story. If you're looking for an illuminating read about Black women's lives, this is a great choice.

(first published at Following The Thread)

The Stories Were Not Told

The Stories Were Not Told / Sandra Semchuk
Edmonton: UofA Press, c2018
312 p.

I was sent this book by the University of Alberta Press, as they know I have a special interest in Ukrainian Canadian topics. This particular book really hit home.

It's a collection of stories from people who were directly affected by the internment of Ukrainian Canadians in WWI. This is a story that many people still don't realize is a part of our history. But it is true; there were camps across Canada, many just for men, but also some (like in Spirit Lake, Quebec) that unjustly interned whole families as enemy aliens.  

They were as awful as you might imagine. The one I know most about is the Castle Mountain Internment Camp -- there is a statue there commemorating the highway between Banff and Lake Louise which was built by prison labour. This experience was novelized in Barbara Sapergia's excellent read, Blood & Salt. 

This book, though, is based in historical fact. It shares individual stories, which are so powerful. Semchuk has collected family stories, historical events, photos, and more, which all come together to both inform and touch the hearts of readers. Even if you aren't Ukrainian Canadian, this book about a neglected part of the Canadian past should interest history buffs, and really, I think, should be used in general education around the war years. 

As I was reading, I began to wonder how Canadians believe that we are so much nicer or gentler than other nations. Where has this self-serving stereotype come from? There are some pretty awful things in our past, and these camps are just one example that we seem to sweep under the rug and not talk about. 

I found the structure of this book well formed -- moving from individuals to larger stories about the camps, sharing lots of photographs not only of camps but of people, and their lives before & after internment. I even saw a photo that I recognized, of my hometown in Saskatchewan. (there were many, many internees in the West, where Ukrainians tended to settle).

And Semchuk's writing style is very effective as well. She lets the voice of storytellers shine through, but has arranged and contextualized the stories within the historical setting, adding a lot of understanding for readers. 

This is an excellent read, informative and balanced, full of necessary stories. I'm glad someone gathered these personal stories told by internees and their descendants, and has shared them in such a readable way. It makes a stronger impact to read about people directly than just the historical fact of camps, although that initial research and work was vital. Perhaps the connection comes from the fact that the author is an artist as well as a scholar, and expresses the heart of the stories in a meaningful way. 

I wouldn't say that this was a fun, quick, or entertaining read -- but it was absorbing and really fascinating to learn from. Definitely recommended to history buffs, other Ukrainian Canadians, or those interested in exploring the intergenerational effects of racism and prejudice in our wider past. 

Lucy Maud in the Muskokas

Lucy Maud Montgomery and Bala / Jack Hutton & Linda Jackson-Hutton
Gravenhurst, ON: Watts Printing, c1998
86 p.

Sometimes my job has unexpected and wonderful perks. Recently I met a couple while I was working, and in conversation we discovered that we were all LM Montgomery fans -- in fact, the husband of the couple was a descendent of Mr. Mustard from Lucy Maud's Prince Albert years. As other fans will know, Maud visited the Mustards many, many years later, when they were in Bala, in Northern Ontario. This visit was the genesis of her only adult novel, The Blue Castle, which was set in the Muskoka region. If you're interested in her visit, there is also a 1995 article written about it by LMM scholar Mary Beth Cavert, available online.

In any case, a little later on, this couple dropped off a copy of this charming book for me. I was completely surprised by this generosity, and delighted to read the story of Jack and Linda Hutton, who started a private museum, Bala's Museum, in 1992. It celebrates Maud's visit and holds family events and gatherings focused on her writing. You can find a brief precis of some of the history of the museum, which is shared in this book, on their website as well. 

While the book seems short, only 86 pages, it is also jam-packed with the story of how Jack and Linda met, married and decided to start an independent museum based on the short, one-time visit that Maud made to Bala. It also looks at the story of Maud's writing life and her celebrity; there is a chapter all about John Mustard; and some contributions by or about contemporary Maud scholars and aficionados, like Mary Rubio or Jean Little. 

It also has a load of wonderful photos of the Montgomery family, of the Huttons and the museum, and of the glorious landscape of Bala. The back cover is a map attempting to trace the movements of Valancy Stirling and Barney Snaith, of The Blue Castle, a route you can follow yourself if you're inclined to take a driving tour. 

It's a charming, homey book, with lots of pure joy in it. You can tell the authors love LMM and the history of the area, and that they have created this still-active museum out of passion. I've only been up to Gravenhurst once, and thought it was lovely, and now that I know all about this nearby LMM location, I'm going to have to go back. This was a delightful read. 

Threads: the Delicate Life of John Craske

Threads: the Delicate Life of John Craske / Julia Blackburn
London: Jonathan Cape, c2015.
352 p.

I heard about this book in the bibliography of a craft book I was studying, and thought it sounded intriguing enough to track down via Interlibrary Loan. It delivered, though not in the way I was first expecting.

It is a delicate biography, mostly because it isn't one at all. The author decides to write about this intriguing character, John Craske (b1887, d1943) but finds that there isn't all that much to discover. The book is about more than Craske himself; it's also about her search for him -- the places she goes to do her research, the people she encounters along the way, related to Craske or not, and her own life story is inextricably linked to the narrative, as her husband dies during the course of her writing this book.

It is fascinating and absorbing reading. 

John Craske himself, the backbone of the book, was an English fisherman from Norfolk who suffered from an undiagnosed disease (they think now it may have been some kind of diabetes). He would fall into long periods of invalidism, in which he seemed not to be in the world at all. His wife encouraged him to paint in order to engage with the world, and feel as if he was on the open seas again, which he missed. Visitors noted that all the surfaces of their house were covered with paintings propped up, and even painted right onto the doors and windowsills. When John became too ill to be able to paint, his wife set him onto embroidery, which he could do from his bed. 

His embroideries were fresh and unique; he used his painting techniques to make embroidered images of the seascapes he loved. As a stitcher myself  I could see how these were unusual for the time, being freeform and individual. He uses his wools and threads to indicate wind, waves, grasses, and more; the movement in his stitching is extraordinary. He was working on a huge panel depicting Dunkirk when he died, leaving only a square of the sky undone. 

Blackburn examines not only his life history and the ways in which he turned to painting and then embroidery, but also what happened to his works after he'd died, and the ways in which his reputation was both made and forgotten. Integral to his brief popularity were the writers Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, who discovered him in his small village, and championed his art after that -- partly out of admiration and partly out of a feeling that he and his wife really needed some financial support. 

Blackburn also visits a couple of small regional museums and institutions that hold a few of Craske's remaining works, finding them poorly stored, not exhibited, or shown a lot of care. They seem to treat them as the output of a local artisan, not worth too much attention. I hope that this book can at least inspire those places to preserve Craske's work for the future, as they are original. 

The book as a whole feels wild and windy, with a lot of open spaces to think and ponder. One of the things John Craske said about being out on the ocean in a small boat was that it made you feel like a small bit of the world; this book's wide-ranging interest and narrative structure also makes you, the reader, feel like one small point in a huge tapestry of life. This was a wonderful, rambling discovery.

Gatekeepers: A History

Gatekeepers: Reshaping immigrant lives in Cold War Canada / Franca Iacovetta
Toronto: Between the Lines, c2006.
370 p.

This fascinating history, winner of the Canadian Historical Association's 2007 Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, was a great read. I am particularly interested in this topic; my BA was in North American History and Literature, and I've kept reading history since, though with not quite as much regularity as I've kept reading literature! Still, I have a fondness for Canadian history, and this book, exploring the role that immigrants played during the Cold War, was a complex and thorough reading experience. The focus is primarily on European immigrants, including Ukrainian & Soviet immigrants, which, if you've been reading this blog for any length of time you will know is personally of interest to me. So for all of those reasons, I found this book both illuminating and surprisingly entertaining.

Iacovetta is a feminist, labour, gender, and migration historian -- and all of these topics are rolled into this narrative. The book looks at those whom she calls "gatekeepers": middle-class institutions (like the Red Cross, the IODE, church and ethnic organizations, even the NFB) and middle-class individuals (journalists, social workers, hundreds of volunteers) and their role in 'Canadianizing' newcomers. But it also looks at the experience of immigration from the newcomers' point of view, and how they in turn influenced the gatekeepers. Each chapter takes one aspect of immigration and discusses it from a variety of angles; for example, the first chapter looks at how the press presented both political and human interest stories. In further chapters, she then examines governmental and institutional attitudes towards socializing all these new immigrants, as well as pointing out the place of Canadian but ethnically based groups, such as the Ukrainian Canadian Committee, in shaping views of how one should remain ethnic while becoming Canadian. The views of such support groups were prescriptive, most of them being strongly and vocally anti-leftist and anti-Communist. (This was the Cold War, recall).

An element I was drawn in by was the focus on women's experiences; many of them were joining husbands or families that had come ahead, while others were single refugees without a family structure to protect them. Iacovetta draws on magazine and newspaper reports - from such mainstream publications as Macleans and Chatelaine - to reveal a fear of female sexuality which informed the treatment of immigrant women. If they followed the strictures laid out for them, learning how to become good housewives and raise morally upright Canadian children, all was well. When things went awry, and domestic violence or more forthright feminine behaviour was revealed, the women were punished by being blamed for any problems which arose. This included having their characters maligned even when they were the victims of violent crime. She discusses a number of criminal investigations among immigrant populations in which women were murdered, and how the focus of coverage was on explaining why these women brought this violence upon themselves (variations on the old and tired 'well look what she was wearing' accusations in cases of rape). In fact, there were numerous social and economic reasons behind these happenings, which Iacovetta delineates and explores further.

Chapter Six, entitled "Culinary Containment?", provided an entertaining look at how 'postwar food and nutritional gatekeepers', such as dieticians, public health nurses, social workers, food writers and so on, influenced middle-class aspirations among newcomers. While many of the women entering Canada at this time had previously worked or been alienated from a home for many of the war years, the Canadian ideal was still the 'domestic containment' of women as homemakers. Women's magazines and television, including NFB films, strongly pushed for the retention of ethnic foodways as a way of making immigrants feel connected to their roots while minimizing subversive political activities. This multi-cultural view held that culinary pluralism was a method of making incoming cultures part of the greater Canadian whole. Still, much emphasis was placed on the consumer desires for new and shiny kitchens full of large North American appliances, and reliance on flashy supermarkets. Furthermore, the well off and comfortably housed nuclear family stood for democracy, as opposed to the Soviet family where the mother had to work outside the home and struggle for enough food to get by. Iacovetta talks about various NFB films made for educational purposes, to inform the gatekeepers and encourage the 'correct' aspirations in immigrants. One such example is Arrival, made in 1957, showing how an Italian woman becomes accustomed to her new life partly through the comfort of appliances and abundant food.

This is quite a complete history on this subject, full of great archival photos, a tempting bibliography and useful index. It reminded me of why I loved my history degree so much in the first place, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in either women's history, the stories of immigration to North America, conditions of the Cold War years, or simply well written social history with tons of fascinating tidbits. I always know I have really enjoyed a book when I can pick out bits to use as witty dinner party reparteé ;) But seriously, if you enjoy reading nonfiction and like women's history, this one is a great find.

Check out Between the Lines' website; they publish some fabulous history and socially relevant nonfiction -- their backlist as well as forthcoming publication list is quite tempting!