Autoren-Bilder

Orysia Dawydiak

Autor von Livestock Protection Dogs

5 Werke 39 Mitglieder 1 Rezension

Werke von Orysia Dawydiak

Livestock Protection Dogs (1990) 27 Exemplare
Kira's Secret (2013) 4 Exemplare
House of Bears (2009) 3 Exemplare
Kira's Quest (2015) 3 Exemplare
Rika's Shepherd (2018) 2 Exemplare

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“It bewildered and dismayed her that she could not control this compulsion to dig up her family’s history at the same time she wanted to bury her own. She’d simply have to get past the cranky bears waking up from hibernation and find a way into the dens they protected.”

Dawydiak’s novel, set in Toronto and Northern Ontario in 1978, focuses on an immigrant Ukrainian-Canadian extended family. It opens with 22-year-old Luba on a long bus-ride north with her widowed mother, Volya, who has just collected her from a psych ward in Toronto. Luba, a pre-med student at the U of T, impulsively attempted suicide after a break-up and is on her way home to Copper Creek to sort herself out on the proviso that she see a mental health counsellor. Luba’s relationship with her mother, “the dragon lady,” is strained and combative. Volya is rigid and controlling. Born in the mid 1920s, her earliest years in Ukraine were marked by poverty, fear, and sadness; her teens were shattered by the Nazi occupation. Given the trauma she has experienced, she’s frustrated by the laziness and selfishness of her Canadian daughter. She loves the girl intensely, but is unable to communicate this, except (in the typical Ukrainian way) through feeding her. Perhaps the only thing the two can agree on at this point is that Luba’s “accident” is not to become fodder for family gossip. Like all unpleasant things, it will not be discussed but buried.

Not long after Luba’s return home, a cousin dies tragically. The extended family from around Ontario gather in Copper Creek for the funeral. Over a period of a few days, Luba witnesses some nasty fireworks between several relatives, a few of whom drink heavily. She’s particularly struck by the sniping between her mother and Aunt Zenia, Volya’s sister, and she is compelled to find out what has fuelled the siblings’ animosity over the years. Luba has an opportunity to probe members of the Toronto branch of the family when Zenia invites her to the city for reasons that are not clear. While there, the young woman visits her ailing grandmother in a nursing home. Baba Sylana’s mental faculties are failing; only occasionally is she lucid and present. During one visit that Luba and her cousin Greg make to the seniors’ home, Baba drops a bombshell, which the cousins have good reason to believe is true. The information makes Luba regard her mother and herself in a different light. Aunt Zenia also makes an unexpected disclosure about the young woman’s dead father, and a further revelation comes later from Volya herself, the final piece of the puzzle.

Although Luba is the protagonist of the novel, the author spends almost equal time on Volya’s backstory. There are flashbacks to a childhood with a brutish, alcoholic father, to her experiences as a forced slave labourer on a German farm during World War II, and to the years working at a textile factory in England after time in a displaced persons camp in Germany. These segments feel true and make for more compelling reading than Luba’s coming of age and her tiresome complaints about her exacting mother. Difficult she may be, but Volya is the more interesting and sympathetic character by a long shot.

The sections concerning Luba’s time of discovery in Toronto make this more young adult than adult fiction, dealing as they do with matters other than family secrets. In them, Luba hangs out a fair bit with her cousin, Greg, a lawyer with a social conscience, who happens to be gay, something that doesn’t sit well with his traditional and status-conscious mother, Zenia. Greg takes his younger cousin along with him to pubs and parties, where she meets his friends and is introduced to the alternative-lifestyle scene. Confused and impressionable, Luba consequently begins to question her own sexual orientation. I suspect the author included these scenes to provide a contrast with the restrictive social and sexual norms within the Ukrainian community of the 70s, but they felt forced and heavy handed. They also ended up forming a larger part of the novel than I expected or appreciated. I could have done without them.

This is not a literary work. The writing is serviceable but not much more than that. However, it is a book that portrays, with authenticity, aspects of the Eastern European immigrant experience. Dawydiak’s presentation of Ukrainian-Canadian culture and attitudes—the social conservatism, rigidity and misogyny, the heavy drinking, racial intolerance and antisemitism—is often less than flattering. Even Ukrainian wartime collaboration with the Nazis is mentioned. For the most part, I was impressed by the author’s refusal to whitewash some of the more disturbing aspects of Ukrainian history and culture, but I was skeptical about Dawydiak’s forgiving treatment of the wartime experiences of one of Luba’s uncles. The author writes of his recruitment into the German army as an 18-year-old, suggesting that he rounded up Jews in Italy only under duress. He was told that if he did not carry out orders, his mother and sisters would be harmed and he’d be beaten. Whether or not such tactics were actually used on Ukrainians in the German army, or the author has softened disturbing realities about Ukrainian involvement in the Holocaust I cannot say. (Some years back, a French Catholic priest, Father Patric Desbois, heard and recorded the testimonies of elderly Ukrainians who’d been forced as terrified young people to carry out the Nazis’ dirty work. For years they’d been weighed down by guilt over their participation; so it may be that Dawydiak’s telling and nuance are justified.) What I do know for certain is that a number of Nazi war criminals of Ukrainian descent settled in Canada without ever being held to account.

Though Canada is home to the second largest Ukrainian diaspora (only Russia has more), this is one of the few novels I know that addresses the experience of this population. In spite of some faults—including a few too many tidy coincidences and dream sequences—I mostly found House of Bears an interesting and absorbing read.
… (mehr)
 
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fountainoverflows | Apr 21, 2022 |

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Werke
5
Mitglieder
39
Beliebtheit
#376,657
Bewertung
½ 3.7
Rezensionen
1
ISBNs
9