Unsettling

I got only as far as the First World War, a third of the way in. I had been reading slowly, meticulously, dog-earing, underlining, committing facts to memory. Every detail, every story, every summation in Helen Potrebenko’s No Streets of Gold: A Social History of Ukrainians in Alberta, published in 1977, was calling to a family history left deliberately unuttered by my maternal great-grandparents. I would read one sentence and have to sit with it for a long time. Ukrainians escaping a sort of serfdom, leaving grinding wars and revolving state control. Made to sail in the cargo holds of ships. Trying to make plots of marshy, bushy land arable with nothing: no tools, no money for tools, no aid from the government that had enticed them here for their labour and then worried it had brought over an inferior class of people. Given three years by Ottawa to break a set number of acres and build a house on their quarter section. The first home a hole in the ground. Men ranging off that land for any work, any pay. Not enough pay, or wages withheld. Swindled, robbed, hungry. Clothing rotting off the body in winter. Ill children. No food, no school, no doctor. Women labouring endlessly.

My time with each sentence grew longer. I reached the point of Canada interning people after the outbreak of the war: “Probably the Ukrainians did not wish to admit even to themselves the nature of their adopted country.” I put the book down.

I had been trying to write about the gaps in my knowledge of how I came to be here, what has been elided or omitted, what I could possibly learn now that more than a century has passed since my relatives settled in Saskatchewan and Alberta. Page by page, No Streets of Gold was returning my story to me, and Potrebenko pulls no punches. Hers is a frank, unrelenting reporting, interspersing her own family lore with those of other immigrant homesteaders. She details as well the background of twentieth-century working-class struggles and includes biting portrayals of what are now Canada and Ukraine: of the former, the monied grifters playing statecraft for profit; of the latter, the oppressive landowners and regimes that prompted hundreds of thousands of emigrations.

The book didn’t make it onto my radar as I was growing up in the suburbs of Edmonton, not like Myrna Kostash’s All of Baba’s Children, also from 1977, which was ubiquitous in so many of my relatives’ homes. That one was almost a reference guide for Ukrainians in the West, together with the Bible, the atlas, and the almanac, and it remains in print to this day. I can’t recall where I found my yellowed paperback of No Streets of Gold — maybe at the trusty Edmonton Book Store, on a trip home one winter, easily a decade ago. Published by New Star Books, the venerated leftist publisher out of Vancouver, which ceased operations in 2025, it’s not so easy to come by.

Potrebenko died in 2022. She’s better known for her novel Taxi!, from 1975, and for her organizing work in British Columbia. She once said to Kostash, about their two trajectories, “You’re going to be rich and famous. And I’m going to be a heroine of the working class.” Theirs were books of the late ’70s. Multiculturalism was in vogue, publishable. But where Kostash offers the dignity of shared resilience, Potrebenko stays with the bigotry, isolation, abuse, and assimilation that marked the Ukrainian immigrant’s existence on the prairies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her focus is on the “incessant and never-ending labour and poverty” that spurred workers’ movements.

I feel an acidic validation, having now read to the end. I see how, in certain ways, nothing has changed: the consolidation of wealth by a greedy, entitled few; the government-backed quick-buck schemes dependent on land theft that spoils water and air and soil. Those with less are invariably abandoned, blamed for their poverty, told it is inherent, inevitable. “Don’t write about that,” Potrebenko recalls her mother saying. “It’s better forgotten. We didn’t live like people, we lived like animals. Well, even animals lived better. I don’t want to talk about it any more.” Like certain of my forebears, she opted for an ameliorative erasure: “If I don’t remember, then there isn’t so much heartache.”

On the back cover is a black and white photograph similar to the ones in my grandparents’ albums: people in the field, operating farm equipment, taking off the crop. Some smiling, some stone-faced. I can better intuit what might be behind those expressions now that I’ve finished No Streets of Gold. And I can feel in myself what happens when one’s history, however painful, is known.