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...