My grandparents came to Canada in the 1920s, around the same time period in which Barbara Sapergia’s new novel, Blood and Salt, is set. My grandfather arrived a couple of years in advance; he homesteaded near High Prairie, and finally settled in Calmar, Alberta. He came to Canada following the same promise of land, freedom and opportunity that Sapergia’s characters follow. Eventually, my grandfather sent a letter to his wife in Warsaw telling her to sell everything and come to Canada with the two children. She did just that. One of those two children was my dad. So it was with great curiosity and no small amount of excitement that I picked up Sapergia’s sweeping historical narrative about a small group of Ukrainian immigrants at the advent of World War One.
The novel begins with a baffled Taras Kalyna, leaning against the window of a passenger train filled with other confused Ukrainians, on their way to the Castle Mountain internment camp. I knew about the Japanese internment camps during the Second World War, but I must have missed school the day the Ukrainian internment camps were discussed. Perhaps it is not included in the curriculum. If it isn’t, it ought to be.
Most of Blood and Salt is set in Castle Mountain and the sections that focus on life in the internment camp—the friendships and struggles, the relationships with the various guards and the overwhelming feeling of injustice—are, by far, the core strength of the novel. This is an incredible story underscored by a government’s ignorance, an unwillingness to listen and profound fear. What happened in these internment camps was inhumane, unjust and shameful. Sapergia shows us this story beautifully. I felt embarrassed, and shocked and angry.
While there are some lovely convergent plotlines in Blood and Salt, this is really a novel about storytelling. It is a major theme and Sapergia weaves her stories together into a fine tapestry, as if she is whispering in the reader’s ear, “We human beings are hard-wired to tell stories.” It seems everyone in the book is a storyteller and these characters all want stories—they yearn for stories and they seem to understand that the truth of a story is far more important than the facts. They forgive fabrication, imagination and augmentation.
Taras finds himself in the camp with a core group of men who become life-long brothers. Together, they suffer the indignities of camp life, and at night when they are exhausted and hungry, and often cold, they look for a story—and they find Taras.
Taras has followed the love of his life, Halya, when her family emigrates to Canada and settles in rural Saskatchewan. Things go okay for the first while. Taras and his parents work their homestead. He gets a job in town, makes a friend and begins to look for Halya. When the Canadian government decides that Ukrainians are a danger because they came from a region ruled by Austria, the nightmare begins. An RCMP officer shows up one day and informs the family that they are going to have to report weekly to police headquarters because they are now considered threats.
Even though he and his parents came to this country because of its freedoms, Taras, and the hundreds of men like him, soon have their freedom stripped away. At a union-organizing meeting, Taras is arrested—there is a bit of a sub-plot here about a mean-spirited boss who also loves Halya—and he is shipped off to the camp. There he spends two years, and grows into a decent and compassionate man who will speak up against injustice. He finds his voice.
One of the men in the camp, Ihor, confesses to Taras that he does not really understand Castle Mountain. This small moment, which echoes throughout the narrative, for me, is stunningly beautiful. It is a simple thing, but it describes the toll of internment so well. These men, who are in the heart of the Rocky Mountains spending their days in hard labour, clearing the forest for the Trans-Canada Highway, still want to find beauty. But it is difficult to do when you are cold, hungry, tired and—most importantly—imprisoned.
After supper he and Taras stop to smoke, looking up at Castle in the fading light. Sometimes Ihor will stare at it for half an hour. Coming from mountains more rounded and worn, he strives to understand the Rockies. His conclusion pains him.
“I can’t find this mountain’s spirit.”
There are many quiet moments of beauty like this one in Blood and Salt.
The men are worked hard, fed poorly and inadequately clothed. The stories they tell each other at night sustain them. They are reminders of their past, the possibility of a better future and of their humanity. Taras tells the story of how he was drafted into the Austrian army and almost certain death, about his love for Halya and his dream of a life with her. Myro, the teacher, tells the story of Taras Shevchenko. It is at this point in Blood and Salt where Sapergia’s own storytelling drifts off course. A different editor might have recognized the fact that while the Ukrainian poet, artist and patriot, Taras Shevchenko, is an interesting historical figure (and yes, the hazy parallels between the real-life Taras and the fictional Taras Kalyna are apparent), having Myro tell this story in such detail was superfluous. It bogged the book down. I was already invested in the fictional Taras and could have done without the history lesson here.
As much as I appreciated the history in this novel, at times the details overwhelmed the story, becoming less of a tapestry and more of a thick, muddy bog. Less is more. For this reader, there were too many places where Sapergia’s background notes showed through the cracks so it seemed as though she was trying to prove that she had done the research. Also there are several archival pictures interspersed throughout this book. Why? When pictures start cropping up in a novel I begin to wonder whether this book might have been better positioned as non-fiction. As a reader of novels, I do not care about the writer’s research—I care about her story. These pictures are something the author could pull out for an interview.
In Blood and Salt, there is plenty of story: sometimes it is brilliant, other times unfocused. And sometimes it is overly laboured. After wading through a section in which a fellow internee, Zmiya, confesses to wanting to kill Taras for taking his job in the old country, I almost closed the book for good. This is an absurd tying up of plot points that really needed no conclusions.
The injustice and hardship of the Ukrainian immigrant experience just before and during World War One are well drawn. The validity of the research is never in question, but its showing at almost every turn is a problem. What the reader really wants to know about the men of Castle Mountain is: Do they live through their internment? Does the boy get the girl in the end? Is there some sort of justice? These are the mysteries that will keep readers going, and the answers are certainly worth the journey. I would have liked this novel more had the author focused on answering these questions.
Thomas Trofimuk’s most recent novel, Waiting for Columbus, was published in 2009.
Related Letters and Responses
It doesn’t take much empathy for me, as an author, to feel Mr. Byers’s pain after being eviscerated by Mr. Levant. I do not know if Mr. Byers is an ideologue or dyed-in-the-wool anti-American Canadian chauvinist and I have yet to read his book. But I am pretty sure Mr. Levant, as revealed in this and previous offerings, gladly numbers himself among those right-thinking Canadians for whom Canada can do little good and America can do little wrong. From this perspective, no matter what catastrophe unfolds in Iraq, America remains strong and brave and refusenik Canada remains snivelling and weak.
Perhaps Mr. Byers is as Mr. Levant so scathingly depicts him, but it is difficult to credit a reviewer hurling epithets and personal invective with this degree of lust. It is also difficult to credit a reviewer who brags that five minutes of in-depth Googling has led him to the “fact” that there is twice the rate of violent crime in Canada as in the United States. In fact, the Canadian and American statistics on violent crime are not comparable because the categories of measurement in the two countries vary hugely, as any criminologist would have helped Mr. Levant to understand. (He would surely be able to find the e-mail addresses of some reputable scholars with his prodigious Googling skills.) What is comparable is the most extreme expression of violent crime, homicide, where the definitions in the two countries are the same and incidence counts are more reliable. In this department, the inconvenient truth for Mr. Levant is that the U.S. wins hands down: Americans murder one another at fully triple the rate of Canadians. According to the FBI, the U.S. murder rate in 2006 was 5.7 per 100,000 while Canada could only muster a measly 1.9 per 100,000. When it comes to violent crime, the U.S. only counts the most serious assaults whereas in wimpy, oversensitive Canada we count all assaults—including a pushing or shoving (although not malicious book reviews)—as violent offences.
I hope Mr. Byers and others who are more fair and balanced—or at least less fast and loose with the facts—respond to Mr. Levant’s egregiously biased screed.
Michael Adams Toronto, Ontario
I haven’t read Michael Byers’s book yet, but Ezra Levant’s attack is so personal and angry it barely qualifies as a review. I can’t comment on Byers’s work, but Levant’s ignorance is total. Abu Ghraib was an anomaly—a “rogue act of abuse”? Tell that to Cherif Bassiouni, the United Nations human rights investigator for Afghanistan, whose two reports detailed the torture of detainees in U.S. custody to the point of death. Tell it to the U.S. military types who have acknowledged to Congress that acts that are defined in law as torture occur in Guantanamo Bay. Those responsible for Abu Ghraib have been punished? Hardly. The highest ranking officer involved was merely demoted, while a couple of low-level grunts were tried.
Levant’s ideological onslaught against Byers and “the left” finishes by incorporating the entire neo-con canon. There is an unbridgeable dichotomy between Muslims and “the West”; global warming can be explained away by summer melting; Canadian liberalism is contemptible; and so on. He is at his most silly when he places quotation marks around the word “rules,” as in the “rules” of international law—as though his personal dislike of global agreements means they simply don’t exist.
Levant’s rant demeans an author who deserves to have his book discussed seriously.
Erna Paris
Toronto, Ontario
Talk about projection! Ezra Levant’s purported review of Michael Byers’s Intent for a Nation (“Fantasy Foreign Policy,” October 2007) is replete with assertions that the book is a “cartoonish caricature,” a “fantasy,” “Oprah Winfrey,” “daydreaming,” “leftist myth,” “psychological therapy” and—not to miss the insultingly gratuitous—“political masturbation.” This has little to do with Byers but a lot to do with Levant’s own views about Canadian foreign policy, which appear to be premised on cartoonish caricatures and fantasies, albeit of a rather different kind, Bill O’Reilly instead of Oprah Winfrey, neo-con rather than leftist myth.
Not without flaws, Byers’s book is, contra Levant, “a serious attempt to outline a Canadian foreign policy.” It’s just not the foreign policy of Stephen Harper. Why not welcome a debate about alternatives, especially if one is as self-assured about one’s own position as Levant wants to appear? But Levant hardly engages with Byers on the level of argument since he is so intent on dispensing ad hominem ridicule.
According to Levant, Byers dismisses terrorism as a “fake problem” or a threat “trumped up by the White House.” Anyone who actually read the book would know that this is simply untrue, a cartoonish caricature. Levant finds the “blurriness of moral equivalence” in Byers, citing his statement that Abu Ghraib “scars the psyche almost as deeply as the image of the two skyscrapers collapsing in Manhattan.” “There is no equating the deliberate mass murder of 3,000 [sic] civilians by terrorists,” Levant thunders, “with an isolated, rogue act of abuse by a handful of U.S. soldiers.” Except that Byers does not “equate” the two, as any reader can plainly see: Levant conveniently ignores the crucial word “almost.”
Besides, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, CIA torture, “extraordinary rendition” (that sent a Canadian, Maher Arar, to a nightmarish torture cell in Syria) are not isolated, rogue acts, but integral to Bush’s global war on terror. It is not a question of moral equivalence, but rather that such dark stains on “our” side must be taken seriously, precisely because we are not those who deliberately plan to murder innocents in the name of God. Levant seems to think that labelling terrorists “Muslim fascists” absolves our side of the obligation of self-critical scrutiny. It does not, and Byers understands this.
Byers’s ideas are relentlessly dismissed as “anti-American.” This is not an argument; it is the avoidance of argument, a label that replaces thinking. Why the bluster? Could it be because Levant (and Harper’s) foreign policy is joined at the hip with the neo-con “fantasy” that has sucked the White House into the fiasco of Iraq? Byers shows us that Canada has often dissented when we had reason to dissent, and has not suffered adverse consequences for acting as an autonomous thinking nation, quite the contrary. This is an inconvenient truth, to coin a phrase. Levant is desperate to sweep it under a carpet of bombast. Bluster hides insecurity.
Unpleasant as it may be, I am drawn back to Levant’s nasty crack about political masturbation (“Foreign affairs is not about accomplishing anything. It’s about feeling good”). Levant keeps dipping into sexual innuendo (“smug impotence,” “frisson of naughtiness”) with Freudian insistence. He sneers at the idea of soft power without ever understanding it. Levant comes from the General Hillier school of hard power: foreign policy is about going out and killing the “detestable murderers and scumbags.” Under the swagger, might we not detect a certain insecurity, as the neo-con fantasy grows limp? Might we not detect some of the same insecurity behind the foreign policy bravado of the Harper government?
Perhaps this has little to do with Michael Byers’s book. But neither does Ezra Levant’s review.
Reg Whitaker Vancouver, British Columbia
Patrick BrethourVancouver, British Columbia
I felt some measure of astonishment when I read Ezra Levant’s assertion that Canada’s violent-crime rate is double that of the United States. My astonishment eased considerably, however, when I checked the sources that Mr. Levant cited. Certainly the numbers he cites exist—a violent-crime rate of 943 for every 100,000 inhabitants in Canada in 2005; 469.2 per 100,000 for the U.S.
However, the American figures only take into account aggravated assault, while the Canadian figures include assaults of all kinds. Not surprisingly at all, a large proportion of the Canadian violent-crime rate stems from level 1 assaults. Subtract those assaults from the Canadian figures and the rate in this country falls to 379—arguably far too high, but well below the American rate.
There are legitimate questions to be asked about crime rates in Canada, particularly the complicated question of under-reporting by victims. But overly dramatic assertions such as Mr. Levant’s only serve to further cloud those already-muddy waters.
Alfred HermidaVancouver, British Columbia
In her review of my book Tell Everyone, Drainie suggests “What the social media universe seems to be best at, in terms of the common good, is helping out instantly during enormous physical crises – earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and fires,” but she doubts my contention that the bonds fostered by social media are “the glue that helps societies prosper and endure.”
There is a risk in underestimating the long-term impact of novel forms of social action nurtured by emerging communication technologies. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, few would have predicted it would become a defining moment in the civil rights movement. Though segregation on Montgomery buses ended in 1956, it took years of campaigning before discrimination was banned in 1964. Even then, the fight for civil rights continued.
In the winter of 2012, social media was critical in turning a moment into a movement, giving rise to Idle No More, the largest nationwide social action movement in Canada since the civil rights movement in the 1960s. As I write in Tell Everyone, it grew from a Facebook page and a tweet into an indigenous-led movement that used social media to rally and engage Canadian and global publics. It is just one example of how activists have appropriated social media as a space to connect, communicate and coordinate in previously unimaginable ways.
It is too easy to dismiss nascent movements like Idle No More. It is part of a new wave of activism, from Occupy Wall Street in the US, to the Indignados in Spain, to Yo Soy 132 in Mexico, where social media has been crucial in uniting people around a cause. On traditional media, such movements tend to be first neglected and then dismissed. On social media, they emerge as vibrant manifestations of the passions and hopes of engaged individuals.
To argue that social media does not matter is to ignore how the power of sharing is transforming how we understand and give meaning to our world. The urge to share is a constant in human history. Technology is not going to turn us into new beings but it does influence the way we think and live. As I write in Tell Everyone, “the marketplace of ideas is being reshaped by the volume, visibility, speed and reach of social media.” And ideas change the world.
