Fault Lines

Not only is Canada a mosaic, but many Canadi­ans are mosaics within themselves. Given this complexity of identity, what does it mean to remember and to memorialize? Why do we commemorate some events and not others? What events should be memorialized?

At a Canadian embassy office reception in Vilnius some years ago while I was on a research trip, I was chatting with the chargé d’affaires while waiting to meet my son, who was on leave in the middle of deployment with the Van Doos Canadian infantry regiment in Afghanistan. Now there was an example of a mosaic: a Lithuanian-heritage Canadian deployed in the French language in a foreign country.

The chargé d’affaires was interested in my son, but he was also interested in me. He wanted to know what a Canadian like me was researching in Lithuania. I told him I was working on...