Ghosts in a Photograph: A Chronicle
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15
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In Ghosts in a Photograph, award-winning nonfiction writer Myrna Kostash delves into the lives of her grandparents, all of whom moved from Galicia, now present-day Ukraine, to Alberta at the turn of the twentieth century. Discovering a packet of family mementos, Kostash begins questioning what she knows about her extended families' pasts and whose narrative is allowed to prevail in Canada. This memoir, however, is not just a personal story, but a public one of immigration, partisan allegiance, and the stark differences in how two sets of families survive in a new country: one as homesteaders, the other as working-class Edmontonians. Working within the gaps in history--including the unsolved murder in Ukraine of her great uncle--Kostash uses her remarkable acumen as a writer and researcher to craft a probable narrative to interrogate the idea of straightforward and singular-voiced pasts and the stories we tell ourselves about where we come from. Rich in detail and propelled by vital curiosity, Ghosts in a Photograph is a determined, compelling, and multifaceted family chronicle.
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Ghosts in a Photograph: a chronicle by Myrna Kostash, delights and inspires with her exploration of family lore through the old photographs her Ukrainian Canadian grandparents and parents have left behind. The author approaches her subject like a sleuth, leaving no stone unturned. Through remembered conversations, a tape of her mother speaking to a university student, visits to the land her grandparents emigrated from, and extensive research into their past, Kostash determines who is who in the photos and what they did during their time on earth. Given the turmoil in Ukraine today and its tortured history, it makes for fascinating reading.
As I read Ghosts in a Paragraph, I recalled the family album I viewed after my mother's death. With her passing, there was no one left who could answer the new questions I had about her family and life in the old country and Canada. This is a familiar problem, one many readers can relate to. Such is life, with its challenges of work and family obligations, that we wait too long to ask. And then when we have the time, or maybe I should say, when we have the interest, there's no one left to ask.
Kostash doesn't let the absence of family deter her from her quest. The author goes to great lengths to gather what information she can, and she goes even further by analyzing the nuggets she manages to dig up. She compares oral history with fact through detailed research and consultation with history professors. And in doing so, the author uncovers various truths that show how stories are handed down, and how they can be coloured by memory and emotion. It all depends on who is telling the story and to whom.
Politics raises its head more than a few times in this book, and given the current war in Ukraine, how could it not? Curious about one relative's murder, Kostash unearths more about this nasty business, one that pits the resistance against what is perceived to be the Soviet enemy. And what the author also deftly portrays is how difficult it is for immigrants to leave the politics of their forefathers' homeland behind when they immigrate.
As Kostash delves into her family's past and the hardships her extended family faced in their newly adopted land, she uncovers more of Canada's ugly history—how indigenous inhabitants were forced off their land in Saskatchewan and Alberta to make room for white settlers, like Kostash's grandparents (and other) immigrants, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The author has written about Ukrainian settlers before in All of Baba's Children, but in this book, she underlines the plight of the people they displaced. It's a good way to end this book, as it's a question Canadians are grappling with today. Truth and reconciliation. How we address the past and our role in it as descendants of white settlers or of people who were on this land before them. I'm not sure the author had this in mind when she began to write her chronicle. But it seems to me these are the ghosts Kostash is suggesting we address.
