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  • Dreams of steady employment in the mining sector led thousands of Ukrainian immigrants to northern Ontario in the early 1900s. As a child, historian Stacey Zembrzycki listened to her baba’s stories about Sudbury’s small but polarized community and what it was like growing up ethnic during the Depression. According to Baba grew out of those stories, out of a granddaughter’s desire to capture the experiences of her grandparents’ generation on paper. Eighty-two interviews conducted by Stacey and her grandmother, Olga, laid the groundwork for this insightful and deeply personal social history of one of Canada’s most colourful ethnic communities. The interview process also brought to light the challenges of doing collaborative oral history with community members, particularly as Stacey lost authority to her baba, wrestled it back, and eventually came to share it, and as interviewees met questions with nostalgic reminiscences, subversive humour, or impenetrable silence. By providing a realistic glimpse into the hard work that goes into making communities partners in oral history research, this book provides a new paradigm for studying the politics of memory, one that recognizes that people are not passive recipients of their histories but rather counter and create narratives about the past by invoking alternative ways of remembering. --Publisher's description

  • As an exploration of the childhood memories of working-class Ukrainians who grew up in Depression-era boarding houses (or houses with a few boarders) in Sudbury, Ontario, this paper treats the oral histories as the subject, not merely the method, of analysis and highlights, in particular, the gendered differences that emerge in the narratives of the men and women interviewed for this project. Moreover, this article argues that even within a politically polarized immigrant group such as the Ukrainians, where left/right, progressive/ nationalist, and secular/religious splits were so pronounced, and thus central to shaping the histories and historiographies of both camps, it was the influence of dominant gender roles rather than politics, religion, or ideology that most directly informed the differing memories of experience that men and women had of growing up Ukrainian and working class in Sudbury. In particular, this article focuses on informants' recollections regarding three areas of activity that were part of everyday boarding house life: children's relationships with male boarders, their domestic chores, and leisure activities.

Last update from database: 4/19/25, 4:10 AM (UTC)

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