According to Baba
-
Stacey Zembrzycki
About this book
Dreams of steady employment in the mining sector led thousands of Ukrainian immigrants to northern Ontario in the early 1900s. As a child, Stacey Zembrzycki listened to her baba’s stories about Sudbury’s small but polarized Ukrainian community and what it was like growing up ethnic during the Depression.
According to Baba grew out of those stories, out of a fledgling historian’s desire to capture the experiences of her grandparents’ generation on paper. Eighty-two interviews conducted by Stacey and her grandmother laid the groundwork for this insightful and personal social history of Sudbury’s Ukrainian community. The interviews also brought to light the challenges of doing oral history, particularly as Stacey lost authority to her Baba, wrestled it back, and eventually came to share it.
By disclosing the hard work that goes into making communities partners in research, Zembrzycki offers a new paradigm for writing oral history and for studying the politics of memory.
Author / Editor information
Reviews
Community studies inform us about social organization and general conditions, and this study does indeed show us how the community as a whole functioned. But Zembrzycki brilliantly organizes her book so that oral histories show us individual lives: the women who refused to talk about domestic violence but could not leave out all signs of it; women who gleaned a feeling of belonging by working with other women, often to raise money for the Catholic Church; octogenarians who fondly remembered themselves as teenagers going to dances and eating fried chicken sandwiches early in the morning; men who described the excessive heat in the mines that caused many to pass out.
This study is grounded in careful research in both written records and oral histories. It is also deeply personal and unforgettable.
Topics
-
Download PDFPublicly Available
Front Matter
i -
Download PDFPublicly Available
Contents
vii -
Download PDFPublicly Available
Illustrations
ix -
Download PDFPublicly Available
Acknowledgments
xi -
Download PDFPublicly Available
Abbreviations
xvii -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Introduction
3 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Building
23 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Solidifying
49 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Contesting
75 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Cultivating
101 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Remembering
128 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Conclusion
148 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Appendix
154 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Notes
168 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Bibliography
200 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Index
222
