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.

A frank and personal account of one historian's effort to share authority with her grandmother in a collaborative oral history project.

About the Author
Stacey Zembrzycki is an oral and public historian of immigrant, ethnic, and refugee experiences. She is the co-editor of Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice (2013).

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.

-- Valerie Yow, Independent Scholar * Ontario History Review *
"Who has not struggled to understand the older people in their lives," asks Zembrzycki by way of her conclusion to this tremendously interesting and thoughtful book. This study provides a good, honest reckoning with an unusual research process. In this sense, it does all historians a service because it makes obvious those parents, grandparents, and other older people who almost invariably inspire - but almost never receive more than a passing mention - in the work of academic historians. -- Karen Dubinsky, Queen's University * Canadian Historical Review *


Awards
Short-listed for Kobzar Literary Award, Shevchenko Foundation 2016 (Canada).



Book Information
ISBN 9780774826969
Author Stacey Zembrzycki
Format Paperback
Page Count 224
Imprint University of British Columbia Press
Publisher University of British Columbia Press
Weight(grams) 380g