Ukrainians in Canada: The Interwar Years, Book 1

Description

The continuation of the book Ukrainians in Canada: The Formative Years, 1891–1924, the Ukrainians in Canada: The Interwar Years, Book 1, is the first in-depth history of the second wave of Ukrainian mass immigration to Canada. It spans the period between the Railway Agreement of 1925 and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, and focuses on the most active and politicized newcomers and their impact on the major religious institutions and secular mass organizations around which community life revolved during those fractious and tumultuous years.

Several thematic threads run through the narrative and unify it. The first of these is transnationalism—the persistence of social, organizational, and especially religious and political ties that continued to bind Ukrainians in the Old Country, in European émigré centres, and in North American colonies with one another. The book shows how Ukrainian immigrants followed political developments and religious controversies in their dismembered homeland, hosted emissaries of overseas political movements and regimes, and recruited teachers, cultural workers, and clergy from every corner of the Ukrainian diaspora.

A second theme is the central role played in Canada by war veterans who had participated in the overseas struggle for Ukrainian independence (1917‒21).  Many of these men were loyal to the exiled central Ukrainian strongman Pavlo Skoropadsky or to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which was based in western Ukraine. As the most dynamic force in the Ukrainian-Canadian community, the war veterans promoted an assertive and militant brand of nationalism, urged their countrymen to greater discipline and obedience, and expressed admiration for authoritarian regimes in Europe.  The book considers their impact on the Ukrainian churches, on the emergence of new secular mass organizations, and on the response of pre-war immigrants to the challenge presented by the newcomers…