On a hot summer night in 1915, a passenger train filled with Ukrainian immigrants rolls westward through the Canadian Prairies. The train is heading for the Castle-Mountain Banff Internment Camp, and none of the men on the train know why they are there. Certainly not Taras Kalyna, barely twenty, who followed his love, Halya, when her family emigrated to rural Saskatchewan. Only a short while ago, Taras and his parents were making a new life for themselves, building a home, working the land, and finding steady employment in town. The Canadian government then decided that Ukrainians, coming from a region ruled by Austria, posed a threat during wartime and should be contained for the duration. His freedom gone, Taras now sits on a train that is carrying him to a prison camp in the Rocky Mountains.
Taras lives at the camp for two years. The men rise early, and spend the day hacking away at the mountains to clear out a path for the Trans-Canada Highway. It is hard work, made even more difficult by austere living conditions and lack of decent food. Fortunately for Taras, he quickly befriends the other men in his bunkhouse, and at night, they tell stories. Myro relates the adventures of the celebrated painter and poet Taras Shevchenko, who dreamt, above all else, of a free Ukraine, and Taras tells how he came to be separated from the beautiful Halya and his plans to find her when the imprisonment is over. Through the power of storytelling, the men discover their capacity to speak out against injustice and create a better situation for everyone.
Told in a wonderfully conversational voice, Blood and Salt effectively exposes the atrocity of Canadian internment camps while reflecting on the importance of love, freedom and national identity. This compelling story will appeal to those who enjoyed the themes in Obasan by Joy Kogawa and Tallgrass by Sandra Dallas, as well as to readers of well-written historical fiction set in Canada.
Also posted on my blog: www.theteatimereader.wordpress.com.
The time is World War I, and Canadian soldiers are proving their worth in the trenches of Europe. But on the home front, Ukrainian Canadians are being sent to internment camps, Canada's Gulag. Bood and Salt is about this forgotten part of Canadian history. They had committed the crime of being unemployed in bad times. Or simply of having come from lands ruled by the Austrian empire. They became "enemy aliens." Taras Kalyna, a young man who deserted the Austrian army to search for his lost love, Halya, becomes one of these men. Imprisoned with hundreds of others in Banff National Park, he helps build a highway from Banff to Lake Louise. Conditions are brutal, the food poor. His time in camp isn't completely lost. He forges strong friendships and begins to learn about the wider world. Myro, an idealistic schoolteacher, tells him stories about the life of the great Ukrainian patriot and poet, Taras Shevchenko. Yuri, a farmer, teaches him optimism. And Tymko, a fierce socialist, helps him ask questions about his new country. Taras has no way of knowing when, or even if, he'll be free again. But even imprisoned, he never stops thinking of Halya. Their stories develop in separate strands until the war ends. And then he'll be free to look for her. Blood and Salt is a work of fiction, grounded in actual details about the Banff-Castle Mountain internment camp. It explores the search for a new life and the search for love n all the while asking what it is to be Ukrainian.
close this panelBarbara Sapergia is a fiction writer and dramatist living in Saskatoon. She has published four previous books of fiction and had nine professional play productions. The co-creator of the children's television series Prairie Berry Pie, she has edited around fifty children's novels for Coteau Books.
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