Book Deep Dive: Ghosts in a Photograph by Myrna Kostash

 

Ghosts in a Photograph by Myrna Kostash

Ghosts in a Photograph was my first exposure to Myrna Kostash's writing. I went in, knowing the subject would likely focus on Ukrainian immigration in the early 20th century–but I got so much more than that. 

This is not the sort of book I can simply discuss the plot and the characters. It is a non-fiction memoir-family chronicle that feels very much like the culmination of years of digging and digging to find something. The way this book must be discussed, I feel, is the way in which it gives empathy and searches for understanding for every individual whose life story Kostash lays out for us. I will review/discuss it from this angle. 

Settler Colonialism

The book sets up from the introduction the tone. We learn a bit about the author’s past work, primarily the classic All of Baba's Children. I have not read this book, initially connecting was hard for me due to that, however, through finishing this book, I believe it must be a spiritual successor, placing All of Baba’s Children squarely on my list for future books to obtain. The other big thing the opening sets up Is the discussion of Canada's genocidal “clearing of the plains” to pull immigrants in to farm. This set up weaves throughout the book and comes around again at the end for a more profound resolution. But what this set up does best is allow for the idea that immigrants leaving their homeland to create a better life for their offspring, whether they intended or not, were still fully capable of participating in the oppression of others.

While Kostash weaves a larger story by describing the lives of her different ancestors and relatives, the conclusion has her reflect on her home, her roots in Canada, not just Ukraine and humbles us by making us remember that we (people who aren’t indigenous to Canada) were once immigrants. 

The barefoot, illiterate Ukrainian settler

This is a stereotype. But it being mentioned in the book, and challenged, caused me to think. This is confronted in the book when Myrna talks about a relative, Vasyl Andriovych Kostashchuk, who was a celebrated writer in the home village of her ancestors, Tulova. There is this idea, this trope, of the Ukrainian settler in Canada in the early 20th century: 

“Coming from a rural village in one of the most underdeveloped areas of Europe, they exhibited traits and modes of behaviour that appeared to the Anglo-Saxon Canadians as primitive and unsophisticated. They disembarked from hastily converted cargo ships in Halifax, Quebec City and Montreal looking exhausted and dishevelled. Many of them still wore the native costumes of their region and some were even barefoot. Their strange clothes, incomprehensible language, lack of personal hygiene and the practice of eating garlic did not endear them to their Canadian hosts. Anglo-Saxon chauvinism reared its ugly head and English newspapers in eastern Canada printed uncomplimentary and abusive articles about the unsuitability of these ‘Galicians in sheepskin coats’.”

The above is an excerpt taken from an article, The Ukrainian Canadians by George Duravetz, Published in The Ukrainian Canadian magazine in September 1988 (https://www.communitystories.ca/v1/pm_v2.php?id=story_line&lg=English&fl=0&ex=00000464&sl=5504&pos=1). 

The idea of what “the Ukrainian” is is one often fueled by the words of those observing what a Ukrainian must be. But that isn’t fully correct, it’s deeper than that. What was the benefit of Anglo Canada to encourage Ukrainians to immigrate, but then to view Ukrainians in not so much words, as a sort of subhuman? To work. As “...foot soldiers of settler-colonialism on the Prairies.” from the introduction in Enemy Alien by Kassandra Luciuk, with art by Nicole Marie Burton (the introduction itself is by Luciuk). A people to help build the country, to work the land they didn’t want to work, to do the labour they didn’t want to do. The predatory practice of inviting immigrants with the promise of a better life, only to make them second class citizens as it benefits the hierarchy of supremacy still continues to this day. It has obviously affected far more than Ukrainian immigrants, and it would make you a fool to not see that it is still here in violent force.

The idea of the Ukrainian as outlined by The Ukrainian Canadians was so prevalent that many of us also absorbed this idea that this must have been our ancestors too. The idea that a Ukrainian who wasn’t a peasant existed, one who was perhaps a celebrated writer? That wasn’t a common thought, it still isn’t. Celebrated and famous Ukrainian authors and artists get called Russian, Ukrainian literature often isn’t allowed to exist as Ukrainian. In this moment we see Myrna surprised at this revelation of her relative’s achievements, she digs up information about his life, we see clearly the picture of what it was to be a Ukrainian writer in a time when Ukrainian identity was being suppressed (as if it still isn’t). Which brings me to my next point.

Censorship, for the Ukrainian writer was always a threat to Russian imperialism

 Forgive me, for I am going to give you more homework: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyCypK6yOl0) This video is called Russian literature is FAKE!? How the Kremlin uses it for war | BIG RUSSIAN LIES #2 by the channel Суспільне Культура (Suspline Kultura). The video discusses how Russian literature is, and was, a propaganda tool that fuels much of the way people view Ukrainians (more of this I will touch on later), but relevant to this point, how a tool of Russian imperialism was to impose their literature, and suppress Ukrainian literature. Often by murdering Ukrainian writers. 

From the video: And what do modern Russians do when they come to Ukrainian land? They erect a monument to Pushkin, and kill a Ukrainian childrens’ writer. Volodymyr Vakulenko was a Ukrainian writer and translator who was killed during the occupation in the Kharkiv region. His body was found in a mass grave, among hundreds of other tortured people. (Anna Danylchuk)

In Kostash’s book she describes how another relative, also a writer, Vasyl Mykolaiovych Kostashchuk wrote under censorship, and how fellow writers of his were arrested and shot, six years after his death. While “great Russian literature” was promoted, Ukrainian literature and art was suppressed (this has not changed much as of today). 

The notion then, that one could be shocked to find prolific and celebrated Ukrainian writers in Ukraine, which challenges the stereotype of the barefoot peasant is a testament to the wicked success of propaganda and xenophobic ideas that permeate the subconscious. The idea that Ukraine has less literature, less art, simply because the people are “often illiterate in their own language” is simply a well planned and effective imperialistic lie. Ukrainians faced imperialistic occupation and suppression, and yet Ukrainian writers who preserved language and culture and the stories of their lives and those around them, they existed and they persisted.

Assimilation

One of the most interesting aspects of Kostash’s book is that it shows us the lives of those Ukrainians in Canada, as well as those in Ukraine, where the line splits but where there are still connections. In one chapter, she describes her maternal baba as she enters into Canada, “Several layers of handwoven skirts and aprons, an embroidered blouse, a sheepskin vest, a kerchief wrapped around the entirety of her hair. Good boots, I think. Perhaps her dead mother’s wealth in coral beads. She was naïve and unsophisticated and would not have known yet to feel humiliated by that wardrobe.” (chapter 6, Palahna Kosovan), to be respected, one had to assimilate. 

Particularly poignant to me was a passage from when she talked about her paternal baba. Her paternal baba held onto her religion and much of her cultural practices, such as the Christmas supper (for those readers who aren’t Ukrainian, there are multiple dishes you make for the supper that all have their own significance, 12 specifically, one for each apostle). This chapter goes onto describe how her father and his brothers assimilated, they were educated, they spoke unaccented English (the mention of unaccented was especially poignant, because the accent itself, even if the family speaks primarily English, does pass down generations, my family is an example of that, so speaking English unaccented is something one does very intentionally). Her father and his brothers would come home on breaks from schooling and debate the existence of God with their mother, their mother who held onto God and her religion as also a grounding part of her culture. 

Kostash also mentions that to her (when she was younger), Ukrainians immigrating later than her own forbears did seemed to be much different, “The kids my age raised within these families were new and intimidating creatures in our midst, fluently bilingual in Ukrainian and English, deferential to their elders, and passionately committed to liberating Ukraine from Soviet captivity when they would be old enough to fight.” (chapter 9, Man in a Photograph). Reading that now, in the year of our Lord 2025, it felt very relevant indeed. Ukrainians coming to Canada from Ukraine are coming from a war and from a history of war that many Ukrainian-Canadians did not experience. To put it better, we were spared, simply because our families immigrated 100 years ago. 

Following the road the book takes us, it makes us think of what it is to have roots in a country that is not the one we were born and raised. I wager some Ukrainian-Canadians feel quite distant from the war, even though those suffering are Ukrainian too. The real question is, I suppose, did we assimilate so much that some of us forgot that? Is assimilation a force to fight against? Can one treasure the roots of where they were born, but also the roots of where their ancestors, and where their fellow people are from? Many things can be true at once, identity I feel, is very much about empathy.

The language of progress thusly enables oppression

Democracy, but not for all. Material support, but not for all. Progress promises the former, while burying the dead it steps on in mass graves.

Kostash describes how her maternal (step) dido was a staunch Soviet sympathizer. She describes Andrew Maksymiuk’s life in such a way to show us why. This was a man who was an exploited labourer, once back home, then in the west after he immigrated. The news he heard was that of the Soviets fighting back against Nazis, and the Communist propaganda aimed directly for the exploited worker, with slogans and promises for a society that supported the working man. He struggled to find work and provide for his family through the depression. We today as a generation underestimate how traumatizing the depression was for our ancestors. My baba talked recently about how her parents had to boil rhubarb leaves (boil once, dump the water to drain the bitterness, boil again) for soup. 

While Ukrainian-Canadians supported Communism as they protested for better working conditions, while they lost contact with their relatives in Ukraine, what they didn’t see was the famine and the violent censorship that was happening in Ukraine under the thumb of Soviet dictators.

There are two chapters especially important in this conversation. Chapter 9, Man in a Photograph and chapter 10, Yuri: Versions of a Murder. In chapter 9 we follow the story of Stepan Fedorovych Kostashchuk, a young man who joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and thusly took his own life at age twenty three (and that of his wife) to avoid enemy capture. In chapter 10, we follow the story of Yuri Kosovan, who was murdered. Kostash investigates the details of the murder, and in all versions, what we know for sure, is that Yuri worked for the Soviets, and that the UPA captured him, and murdered him. 

It is important to remember that not only were these real people, they were both relatives of Kostash herself. As we dive into the details of their lives, the book portrays their motivations with nuance, and gives space for those families who mourned them. 

The way the UPA is discussed is of great fascination to me. This is a rebel army that was known to be responsible for the massacre of Polish civilians (Volhynia massacre) and pogroms against Jewish people (that is the typical meaning of “pogrom” but this is for clarification). It was also an army formed primarily to combat Ukraine’s occupiers, at the time Soviet, Nazi, and Polish. Reading about this subject broadly is challenging. It should be challenging. While one should not excuse ethnic cleansing and pogroms, one also has to understand that nationalist armies who organize and grow to fight off their occupiers don’t exist without occupation. 

We also must note with empathy that those civilians, even those civilians who became combatants had few options. Live quietly, or leave if they could. Join the Soviet army (only just after Holodomor, no less), join the Nazi army, or join the UPA. The divisive attitudes exist to this day, but things are shifting still. At the time of researching for this book, Kostash notes that to Yuri’s village, and to those that remember and mourn him, he was a Soviet hero. To those that remember and mourn Stepan, he was a Ukrainian hero. Even on opposing sides, both of these men were still Ukrainian in a time where Ukraine was under occupation by multiple forces. 

The way that the oppression of various ethnic groups is discussed in this conversation is relevant too. Ukrainians, Poles, and Jewish people are described as separate. As if existing in a similar geographical location, as if having a shared history, but always being separate people. The discussion of families who are perhaps Polish-Ukrainian, Jewish-Ukrainian, Jewish-Polish, or perhaps even Jewish-Polish-Ukrainian are not discussed. Were they simply ripped apart? Were they forced to abandon parts of their identity to pass as one? For those of us with all three in our ethnic background, when we read about this, are all three separate voices that are fighting with each other? Or are they all one collective scream? 

This line stood out for me, from chapter 9, “Perhaps both can be true: the martyrdom and the pogroms?” (Myrna Kostash). Surely we can acknowledge atrocities and no, we should never ignore them. Also surely we can acknowledge that the fight for independence was, and is still today, justified, and that the notion that Ukrainians are uniquely antisemitic is built on propaganda. From the previously mentioned video, Russian literature is FAKE!? How the Kremlin uses it for war | BIG RUSSIAN LIES #2 by the channel Суспільне Культура (Suspline Kultura):

“This kind of literature [describing classic Russian literature, specifically the book How the Steel was Tempered by Mykola Ostrovskyй] not only denies the idea of Ukrainian statehood, it can somehow be explained by the political and ideological component. But Ukrainians are simply caricatured in such literature. These are anti-Ukrainian texts, they are harmful because they portray Ukrainians as idiots, as criminals, as people who should only be condemned, and rejected.” (Serhii Zhadan)  

I also believe that when we talk about violence committed in response to oppression, that it is irresponsible to neglect to discuss the oppressors. When we talk about atrocities committed by the UPA, when we ignore those committed by Ukraine’s occupiers, we create a narrative. A narrative that justifies the occupation of Ukraine, because of the violence Ukrainians have caused, we absolve occupiers of their occupation, oppressors of the oppression they committed, because this is the easier narrative to swallow, because the idea that multiple forces were responsible for atrocities requires too much nuance. It is easy to fall in love with revolutionary violence when it sits in the palms of our hands in a fiction book, but it is much harder to accept that in real life, revolutionary violence will always harm civilians as well. But we must think, is this harm the fault of those who want to live in their own land, free? Or is it the fault of the oppressors? Why do we ignore the role of the oppressor? Why is it easier to slap an imperialistic power on the wrist while looking down at revolutionary violence, than it is to understand why the revolutionary violence happened in the first place? And finally–

Why are the most widely spread voices, the ones most listened to, about Ukrainian history, Ukraine’s fight for freedom throughout the 20th century not primarily Ukrainian? Why does Russian propaganda still control the narrative of how Ukrainians are viewed? I don’t have answers, these are simply things we need to think about when examining these topics. 

I took you on this tangent, but now to my point: the propaganda of imperialism, be it Communist or Capitalist, will always prey on the oppressed while benefiting the oppressor. They use the language of progress to cover up their own atrocities. Most people who believe in these systems are at heart, decent, probably kind, average people. And that’s the most frightening thing. The idea of rewarding hard work is good. The idea of supporting all workers equally is also good. These conversations primarily boil down to basic human rights, the rights we all deserve–but once you see the pattern, you won’t unsee it. Under examples of both Capitalism and western Democracy, and also under examples of Communism, you will find people in power stripping othered people of the most basic needs (food, water, medicine, etc…) and suppressing their voices, in order to benefit those higher on their hierarchical order. 

I admire Kostash’s writing, and that no matter the circumstances, all three of the men I mentioned in this section were discussed with empathy and nuance. They were human, they were her blood, in their heart of hearts they were just trying to survive. Is evil the man who is trying to live, or is it the man with the political power to choose who lives or dies?

The stories of women

This book is ultimately a work of feminist literature. Not just because Kostash herself is a feminist, but also because the book takes special care to tell the stories of women. Both Kostash’s paternal and maternal baba get a lot of pagetime. We see their struggles, we see how they had little control over the direction of their own lives. 

The truth of it is simple, women are always marginalized, people who aren’t women, but are close in proximity to womanhood are also always marginalized (those trans and nonbinary folks who are not women). But men? Men are sometimes marginalized, but not for being men. For while Ukrainian men struggled at home and abroad, Ukrainian women struggled in the same way (I use past tense for the time period the book discusses, but this is not entirely past tense), but Ukrainian women also struggle by virtue of being women. 

Kostash mentions at various points that it was much harder to find records of the lives of the women than the men, the men whose work she relied on for information often did not focus on also writing or keeping records of the women in their lives. 

During the chapters focused on war and violence against civilians, there is the mention that Yuri Kosovan’s wife (whose name was not written down) was raped by the men who dragged him away. Her story has not enough records for us to know her point of view, what happened to her, and what she did afterward.

In Ukraine the women were aiding by burying the dead, supporting their communities through their harsh reality. In Canada they were working on homesteads, or in cities (whatever work they could find), they were supporting their households, their neighborhoods. But their names are harder to find, their names are on less (or no) memorial plaques. 

One of the deepest cuts of misogyny is that it acts as a form of erasure for the history of women, the role women have played, what women have done in pivotal historical events. This book goes through a nearly century long family tree of stories, and Kostash puts in extra care to tell the stories of the women involved.

The empathy of humanizing

Living in a time of political turmoil and dehumanization, I think we are beginning to forget what it is to humanize. 

The framing of this book is through photographs and letters that Kostash finds. She describes the photographs with an in depth touch that allows us to visualize them, and both understand who the people in the photographs were, and who they are to Kostash. 

There is an innate humanness in seeing someone in their day to day life, such as the chapter focused on Nick (Nikolai/Mykola) Kosovan (chapter 7, Who Was Uncle Nick?). We begin by seeing him in a photo, holding an armful of cucumbers. We learn about him as we would any person, from his family, the work he did. We then learn about his activism in both Ukraine and later in Canada, he then was deported from Canada for his “revolutionary activity”. The last thing we learn about him is that he took his own life, and that his family doesn’t talk about that, in Kostash’s words (from the end of chapter 7): 

“Uncle Nick, the radical from Dzhuriv, with his armful of cucumbers, outside agitator in Lethbridge, arrestee, deportee, suicide swinging from a rope in the village barn, vanished from recall, who I am not supposed to know.”

There are a couple things I believe we stand to learn from the way that Kostash writes with empathy and humanness. One is that this can and should apply to fiction too. In order to tell a cutting story about politics, especially one mirroring our real world politics, one must employ this tactic, let the reader understand how living in these conditions affect people. The second is that when we discuss our current political issues, do we employ this empathy and nuance? Do we pay attention to the voices that are often erased? Do we humanize those who have faced dehumanization? 

I believe that perhaps the most powerful tool we have against oppressive regimes is humanization. And here is a book that expertly humanizes everyone whose life is explored. I of course acknowledge that as these are Kostash’s own family, humanizing is natural, but in combination with the nuance around each of their different political views, and the life each led? It strikes me that we often don’t talk about our fellow people this way enough, we often neglect to do so. We still have time to do better. 

Where does this leave us?

Is there truly a satisfying conclusion to a book that hit me so close to home? That will be on my mind ten or twenty years from now? I consider it a must read, not just for those interested in Ukrainian history. This book is much more than that. Ukrainian focused books by Ukrainians rarely have much reach outside Ukrainian readership, and if there was an example of a book that deserves to be widely read by a variety of people, it is Ghosts in a Photograph by Myrna Kostash.

The book concludes with Kostash discussing and reconciling with the oppression of Indigenous Canadians, and then visiting the graves of her family members, mourning them. She tracks down the grave of her maternal dido, one that took years to find. It leaves me, the reader, also mourning. Not just the end of the book, not just the people I learned about through reading it, but of the broad scars that history leaves. History is a living thing, and in many ways, repeating itself. 

We are products of the generational trauma of our forebears, our peers are as well. How much more will it take before we all step up, en masse, to oppose the violence that our ancestors faced, or participated in? Is it really that complicated?