Reviewed by Margot Block (published March 28, 2013)
It is August 18, 1915. Barbara Sapergia’s novel begins with the image of a young man, staring at his own reflection. Taras Kalyna has nothing to look forward to as he approaches this ghost land located near Banff, one of a train load of prisoners headed west. Blood and Salt offers its audience a complex and rich journey into the life of Kalyna and other members of a group of Ukrainian immigrants fed a daily dose of extreme physical hardship. Her descriptive, vivid writing brings to us a loaded understanding of Ukrainian existence and lifeblood through their detailed memories and fragments of the lives of Ihor, Tomas, Yuriy, Tymko, Yaroslav, Taras Kalyna, Hayla and Viktor. They have risked everything to make the move from their homeland, Ukraina, to Canada, with the naive hope of a better future that might include streets paved with gold.
Without relying on the rigid outline of a chronological tale, Sapergia takes us from the internees former lives to Saskatchewan and then to their capture and horrific ordeal at the hands of the Canadian military from 1915 to 1917, in Alberta.Written with a simplicity reserved for the voice of its survivors, the reader is placed squarely in the internment camp, an experience reserved for the enemy within. Along with the suffering these men encounter, this tale takes one’s imagination through a personal, educational tour of a Ukrainian-Canadian existence, bringing to us a clear presentation of language and culture, poverty and the revolutionary politics of that time.
The realistic black and white photograph presented on the front cover of the novel provides a striking clue to the dark, riveting subject matter that is contained in these four hundred pages. As broken as the camp refugees, the photo of the internees is fractured into separate strips running vertically down the pristine white cover of Blood and Salt. This fractured likeness drives home the dehumanizing aspect, the destructiveness of the war-time internments, the horror of a dirty little secret that has been pushed out of mind. The fragmented picture shows the backs of three men, dressed in tattered clothing, bent in subjugation, a grey representation of the nameless, faceless victim. Unforgettable, this image represents the lasting effect of Sapergia’s work on her reader’s consciousness, that is, the memory of a few broken men struggling to survive this brutal internment camp.
The reader ingests a shattered Ukrainian story, dominated by a group of people bearing foreign names, tracing their heritage back to East European roots. The tale moves forward, delivering the promise of strong connection to Ukrainian heritage and unique ways to responding to that culture and language. We discover a complicated, layered tale, filled with interesting ideas and political subject matter. Along the journey to Ukraine and back to Canada again two very important questions arise. These questions are ones no citizen of any country can forget and every person must carry with them in their hearts. How does a country forget? How do we remember?
The primary loyalty of Blood and Salt is to communicate a detailed illustration of the Ukrainian immigrant experience at the Alberta internment camps of World War I, a tortured existence tied to the harsh and unforgiving land of Castle Mountain, near Banff. Sapergia leads the reader to an appreciation of the inhumane treatment of the internees through the expression of key details. She sets up a contrast between the military commanders and the prisoners they are responsible for. The military commanders are referred to by first and last name, while the sole use of the first name of prisoners at the internment camp brands them as just another statistic. It is through these representations that we are reminded that members of this internment camp become little more that a number on a page. Kalyna, his friends and enemies are reduced to their name, marital status, and the location in the old country that they immigrated from. Amid these impersonal details, the “what have I done wrong? why am I here?” are easily obscured.
Sapergia’s body of work bring us to unfamiliar territory, to the language and culture, so much of part of a broken Ukrainian story, an experience Sapergia is able to tell us about so beautifully, deeply and personally in her writing. This beauty, this ability to manipulate language is clear even in the early pages of Blood and Salt. She writes eloquently of shock at the internment ordeal, speaking of “ dark shapes just outside the window, cutting off light.” Then she moves Taras to romanticize his last image of Halya where she writes “… he loves her fierceness, the shadow that can come across her face like a cloud over the sun. He reaches under his shirt for a round pendant…” Despite the isolation of that imprisoned life in Alberta, this is a testament to her skill as a historical fiction writer.
Barbara Sapergia and her work reminds us of the unique Ukrainian-Canadian culture and its bare survival in the circle of early Ukrainian immigrants, who encountered a speaker of their native tongue extremely rarely. She does this in a deliberate and careful way, noting the use of fluent Ukranian, then, dispersing a Ukrainian word here and there throughout the novel, making the reader familar with the look and sound of a foreign language buried in subtle, political clues. She also is careful not to de-ethnicize aspects of the culture which might put off the reader, employing the conscious use of Ukrainian names like Taras, Tymko, and so on.
Sapergia’s previous books have included Dry, Secrets in Water and South Hill Girls, a collection of ten short stories. She was nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best sci-fi novel of the year in 2007 for her novel, Dry. She received the Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction for Secrets in Water. Sapergia was born and raised in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in the industrial community of South Hill, better known as Garlic Heights. These facts are central to an understanding of Blood and Salt. Sapergia reveals to us a familiarity with the topography and geography of the larger region, and a detailed knowledge of the industrial labour that formed the economic imperative for creating the work internment camps.
Blood and Salt shows the muted politicization of poverty and more specifically, based on the characters’ land of origin, it makes a connection between ethnicity and total horror, the thrusting of Ukrainian immigrants into impoverishment and hell as the internees would experience it. On the surface, we have a clear description of that horror, but the work holds greater meaning for the discerning eye. Sapergia does not shy away from the use of symbols, littered through the tale, symbols that never would have been part of the documented history.
One example of a politicized symbol is the injection of a tourist hotel along the journey to Castle Mountain. On the way to a cruel imprisonment, the internees will be starved, tortured and abused. Yet, in the same vicinity, tourists will vacation, relax into decadence at a location strikingly near to Castle Mountain and its legacy. Sapergia offers us her political viewpoint of the situation of poverty and a delicate and specific way of revising history. So Blood and Salt, littered with left of center politics, hints at the oppression of one class of people at the hands of another. This Yaroslav ironically observes, remarking “it’s not a castle. It’s a tourist hotel.”
Coteau | 464 pages | $21.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1550505139
‘Blood and Salt’ by Barbara Sapergia
Book Reviews
It is August 18, 1915. Barbara Sapergia’s novel begins with the image of a young man, staring at his own reflection. Taras Kalyna has nothing to look forward to as he approaches this ghost land located near Banff, one of a train load of prisoners headed west. Blood and Salt offers its audience a complex and rich journey into the life of Kalyna and other members of a group of Ukrainian immigrants fed a daily dose of extreme physical hardship. Her descriptive, vivid writing brings to us a loaded understanding of Ukrainian existence and lifeblood through their detailed memories and fragments of the lives of Ihor, Tomas, Yuriy, Tymko, Yaroslav, Taras Kalyna, Hayla and Viktor. They have risked everything to make the move from their homeland, Ukraina, to Canada, with the naive hope of a better future that might include streets paved with gold.
Without relying on the rigid outline of a chronological tale, Sapergia takes us from the internees former lives to Saskatchewan and then to their capture and horrific ordeal at the hands of the Canadian military from 1915 to 1917, in Alberta.Written with a simplicity reserved for the voice of its survivors, the reader is placed squarely in the internment camp, an experience reserved for the enemy within. Along with the suffering these men encounter, this tale takes one’s imagination through a personal, educational tour of a Ukrainian-Canadian existence, bringing to us a clear presentation of language and culture, poverty and the revolutionary politics of that time.
The realistic black and white photograph presented on the front cover of the novel provides a striking clue to the dark, riveting subject matter that is contained in these four hundred pages. As broken as the camp refugees, the photo of the internees is fractured into separate strips running vertically down the pristine white cover of Blood and Salt. This fractured likeness drives home the dehumanizing aspect, the destructiveness of the war-time internments, the horror of a dirty little secret that has been pushed out of mind. The fragmented picture shows the backs of three men, dressed in tattered clothing, bent in subjugation, a grey representation of the nameless, faceless victim. Unforgettable, this image represents the lasting effect of Sapergia’s work on her reader’s consciousness, that is, the memory of a few broken men struggling to survive this brutal internment camp.
The reader ingests a shattered Ukrainian story, dominated by a group of people bearing foreign names, tracing their heritage back to East European roots. The tale moves forward, delivering the promise of strong connection to Ukrainian heritage and unique ways to responding to that culture and language. We discover a complicated, layered tale, filled with interesting ideas and political subject matter. Along the journey to Ukraine and back to Canada again two very important questions arise. These questions are ones no citizen of any country can forget and every person must carry with them in their hearts. How does a country forget? How do we remember?
The primary loyalty of Blood and Salt is to communicate a detailed illustration of the Ukrainian immigrant experience at the Alberta internment camps of World War I, a tortured existence tied to the harsh and unforgiving land of Castle Mountain, near Banff. Sapergia leads the reader to an appreciation of the inhumane treatment of the internees through the expression of key details. She sets up a contrast between the military commanders and the prisoners they are responsible for. The military commanders are referred to by first and last name, while the sole use of the first name of prisoners at the internment camp brands them as just another statistic. It is through these representations that we are reminded that members of this internment camp become little more that a number on a page. Kalyna, his friends and enemies are reduced to their name, marital status, and the location in the old country that they immigrated from. Amid these impersonal details, the “what have I done wrong? why am I here?” are easily obscured.
Sapergia’s body of work bring us to unfamiliar territory, to the language and culture, so much of part of a broken Ukrainian story, an experience Sapergia is able to tell us about so beautifully, deeply and personally in her writing. This beauty, this ability to manipulate language is clear even in the early pages of Blood and Salt. She writes eloquently of shock at the internment ordeal, speaking of “ dark shapes just outside the window, cutting off light.” Then she moves Taras to romanticize his last image of Halya where she writes “… he loves her fierceness, the shadow that can come across her face like a cloud over the sun. He reaches under his shirt for a round pendant…” Despite the isolation of that imprisoned life in Alberta, this is a testament to her skill as a historical fiction writer.
Barbara Sapergia and her work reminds us of the unique Ukrainian-Canadian culture and its bare survival in the circle of early Ukrainian immigrants, who encountered a speaker of their native tongue extremely rarely. She does this in a deliberate and careful way, noting the use of fluent Ukranian, then, dispersing a Ukrainian word here and there throughout the novel, making the reader familar with the look and sound of a foreign language buried in subtle, political clues. She also is careful not to de-ethnicize aspects of the culture which might put off the reader, employing the conscious use of Ukrainian names like Taras, Tymko, and so on.
Sapergia’s previous books have included Dry, Secrets in Water and South Hill Girls, a collection of ten short stories. She was nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best sci-fi novel of the year in 2007 for her novel, Dry. She received the Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction for Secrets in Water. Sapergia was born and raised in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in the industrial community of South Hill, better known as Garlic Heights. These facts are central to an understanding of Blood and Salt. Sapergia reveals to us a familiarity with the topography and geography of the larger region, and a detailed knowledge of the industrial labour that formed the economic imperative for creating the work internment camps.
Blood and Salt shows the muted politicization of poverty and more specifically, based on the characters’ land of origin, it makes a connection between ethnicity and total horror, the thrusting of Ukrainian immigrants into impoverishment and hell as the internees would experience it. On the surface, we have a clear description of that horror, but the work holds greater meaning for the discerning eye. Sapergia does not shy away from the use of symbols, littered through the tale, symbols that never would have been part of the documented history.
One example of a politicized symbol is the injection of a tourist hotel along the journey to Castle Mountain. On the way to a cruel imprisonment, the internees will be starved, tortured and abused. Yet, in the same vicinity, tourists will vacation, relax into decadence at a location strikingly near to Castle Mountain and its legacy. Sapergia offers us her political viewpoint of the situation of poverty and a delicate and specific way of revising history. So Blood and Salt, littered with left of center politics, hints at the oppression of one class of people at the hands of another. This Yaroslav ironically observes, remarking “it’s not a castle. It’s a tourist hotel.”
Coteau | 464 pages | $21.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1550505139