All of Baba’s Children

Spring 1992

Paperback 464 pages

Non-Fiction

The story of one woman’s personal discovery of her Canadian-Ukrainian cultural origins and the impact of that invigorating discovery on her life.

IN MYRNA'S WORDS
Myrna Kostash discusses writing All of Baba's ChildrenAll of Baba’s Children, published in 1978 by Hurtig Publishers, was my first book and, thanks to NeWest Press, it has stayed in print ever since. It has become something of a “classic,” with a whole new generation reading it who were not even born when I did the research, in the town of Two Hills, Alberta (pop.1200) in the summer of 1975.

At the time, I was living in Toronto, making my living as a freelance magazine journalist. I had left Alberta in 1965 and it certainly was never my intention to live there again. But, when it came time to try my hand at writing a whole book, the subject I chose – still a mystery to me 35 years later – was the life stories of Ukrainian-Canadians in a prairie town.

I rented a room for three months in the Frontenac Motel just off Highway 36 and, one by one, interviewed men and women who, like my parents, had been born on homesteads, the children of Galician immigrants. I wanted to know everything about them – their education, their churches, their politics, their families, their traditions, their jobs – and they told me. But I had a set of attitudes of my own, as a third-generation Ukrainian-Canadian, a student during the 1960s, an ex-hippy,  a feminist.  So when the book came out, not everyone was pleased with what I had written about them. Others, though, were thrilled. And so a “classic” was born: love it or hate it, everyone knew about All of Baba’s Children.

I never did go back to Toronto. It was exciting to be in Alberta in those years of a burgeoning independent cultural scene – including publishing – and in the heyday of multiculturalism. Although I had firmly rejected any sense of connection with Ukrainian-Canadians outside my family, the Ukrainian-Canadians of western Canada wouldn’t let me forget where I “came from” and “whose people” I was. And so, with my first royalty cheque for All of Baba’s Children I bought a quarter section plus log shack near Two Hills, named it Tulova for my grandparents’ village in Ukraine, and spent many happy summers there, getting to know “where I came from” in a very deep way.

A word on style: I had come to magazine journalism through the New Journalism, the kind of writing I was reading in Rolling Stone magazine in the late 1960s and 1970s. It was “journalism with a great big attitude,” which is to say reportage with a definite point of view. How the writer felt and what she thought about her subject was very much the point of the New Journalism, and I took to it like a duck to water. And that is how I wrote All of Baba’s Children. Full of emotions that I didn’t know I had until I wrote it. …And that’s what writing has turned out to be for me, over and over: learning what I really think and feel.