Our Lives: Diary, Memoir, and Letters

As a precocious young girl, Surekha knew very little about the details of her mother Amma's unusual past and that of Babu, her mysterious and sometimes absent father. The tense, uncertain family life created by her parents' distant and fractious marriage and their separate ambitions informs her every action and emotion. Then one evening, in a moment of uncharacteristic transparency and vulnerability, Amma tells Surekha and her older sister Didi of the family tragedy that changed the course of her life. Finally, her daughters begin to understand the source of their mother's deep commitment to the Indian nationalist movement and her seemingly unending willingness to sacrifice in the name of that pursuit. In this re-memory based on the published and unpublished work of Amma and Surekha, Meenal Shrivastava, Surekha's daughter, uncovers the history of the female foot soldiers of Gandhi's national movement in the early twentieth century. As Meenal weaves these written accounts together with archival research and family history, she gives voice and honour to the hundreds of thousands of largely forgotten or unacknowledged women who, threatened with imprisonment for treason and sedition, relentlessly and selflessly gave toward the revolution.

From its inception in 1885, the Alaska School Service was charged with the assimilation of Alaskan Native children into mainstream American values and ways of life. Working in the missions and schools along the Yukon River were George E. Boulter and Alice Green, his future wife. Boulter, a Londoner originally drawn to the Klondike, had begun teaching in 1905 and by 1910 had been promoted to superintendent of schools for the Upper Yukon District. In 1907, Green left a comfortable family life in New Orleans to answer the "call to serve" in the Episcopal mission boarding schools for Native children at Anvik and Nenana, where she occupied the position of government teacher. As school superintendent, Boulter wrote frequently to his superiors in Seattle and Washington, DC, to discuss numerous administrative matters and to report on problems and conditions overall. From 1906 to 1918, Green kept a personal journal-hitherto in private possession-in which she reflected on her professional duties and her domestic life in Alaska. Collected in The Teacher and the Superintendent are Boulter's letters and Green's diary. Together, their vivid, first- hand impressions bespeak the earnest but paternalistic beliefs of those who lived and worked in immensely isolated regions, seeking to bring Christianity and "civilized" values to the Native children in their care. Beyond shedding private light on the missionary spirit, however, Boulter and Green have also left us an invaluable account of the daily conflicts that occurred between church and government and of the many injustices suffered by the Native population in the face of the misguided efforts of both institutions..

Arthur Bear Chief suffered both sexual and psychological abuse during his time at Old Sun Residential school in Gleichen on the Siksika Nation. My Decade at Old Sun, My Lifetime of Hell is a of chronological vignettes that depict the punishment, cruelty, and injustice that Arthur endured at Old Sun and then later relived in the traumatic process of retelling his story in connection with a complicated claims procedure. Late in life, after working for both the provincial and federal government, Arthur returned home to Gleichen. It was there that he began to reconnect with Blackfoot language and culture and to write his story.

On March 15, 1939, Helen Waldstein's father snatched his stamped exit visa from a distracted clerk to escape from Prague with his wife and child. As the Nazis closed in on a war-torn Czechoslovakia, only letters from their extended family could reach Canada through the barriers of conflict. The Waldstein family received these letters as they made their lives on a southern Ontario farm, where they learned to be Canadian and forget their Jewish roots. Helen Waldstein read these letters as an adult; this changed everything. As her past refused to keep silent, Helen followed the trail of the letters back to Europe, where she discovered living witnesses who could attest to the letters' contents. She has here interwoven their stories and her own into a compelling narrative of suffering, survivor guilt, and overcoming intergenerational obstacles when exploring a traumatic past.

Mowafa Said Househ's family fled Palestine in 1948 and arrived in Canada in the 1970s. He spent his childhood in Edmonton, Alberta, where he grew up as a visible minority and a Muslim whose family had a deeply fractured history. In the year 2000, when Mowafa visited his family's homeland of Palestine at the beginning of the Second Intifada, he witnessed the effects of prolonged conflict and occupation. It was those observations and that experience that inspired him not only to tell his story but to realize many of the intergenerational and colonial traumas that he shares with the Indigenous people of Turtle Island. His moving memoir depicts the lives of those who live on occupied land and the struggles that define them.

In 1976, at the age of twenty-three, Farideh Goldin left Iran in search of her imagined America. She sought an escape from the suffocation she felt under the cultural rules of her country and the future her family had envisioned for her. While she settled uneasily into American life, the political unrest in Iran intensified and in February of 1979, Farideh's family was forced to flee Iran on the last El-Al flights to Tel Aviv. They arrived in Israel as refugees, having left everything behind including the only home Farideh's father had ever known. Baba, as Farideh called her father, was a well-respected son of the chief rabbi and dayan of the Jews of Shiraz. During his last visit to the United States in 2006, he handed Farideh his memoir that chronicled the years of his life after exile: the confiscation of his passport while he attempted to return to Iran for his belongings, the resulting years of loneliness as he struggled against a hostile bureaucracy to return to his wife and family in Israel, and the eventual loss of the poultry farm that had supported his family. Farideh translated her father's memoir along with other documents she found in a briefcase after his death. Leaving Iran knits together her father's story of dislocation and loss with her own experience as an Iranian Jew in a newly adopted home. As an intimate portrait of displacement and the construction of identity, as a story of family loyalty and cultural memory, Leaving Iran is an important addition to a growing body of Iranian-American narratives.

Since childhood, Tony Fabijančić has travelled frequently to Yugoslavia and Croatia, the homeland of his father. He spent time with his peasant family in the village of Srebrnjak in the north and escaped to the Adriatic islands in the south where he could break free from the constraints of everyday life. Those two worlds-the north, marked by the haunting saga of family life, its history and material practices, and the south, a place defined by travel and escape-formed the two halves of Fabijančić's Croatian life. Over time, he observed Srebrnjak become a white-collar weekend retreat, the community of peasants of the 1970s, to which he was first introduced, only a distant memory. From the continental interior of green valleys and plum orchards to the austere and skeletal karst coast, Drink in the Summer is a unique record of a place and people now lost to time, a description of a country's varied landscapes, and a journey of discovery, freedom, beauty, and love. Preface Acknowledgements Note on Pronunciation When the Sea Is Bluer + Brač Learning to Fly Drink in the Summer Coda Yugoslavia + Rab Srebrnjak Winter The Woman from Brezje + Pag Transitions, Departures Srebrnjak Mansion + Cres + Vis A Slower Tempo + Hvar Yugonostalgia Brač Revisited Return Works Cited From the continental inland of green valleys and plum orchards to the austere, skeletal coast, Tony Fabijančić captures Yugoslavia and Croatia in this moving memoir about his journey of discovery, freedom, beauty, and love. A beautiful reminiscence on the places of our youth and the indelible marks they leave on our souls.

In 1910, young Pierre Maturié bid farewell to his comfortable bourgeois existence in rural France and travelled to northern Alberta in search of independence, adventure, and newfound prosperity. Some sixty years later, he wrote of the four years he spent in Canada before he returned to France in 1914 to fight in the First World War. Like that of so many youthful pioneers, his story is one of adventure and hardship-perilous journeys, railroad construction in the Rockies, panning for gold in swift-flowing streams, transporting goods for the Hudson's Bay Company along the Athabasca River. Blessed with the rare gift of a natural storyteller, Maturié conveys his abiding nostalgia for a country he loved deeply yet ultimately had to abandon. Maturié's memoir, Man Proposes, God Disposes, appeared in France in 1972, to a warm reception. Now, in the deft and marvellously empathetic translation of Vivien Bosley, it is at long last available in English. As a portrait of pioneer life in northern Alberta, as a window onto the French experience in Canada, and, above all, as an irresistible story-it will continue to find a place in the hearts of readers for years to come.

Ingelore Rothschild was twelve years old when she was whisked out of her home in 1936. It was her first step on a cross-continent journey to Japan, where she and her parents sought refuge from rising anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany. A decade later, as she sails away from what has become her home in Kobe, Japan, Ingelore records her memories of life in Berlin, the long train journey through Russia, and her time in Japan during World War II. Each leg of the journey presents its own nightmare: passports are stolen, identities are uncovered, a mudslide tears through the Rothschild's home, and the atomic bombs are dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Ingelore's bright, observant nature and remarkable capacity for befriending those along her way fills her narrative with unique details about the people she meets and the places she travels to. The story of Ingelore and her prominent German Jewish family's escape is an invaluable account that contributes to Holocaust witness and memoir literature. Although she was forever marked by her traumatic past, Ingelore's survival story is a painful reminder that only European Jews with significant financial means were able to carefully orchestrate an escape from Nazi Germany.

When Joegodson Déralciné was still a small child, his parents left rural Haiti to resettle in the rapidly growing zones of Port-au-Prince. As his family entered the city in 1986, Duvalier and his dictatorship exited. Haitians, once terrorized under Duvalier's reign, were liberated and emboldened to believe that they could take control of their lives. But how? Joining hundreds of thousands of other peasants trying to adjust to urban life, Joegodson and his family sought work and a means of survival. But all they found was low-waged assembly plant jobs of the sort to which the repressive Duvalier regime had opened Haiti's doors-the combination of flexible capital and cheap labour too attractive to multinational manufacturers to be overlooked. With the death of his mother, Joegodson was placed in his uncle's care, and so began a childhood of starvation, endless labour, and abuse. In honest, reflective prose, Joegodson-now a father himself- allows us to walk in the ditches of Cité Soleil, to hide from the macoutes under the bed, to feel the ache of an empty stomach. But, most importantly, he provides an account of life in Haiti from a perspective that is rarely heard. Free of sentimentality and hackneyed clichés, his narrative explores the spirituality of Vodou, Catholicism, and Protestantism, describes the harrowing day of the 2010 earthquake and its aftermath, and illustrates the inner workings of MINUSTAH. Written with Canadian historian Paul Jackson-Joegodson telling his story in Creole, Jackson translating, the two of them then reviewing and reworking-the memoir is a true collaboration, the struggle of two people from different lands and vastly different circumstances to arrive at a place of mutual understanding. In the process, they have given us an unforgettable account of a country determined to survive, and on its own terms.

In May of 1868, Elizabeth Bingham Young and her new husband, Egerton Ryerson Young, began a long journey from Hamilton, Ontario, to the Methodist mission of Rossville. For the next eight years, Elizabeth supported her husband's work at two mission houses, Norway House and then Berens River. Unprepared for the difficult conditions and the 'eight months long' winter, and unimpressed with 'eating fish twenty-one times a week,' the young Upper Canada wife rose to the challenge. In these remote outposts, she gave birth to three children, acted as a nurse and doctor, and applied both perseverance and determination to learning Cree, while also coping with poverty and short supplies within her community. Her account of mission life, as seen through the eyes of a woman, is the first of its kind to be archived and now to appear in print. Accompanying Elizabeth's memoir, and offering a counterpoint to it, are the reminiscences of her eldest son, 'Eddie.' Born at Norway House in 1869 and nursed by a Cree woman from infancy, Eddie was immersed in local Cree and Ojibwe life, culture, and language, in many ways exemplifying the process of reverse acculturation often in evidence among the children of missionaries. Like those of his mother, Eddie's memories capture the sensory and emotional texture of mission life, providing a portrait that is startling in its immediacy. Skillfully woven together and meticulously annotated by Jennifer Brown, these two remarkable recollections of mission life are an invaluable addition to the fields of religious, missionary, and Aboriginal history. In their power to resurrect experience, they are also a fascination to read.

A Woman of Valour is the biography of Marie-Louise Bouchard Labelle, a French-Canadian woman who found love with a priest thirty-three years her senior. Against all social convention, they lived, produced three children, and built a life together after fleeing their village. However, after several years together, Bouchard's husband ultimately chose to return to the priesthood, abandoning his family as a result. Through interviews and documentation, Claire Trépanier tells Bouchard's story of survival while highlighting the history of women's stature in Canada, and raising a question about the celibacy of Catholic priests.

Written in his mother's unique voice, John Leigh Walters pushes the boundaries of memoir in A Very Capable Life, the extraordinary journey of a seemingly ordinary woman. Zarah Petri was a child when her family left Hungary to establish a new life in Canada in the 1920s. With courage and innovation, Zarah and her family survived the Depression, even if it meant breaking the law to do so. In celebrating Zarah Petri, A Very Capable Life pays homage to all "ordinary" women of the early twentieth century who challenged society's conventions for the sake of survival.