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Bezig met laden... Firebirddoor Glen Huser
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Firebird explores a period in our history - one year in particular (1915-1916) - when a massive number of newcomers were deemed "enemy aliens," arrested and put into internment camps set up all across Canada. Alex Kaminsky, a fourteen-year-old Ukrainian immigrant boy, suffers burns to his hands and face when his uncle's farmhouse burns down. Rescued by a neighbour, he is tended to by a backcountry midwife before being taken in by a local postmaster. Determined to search for his older brother, an itinerant farm worker (and talented artist) who has disappeared, Alex follows Marco's trail from a Vegreville farm to Edmonton. From there he is on the run from officials to Calgary and finally Banff, where he finds his brother close to death in the Castle Mountain Internment Camp. In many ways it is a voyage of discovery for Alex, discovery of the hatred harboured by many for immigrants who once lived happy lives in what has become an enemy empire. But also the discovery of those with a strong sense of humanity who decry Marco's treatment and go the extra mile to help the brothers. For readers who believe such internment camps began only with Japanese Canadians in WWII, Firebird will be an eye-opening experience. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Huser’s novel for older children and young adults focuses on Canada’s World War I internment of enemy aliens from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, most of them Ukrainian Canadians. The author brings this shameful piece of Canadian history to life through the story of two orphaned brothers, Alex and Marco Kaminsky. His telling is enriched with Slavic and Ukrainian folksongs and tales, art and music. As the book opens, Alex, who’s about 14, is living with his uncle; his older brother, Marco, has gone off to work as a farmhand on the Granger farm in Vegreville, Alberta. He is expected to return in December.
Uncle Andrew is known to love his moonshine. Drinking heavily late into the night, he knocks over a kerosene lamp and sets his farmhouse ablaze. Alex, awakened in the loft by the smoke, tries unsuccessfully to save his uncle, only to have his own hands and face badly burned. He’s rescued by neighbours and taken to the home of a local rural nurse. Once sufficiently recovered, he is determined to find Marco, who mysteriously and uncharacteristically did not return to Uncle Andrew’s farm when he said he would.
Huser’s novel details Alex’s quest to find his brother. Young, penniless, and not yet fluent in English, Alex is helped along the way by a postmaster/shopkeeper and a Norwegian carpenter, as well as a sensitive schoolteacher and the moneyed aunt who raised him. It turns out that a confrontation with the farmer who cheated him of his wages was enough to have Marco arrested, detained, and used as slave labour in an internment camp in Banff, Alberta. Conditions are brutal for men imprisoned there. Many become ill and die. Some try to escape: a few are successful; others are tracked down or shot.
While Alex’s determination to find his brother is rewarded, the story is ultimately one of great sadness.
Huser manages to communicate a great deal about conditions in rural Alberta during the second decade of the twentieth century. Canada was then a rigidly WASPish place; bigotry towards Eastern Europeans was rampant and intense. Through Stella’s story, Huser also manages to give young readers a sense of immigrant women’s difficult lot—their lack of agency and access to education, poverty, and, once married, their endless pregnancies. (I know this fairly intimately, as my Ukrainian-Canadian grandmother was one of these women.)
I’ve read two other of Huser’s novels for young people and know him to be a sensitive and skillful writer. In this story, I believe he attempted to counterbalance the distrust and prejudice of many Anglo-Canadians towards immigrants by having his likeable main character assisted by people with great generosity of spirit, but I was not convinced that this would have been the way things were for a boy in Alex’s shoes. Given the sadness of the story, however, I understand that decision in a novel for young people. ( )