In 1936, Olena Solowska left the grinding poverty of her village in eastern Poland (now western Ukraine), with her two daughters, Natalia and Vira, aged 14 and nine. Her husband, Tomasz, had left several years before to find work in Canada. The family was reunited in Depression-era Toronto, where the poverty continued, augmented by racial discrimination. But the girls flourished, thanks largely to two compassionate schoolteachers who took them under their wings; eventually they found careers, married, and had children. Natalia’s middle daughter, author and professor Janice Kulyk Keefer, grew up with the stories of home told by her mother, aunt, and grandparents. Honey and Ashes is Keefer’s attempt to record and preserve those stories, and to understand their wider significance beyond the personal.

Some of the stories are of kindness and laughter, but all are tinged by an ambivalence that grows stronger for Keefer over the years. Many of the stories are laced with unimaginable cruelty – of adults towards children, of siblings towards each other, of conquering soldiers towards hapless villagers during age-old ethnic conflicts. Keefer is at pains to reconcile the cruelty inherent in her family’s past with her own ethnicity and identity. Her ambivalence has driven her to undertake the dangerous return to her grandparents’ village in post-glasnost Russia in search of answers to the myriad questions those stories raise.

This is a popular genre; many others have attempted to depict their family’s histories in books and films, some with more success than others. Fortunately for the reader, Keefer’s anecdotal research is balanced by a disciplined historical perspective. However, her endless ruminations on the nature of memory and identity can be frustrating. Her journey back to the Old Place, as she calls it, fails to provide many of the answers she seeks. Most of those who could provide the answers are long dead, and those who remain have tried to bury a past too painful to recall, or offer conflicting reports. Nonetheless, this is a thoughtful and valuable piece of work by a fine writer.