Excerpt from the "FOREWORD" At the point of emigration or immigration, a family history splits in two. Ghosts in a Photograph is a Canadian granddaughter's account of her grandparents' lives in Canada and the mystery and strangeness of the lives left behind in Galicia, now Ukraine. Each narrative of my grandparents is assigned a kind of vita. There are five of them, the fifth being my mother's stepfather. They all emigrated from villages within shouting distance of each other in Galicia and immigrated into Canada between 1900 and 1910. Their stories, as I received them, began on day one of their settling in Canada. When I had first thought of the project that has become Ghosts in a Photograph , it had been a century since all my grandparents had arrived in Canada. It was also some forty years since the publication in 1978 of my first book, All of Baba's Children .

That book had been written from the intense curiosity I felt -- in the era of official and popular multiculturalism, so enthusiastically embraced by Ukrainian Canadians -- about the life experiences of my parents' generation, the first born in Canada. As for the immigrant settler generation represented by my grandparents, they had been reduced to the stultifying pieties of stories of "pioneers" as assembled by grateful descendants in Canada, and dismissed by me as of little interest. Now, however, informed by my own history, literary and personal, that ranged over issues of feminism, the New Left in Canada and Eastern Europe, the dissident movement of artists and intellectuals in Soviet Ukraine, Slavic roots in Byzantium, narratives of violent Indigenous and settler conflict in Western Canada -- I was eager to look again from multiple perspectives at the lives of my grandparents, be they farmers or child-bearers, members of a local intelligentsia or working-class menials, socialists or the pious unlettered. It all began with a photograph and the revelation (better late than never) that my grandparents, all of who had emigrated as adults, had had a life in the villages of Galicia before their momentous leave-taking for Canada. And in those villages their lives had intertwined with family members and relatives of whom I had little or no inkling. An exception was the small family of my maternal Baba with whom she had been corresponding since the early 1960s, but even so there were gaps, sensationally so.