When I found this book in the Amazon book store, I wondered if it was yet another autobiography by an English professor in a publish or perish bind at an obscure college, a New York off-off broadway author, or a BOBO with bucks restoring a mansion somewhere. WOW! what a pleasant surprise! HONEY AND ASHES by Canadian Janice Kulyk Keefer is as powerful as A BRIDGE ON THE DRINA, A WOMAN IN AMBER, SHATTERED SELVES, OR THE HAUNTED LAND. Don't they give out awards in Canada?

Kulyk-Keefer is Canadian of Ukrainian-Polish descent. (Keefer is her husband's last name.) She says the feeling of never "fitting in" with her Anglo-Canadian neighbors and classmates as a child inspired her as an adult to search out her own roots, thinking this might point her toward her "real" identity and her "real" home.

As part of the effort to constuct her "real" identity, she traces the geneology of her family, interviews the surviving members and others who knew them, and undertakes a difficult journey to the village of her mother's birth in the Ukraine. Since her father was of Polish descent, she visits her last known relatives in Poland on her way back from her mother's village. This may all sound fairly straightforward, but I have seldom seen such elegant and beautiful prose coupled with such tenacious research. The result is the resolution of a personal mystery, or at the least, the beginning of knowledge.

Anyone who has ever poured over old letters; dug through photo albums and other family treasures; searched Census, administrative, and other records; struggled with bureacrats to travel to a remote location will appreciate Ms. Keefer's efforts. She is a student of the history of her parent's bloody homeland. She is the ethnographer who waits with great patience while an old woman recalls with extreme pain and difficulty the day the Nazis shot many of her relatives, and the day the Russians collected the rest and sent them to the Gulag. She is the scholar pouring over old mouldering papers and notes in the archives. And above all, she is the poet who casts her story into a tale laden with rich metaphor....

"Are we, in the end only what we can remember? Or, are we also all that lies deep inside us, stored in the niches of a long, dark corridor whose door we shut behind us long ago? The painfulness of remembering--the physical process of recall. How we speak of triggering memory, as if it were a loaded gun."

Janice Kulyk Keefer explores her duel heritage as she is a Canadian by birth and a Ukrainian-Pole by blood. Keefer struggles to find a sense of belonging between these two very different worlds which act as threads that intertwine, weaving her identity. Keefer lyrically captures her memories and experiences while reflecting on her past in a manner that touches the reader for all time. A statement from the novel that has lingered in my mind is: "Belonging-a word that's both an outstretched hand and a fist clenched round your heart, a fist that won't let go." A truly magnificent read!