Dynamic ethnicity and transcultural dialogue: A study of selected Central and Eastern European -Canadian fiction

Central and Eastern European-Canadians have become an invisible minority in the discussions surrounding multiculturalism, diaspora, ethnicity and race within Canada. This study makes visible Central and Eastern European-Canadian ethnicities, as imagined by Central and Eastern European-Canadians themselves, and demonstrates that they are still very much alive, diverse, and dynamically evolving through cross-cultural interactions. Grounding Central and Eastern European-Canadian ethnicities in the socio-historical context in which they are performed, this chronological overview of Central and Eastern European-Canadian fiction establishes an early preoccupation with creating a space of dialogue, a preoccupation that becomes central to more recent texts.;The Central and Eastern European-Canadian fiction analyzed envisions transcultural dialogue among minority and majority ethnicities in order to construct a dynamic ethnicity in the space between what state multiculturalism encourages, what the other sees, and what the self desires. These texts demonstrate how, in the dialogue with the nation of Canada, with other nations and with other ethnic groups, ethnic subjects rewrite themselves, thus playing an active part in defining their dynamic ethnicity not only on the basis of difference from the 'other' but also in conversation with the 'other.'.;The writers under consideration are hyphenated Canadians of various cultural heritages: they are Czech- (Jan Drabek), Hungarian- (John Marlyn, Gabriel Szohner, Stephen Vizinczey, Tamas Dobozy), Russian-Jewish- (David Bezmozgis), Hungarian-Jewish- (Judith Kalman), Polish- (Eva Stachniak), Romanian- (Kenneth Radu), and Ukrainian-Canadians (Vera Lysenko, Maara Haas, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Lisa Grekul, Marusya Bociurkiw). All of them write a kind of Central or Eastern European ethnicity into their narratives, and set that ethnicity in dialogue with others. They imagine ethnicities that engage with and respond to constructions of Central or Eastern Europeans which exist or have existed in the Canadian imaginary, which is why this study reads Central and Eastern European-Canadian fiction in dialogue with ethnic majority Canadian writing, such as Sinclair Ross's As for Me and My House, Gabrielle Roy's The Tin Flute, Street of Riches and Where Nests the Water Hen, Robert Kroetsch's But We Are Exiles and Margaret Atwood's Wilderness Tips.