A House Full of Strangers
Ukrainian immigrants traveled to Winnipeg, Manitoba in search of better lives in the 1930s and 1940s, often living in and running boarding houses to supplement their meager incomes. Stevan, who grew up in such a home, shares detailed slice-of-life stories drawn from her own experience.
The fifteen stories stand alone, capturing the authentic experience of immigrants for whom even moving across town meant encountering new prejudices. Sorrow, illness, and bias challenge newcomers, who scrape by on whatever work they can find, even selling homebrew.
In “Something in the Blood,” illness strikes Nick Melnyk, forcing his wife, Irene, and their two sons to leave Quebec and return to her mother’s boarding house to survive. Trials, hospital stays, and mounting debt test the family’s bond. When a doctor diagnoses leukemia, Irene’s mother recommends leeches to draw the cancer from his blood. Through months of treatments and transfusions, the family holds together, not knowing if he’ll recover.
In “The Promise,” an old man named Gerald finds himself rejuvenated when a young girl asks him to buy a ticket to her show. When he says he can’t attend, she offers him a ride from her parents. Gerald cleans up his act and waits: a bittersweet story of a lonely man in a houseful of strangers.
A handful of characters – Anna, Michael, Zoya, Baba, and Judy – recur across stories, though their threads aren’t always easy to follow. Anna interferes in her tenants’ lives, especially young women she fears are straying from a righteous path; her concern often shades into nosiness. Kindness and abuse sit side by side throughout.
The era’s misogyny, upheld by men and women alike, comes through starkly; men’s entitlement toward women boarders is repulsive precisely because it’s true. More dialogue and less exposition would help, and shifting timelines, settings, and points of view sometimes make the collection challenging to track. Still, it’s a compelling historical portrait that could benefit from one more editing pass.
