Svoboda

Summary: Growing up in the 1950s Vasili knows that being a Doukhobor has altered how others see him. He has heard the immigrant slurs, and begins to understand that his life in the Kootenay-Boundary region of British Columbia is complicated by his past, and that the once visible symbols of his faith - the loaf of bread, the cellar of salt and the jug of water, and his parents' hymns and psalms do not hold the power they once did. The history of protests and imprisonments of earlier decades were lost memories to him, but the refusal of the Sons of Freedom to military registration and the building tensions of nude protests and arson in the '50s and '60s were not events that Vasili could ignore. As the Canadian government's show of force inflamed the tensions and the Sons of Freedom were arrested, imprisoned, and their children hunted by mounties and sent to residential schools, Vasili began to experience the wide gap between Canadian culture in the twentieth century and the values and aspirations of the Doukhobor people. In the explosive and shifting values of the 1960s, he learns what it takes to understand the culture of the pacifist and the imperative of the warrior. The story of Vasili, who walks in the shadow of the past and in the light of the future, marks this novel as a distinctive cultural read in a territory where few writers have gone before.

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