Prescriptive Remembrance of Ukrainian Canadian History in Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s Second World War Trilogies

The differences between the Soviet and Ukrainian versions of history have been at the center of diasporic historiography, yet only recently have they begun appearing in Anglophone children’s literature. Most North American children’s and YA books set in Second World War Eastern Europe tend to show Ukraine as just an extension of Russia and pay no attention to the distinctiveness of Ukrainian culture and history. However, this approach has been challenged by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch, a bestselling and award-winning Ukrainian Canadian author of historical fiction, who for more than twenty-five years has been introducing previously ignored topics to Canadian children’s literature. This article argues that what Skrypuch does in her Ukrainian-themed texts can be described as “encouraged commemoration” or “prescriptive remembrance” of Ukrainian history and collective memory. Reading Skrypuch’s two Second World War trilogies, the author of this essay studies how the novels address the tensions between individual and collective forgetting and recollection of the traumatic experiences of Ukrainian children who have fallen victim to both the Nazis and the Soviets.