Author: Marsha

I was recently interviewed by the wonderful Bill Graveland, National Correspondent with the Canadian Press. He wrote this story, and it has been published in newspapers across the country:

http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/first-world-war-internment-camps-a-difficult-scar-for-canadian-ukrainians-1.939742#commentsForm-321428

Iryna Korpan’s exceptional documentary film, She Paid The Ultimate Price” was picked by two Toronto Film Festivals for public screening:

Sept.7 at 6pm at Toronto Underground Cinema on 186 Spadina Ave. .
Also you can join me on Sept.23 at 5:30 pm at Rainbow Cinema on
80 Front St.East .

Additional information about festivals can be found on http://www.film-fest.ca and http://www.commfest.com.

Here’s a preview. The documentary is about her own Ukrainian grandmother who was executed for hiding Jews during WWII:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoUedhtf6kE

August 23 is Black Ribbon Day — to commemorate the August 23, 1939 pact between Hitler and Stalin to divide up Eastern Europe. Their collaboration continued for the first two years of WWII. These two tyrants caused the deaths of 14 million Eastern European civilians (Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, the people of the Baltics). Armed forces casualties added many more millions to the death toll.

It is a surreal experience, reading an academic’s take on a novel one has written. This popped up in my google alert today:

http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/9829/1/aulanowicz.pdf

Scroll to page 58. It’s a fascinating dissection. My favourite line? The Hunger is not necessarily a good novel but it’s an important one.

Here’s the article.

And here’s what they say about Last Airlift:

As Saigon was falling to the North Vietnamese in April 1975, those who were caring for babies and children orphaned by the war worried about the fate of their charges. A series of evacuation flights called “Operation Babylift” carried several thousand young children to other countries around the world. Skrypuch tells the story of the last Canadian airlift through the memories of one child, Son Thi Anh Tuyet. Nearly 8 years old, the sad-eyed girl on the cover had lived nearly all her life in a Catholic orphanage. With no warning, she and a number of the institution babies were taken away, placed on an airplane and flown to a new world. Tuyet’s memories provide poignant, specific details. The nuns expected her to be useful; she helped with the babies. Naturally, she assumed that John and Dorothy Morris had chosen her to help with their three children; instead, she had acquired a family. Tuyet’s experience is the author’s focus. It personalizes the babylift without sensationalizing it. Immediate and compelling, this moving refugee story deserves a wide audience. (Nonfiction. 10-15)

This is an interesting academic article on my three Armenian Genocide novels, The Hunger, Nobody’s Child, and Daughter of War.