Politics and picture books make uneasy bedfellows and Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch in Silver Threads has not altogether succeeded in compressing the complexities of history into a brief story for young children. She does successfully create a sense of the love and mutual dependence of a young Ukrainian peasant couple, Anna and Ivan, who leave the old country to clear and farm a homestead on the Canadian prairie. Silver Threads shows how the partnership of husband and wife provides the companionship and the co-operative labour that enabled settlers like Anna and Ivan to overcome hardship and thrive in the new country. “‘It takes two of us,’ Ivan would say, ‘one to push the plough and one to pull.’” Michael Martchenko’s attractive illustrations, which delight in the beauties of Ukrainian embroidery and costume, also emphasize the equality and partnership of the couple.

The silver threads of the title refer to the web of a little spider that Anna and Ivan welcome as a lucky sign in their old home, on the immigrant ship, and in their new prairie homestead. At the climax of the book, the spider miraculously covers a bare Christmas tree with glistening threads, which help to guide Ivan home when he is lost in the dark. Except in Charlotte’s Web, spiders don’t fare well in fiction, so their helpful role in this story is a pleasant change. The story ends warmly, with the reunion of the couple and the reaffirmation of their will to make a life in the new country.

Drawing on her own family history, Skrypuch reveals how the Ukrainians, who were encouraged to bring their farming skills to Canada in the early years of this century, were not treated so appreciatively when World War I broke out. Because their former homeland had been annexed to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, people like Ivan were considered by Canadian officials to be “enemy aliens” and sent to internment camps. Like the internment of Japanese Canadians in World War II, this treatment of Ukrainian immigrants is a real blot on Canadian history. The irony that Ivan is arrested as an enemy when he goes to enlist to fight for Canada (against the “foreign emperor” who had annexed his old homeland) is particularly poignant.

To compress the inevitably complicated issues of policy and motivation during another period in history into a simple text, however, is to invite distortion. The tyranny of the foreign emperor who “steals” their country, and the injustice of the Canadian officials’ suspicion of Ivan, make a stirring story, but different stories lie in the assumptions that Canada had plenty of empty land waiting for anyone brave enough to claim it, and that the removal of the thousands of trees that covered the homestead was a good thing. The indigenous people of Canada have quite a different perspective on these issues. And while the tale of Anna and Ivan is dramatic, convincing, and quite well told, the historical note appended to it is problematic. Using such loaded words as “lured” and “concentration camps” implies that Canada treated the Ukrainians as the Nazis did the Jews and gypsies, and adds a tone of grievance ill-suited to the picture book medium.