An Emotional Passage into Intergenerational Storylines: Creative-Critical Reflections on Antonakos Boswell’s Inheritance Antonakos Boswell, Angeline. Inheritance: An Intergenerational Story of Greek-Canadian Success. Self-published: Angeline Antonakos Boswell, 2020, 166 pages https://inheritancegraphicnovel.wordpress.com/

The immigration story carved out by Antonakos Boswell within Inheritance (2020) is one that many Canadian families of settler origins will be able to appreciate. Most of them, I would wager, have pondered over the intimate circumstances and troubles around how their families immigrated to Canada as fourth-to-third generation settlers. These stories as a living, oral archive may be rudimentary, distant, and unclear to their members and familial networks, but they run deep with potency as Antonakos Boswell (2020: 105) demonstrates in reminding the ethnography’s reader of their ramifications from one generation to the next. And, in briefly pausing between the pages, I could not help but wonder if one of my own familial lineages—those exiled from Russia as Doukhobors and who painfully found their way into Canada—followed a similar pattern of capital accumulation priorities: such that, my ancestors, like many other settler-immigrant families, struggled through each successive generational transition by stockpiling wealth (security), then education, and finally emotional well-being if they were lucky enough to make it big or simply break even in Canada. And, pausing further within that line of flight, I surrender to thoughts of how much first-generation immigrants have sacrificed through their unfathomable work efforts, energies, and magnanimous souls and will continue to do so in pursuing an unfathomable level of hope and moxie for a better life. Antonakos Boswell traces and illustrates her family’s migration from Greece to Canada, where her autoethnographic fieldwork takes place in Ottawa as it unravels these movements via a mix of oral life histories, familial interviews, and visual research-creation methodologies. The text, Inheritance, is divided into twelve sections, 166 pages, that speak to three generations of Greek-Canadian settlers. It starts with the Antonakos line as Angelo—affectionately referred to as Pappou or “grandfather” throughout the text—embarks to Eastern Canada at the behest of his new wife and falls into the heavy rigours of the restaurant and hospitality industry. Later, as the story evolves, we discover how Angelo, after an initial failed immigration attempt labouring in Montreal, manages to return from Greece and open his own diner and bar in Spencerville, Ontario (near Prescott, the US-Canadian border, and Montreal). This juncture, Angelo’s story, becomes the first point of entry for Antonakos Boswell’s fieldwork, which grew from a senior-level Anthropology of Work course offered by Dr. Larisa Kurtović at the University of Ottawa. Inheritance tracks the effects of this immigration on Antonakos Boswell’s mother and herself in sussing out relevant intergenerational patterns and ways of being that Angelo unwittingly and intentionally passed on to them. And, while Antonakos Boswell’s research and fieldwork begin with questions centred on economic concerns, the exploratory (and unravelling) processes of her anthropological encounters and arts-based expressions delicately realign and hyper-attune this attention onto psychological and intergenerational foci. This expansion of how Antonakos Boswell learns to (re)define “success” leaves the reader holistically and emotionally enriched as each comes to grasp the shifting context from which a successful life emerges. The pivotal impression that I wish to transfer upon potential readers of Inheritance—within this brief creative-critical reflection—is that it imaginatively succeeds in re-positioning the ambiguous, even somewhat nebulous, term of what is intergenerational within anthropology from the purely theoretical domain of print analysis to something pleasantly palpable, storied, and sensed throughout the passages of this text. It illuminates the journey of what “kind of life you leave for others to pick up from… What direction you moved the stream towards… What you built for those who will come after you” (Antonakos Boswell 2020: 14). That is, Inheritance excels as a pedagogical example and tool for getting into those …