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C4 THE OAKVILLE BEAVER Wednesday, July 4, 2001 Sheridan prof helps readers walk in global shoes By Carol Baldwin ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR E va S ta ch n ia k w ish es n eig h b o u rs co u ld w alk in each o th er's sh o es, ex p erien ce th in gs th rou gh each o th e r 's eyes. T h at is th e on ly w ay th ey w ill ev e r g e t to really kn ow one an other, sh e says. However, since that is impossible, the Sheri dan College professor has done the next best thing. She has written a book about her native Poland - a love story that will help its readers walk in the shoes of their global neighbours who have lived under and after communist rule. "I really think the novel should be of interest to Canadians because people who come and live among us here, come with their stories. And their stories need to be known," she explains. "Cultur al communication is reading about the lives of immigrants who look at our society from the out side, and also, who learn our values and go back to the countries they came from and look at them through our eyes - Canadian eyes." Stachniak was fortunate enough to come to Canada 20 years ago - "just three months before the declaration of martial law and the crackdown on solidarity in Poland. It was a very difficult time in Poland, and a lot of people came to Cana da," she says, explaining that she came to her new country on a government of Canada grant to complete her doctoral thesis at McGill Universi ty. However, in retaliation against the Polish gov ernment, Canada withdrew that particular grant the following year but did allow Stachniak to apply for landed immigrant status if she wanted to stay, which she did. Since she had studied English as a child and lived in London, England for a year, her language skills were better than the average immigrant. And about six months after her arrival, her hus band and son left Poland and joined her in Mon treal, where she finished her doctorate and worked for the Polish section of Radio Canada International. Later she and her family moved to Toronto, where Stachniak got a job at Sheridan College teaching English, inter-cultural communications and business communications. In fact, she even developed some links between Sheridan College and a private college in Poland, where she and three other instructors gave summer workshops to students in 1991. Six Sheridan business students also took advantage of that link, visiting Poland on a co-op placement a few years later. "They had a wonderful experience. They saw the economy change before their eyes. They net worked, traveled all over Poland," she says. "Then we hosted a group of Polish students at Sheridan a year later." Stachniak's recently-completed first novel, Necessary Lies , focuses on Breslau, her home town - a town that was part of Germany before Stalin gave it to the Polish. "I was bom in a city that was, until 1945, a German city. My neigh- Photo by Riziero Vertolli Eva Stachniak, a professor at Sheridan College, has written her first book based on her own Polish heritage and Canadian experience. The new author says her book, Necessary Lies, is a love story involving mystery, betrayal and lies. It is available in most bookstores, including the one at Sheridan College, as well as online. bour, across the street (in Canada) also grew up in Breslau," she says, explaining that, since her neighbour grew up in the town when it was Ger man, the two women have entirely different per spectives on the same community. "That's where the main idea for the novel came from - a love story between a woman of Polish origin coming from Breslau and falling in love with a Canadian who was bom in (the Ger man) Breslau...W hen I started thinking about it, I knew it w asn't a short story. It was clearly a novel." And although it is a love story, Stachniak says it is also about the heroine's trip back to post communist Poland, where she had been married to another man years before. "Her Canadian husband was not terribly faith ful to her. So there is a triangle there; and there is a mystery," says Stachniak, admitting that some of the experiences that Anna, her heroine, encounters on returning to Poland mirror the author's own experiences when she went back after the communist regime crumbled. "It's a novel about how difficult it is to free yourself from the historical burden, in Europe especially...the tragic history and how it carries over here. You still can't escape what happened to your family," she explains. "It's very much a novel about forgiveness, reconciliation and acceptance. There's a lot of betrayal, a lot of lies - many of them quite necessary. Hence the title." Necessary Lies is available in most book stores as well as on the Internet at Chapters.ca and Amazon.com. For a taste of the story, you can read an excerpt at www.sheridanc.on.ca/ -stachnia/. The author's second novel is already in the making. Only this one will take place in the 19th century. "It is also a cross-cultural story. It will concern the Polish and the French connec tion...The same theme of having to leave. And there will be a very strong love component," she explains, adding that some archival research actually provided her with a few colourful char acters for that historical novel. 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