I’LL FIND YOU, UKRAINE

Good morning, Gorgeous’. How is your week going? Mine is very good except for obvious news events that plunge us further into cruel stupidity, but I hold Zelenskyy in even higher regard than I did before. Those idiots crumbled around him. But enough about that. 

How does it feel to be Ukrainian with no Ukraine? Like me, I suppose? Lot’s of Americans Gen X and older have immigrant parents and/or grandparents who came from elsewhere, then immediately decided “We are Americans now” and stopped teaching their language and their cultural specifics to their children, and not because America was welcoming and they felt embraced and newly patriotic, it was quite the opposite. Americans viewed foreigners with suspicion and often hostility, especially Eastern Europeans because we were likely “commies.” (It’s funny that Slavs are called “Eastern Europeans” as we have never been part of Europe. Why not just call us “The Other White People,” which we are also not…) My family learned nothing save the words for “grandma”, “grandpa” and “dog” in their own language. They learned to farm, but never taught that either. We were ghost people. Not talking about the unspeakable things that pushed us to the United States. I still don’t know why we came. I only know that whatever it was, it was awful. So awful it fumed out of tired cracks like brutal, vaporous monsters in the dark and drank a lot. “Ukraine” was a wormhole to someplace really, really dark. 

But it turned out the “dark” place wasn’t Ukraine at all, but Saratov, Russia. Being Ukrainian in Russia is never fun as I understand it. I have no idea why my family was in Saratov either. I took Russian in school and could read it ok. I remember reading something in Russian (that I couldn’t understand) on our immigration documents to my uncle Bill so he could translate for me. He couldn’t read it, but could speak it, and couldn’t speak it but could read; we were a translating machine made of popsicle sticks and tape. I remember Bill saying to me, a little sadly, “I only speak fake Russian,” not even saying the word “Ukrainian” like it wasn’t even good enough or worth it to say. It made me sad too. My grandparents came to the US right around WW1 and there were literally no other Ukrainians where they lived in Washington State. They were completely isolated and to make matters worse, my grandfather and his siblings all hated each other. They all took the same “American” surname but each spelled it differently. Bizarre. 

My uncle Bill is long gone and there is no one to ask anymore. Not that any of the original folks would answer. They absolutely wouldn’t. They committed cultural suicide. They killed us. They were ghosts. I am part ghost. When you are born of ghosts how do you find your ancestors? I’m not talking about DNA tests or genealogy websites. I can’t find my family by our last name, it is Shevchenko, which means “shoe maker” which is basically the same as having the name Smith, Lee or Garcia. The most common of names. There is a sea of Shevchenkos out there. I can’t even claim to be related to the Ukrainian national hero, Taras Shevchenko, who was a poet and a painter, as there are so many. If you can’t find your family, how do you feel your people? How are you made of them? Thousands of years of cultural development gone in one single generation. My grandparents killed us before Americans could do it to us. For what? Our safety or pride? For shame? I’ll never know.

At least I have homemade borscht and can read the language. I guess that’s not nothing, but I do feel unrooted and restless inside. Incomplete somehow. I don’t want to do things that are performative or less than my authentic self so I keep looking for my ancestors inside. But where do I find Baba Yaga on this continent? Maybe she’s me?

Taras Shevchenko in his wooliest of outfits and likely most “aromatic” of mustaches.