Elaine Shein is Managing Editor of the Western Producer.
Gathered around a fuzzy television screen a couple of Christmases ago, my family watched several hours of videos. They weren’t the usual rental-action-thriller or laugh-a-minute home-video type.
Instead we were treated to educational, emotional ties with our ancestors’ homeland. Some relatives had taped scenes of life from Ukraine during a visit there.
Here was the 350-year-old wooden church where my grandfather attended mass as a young man.
In this yard stood the small white-washed house where my great-grandmother was born.
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This village with its clucking chickens, barking dogs, and storks nesting on power poles was the birthplace of my relatives for several generations.
Several hours were devoted to introducing relatives, showing their homes and allowing them to share their lives with us; gathering family and friends for meals, sharing their patriotic songs, or presenting long monologues on “the hard life” of Ukrainians.
The opening up of Poland, and later the former Soviet Union, encouraged new ties to be made between our Canadian relatives and those still within Eastern Europe.
Phone calls and personal contact is now possible. In recent years, I have had Ukrainian and Polish relatives appear and suddenly become part of our lives.
By phone they told us of their daily life: they had no fuel for transportation or home; buses weren’t running; and power was on for only six hours daily in winter.
Most importantly, in a country trained to queue everywhere to purchase goods, there was no food to line up for.
The irony is that the Ukrainians have always been a people linked to the land and food production.
The settlers who came to the Canadian prairies tore up the prairie grasses, cleared the bush and sowed the seed they brought with them.
Has life changed much for my rural relatives in Ukraine? The video showed the people who worked on collective farms but also were able to own some of their own land. It varied from one to maybe four acres.
The small farms were heavily diversified. They included dairy cows, pigs, chickens, rabbits (for meat and fur), geese, corn, potatoes and grapes. Some even had roses or other flowers they grew to sell at the markets.
The farmers used any way they could to have their land support them or to earn money to survive.
When my ancestors came over, they lost track of relatives and neighbors. Instead, they concentrated on farming here with the methods they learned from the old country and adapted to meet the challenges of Canada’s environment.
Thanks to them, many of us are here today. Whether we’re still on the farm or living in the city, most of us are comfortably surviving with shelter, clothes and an endless selection of food.
Perhaps we are beginning to realize and appreciate the sacrifices made by our ancestors two or three generations ago.
And thanks to these videos, I finally feel I understand better my grandparents, great-grandparents and other relatives who came from Eastern Europe a half century or more ago.
