My Dead Parents

by Anya Yurchyshyn

  After getting married, they settled in Rai, where Dymtro managed forested land owned by a Ukrainian cardinal, and Irene taught grade school. My father was born at home, and my grandmother returned to work soon after his birth. Dymtro made enough money that the family was comfortable on his salary alone, but Irene enjoyed working and refused to give up her job. “She just wasn’t the stay-at-home type,” Lana said. In between classes, she ran back to their house to breastfeed.

  Rai was quiet and woodsy, beautiful enough that a Polish count had one of his estates there. Surrounding his large villa was a park; one of the few photographs I found of my father as a small child shows him playing in front of the estate’s sculpted pool as my grandmother watches, looking happy and relaxed. It’s impossible to know if she was aware of the chaos that was coming.

  As World War II closed in, an underground movement of Ukrainians tried to take advantage of the anxiety it was causing to weaken Poland’s hold over them with violence, kidnapping, and murders. Factions of Polish nationalists who were determined to maintain control over the region retaliated with the same tactics. “There was a lot of Polish-Ukrainian stuff going on during that time,” Lana said, “and it was very, very ugly.” The Germans arrived, as well as the Russians; different wars on different scales. Everyone was trying to survive. Some went after people or groups they perceived as threats, others aligned themselves with those they thought would protect them, but who and what was safe kept changing.

  One evening, my grandfather learned that his family had appeared on a “Polish list,” a list of Ukrainians whom the Poles intended to murder. “You’d better get out,” a coworker told him, “because if you don’t, they’re going to kill you.” Lana didn’t know if her family had been targeted simply because they were Ukrainian or because they were incorrectly perceived to be a part of the independence movement. While independence was my grandparents’ great hope, along with peace, they weren’t actively fighting for it.

  My grandparents packed up what they could and threw it into their cart. They were supposed to leave that night with another family who’d found out they were on the same list. Just before they set out, my grandfather changed his mind. “He had a premonition or something,” Lana said. “It spooked him enough that he risked staying until morning.” A few hours after leaving the next day, they came across the bodies of the other family on a riverbank. They had been shot.

  My father’s family traveled through Poland, trying to avoid attention and sleeping wherever they could. At some point, my grandparents had to split up; my grandfather got on one train, and my grandmother and father got on another. My grandmother was horrified to discover they’d be sharing a car with Polish women who said things like, “If I come across a Ukrainian, I’ll slit his throat!”

  “Babtsia was terrified. Your father was very talkative, and she knew she couldn’t control him. She told me she kept whispering, ‘You cannot talk, you cannot talk,’ because he spoke Ukrainian. It was one of the few times that my mother ever admitted to being afraid.

  “There were a lot of stories of my parents trying to reconnect,” Lana continued. “It was very haphazard. One time they were on a military train, maybe in Slovakia, and there was a bombing; your father and Babtsia had to hide under the table. They stayed in different places along their journey if my father could get some kind of work. One story I remember was that my father and a friend would buy sugar and then sell it at an inflated price. My mother always hoarded sugar.” She laughed. “Maybe that’s why.”

  They settled in Austria for a few years while they figured out where they could go next. That was where my father started school and Lana was born. My grandparents had wanted to go back to Ukraine, even if it was in ashes, but discovered they couldn’t. There were rumors that when people returned, the Russians labeled them traitors and sent them off to the gulags.

  They wanted to leave Europe and were willing to go almost anywhere. They could have followed other Ukrainians to Brazil or Argentina, but in 1948, they received the necessary sponsorship from friends of friends of friends who’d settled in New York. They sailed to America and moved to Manhattan’s East Village, a fist of Ukrainian immigrants that offered their language and food, churches and schools, manners and memories.

  I thought of what my father would have remembered of Ukraine and Europe, having left the first at four and the second at eight. Mostly images and emotions that didn’t belong to clear events. Flashes of fear, his own and his parents’; panic and destruction. He’d have padded those fragments with the stories his parents told him and Lana, stories that were repeated until their children could claim ownership of them as well. This is what happened to us. What he didn’t remember was remembered for him. They weren’t the dead bodies—those of the family they didn’t leave with—but they could have been.

  After two years in New York, my grandfather’s English had improved enough that he could get a job in his old field. He didn’t want his family to suffocate in a tiny apartment, and he missed trees. He looked for jobs where there were forests, found one at a mining company in Minnesota, and moved his family to the closest town. That job led to others, and to other towns throughout the state, and soon he retrained himself to be a mining engineer. My grandmother hoped to become a nurse and worked as a nurse’s assistant wherever they lived, but after a number of years she had to quit because she developed back problems. They didn’t have a lot of money, but they had enough.

  Although they were continually uprooted, the one steadying center in my father and aunt’s lives was their Ukrainian identity. They were taught to read and write Ukrainian, the language spoken at home, regardless of where “home” was.

  My grandmother told her children that everything they said or did was a reflection of Ukrainians in America. They always had to look nice and neat, behave like the cultured Europeans they were, and, of course, do well in school. But my grandmother’s strong opinions and impulses were often conflicting. She insisted that her children be models of decorum, but said it was equally important that they think for themselves and be independent. She wanted her kids to be individuals, yet constantly reminded them that they were already a part of a very defined whole.

  In Hibbing, there was only a smattering of Ukrainians, people who were too old for my grandparents to befriend and who didn’t have kids their children’s age. This meant my grandparents had to work extra hard to reinforce their heritage. They spoke often about Ukraine and the life and family they’d left behind, and subscribed to Ukrainian American newspapers. They talked politics and dissected events taking place in Russia or Hungary. My father began participating in these talks after he joined the debate team in middle school. Conversations about Communism and the state of Eastern Europe started before dinner and continued after coffee, and they were often heated. Aunt Lana explained that my father enjoyed pushing against his parents’ ideas, even when he agreed with them. “He wouldn’t get riled up, but they would get riled up, especially my mother. I think my parents respected how he acted, but also found it annoying.” She sighed. “They weren’t really arguing, but it all sounded like an argument to me. I hated it.”

  When I asked Lana what my father was like in middle school and high school, she said she didn’t really know. “He was six years older than me, so I didn’t pay too much attention to him. He was always busy with homework and activities. Of course he was always getting awards and honors.” Though she was a strong student as well, I got the impression their parents considered my father the star.

  “Did he have friends?”

  “What?” She laughed. “Of course he had friends. When he wasn’t doing schoolwork, he was practicing with the school band and the debate team. He was always hanging out with people.”

  I thought of him being pulled forward in school and backward at home. He was told to remember who he was while being pushed to become something more; to master being two things at onc
e, belong twice. He hadn’t just survived; he’d excelled. He spoke Ukrainian, started school in German, then went to school in English and was president of his class. Moving so often hadn’t held him back. If anything, it taught him how to adapt and thrive anywhere. The qualities of his that I’d envied may not have been innate. Perhaps he’d had to fight to become the person he was.

  I asked Lana if she knew about the speech my father gave in high school. When she shook her head, I told her about my conversation with Donna. She looked at me in amazement. “I didn’t know about any of this.”

  I didn’t confess that my father’s willingness to share so much with people he didn’t know, but not with his children, had begun to bother me. I couldn’t deny that I’d never been interested in his life before, but it felt strange to have to go to Lana for my father’s story, for my family’s story. I felt that I was asking to be a part of something he’d wanted, or needed, to keep for himself.

  His approach had been so different than that of his parents, and of Lana. Babtsia and Dymtro ensured that Ukraine stayed vivid for their children and reminded them who they were, and Lana had done the same for her kids. When I asked her about her choice, she said it was somewhat accidental. She’d never thought about raising her children to speak Ukrainian because she’d never really thought about having them. She’d married a Ukrainian, but only because she’d fallen in love with one, and together she and my uncle decided to keep their heritage alive by sharing it with their children. Their Ukrainianness was the result of circumstances my father hadn’t chosen.

  Maybe my father thought his story wasn’t relevant to his daughters. It hadn’t seemed relevant when he occasionally spoke of it. If I’d been asked, I would have said I was happy that my father didn’t make me listen to his stories. But now I wished he’d told me so much more. I couldn’t think of anything that might excuse the way he’d treated me, but I could imagine why he was so quick to grow frustrated with me. He’d had far more disadvantages and was able to do well in spite of them. He may have perceived my disabilities and behavior as weakness. Perhaps he thought he could make me tougher, and refused to accept that his methods didn’t work. My character was too different, my enemy, somehow more terrifying.

  My grandparents were the primary source of my father’s connection to his background, which meant he was able to develop an American identity separate from theirs, but not a Ukrainian one. That changed when he moved to Baltimore to attend Johns Hopkins, where he became friends with Natasha, who was from the area. She told me that my father really honed his Ukrainian identity during college. A bunch of people their age—some who were from Baltimore, some who’d come there for school—formed a group that was part of the Federation of Ukrainian Students Organization of America, and my father was elected head. They held talks and dances, and attended conferences in Chicago and Toronto.

  After not seeing him for decades, I reconnected with my father’s friend Ruslan at his office in the East Village, a few blocks from my grandparents’ first apartment. Ruslan was a frequent guest at our house when I was growing up. He and my father saw each other periodically during their childhood in Minnesota and reconnected when my father was at Johns Hopkins and Ruslan was visiting friends in Baltimore. A few years later, they were in Chicago at the same time, while my father was in graduate school, and Ruslan had helped him integrate into the local Ukrainian community. They were together again soon afterward in Boston, where they worked with a group of academics and Ukrainian professionals to establish the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. When he and my father weren’t talking politics and working through the extensive beer list at their favorite German restaurant, they were talking politics at our house over my father’s smothered pork chops. I loved having Ruslan over, though he smoked a stinky pipe, because he was gregarious and let me climb all over him and tug on the cuffs of his suit’s brown pants.

  After we embraced, I stepped back and saw that he hadn’t changed much. His eyes were still wild behind his large glasses, his hands and arms still emphatic accompaniments to every sentence he spoke. Seeing him made me remember how much time I’d spent with him when I was young and how much I’d enjoyed it.

  Ruslan did educational work with Ukrainian American youth. His office, which he shared with people who also worked within the local diaspora and immigrant community, was empty of people but full of their work. Chaotic stacks of books and files teetered on mismatched desks and chairs. He cleared off a chair for me and placed it across from his own.

  He spoke for hours about my father, growing more excited as time passed, as if he were continually recharged by his own florid speech. While Lana had spoken carefully, Ruslan presided over our conversation like a raconteur. Memories and thoughts flew from his mouth with authority and force.

  He started by saying that my father “marched to the beat of a different drummer” and did what he wanted without apology. He was driven by a need to succeed as well as a stubborn independence, which was why he changed his major from premed to business, disregarded his parents’ objections to marrying my mother, and worked in “strange” countries. “Your father wanted to be a man who made a difference,” Ruslan told me, “to change the world.” Specifically, he said, my father wanted to change the world by contributing to the destruction of the Soviet Union.

  I laughed, but when Ruslan frowned, I composed myself. I conceded that yes, my father seemed to hate Russia because of how it had treated Ukraine, but any hope of personally destroying the country was probably a fantasy. I told Ruslan I’d referred to myself as “Russian” once when I was little and had to explain the origin of my name, and had received a long lecture about it. My father had repeated, “You are not Russian, you are Ukrainian!” for what felt like two days. I’d said I was Russian because most people didn’t know what Ukraine, or even “the Ukraine,” as it was often referred to then, was—but I didn’t tell that to my dad.

  I also said that Natasha admitted that when she and my dad were in Baltimore, members of their Ukrainian student group would destroy anything Russian that they found—flags, signs, posters. Their hatred of Russia was a given. Once, she told me, she’d torn down a small Russian flag and stuck it in a bucket of paint. However, I wasn’t aware of my father actually wanting, or doing, anything to destabilize Russia’s power at any point in his life; he’d chosen instead to strengthen Ukraine. Ruslan argued with me and said that in the eighties, my father had been a part of a secret scheme that sought to undermine Communism by privatizing Bulgarian fruit farms. When I laughed again and pushed him to substantiate this outrageous story with details, he quickly dropped it and moved on.

  My father didn’t like to talk nonsense, Ruslan said. He only spoke when he had something to say, and then, he spoke firmly and directly. “Your father had a dignitas about him, and he wouldn’t throw it away. He could not just talk to anyone at a party and go ‘Hee-hee-hee, ha-ha-ha.’ Some people have a rich internal life that they can’t always project, and your father was one of them.” Ruslan held up a finger to make sure he had my attention. “He had a secret garden inside. His soul was his garden. And this garden was where he was at home. He closed one door and opened another up.”

  I knew of such places. I’d searched for one in the junk room, and when I didn’t find it there, I created one inside my head. My father was the reason I’d needed a secret place. Was the frenetic nature of his childhood the reason he’d needed his? If he’d built it when he was a child, why did he still go there as an adult?

  Ruslan asked me if my sister and I spoke Ukrainian. I shook my head. “They sent my sister to a Ukrainian school for a little while, but she hated it so much that they gave up, which meant I never had to go. Sometimes he would try to teach me a few words from kid’s books, but I didn’t take it seriously enough for him.” I paused. “Now, of course, I wish I spoke it.”

  “Well, kids don’t learn language from books,” he said. “He sh
ould have known that.”

  “He could have tried harder, but he wasn’t really around a lot, and I wouldn’t have wanted him to. But it meant that only he was Ukrainian, not us. When he started working in Ukraine, all we could do was watch. Not that we wanted to join him.” I paused again, then said, “I’ve been wondering why he kept his pride and nationalism to himself, or for himself. I never knew it was as important to him as it was, and now that I do, I don’t understand why he didn’t share more of it with me.”

  We decided to grab a meal at a Ukrainian restaurant down the block once the light outside his office’s dirty window dimmed. As I gathered my belongings, I asked Ruslan if he thought it was possible that the car crash that killed my father wasn’t an accident. I’d waited until the end of our conversation to mention my father’s death because it seemed much less significant than his life.

  “Of course! He was murdered!” he bellowed. He waved his hand to indicate that the answer was a given, barely worth addressing.

  It wasn’t a given, not to me. Until I’d asked the question, I hadn’t taken it very seriously. I’d expected him to say no.

  After a moment, I said, “Why ‘of course’?”

  “When people wanted to follow up, everything disappeared! His car was gone. The van that hit them was gone. The driver was gone. There was nothing. No physical evidence, no crime scene.”

  It was the first time I’d heard anything about what happened immediately after my father died, details that broadened the picture surrounding what I’d viewed as an event isolated from motives and outcomes. I didn’t know if Ruslan’s statement was theory or fact, something he’d imagined or something he knew on good authority. I’d never looked into the crash myself. Doing so hadn’t ever occurred to me. A wave of shame about my ignorance, about my deep lack of knowledge, washed over me. I didn’t know what to think, so I smothered my reaction. “Later,” I told myself. “Later.”