FINDING MY UKRAINIAN FAMILY

(This is a draft on an article published in Saga Magazine 2005)

As a child, I was too busy trying to adapt and fit in to give much thought to my Ukrainian roots. Besides, my parents always told me that they were the only survivors in our family; everyone who had stayed behind in Ukraine, they believed, must have perished in the war. So I thought of myself as a bit of human flotsam washed up on a faraway shore. And it wasn’t until my parents were getting old that I realised that they wouldn’t be around forever, and if I wanted to find out about where I had come from, then I had better get a move on.

My parents hadn’t talked to me about the difficulties of their lives; they had wanted to shield me, I suppose, from the awful things they had been through. But a couple of years before my mother died, I did talk to her, and recorded what she said on tape. That tape, I thought, would one day be the basis of a novel.

One of the wonderful things about writing, though, is that the idea you start out with is not necessarily the one that gets written. The characters have a way of taking over, and that’s what happened in my first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainaian. I had thought I would write something profound and sad about the ‘human condition’, and I ended up winning an award for comic fiction. Maybe the human condition is funnier than we think at the time.

But my mother’s story is in there, threaded in among all the other stories, and doing the background research for it on the internet, I found much more than I had ever thought would be possible. Late one night I came across a Russian family-search website (www.vgd.ru). I typed in my surname and my mother’s maiden name, sent it off, and forgot about it.

It wasn’t until a whole year later, when the book was well on its way to publication, that I found three mysterious letters in Cyrillic script in my email inbox. One of them was from someone in Israel who claimed to be related to an uncle of my grandmother. Hmm. A likely tale, I thought. I had forgotten all about the family search website. The other two seemed even more unlikely: one claimed to be from my father’s niece, the other from my mother’s sister. I thought this must be one of those internet scams where I would be asked to send huge sums of money to these putative relatives. But, just in case, I replied, with a couple of ‘trick’ questions, that only real relatives would know the answer to.

The letters that came back brought tears to my eyes. Not only did they answer the questions, but they sent a whole family tree. And there were photographs - they must have scanned them in – of my grandparents whom I had never met, of aunts, uncles, cousins – there are dozens of them over there! Photos of my parents as children and later as young adults.

How familiar and yet how different they looked, in their quaint 1930s-style clothes, their faces unlined, and laughing as though they had no idea what life would throw at them.

My parents in 1938

And alongside all the old sepia photographs, some colour snaps of my new Ukrainian family: my cousin Marina, who is the daughter of my father’s sister, now in her sixties and living in Moscow with her daughter and grandchildren. And my cousin Yuriy with his mother Oksana, who is aged 86 and still living in Luhansk. Oksana is my mother’s sister; they hadn’t seen each other since 1943. This summer, my daughter and I went over to visit them.

People ask: well, what were they like? Were you surprised? Actually, what surprised me was that, in spite of the war and the huge upheavals that split Europe and our family in two, we are all so alike.

My cousin Yuriy is six years younger than me, and, like-me, is a part-time lecturer in an academic institution. His mother Oksana, my new-found aunt, is seven years younger than my mother would have been, and is uncannily like my mother was when she died; it was wonderful but heartbreaking, as though my mother had suddenly come back to life, and was holding me in her arms and laughing and kissing me in a way that was the same, but subtly different . My daughter Sonia, now twenty-eight, is so like my mother was at that age that all the relatives fell on her with big hugs and cries of “Our blood! Our blood!” I think they were a bit disappointed in me – I look more like my father.

But although we have remained very alike as people, the great difference between me and my new Ukrainian family, which made me very sad to see, is how poor they are, and how hard their lives had been. Seeing the cramped conditions in Yuriy’s tiny one-bedroomed flat, which he shares with his partner Lyuda, a lawyer, made me realise how easily I take my roomy house and my holidays abroad for granted.

Aunt Oksana’s gracious but crumbling flat dates back to1912, and has been in the family for some seventy years – my grandmother Marina, after whom I was named, died here of pneumonia in 1952. From the outside, the block looks almost derelict; inside, the flat is decidedly Spartan – it needs a lick of paint, a new bathroom, and a central heating system. It is stuffed full of photographs, framed on the walls, in albums, in envelopes in drawers, everywhere you look. Of all the modest wealth our family once had, this is all that is left. And yet what took me by surprise was not how different it was, but how at home I felt.

Aunt Oksana shows me the family photographs

Soon I learned the secret of how Lyuda and Yuriy survive in their tiny flat: they have a dacha. Every weekend, they pile into their ancient BMW and drive some thirty kilometres to a settlement on the banks of the river Donets. Sometimes Oksana comes too. In fact their ‘country cottage’ is bigger than their flat in town, with two bedrooms, a comfy sitting room, a kitchen, and a vine-covered veranda where we took our meals. What the dacha doesn’t have is a bathroom. The only water is piped in a rusty iron pipe from the river, and is definitely not for drinking. The toilet is an earth closet.

However, Yuriy has ambitious plans to create a new bathroom at the bottom of the garden, which will even have a warm sun-powered shower: a black-painted barrel of water on the roof. The garden at the dacha is a typical Ukrainian garden, every inch planted with fruit trees, strawberries, lettuces, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, onions, beans. No lawn. No deck chairs or sun loungers, or other such softie nonsense that I have come to take for granted. No, the dacha is where you come to grow your vegetables, gather and bottle your fruit, brew or distil whatever tempts your palate, and relax with a few glasses of vodka and a fabulous meal in the evening.

Their dacha is one of maybe two hundred in a sprawling community of similar dachas connected by dirt roads, with everyone working away on their plots in the brilliant sun, chatting and swapping seeds, fruits and cuttings. The atmosphere is like a giant allotment. You have to be very careful what you say as you walk by on your way down for a refreshing dip in the river. A friendly word, and you will be whisked into one of the cottages, forced to sample jams, pickles, preserves, smoked fish, and last year’s vodka or blackberry wine, while the proud owners stand over you and keep refilling your plate and glass, and you won’t be allowed to escape without a basket of apricots and a couple of giant marrows to stagger back with.

Maybe it’s a nostalgic recreation of village life for city-dwellers who still have a foot and a heart back in Ukraine’s rural past. It made me realise why my mother’s English friends were all gardeners, and why she loved nothing more on a summer’s afternoon than to walk along and chat to everyone working in their front gardens.

The idyllic village communities still exist in Ukraine, but there is also a huge amount of suffering and poverty in the countryside, especially among the old people. During our last week, Yuriy took us out to visit some more relatives at Krasniy Dirkul, a tiny village about as far east in Ukraine as you can go, right on the Russian border. Here we met my cousin Lena, whose grandfather and my grandmother were cousins. She and her husband Valeriy have a cottage and a smallholding in a tiny settlement on the banks of a lovely willow-fringed river. They keep a few chickens, grow their own vegetables, pump their own bore-hole water, and look after their grandchildren all through the summer months when the parents’ jobs mean they cannot escape the city.

Milking is still done the traditional way at Krasniy Derkul

It is blissful in the summer; in the long bitter winter, it is a real struggle to keep warm and to get enough food to live. There are no shops within walking distance so you have to survive on what you have managed to pickle and bottle. The state pension is negligible, coal is unaffordably expensive now they have closed most of the mines, and fresh food is impossible to come by. As always, it is the old people suffer the most.

The cottage at Dashiv where my father’s family lived during the war

A view of Khutor Mikolaevka, the hamlet my mother’s family came from

My eighty-year old aunt Alevtina, who is the widow of my mother’s younger brother, is an example of just how tough you have to be to survive. She lives in a tumble-down cottage a couple of fields away, where she keeps ducks and geese, and milks her own cow. She is also a school teacher, and she still walks the four kilometres there and back every day to teach at the local school. Her subject? English – and although she has never been to England, and in fact we are the first English people she has ever met, her pronunciation and grammar are superb.

Alevtina (on the left next to my daughter) laid on a splendid feast for us. My cousin Yuriy (holding the bottle) is between cousins Valery and Lena and Alevtina’s granddaughter who has come to stay for the summer.

Lena is a talented cook, and she is disappointed that we are only staying for four days; it means she will have to stuff a fortnight’s worth of food into us in less than half the time, and she certainly does her best. At one point, when we decline a fourth helping of cherry-filled dumplings served with lashings of sour cream, she throws her hands up in the air, and cries, “Oh Lord, what sin have I committed that you have sent me such a useless bunch of guests who won’t eat anything!”

A traditional bread and salt welcome from cousin Lena

She does teach us the recipe, though. Delicious, but complicated and time-consuming to make. And the cherries just aren’t the same over here in England.

Cousin Lena teaches my daughter and me how to make varenniki

And now the mystery of how we found our Ukrainian family, and how they found us, is revealed. Lena’s sister, Olga, comes down for a visit. Olga is working as a computer programmer in Israel, and it is she who, in a quiet moment, typed my mother’s family name into Google. And up came my entry from the family search website.

Discovering my Ukrainian family has changed my sense of who I am. I am still English, an English writer. And of all the privileges growing up in England gave me, having access to the wonderful English language is the one I value most. But I am an English person who loves gardening, who can swap family banter in Ukrainian, I can do a mean beetroot soup, and I am still working on that cherry dumpling recipe.

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More pictures below
You can see why I have a thing about vehicles!

This home-made tractor is used for hauling logs in Krasniy Derkul. The motor comes from a pump, the wheels come from various cars, and the body is mainly bits of galvanized steel. No wonder the engineer is proud!

A Zaporozhets - typical view

My cousin’s Zhiguli - note the front passenger seat

No idea what make or model this is – but it still goes!