Seven Signs of the Lion

SLIGHTLY REMEMBERED ANCESTORS

SLIGHTLY REMEMBERED ANCESTORS

It was a journey he planned to the roots of the homeland of not particularly remembered ancestors, one that was foreign to him, since he grew up in the environs of the melting pot of the New York City area. Those ancestors simply weren’t remembered by him in his own living memory, so he had to learn about them in other ways, and if such a thing exists, perhaps it was some kind of a genetic memory of them that he somehow still retained as well as bits and pieces of familial oral history. He was also forced to learn about them in the dreaded Ukrainian Saturday schools where he had to memorize poems by Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko and Lesya Ukrainka and where he was taught by laxative-intolerant refugee men and women in their seventies. In that way he learned about the language and country of what had become fossilized in their fading memory from the years 1943-1945 when these refugees were forced into Nazi work camps. They were later to be named with the more elegant euphemism – displaced persons. Nicholas’s grandfather and father used to call them dependable people. His grandfather learned the trade of a mason even though he was a schoolteacher back in the old country. His university degree and education meant nothing in a land where he needed to learn English just to survive, much less find the money to return to school for more degrees even to approximate his previous social status. His first job was as a janitor, then a night watchman, and then an apprentice mason’s assistant until he learned the trade from his toothless Italian mentors whose broken English was worse than his. It was easier just to work, though he kept on top of all the events going on back in the homeland including the Brezhnev years of repression, the Chornobyl explosion in 1986, the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 and Ukrainian independence. He didn’t live to see the Orange Revolution of 2004. He would read his Svoboda Ukrainian daily newspaper out of Jersey City religiously as three or four of them often would arrive on the same day. So he went from respected intellectual to respected manual laborer and craftsman, though he did make pretty good money until his retirement. He proudly bought his first black Buick with cash (he didn’t believe in credit) and kept it for nearly twenty years. He pronounced the name something like “Boo-ick.” In emigre Ukrainian it was his kara (taken from the English word “car”), which in real Ukrainian meant “punishment.” It wasn’t a punishment of course, but rather just something to get him to church, to work, and to the store. He barely put 5000 miles a year on it and it was always waxed to a lustrous shine. He bought the first family home in Queens the same way, with money saved and not a penny wasted on frivolous things. A lot of his friends from the old country squandered their money in bars and in the Ukrainian club called Tryzub, or Trident, but not he. (The trident was the emblem of Ukraine that was banned in Soviet times. It’s made a comeback since independence.) He did love to drink whisky and Rolling Rock beer, but never to excess. He’d religiously have a shot of Seagram’s Seven in the morning when he woke up, at lunchtime with the Italian crew of masons, and in the evening after dinner. Like a Japanese, he couldn’t pronounce the “l” in “Rolling,” so it came out sounding like “Rorring.” He lived to the ripe age of 77, never having been sick a day in his life in his adopted homeland. He did, however, become a bit stooped over because of the heavy hauling he had to do. The years of heavy loads of mud, as the paesano masons called it, of mortar, in wheelbarrows and lifting sixteen-inch blocks curved his back into scoliosis and made him an inch or two shorter, though he never was one to complain – except about the “lyakhy” (the pejorative Ukrainian word for Poles) and the “prokliati Moskali” (accent on the last syllables – the damned Russkies).

Mention the word “communism” or “revolution,” and he would fly into a rage. He and his wife Olesya, who worked at the counter in a bakery shop in the Ukrainian neighborhood where they had settled, saved every nickel they could squirrel away to pay for the education of Nicholas’s father, who graduated from high school despite having to learn English as a teenager and who got an engineering degree from Stony Brook University and along with that a well-paying job with the local planning commission as their engineering consultant. Nicholas’s younger brother Yaroslav (known as Jerry by his American friends) got his accounting degree from Stony Brook, while Nicholas got his in English literature from there, too.

Nicholas took a job at Nassau Community College and learned to hate it with a passion, a hate that grew with each year. The place wasn’t bad. It just was stifling him, and he didn’t know why. The students were getting worse each year (or he was getting smarter – hardly!), and the course load was way too heavy, though the pay was pretty good. He just was suffering from burnout. His brother with the malleable bicultural name Yaroslav-Jerry, who could have never even dreamt of forgetting his Ukrainian origins as a result of that first name, married the proverbial nice Ukrainian girl next door Rostyslava (Rusty in English), whom he met at church on Sunday, and was living the hyphenated Americrainian assimilation dream with three kids and a house in Syosset. He worked as an accountant for Pathmark, and his wife became the archetypal Ukrainian hospodynia, or housewife, making everyone gain pound after pound each year on Ukrainian varennyky (potato dumplings), holuptsi (stuffed cabbage), and tortes of all kinds for special and even not very special occasions. Great torte making entered Ukrainian culinary life through the Austro-Hungarian occupation. Some colonial invasions have their upside. He and his wife became more and more Americanized and just as the church they attended switched to mostly English masses, their Ukrainian identity became more and more submerged and meltingpotted as time went on. They spoke at home in English to the kids to the disdain of the grandparents, but made them go to the summer camps at the Ukrainian Soyukivka resort in the Catskills at Kerhonkson. But that attrition of language skills will happen when foreigners come to foreign lands and have children. Oddly, Nicholas, who wasn’t particularly interested in the homeland of his ancestors when he was growing up, who didn’t have kids of his own, got infected with searching for his ethnic roots later in his life.

Nicholas had gotten married much too early and his “mixed marriage” (i.e., to a non-Ukrainian Sicilian girl and also the child of emigrants, the latter of whom could barely speak English even after being in the US for over thirty years). Nicholas and Gina after several years of making a go of it just came to the mutual realization that they didn’t get along and couldn’t iron out the differences between them. They turned out to be just totally different people than the two people who married each other. Nicholas was both introspective and outgoing, that is, he became outgoing after overcoming his early teenage shyness. He was also a Libra and even-tempered, though he didn’t believe in any kind of zodiacal predetermination of personality. Gina was Aquarian, restive, fiery and even explosive, but also very introverted. Over time Nicholas constantly began to brood over his job, which bored him beyond tears. Unhappiness breeds unhappiness (Tolstoy must have said something like that, Nicholas thought, as he recalled it from one of the classes he had taken at Stony Brook with a professor of Polish extraction), and he bred a lot of it, though he and Gina thankfully neither birthed nor bred any children, though they tried. But you need the former to do the latter.

The dream to go to the homeland came a year or so after his marriage ended. There were no kids to divide Solomonically; they had two separate but equal cars of the same vintage, so they could each take one, both of them Toyotas and no longer American-made Buicks like his grandfather’s; and both shared just an apartment as their abode, one that Nicholas was happy to move out of, taking with himself most of the Ukrainian trinkets he had recently accumulated in his search for his Ukrainian roots (a Kozak (aka as Cossack) bulava, or mace (a symbol of power); multicolored pysanky Easter eggs; a few embroidered shirts; inlaid enamel wooden boxes from the Carpathians; and a growing Ukrainian music and literature collection he had picked up from the Arka and Surma Ukrainian stores on Seventh Street on the Lower East Side). He particularly liked the Kvitka Cisyk folk songs he had picked up. Her voice was pure, gentle and powerful, and the instrumentation exquisite. Unfortunately, Kvitka, whose name means “flower,” withered away of breast cancer in 1998. Her claim to fame in American culture was singing the “Have you driven a Ford, lately?” jingle and having had her name mangled when she appeared on the Johnny Carson show once. Gina decided to keep the embroidered tablecloths someone had given them as a wedding gift because they reminded her of the Italian ones her own mother had brought over from her mother’s home town of Sciacca in Sicily.

When the dream of Mr. Viktor and the murky city had come to him, Nicholas took it quite seriously. He first decided to take an extended summer vacation and sign up for an advanced Ukrainian language class at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Summer Institute. He had started taking another class at the same time with a professor of Ukrainian literature from Yale or Princeton; he couldn’t quite remember where he was from, but it was one of the Ivies. The guy was SO arrogant and had SUCH a condescending attitude that Nicholas dropped it on the first day.

Nicholas’s homespeak Ukrainian was on the old-fashioned side and frozen in time circa 1943 when his grandparents had left – since they and his parents were the conveyors of his spoken language skills. He also remembered many of the Old Church Slavic words from church services such as “prysno,” “vonmim” and “paky, paky.” So at the summer class he had to unlearn those ingrained habits of kitchenspeak and churchspeak with his parents and grandparents, who lived in houses next door to each other in the Ukrainian neighborhood in Queens on 31st Street, to learn to speak in the way that Ukrainian was spoken now in the abandoned homeland.

Nicholas’s teacher Andreya in the summer program was from the Taras Shevchenko University in Kyiv and was super. She was bright, bubbly and kindhearted, and married to an energy company executive in Ukraine. Nicholas spent some extra time with her in the afternoons working on his spoken Ukrainian and she on her spoken English in the coffee shops and ice cream parlors of Cambridge, and by the end of the summer session, he had built up enough confidence to take the plunge for a journey.

Nicholas also met the Ukrainian writer Andriy Yurkevych there, who gave a reading from his poetry and prose works. Yurkevych was doing a writer’s residency in the summer at the Tufts creating writing program. He had been invited by Rurik Denysiuk, who, despite the heavy-duty Scando-Ukrainian first and inescapably Ukrainian last name was Director of the program and a poet and novelist who wrote in English. The three of them (Nicholas, Rurik and Andriy) hit it off quite well and spent a lot of time in the evenings ruminating over the meaning of the universe as well as the blessings and curses of Ukrainianness, and sipping cognac and draft beer in the establishments of Cambridge like the B-Side Lounge and John Harvard’s. The Ajanta Indian restaurant on First Street was also a favorite spot for them to meet. Nicholas loved spicy Indian food, and Andriy enjoyed both that as well as the exotic flavors he had never tasted before his residency abroad. He later wrote a cycle of poems called “The Tastes of India” that must have been influenced by the meetings at the restaurant. And Nicholas invited Andriy to come visit him on Long Island for a few weeks at the end of the summer and the beginning of the academic year where they spent some time at Long Island Beaches and visiting Nicholas’s good graduate school friend Sarah at her family’s summer home in Sag Harbor.

With speaking skills improved after the end of the summer in Cambridge, Nicholas decided to apply for a Fulbright to teach English during the course of the next academic year – and to his surprise managed to get one on the first try. He was granted a leave of absence from his teaching position for a five-month Fulbright stay and got a placement at Ivan Franko National University in Lviv, the city of lions, a city of about 800,000 people (and a good 120,000 of them students) in what was described to him as the western cultural capital of the country. It was the biggest city closest to the villages where his grandparents and parents were from, and, in fact, nearly equidistant from both of their respective villages. It was also the city that in a purely intuitive way he somehow understood had to be the city of his lucid dream. Some things you just seem to know.