Preface

When I was a teen, I was an avid reader. I picked up all sorts of novels, short story collections and memoirs, but I was never able to find stories about Ukrainians who had come to North America. My Ukrainian grandfather died when I was in grade eight, and my grandmother died when I was in grade ten. But my father is a wonderful storyteller, and he did tell me all sorts of stories that his parents had told him. He also told me stories of his own childhood.

I longed to read books about Ukrainian immigrants, but I could not find any. I know, now, that there were stories. But they were written in Ukrainian, and because I couldn't read or write Ukrainian, they were not accessible to me. One time, when I was about ten years old, I found a book about Cossacks in our local public library. It was the first and only time I found a story remotely about Ukrainians. I took that book home and read it cover to cover. I still remember the colorful illustrations of men with their tonsured hair flowing, riding their mighty horses across the Steppes. I took that book out of the library so often that it began to fall apart.

Because I couldn't read about Ukrainians, I decided to do the next best thing. I read Russian stories, Polish stories, and Jewish stories. The stories plunged me into a different time and place and were very entertaining, but I began to notice a disturbing trend. Ukrainians were often portrayed with negative stereotypes. I noticed the same when I read North American stories about Ukrainians. While it was frowned upon to stereotype other ethnic minorities, why was it acceptable, and common, to portray people whose names ended in chuk, iuk, ski, and enko as buffoons, bullies, drunks, and murderers?

It wasn't until I was an adult that I heard about the kobzars. These were the blind, wandering minstrels of Ukraine. The kobzars memorized long epic poems that had been passed down from generation to generation. These poems captured the rich history, the folk tales, and the cultural identity of Ukraine. When a kobzar came to a village, he was clothed and fed. And people gathered round to hear the tales.

During Stalin's regime, kobzars were people who could pass information from one village to the next. Now, the older tales were intermingled with contemporary stories of Soviet repression, famine, and terror. Stalin heard about these kobzars, and he was not amused. In the 1930s, he called the first national conference of kobzars in Ukraine. Hundreds congregated. And then Stalin had them all shot.

As the storytellers of Ukraine died, the stories died too. But Stalin wasn't content with this. He rounded up Ukrainian journalists, artists, novelists, and playwrights, and murdered them, too.

The word "kobzar" resonates for another reason. Kobzar is the title of Taras Shevchenko's first collection of poems, published in 1840. Taras Shevchenko was born a serf in Tsarist Russian controlled Ukraine but rose to be Ukraine's most beloved poet and artist. He suffered censorship and exile in his lifetime for writing about the rich history and culture of Ukraine. He is popularly known as The Kobzar. During Stalin's time, Shevchenko's writings were deliberately falsified.

Some Ukrainians did escape the Stalin terror. And some of them immigrated to North America. But these immigrants were not writers. They were farmers, pharmacists, engineers, and coal miners. Even now, although there are millions of North Americans whose roots are in Ukraine, only a handful of them are writers. My passion is to write stories that capture real experiences that have been suppressed or lost. That's why I often write about Ukrainians. When you don't write your own stories, someone else will write their version for you.

After I published a few books touching on Ukrainian history, people began to contact me by e-mail, telephone, and letter. Thank you for writing my story, one letter said. It is time that the record has been set straight, said another. Others wrote, I have a story, too. After a while, I gathered together people who had stories and started up a small e-mail critique group. It was through this group that most of the stories in this collection have emerged. They are arranged in chronological order, beginning with an early homesteader tale in 1905 and ending with a story set during the Orange Revolution and the election of Yushchenko in 2004.

We are the Kobzar's Children. Our parents and grandparents suffered in silence, with their life stories and histories either suppressed or falsified. This anthology tells a century of untold stories. I hope that after you read this book you will be inspired to talk to someone whose stories have been deliberately forgotten, because the injustices that we forget, we are bound to repeat.