chapter 2

My father was most definitely Ukrainian, yet he did not come from the Ukraine. The country did not actually exist at any point while he was alive. And anyway, at that time and in his part of the world the borders and states, leaders and countries shifted back and forth almost like the tide. Meanwhile the population itself was a fairly even mix of Ukrainians and Poles, with the difference being made up by Jews, Germans, Czechs and Russians to name but a few. But by mixed, I don’t mean living side by side. It was more a matter of ‘this village is Ukrainian, the one down the road is Polish’, and so on. No, for my father being Ukrainian was not simply a matter of coming from a country called Ukraine.
Take his surname for example, transcribed from Ukrainian into its nearest English equivalent. The clue is in the ending ‘-skyj’ as opposed to the more typical Polish spelling ‘-ski’. All down to how it was initially translated into English. There is no straight equivalent to ‘-ский’ since some of the letters simply don’t exist in the English language. The Ukrainians tended to opt for ‘-skyj’, which I happen to think is much nicer looking. I like the way the y and the j curl round one another and underneath the k, keeping each other company and neatly rounding off the end of the name. The Polish i on its own looks harsh and sharp in comparison. Or maybe this is just the hidden Ukrainian in me. So what if the native English speakers cannot cope with the sight of y and j next to one another?
But what did make my father Ukrainian then? Even more, what made the Ukrainians living where he lived, in the Western-most province of a place called Galicia, think that they belonged with the rest of the Ukraine to the East? When Galicia has a separate, long and extremely complicated history all of its own. A little hotchpotch region of Eastern Europe falling between Soviet Russia and Poland, the East and the West, the Carpathian Mountains and the river San...more; it is a positive boiling pot of cultures and ethnicities. So where did this group of people get the idea that they belonged together? That they had an identity which bound them tightly, irrevocably to one another and excluded everyone else? Scattered peoples in the borderlands, intermixed with so many others and yet separate, segregated.
It is ironic that a Ukrainian state existed for a few short years just before my father’s birth and never again until about ten years after he died.