A gravesite off the beaten track on the side road to the historic site of Fort Battleford in Saskatchewan proved—I see this now—an intellectual, emotional, and moral turning point for me before I knew I would write Ghosts. It was the grave of the eight Indigenous warriors who had been hanged for the slayings at Frog Lake settlement. I’m a lifelong Albertan but I knew nothing about any of it. It took almost a literal stumble along the bank of the Battle River to come across the site, now dignified by a black granite headstone, encircled by a ring of skinned and weathered tipi poles, the ribs of a tipi, open to the four directions.

It is a mass grave.

Kapapamahchakwew Wandering Spirit; Paypamakeesit Round the Sky;Manachoos Bad Arrow;
Kittimakegin Miserable Man; Nabpace Iron Body; Apaschiskoos Little Bear; Itka Crooked Leg;
Wawanitch Man Without Blood.

I read the names and, although there are no dates included in the inscription, I knew they had been buried in 1885, and so I stood transfixed at the granite stone. Up to that moment, I had not taken note of how narrow was the slit in time between the two events: the crushing in 1885 of the last resistance to incarceration on the reserves and the arrival in June 1900 of my paternal grandparents from Galicia. Fifteen years. The gap was fifteen years—but it may as well have been an eon between two chronologies, as though all that had gone before “our” arrival and possession of the land belonged to unrecorded time.

There, on a small plaza, stood a monument that seemed to serve the same purpose as all the cenotaphs in Canadian towns dedicated to the memory of their war dead. A Soviet soldier in a helmet, a battle rifle held across his chest—stalwart, broad-shouldered, and Aryan—protectively rests an arm on the shoulder of a young girl who clutches a large circular wreath, the unending circle of life, I suppose, as laid at memorial places. Just so, here. The two figures stand on top of a large marble base on which are inscribed a red star and the words, “To Our Countrymen Who Perished on the Fronts of the Great Patriotic War and at the Hands of the Ukrainian Bourgeois Nationalists, with Gratitude from the Workers of the Village of Dzhuriv.” The relatives stand around me, arms crossed over their chests, looking stern, even a little proud. It takes me a few moments to realize why I have been brought here: on a separate marble installation two columns of names have been engraved. On one, those who fought on the fronts; on the other, “These perished at the hands of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.” I read down the list and there he is, Kosovan, Yuri P. In my ear, Baba’s voice: Poor, poor Yurochko.
I take a couple of photos but ask no questions. I wish I had. Pp 221-222

“Dido Yuri was more a socialist and anti-nationalist than a communist but was installed by the Soviet regime in some civic function in the village. We think he was betrayed by neighbours who supported the UPA, and who had lost family members killed by the Soviets. Dido was ‘disappeared’ by the Banderivtsi [Banderites, UPA] at Christmas. This happened in 1945. They came to the house one evening and took Dido Yurko away. To this day we don’t know whether they executed him on the spot or led him away somewhere. Dad told us that in those days it was impossible to go looking for anyone because then the Banderivtsi might have shot the whole family” p 232

In 1990, on the eve of Ukrainian independence from the Soviet Union, a group of Tulova’s youth began a cultural circle, “For Freedom,” and proceeded to renew village monuments that had been “ruined by the totalitarian system of the Communist Party,” such as a memorial cross erected for an earlier and unluckier generation of “fighters for the freedom and independence of Ukraine.” Also in the works, a monument “to the Heroes of Ukraine from Tulova Village,” going all the way back to the First World War, “especially the six active participants in the Ukrainian National Organization-Ukrainian Insurgent Army, who gave their young lives for the freedom and independence of Ukraine. Eternal Be Their Memory.”

Good as done. In 2013 I view them all, plaques, crosses, wreaths, national symbols, and inscribed tablets, and I make note of all the Kostashchuks, inscribing them all in my own Notebook of the Violently Dead. On the granite base of an imposing grassy mohyla (mound, barrow) a dedication has been inscribed: “To the fighters for the state independence of Ukraine 1939–1950.” Stepan’s name is there, Ivanna’s is not. P. 212-213

Ivan Tomaschuk pulls a paper from the sheaf in its cardboard folder. It’s a poem (unattributed) that I take away with me and translate later:

Forty four years have passed since the executioners took your life.
O how horribly the executioners abused your dead bodies.

He takes me back to the cemetery and Stepan’s and Ivanna’s are the first graves you see now as you come through the little gate. They lie under a dual granite headstone with their teenaged photo portraits imbedded in bronze plaques.

If you, Stepanka, were now with us among the living
You would not bear this, proclaimed the anonymous poet.
O sleep sweet young friends, we will lay a curse for you.

But only a simple black cross has been inscribed in the granite and someone has left a large plastic wreath of yellow flowers. Once upon a time, Stepan forsook the village for the camaraderie of the forest, but here he is simply Stepanka of Tulova, one of God’s children now, and their own. P. 211-212

Two insurgents stand side by side, behind them the woods. They are in uniform and armed, but they seem relaxed, posing; although the older man on the left, who is looking into the camera, seems wary, wearing an expression of melancholic reflection as though—compared to the younger man—he has already seen or experienced much that has unsettled him. For his part, the man on the right—with his cap tilted over his right brow, his sidelong look, his slouch, the bravado of the naked knife in his belt—is nonchalant. But even his expression, unsmiling, seems a projection of an inner feeling, and he’s not so much looking sideways away from the camera as into a private reverie….Of the village of Tulova, [he] has my name: Stepan Fedorovich Kostashchuk.
I’ve seen pictures of men like these—French Resistance fighters in the maquis; the Mac-Paps (Mackenzie–Papineau Battalion brigade) in Spain, crawling out of the trenches at Fuentes de Ebro; Polish commandos in the sewers of Warsaw—but of my Ukrainian relations in uniform on the losing side of the Great War, or in interwar Poland fighting back Bolsheviks, or under German occupation 1941–1945, or, finally, under Soviet occupation, nothing. The Canadian family hasn’t a single photograph taken during wars, occupations, civil wars, none of underground armies, a Red Army, Bolsheviks. Purges, pogroms, mass graves, unmarked graves: not a single image. Of a war that had overwhelmed our relatives in western Ukraine—of whose existence we were anyway oblivious—I knew and read and heard nothing. P. 201

I scrutinize Stepan’s features but of his motives they give nothing away. I’d say he’s in his early twenties, clean-shaven with well-formed ears close to his head; his cap is perched at a rakish angle, and two leather straps criss-cross his jacket with its deeply wrinkled sleeves. The naked blade of the knife protrudes from his belt and his right hand lightly holds between thumb and forefinger the upright barrel of a gun. He stands at ease, right hip cocked slightly.

He has full, unsmiling lips. And it is this mouth and the rakishly tipped cap that remind me of Marlon Brando in The Wild One, his leathers draped over his motorcycle. The same rakish tilt of the cap, the same full lips, though on Brando they are voluptuously parted: a face I have lusted for, well past my adolescence. The jolt of aesthetic arousal, in the case of this young guerrilla in calf-high leather boots and broad-bladed knife at his hip, strikes me immediately as indecent. For one thing, he was probably long since dead; for another, he was a relative. And he belonged to an army characterized in scholarship as well as propaganda as Nazi-collaborationist bourgeois nationalist. p. 202

Dido was a socialist, never a communist, although he passionately defended the achievements of the Soviet Union made in the name of the working class. He never homesteaded; he was a day labourer in Edmonton when he could get work, literally a ditchdigger, while Baba worked ceaselessly selling milk and cream and eggs and taking in laundry. As for his life before coming to Canada, I know almost nothing except that he worked alongside his older brother, Nikolai, in Silesian coal mines.
Bingo! Coal mines + Socialism + Galicians = Crowsnest Pass. As I drove slowly around each community, I looked for signs of the society that had once embraced these elements. The abandoned coke ovens and collapsed collieries, the museum photographs of once-bustling main streets, a Workers Hall, a union hall. The communities of Michel and Natal have been bulldozed into the ground. A real bulldozer ran through a picket line of striking miners’ wives in 1935 where now only a grassy hillside says this was Corbin.
But in the federal elections of 1908, 1911, and 1921, the socialist vote in Blairmore, AKA “Red” Blairmore, “Communist Capital of Canada,” had taken 10%, then 29%, and finally 36% of the total. In February 1932, mine union representatives were swept into office: mayor, councillors, school board. May Day was declared a civic holiday. The town’s main street, Victoria Avenue, was renamed Tim Buck Boulevard for the imprisoned leader of the Communist Party of Canada.
The street sign Tim Buck Boulevard, tilted sideways, sits under a sift of dust on the floor of The Crowsnest Museum. Pp 177-178

I took a great interest in the smudgy-coloured magazines strewn around the little living room. Later I understood the propagandistic naiveté of such imagery—Boy Meets Tractor, Romance Ensues—and would adopt a sneering attitude, mocking the smiling, the euphoric, tractor drivers and milkmaids of the collective farms and the pulsating cement workers and coal miners of the mammoth industrial projects of the post-war Soviet Union. But at the time they were simply part of the atmosphere of my grandparents’ home. P 189
It’s the Depression, the proletariat of Edmonton is standing in patient lines at soup kitchens, treading with grave circumspection, hat in hand, from back alleys, up the sidewalks, and to the screened and latched back doors of modest homes, where a kindly housewife might be moved to wrap up in a clean rag some bread and a boiled egg. The proletariat is pulling out both trouser pockets and saying, here is all I have, lint and a rubber band.
Meanwhile, over there, where the East is Red, one-sixth of the planet—a vast, curved land under heaven and the dominion of Slavs—workers and peasants are enthusiastically constructing a new homeland in Baba’s and Dido’s names. I can imagine Dido learning to stand with his back straightened, shoulders pulled back, hands snapping his suspenders. Pp 190-191

Meanwhile, at 12518–83rd Street, up in the attic: Andrew, who had worked at Silesian coal faces alongside Nick, his older brother by two years, then waited to be sent the steerage ticket to Canada, arrived in 1912, and was settled into the attic room.

There is another photograph of Nick together with Andrew, with no caption, cropped top and bottom and lifted untidily from the black paper of a photo album. This must have been taken in Canada, to judge from the Canadian style of shirts, jackets, and ties the men wear. They stand side by side against a backdrop of a tall hedge (looks like caragana with mature pods). They don’t look much like siblings, Nick having a darker complexion and thick, dark brows and moustache that give him a martial air compared to Andrew’s youthful hairless face and woebegone expression. What might have been the occasion for such a formal pose? Perhaps they wanted a picture taken to be sent back to Dzhuriv, to confirm that Andrew was indeed in the care of his older brother, that they were prospering, that they could afford the making and posting of a photograph, but I have no recollection of any correspondence mentioned, discussed, or reread between the Maksymiuk brothers and their relatives in Galicia. In any event, the photo seems never to have been sent off and became, I imagine, a kind of keepsake for my mother—among whose papers I found it—of her handsome father who loved her very much.pp 121-122

This is how we, his several granddaughters, remember Dido Andrew, although we have different feelings about him: skinny, bug-eyed, with grey-stubbled cheeks, often in long johns under his work pants with suspenders hoisted over his shoulders, no shirt. We also remember his good suit. It was the one he wore for the studio photographs, shoulder to shoulder with Baba, dark grey with a pale, thin stripe running through the weave. He stares straight at you. If you cover the bottom of his face, he stares at you through a pair of stricken eyes, blue. P. 173

They were not a happy couple, by any evidence. I never saw them exchange an affectionate look or touch; to the contrary, they seemed perpetually cross and fed up with each other (one didn’t need to understand much Ukrainian to read the situation), and, with a surfeit of womanly solidarity with Baba, I hoped that Dido would die first and leave her some years of peace. (She outlived him by two years.) Long after their deaths I would begin to revisit this judgement—how marriage yokes a couple together for reasons of mutual need; how they must labour together and together provide as best they can for their children; how, when I look at their formal portraits, I see in their faces something other than the disappointment and spite and weariness I had always read there. But this was later. P 143

Nick in Lethbridge

I now resorted to reading the Indexes and Bibliographies in books about Lethbridge in the Local History section of the Edmonton Public Library and continued my internet searches with keywords. This is how I decide that Nick Kosovan had arrived in Lethbridge in the middle of a brutal Depression, a working man seeking his fortune when municipal budgets could ill afford public works and services, let alone relief for the unemployed. By late 1929, Lethbridge city council had met in emergency session to consider how to meet the escalating demands for relief. An emboldened Ku Klux Klan of Canada was protesting the employment of “Orientals” and Slavs when red-blooded white men themselves had become public charges. Perhaps Nick found grunt work in the mines—the KKK didn’t think much of the United Mine Workers either—in Diamond City, Shaughnessy, or Taber.
Let’s say he then goes to the beet fields, one of the lucky immigrants to get a job…. The search engine has taken me straight to the indispensable work of two labour historians—John Herd Thompson and Allen Seager—and their 1978 article “Workers, Growers and Monopolists: The ‘Labour Problem’ on the Alberta Beet Sugar Industry During the 1930s.” They reproduce an undated pamphlet, its title handwritten in block letters: “FASCIST MOB ATTEMTS [sic] TO TERRORIZE BEET WORKERS.” It opens with a flourish: “We Beet Workers of Southern Alberta, after being driven to a starvation level through cut after cut in the price of our labor, have organized, as the only means of resisting further depths of misery, and regaining some measure of a decent standard of living” (Thompson and Seager 152).
I elaborate a formula: Radical Workers + anti-fascists + depths of misery = Uncle Nick. P.p 164-165

Two young men in suits stand behind two women in embroidered blouses and kerchiefs; between them is the patriarch, a white-haired, white-mustachioed elder in a sheepskin vest, his white pants tucked into knee-high boots. A girl-child dressed in her own embroidered blouse and jacket stands on a stool between her mother and (I’m guessing) her grandfather. She is in no obvious relationship with either of the young men. This is a postcard-style photo in which my mother has written: “My uncles, my aunts, my cousin and my grandfather.”
“Uncle Nick”?
Stuck to the back of the postcard-photo is a yellow Post-it Note in my own hand, although I have no recollection of writing it: “Nikolai,” I’ve written in Cyrillic, meaning the man with a moustache and the same shock of lank, dark hair across his forehead as the man with the cucumbers in a field in Lethbridge. Here he looks some ten years younger, so the 1920s. I have identified the others: Yuri Kosovan, Nikolai’s brother; Nastunia, Nikolai’s wife; Maria, his daughter; Palahna, Yuri’s wife. And also, Petro, my mother’s grandfather and my great-grandfather, he who rolled beer casks off his wagon into the village pubs. Pp 169-170

“Uncle Nick” Mykola Kosovan

Man with Cucumbers

The photo has fallen out of my mother’s album, which lies on my lap. On the back of the photo, recognizably in my mother’s hand and in pencil, “1934. Baba’s brother Nick, Lethbridge..”
I turn the photo over to look again at “Uncle Nick.”

The black-and-white photograph, such as taken by a Brownie box camera, shows a man, perhaps forty years old, with the sun and windburned face of a farmer, a thick hank of dark hair falling across his forehead. He wears a workman’s denim bib and coveralls and kneels on one knee in the middle of a flat ploughed field, perhaps recently harvested. The edge of the field is the horizon that cuts dramatically at an angle to the sky. The man, who looks straight into the camera with a bit of a smile, holds an armful of cucumbers.
I haven’t the slightest idea who he is. pp 157-158

[Second cousin Petro Kosovan in Ukraine emailed me] “This [photo] is Mykola, ‘Nick,’ one of seven children including four brothers, your Baba’s siblings. At the time of the 1917 Revolution, he was an activist and participated in meetings. Then he went to Canada (where his sisters Sophie and your Baba already lived) and there he again took up revolutionary activity. He was arrested and deported back to Ukraine. Myrna, I don’t know anything more exact but this is what I remember from my father’s conversations. If I learn anything more, I’ll write you.” (He never did.)

There was another sisterhood, Baba’s own comrades, as I surmise from a photograph of five women lined up in a row in front of the house’s back door, all, except Baba, wearing thick sheered-fur coats (otter? beaver?) with broad collars, simple cloth hats and gloves. Not a smile to be seen. It’s a winter day but Baba wears only a sweater over her dress and, to me, a rather ridiculous hat, broader at the crown than at her brow, resembling a dented stovepipe, and black as coal. She stands cross-armed, stout but not yet stooped. Dido is anchoring the group, smart in a dark suit, white shirt, and tie. Rather formal. What is the occasion? Mum has written on the back of the photo: “Dido in his glory.” What—the only man among women a kind of glory? The women visitors look like nothing so much as the cheerless delegates from a women’s organization, Ukrainian to be sure and not fancy, but checking on the management of Palahna Maksymiuk’s household nevertheless.

Although the oval portraits of the Bolshevik household gods, Lenin and Stalin, had long been packed away or even discarded, I grew up hearing, repeatedly, that they had once adorned the living room wall but had been taken down after the incident of the boy from Mum’s high-school class who came calling. He took one look at the Commies on the wall and bolted right back out the still open door. P. 142

They were not a happy couple, by any evidence. I never saw them exchange an affectionate look or touch; to the contrary, they seemed perpetually cross and fed up with each other (one didn’t need to understand much Ukrainian to read the situation), and, with a surfeit of womanly solidarity with Baba, I hoped that Dido would die first and leave her some years of peace. (She outlived him by two years.) Long after their deaths I would begin to revisit this judgement—how marriage yokes a couple together for reasons of mutual need; how they must labour together and together provide as best they can for their children; how, when I look at their formal portraits, I see in their faces something other than the disappointment and spite and weariness I had always read there. But this was later. P 143

Palahna Kosovan Maksymiuk 1892-1979

Baba Was a Bohunk” was published under the editorship of Robert Fulford (he had bought my first-ever published piece in 1972), who, despite his ten-year seniority on my generation of fledgling magazine writers, was encouraging of our New Journalism breaches of journalistic conventions. At least, that’s how I read my own supremely confident voice, encouraged by his editorial leniency, opining, without presenting much evidence, on the identity and presumed history of my maternal Baba. I had been away from western Canada for a decade, during which I had rarely spoken with her but depended on my mother’s news to stay in touch.

The piece’s title was formulated by the editors and didn’t bother me in the least, because it was true: although the Canadian Oxford Dictionary defines “bohunk” as “derogatory,” literally, it means “an immigrant from central or SE Europe” But now, retrospectively, I am truly nonplussed by the subtitle, “And so am I—a stranger, despite three generations in Canada,” given that I was making precisely the contrary point. I do not recall noticing this flagrant discrepancy at the time. The titular “bohunk” was doing its job, earning me a notoriety and a prospective readership for the book I was still writing, All of Baba’s Children.

The piece is illustrated by a handsome black-and-white photograph of the two of us seated shoulder-to-shoulder—I, a head taller—on Baba’s sofa. I have no recollection of the event, but there must have been considerable disordering of her modest living room to find a place for camera, cables, and lights, and there must have been instructions to tilt a chin, shift a shoulder. Someone artfully arranged the embroidered cushions that are perched behind our heads while the celebrated portrait photographer Arnaud Maggs, all the way from Toronto, took his best shots. My expression is one of serenest imperturbability, but Baba, who has donned her two-stranded pearl necklace for the occasion, at least has the presence of mind to look bemused. P.p 128-9

Baba stands companionably with Mrs. Barton in a photo saved in my mother’s photo album. With snow still underfoot, in their sensible shoes they stand outside, wearing cotton dresses (I surmise the flashbulb for Brownie cameras had not yet been invented, for all of mum’s photos are taken outdoors), bright grins on their faces. Baba has the same blunt haircut as her daughters; Mrs. Barton’s style has a wave across her forehead. Mrs. Barton’s “English” dress, perhaps purchased in a shop, is somewhat fitted to her form, with a pleated flare in the skirt, but Baba’s is homemade, basically a long gaily patterned pillowcase with sleeves. But she’s looped a bit of ribbon and fastened it to the collar at her throat. Her face and neck have become fleshy, her legs thickened around the calves. Mrs. Barton, leaning into Baba, has extended her left leg forward a bit, almost flirtatiously, toward the photographer. P. 139

My mother to interviewer: “My father died of pneumonia, walking to and from the meat-packing plant.”

You could buy this image of the Swift Canadian Company Plant as it stood in 1914 and mail it to someone to impress, that Edmonton had its own “industrial centre.” And over it loomed the great stacks of the packing plants, as slender and upright as the abattoir and packing operations were squat, crouched under the weight of a million bricks. In the 1920s, the Swift Canadian plant was merely functional—swathes of featureless cubes of brick, walls punched with rectangular windows no better than squint. But the smokestack soars right out the top of the frame. The first time that I contemplate this image, I think: “If my grandfather has a grave, it may as well be here.” Pp 119-120

“Is there anything else you’d like to know about your grandfather?”

“Yes. Where is his grave?”

Scrolling around the World Wide Web, Ms. Rendell landed on Canadian Passenger List 865-1935 at Ancestry.com, and there found “Mykola Maksymick.” Gender: Male. Age: 25. Estimated (estimated?) Birth Year: abt. 1886. (Facts start to line up with his Immigration Inspection Card that I have already filed away in a ziplock bag.) Date of Arrival: 20 May 1911. Vessel: Gothland. Port of Arrival: Quebec. Port of Departure: Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Maksymick. Close enough.

Lewis fed this into a database of Canadian cemetery registries. And there he lies: Nick Maksymick, buried 08/12/1918, Block 0003, Plot 0054. Beechmount cemetery in Edmonton.

I wept.

“That happens a lot here,” said Lewis, and passed a box of tissues.

Nikolai Maksymiuk 1886–1918

My mother was eighty-nine years old in 2004 when she was interviewed for several hours by a researcher for the “Local Culture and Diversity on the Prairies Project” at the University of Alberta’s Ukrainian Folklore Centre. He was Andryi Chernevych, from Ukraine, at her kitchen table to get the stories of her generation of Ukrainian Canadian teachers.

There are three extant photographs of Nikolai Maksymiuk, and my mother held up one of them, taken on his wedding day, to show the university student-interviewer. “Look,” she says, over the tape recorder on her kitchen table, “Wasn’t my father a handsome man?” The small photograph, still in excellent condition in its wooden frame—the expressions, on the faces of the bridal couple, are of startling clarity—now hangs on my bedroom wall. (What does the university student see?)

I see a short, stocky, and swarthy man with a moustache that frames his upper lip and ends in a little twist. and he is as unsmiling as his bride. His dark brows are drawn together above a fixed, almost glinty, gaze, his nose and ears are finely shaped, He’s short but with a manly set to his shoulders. He had, after all, built the house on the stoop of which the couple stands before he sent for her. P 118

“Wasn’t my father a handsome man? And I never knew him. He died when I was four [voice quivering]. That’s the house: 12518–83rd Street. It’s gone now. . . .”

I had forgotten that I have among my own photos one of the 83rd Street house when it still stood. It’s a coloured photo cropped square and probably taken on one of my visits to Edmonton when I lived in Toronto. I may even have taken it when on a nostalgic Sunday drive with my parents. I drove down the street just the other day and there is no longer such an address. P 131

In 2008, fellow parishioners from my church in Edmonton, having returned from a trip to see their own family in Tulova, presented me a booklet. Of some sixty pages, rather cheaply produced in 2002, its authors, Vasyl Kharyton and Mykola Biiovskyi, village teachers and community activists, had borne the costs of publication “with financial support of a local dairy.” Titled Tam De Dobri Lovy (There Where the Hunting is Good: Sketches of the History of Tulova), they said it might be an “interesting” read for me.

“Interesting”? As I made my way through it - loaded with genealogies of families from Tulova -fragments of worlds of an array of Kostashchuks opened up before me, leaving me dazed. I flipped through it again and was stopped dead on page 33: there inside an oval was the exact same portrait of that young man [whose framed photo was hanging on my office wall], a little cloudy in black-and-white reproduction, minus the frame. P. 51

There is a caption under the photo: “literary scholar Vasyl Mykolaiovych Kostashchuk.” This is exciting, another literary antecedent from the Galician homeland. But so young! What had happened to Vasyl Mykolaiovych after he had left that studio for his graduating picture?
p 94

Deepening the mystery is the sepia-toned postcard-sized version that spills out of one of my father’s manila folders. Someone from the Old Country has written on it, in English, “Cosin Bill Kostash.” P 97

When Mum moved out of her house into assisted living at age ninety-three, my sister was tasked with the responsibility to set aside, for my consideration, all materials that had accumulated in the basement rooms loosely categorized as “Ukrainian stuff.” This included an impressive number of files and books in my father’s study that had sat undisturbed since his death thirteen years earlier.

Uniquely, however, hung the tinted portrait of a young man dressed in (I’m guessing) a high-school uniform very much Old Country, with thick waves of hair atop a high forehead. Looking out into the middle distance, he bore an expression of remarkable serenity. He had hung there for decades without my once having asked my father, “Who is that?” “Where did the picture come from?” “Why do you keep it?” The frame alone, of polished oak, was eye-catching: someone had gone to some trouble to conserve the photograph. (My Kostash cousin in Ottawa wrote me: “The portrait probably belonged to our grandparents. It hung behind a door in my parents’ bedroom on the farm and later in a spare room in the basement in the house in Vegreville. I always found the frame most odd. I thought Mom gave it to you but she may well have given it to your father.”)

In the event, my sister sold the portrait to an “antiques and collectibles” merchant for the value of the frame: forty dollars.

Who was Vasyl Andriovych Kostashchuk and what had he written? Whoever he was and whatever he had written, he was grafted onto a Canadian family tree that had taken no notice of him. But I would track him down and, by doing so, marvellously construct a literary lineage for myself forged in darkest Galicia.

[It was thanks to a lunch in the Kyiv apartment of Dmytro Pavlychko, noted editor and poet,, and his book shelf, that I had my first clue.]

I turned the book over in my hands. It had a decidedly Soviet look to it, in its grey cover that was pasted onto layers of pressed cardboard, layers of which were already poking out of the corners. It was not hefty, only 190 pages, and its cost sixty kopecks, which was pretty cheap considering the kopeck was a denomination of the ruble. On the final page, Vasyl Andriovych tells us he wrote his modest reminiscence in Kolomyia between 1937 and 1958. On the equivalent of a copyright page, the printer tells us, in Russian, that this is a work in the Ukrainian language.

I held the book as though I was the custodian of a family secret entrusted to me by sheer happenstance. I didn’t know what to do with it. Over the years I would remember I had the book and would open it up, flip through it to see just how complicated it would be for me to read it, take note that it seemed quite readable, then, wondering what would finally goad me to the task and whether I should do so sooner than later given the state of the yellowing pages and uncertain binding, I would shelve it again. P. 50

[I picked it up again in 2021] I opened and began to read, from the beginning.

Seven kilometres from the northern exit of the town of Sniatyn in Ivano-Frankivsk district lies the village of Rusiv. It lies hidden in low-lying land surrounded by hillocks. Knolls similarly run across [maybe “through”?] the village. (I’m the translator and I can’t make up my mind.) On one such knoll, the school, on another, the church, on others, the cemeteries. There are five of them, by which one understands that Rusiv hearkens back to primeval settlers. In 1622, when Tatars burned the neighbouring village, Stetseva, only five farms were saved. Frightened, people abandoned their village and hid in the forests of Rusiv.

(So far, a whole long paragraph translated, the dictionary consulted only eight times: I should have started reading this long ago.)

An upright slab of stone bore the likeness of "Vasyl Kostashchuk, author, 1896–1973," his sculpted head with furrowed brow bent over to consider the open pages of a book in his hands. I stood dumbfounded.
This was 1988. My grandfather had left eighty-eight years earlier. As far as my Canadian generation imagined it, if he had time travelled to Tulova he would have found it pretty much as he had left it—oppressed peasants toiling under the lash not of the Pan but of the Party. But, look, here was a writer and scholar who seems never to have left Tulova. Nobody had ever told me. No one in Canada seemed ever to have uttered his name. ...Writers in the family? I was the writer.
In my travel notes I wrote that "I sat down on the grass to take the measure of this information: I had not come, miraculously, from illiterates.". Pp46-47

The photograph has been reproduced in multiple copies on the walls of Kostash homes, in newspapers, in Ukrainian Canadian pioneer histories, chronicles, and memoirs. I have one in my own study. It is a group photograph, in the sense of separate portraits of six sons in graduation garb who surround, like a garland, portraits of Fred and Anna Kostash, now in their encroaching old age. Has Anna been included as a courtesy or even as an afterthought—a lifelong illiterate, she is surrounded by men who are all educated; Helen, the only daughter [the young woman in the top row], is virtually unschooled as well except for the occasional lesson from immigrant schoolteachers who boarded a few weeks at a time on the Kostash farm and brought her up to the reading level of grade three while she baby-sat her younger brothers.

"By 1948 the Kostash family had earned nine more degrees," J.G. MacGregor wrote with breathless admiration in Vilni Zemli, having remarked on Harry, the Kostashes’ eldest son, as an early Ukrainian graduate from the University of Alberta in 1921. "All six of Frederick Kostash’s sons graduated" (258)—and here I break off, stung on Baba’s behalf that Fred should be named as the single progenitor of all those clever boys.
A family’s resources, the surplus, invested in the sons. pp 81-82

Neither brother nor husband [higher education in Galicia] nor her sons ever broke through Anna’s intellectual solitude. (Did they even try?) She grew up totally illiterate. In Canada the most she could do in the English language was to sign her name..p 83

Anna Svarich Kostash 1879-1964

She hadn’t always been a crone…. I see her at age thirty, young and handsome, her parents still alive, Fred still dark of hair and moustache. They are perched outside the house on straight-backed wooden chairs that have been brought out from the kitchen and Anna holds her own toddler—her five other children arranged around her and Fred—for all the world the proud and satisfied matriarch of a lineage whose Ground Zero was here, Royal Park, near Vegreville, epicentre of Ukrainian settlement in Alberta. It has been ten years since the dashing emigrant hauled her out of Tulova. P 68

July 1, 1951—so I have captioned it when I pasted it into my childhood album—perhaps exactly on the Dominion Day holiday weekend, she is surrounded by the generation who have redeemed her sacrifices, her surviving children. They all smile, as well they might; she sits hands folded, clothed in black, and with the crocheted cap, head slightly tilted, not so much unsmiling as pensive. She is seventy-two years old, younger than I am now, but ageless in the sense that I never knew her to look any other way…. the face I knew, grooved and surmounted by large, round spectacles, from behind which her bleary eyes seem to strain for focus, a little upturned smile, ears tucked into the black crocheted cap. P 67

The dedication, “For Fedor Kostashchuk,” is handwritten in ink in elegant Cyrillic script on the back of a studio portrait, framed in decorative cardboard, of a family group.

No names nor place nor year. My Kostash cousin in Ottawa had found it among her parents’ memorabilia. We have no idea who these people are. Fedor Kostashchuk was our grandfather. He emigrated from Galicia to western Canada in 1900, and dropped the “chuk.” The photo could be a hundred years old. We are barely into the era when, “for the first time in history,” John Szarkowski tells us, “even the poor man knew what his ancestors had looked like” Off-frame there is a photographer for whom they are posed. All seven adults and five children sit motionless as statuary in startling clarity (only the baby is a little fuzzy for having fidgeted) in their village finery, elaborately embroidered sheepskin vests, strands of coral beads, hair neatly tucked within kerchiefs, clearly all decked-out and on display for the relatives in Canada. They are seated in front of a studio curtain painted with trees in a woodland. I try to match faces as those of siblings or mother and daughters and discern a relationship from a hand resting on a shoulder, a baby on a lap. None of this group resembles the Canadian relatives whose family portraits I know by heart [Ghosts in a Photograph p.43]