So, the blog has a new look. You can thank Ben Guilfoy for his design help and my mom for that classic photo. She really does seem to be mastering new technology now. And by that I mean, she went to Staples and had them scan the photo for her...
This is a real Ukrainian picnic, not the kind my family and I always joke about that involves cleaning the whole house; dusting, scrubbing the floors, taking down the curtains, and beating the mattresses and rugs. The woman on the far right is my great-grandmother, Anna. This is in Ansonia, Connecticut, not actually Ukraine, but it's with people from the "old neighborhood", (all Ukrainians). My grandmother is not in this picture but she was about 13 years old at this time. And funny enough, even though my grandma and I didn't grow up in the same town, this field is less than a half a mile from the house I grew up in where my parents still live.
My immigrant great-grandparents didn't have a lot of money, and my great-grandfather asked his wife if she would like him to save up and buy her a pearl necklace like the ones her friends were wearing. In reply, she said she already had her pearl. He's the baby right there in her arms- my great-uncle. Sadly, he was killed serving in WWII.
I have only vague memories of my great-grandmother, who lived to age 93, but I've heard a lot of good stories about both of my great-grandparents. My great-grandfather worked in a factory and when he came home in the evening, he fed and played with the kids while she did her sewing. My great-grandma was a talented seamstress and she said the sewing work she did for others in her lifetime could have filled an entire room. So, they were a relatively modern two-income household out of necessity. While her work was technically domestic, she still used it to earn money. It's funny how we pretend that women always were contained to their own domestic spheres, and that men had no hand in the household, but it was really only after the 1940's, when more women had the chance to replace men outside the home, that people started really getting their feathers ruffled about that sort of thing. Like so many trends in history, people become upset by change and hold on to some imaginary ideal in the wake of it. Poverty made it a necessity for women and children to work in factories through the nineteenth century after all, but WWII seemed to make people hyper-aware of this homemaker ideal that probably didn't exist so strictly before.
From everything I've heard, Anna was a pretty tough lady. I seem to remember a story about her delivering a baby in their apartment building when the local doctor was unable to make his way over there. She claimed that the women in Ukraine just gave birth right in the middle of their work in the fields, and when they were done, they would take a bale of wheat back into the house with them so they wouldn't waste a trip. I think that particular anecdote gets more extreme with every generation it goes down though...
But really, after her father died, she had no choice at age 16 but to head to America. She never saw her mother again but she still found a way to make a life for herself here and loved her adopted country. She lost three children to disease and war and still managed to carry on. With the help of my grandma, who taught her parents and their friends in a citizenship class, they all became citizens and were very proud to vote in America.
From Anna's account as well, the Ukraine had always been a besieged upon place, shifting between whichever country claimed to own it at the time. This doesn't excuse the mess over there now of course. In the face of adversity, I wish the Ukrainian people the kind of toughness my family had, although my hope for the future is that they won't need it.
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