"My Mother's Village" opens with a small legacy: a fork from Displaced Persons' camp, an embroidered shirt, a thick braid cut in exchange for food. These are common mementos but another legacy dwarfs this small offering - the deep emotional burden inherited by children of post World War II Ukrainian immigrants.
The film extends a siren call of rustic pastorality - straw-fed bonfires in gently falling snow, a Sowing ritual - "may your cows give milk," rough-hewn wooden fences, bright blue doorways and lush green pastures. Throughout the rustic village ring songs of the formerly silenced history. But this pastoral landscape disguises the ugly history and deep emotional turmoil connected to the eastern European country known as the Ukraine ("borderland").
As the film unfolds, the history of the Stalin years come to life - atrocities visited upon an entire nation - nine million dying from hunger; slave labour from Displaced Persons camps, corpse-strewn streets people no longer saw because they were "barely shuffling one foot in front of the other." A blue-eyed octogenarian describes beatings from Red Army soldiers searching for partisans. She chose physical suffering rather than being "an informer and suffer sin on my conscience."
When the Ukraine was liberated, many fled to the US or Canada rather than return to Russia. Today many children of those displaced persons retain that feeling of displacement as they are torn between an obligation to keep Ukrainian history alive and a desire to move forward.
"I wanted to wear v-neck sweaters, belong to the sorority and have the penny loafers," said Lasia. Instead she felt compelled to become a Ukrainian role model. Ever present was the feeling of metost (phon) - the longing for something else. Caught between two worlds, these children struggled to find their place in Canadian society.
Lasia voices bitter disappointment at discovering her homelanders' apparent apathy, "I'd spent my lifetime . . .saving the culture for these people," but those in the homeland had moved on.
"We're delighted with what we've been given," said a 60 year-old Ukrainian farmer, "including working the land even when it is such hard work." They found "It's better to laugh than to cry."
Now that the Ukraine is free, displaced persons' children must decide "What and how much" to pass on to their own children. Himself a child of displaced parents, Paskievich says he is neither bitter nor angry but he too questions the wisdom of passing the legacy to the next generation. "We were by the fire where our parents were burnt. Our children are further away from the fire," he said. "Do we say to our children come by the fire so you can be burnt?"
Like the film's Melnick, many who "wanted to escape the grinders, sausages and the smell of garlic" now find them "artistic and poetic - I don't want to deny myself." These children are ready to move into the future while retaining the best of their culture. When the Ukraine became free, said one participant, "I no longer wanted to go there. I felt my job was done. I have to shed some of the ancestral baggage in order to fully express myself . . . I want to dance in red shoes." This new generation struggles with guilt but they are determined their children's world will be "brand new territory."
Filmgoers like Vera Hnenny experienced an "ah-ha" sensation because the participants' experience so closely mirrors her own - that obligation for total immersion into the Ukrainian identity and the confusion that obligation engenders. Like others, Hnenny is grateful for the film because "I'd always felt this but never heard anyone articulate it."
Originally Printed in "The Prairie Messenger"