A VIEW FROM CANADA: Home for Christmas? (12/25/88)

A VIEW FROM CANADA

by Orysia Paszczak Tracz

Home for Christmas?

Even though it was many years ago, when I worked in the university library, I remember the conversation in the staff lounge clearly. It was mid-December. A co-worker who had been a British war bride sighed, "Oh, to be back home for Christmas!" A Canadian woman, who had spent her whole life here, snapped, "What's the matter with you? You are home! Canada has been your home for 35 years!" With a faraway look in her eyes, the woman from Britain sadly smiled, "You don't understand about home."

I understood. There are so many concepts of home. Home is where you and your family live at any given moment. Home is your parents' house where you grew up. Home is the grandparents' farm where everyone of every generation gathers for special occasions. But home does not have to be a specific building. Home can be wherever your parents are now, even though the old family house no longer stands. If your parents are gone, home can be wherever you and your siblings gather for holidays. Home means family, no matter what the surroundings.

The latter meaning of home applies to me. As a child of the DP (Displaced Persons) post-war period, I have had so many homes that it's difficult to count. There was the half of a barracks room divided with hanging army blankets in the DP camp in Berchtesgaden, the back porch, the storefront and the numerous apartments in Jersey City, the apartment in Newark, and then a house, an actual house in Irvington, N.J. After I moved away for university, and then got married, my parents bought a house, this time a single-family, in Maplewood, N.J. Now, my mother lives at Soyuzivka, my sister and her family in Morris Plains, N.J. So - for me, where is home? For everyday, it is here in Winnipeg with my family. But, on Sviat Vechir, Christmas Eve, I think of home as being wherever my mother and sister are, even though I am not there.

What about the people of my mother's and late father's generation, those who were in their late teens and older, just as World War II erupted and raged? They were in their prime, but instead of living normally, they were part of the slave labor force in Germany, or served in the various armies, or were part of the wandering displaced millions throughout Europe. After the war, they chose not to go home, to Ukraine. But it was not a true, free choice, where one selects that which is most desirable, where one has a preference. Circumstances chose for them. It was a Hobson's choice - this or nothing, a choice with no alternatives.

The displaced generation had left parents, brothers and sisters, and an extended family behind. Both my mother and father were the only ones from each family in the West. Everyone else was "vdoma" - home. I have known no grandparents, aunts or uncles. From the mid-1940s the families would not communicate with each other again until after Stalin's death in 1953.

From the time I can remember, for my parents and their contemporaries Sviat Vechir was not the joyful holiday celebration it was for us children. That traditional empty place setting symbolized for them all that they had lost - parents, relatives and home. I saw and felt the pain, longing and tears as we preyed, carolled and sat down to taste the first spoonful of kutia. No matter how well they had succeeded and prospered in their new North American home, no matter how they had settled in here, it was not the same, even 30 to 40 years later, especially at Christmas. They were not home.

That is how our early pioneers have felt. Theirs was an economic choice of survival, a better life - but the sense of loss, of separation must have been the same. Their descendants, though, through many generations, are at home here. One fifth generation Canadian told me that she goes home to the farm outside of Dauphin the way others go home to the selo (village) in Ukraine, Another told me his family, all 30-some people gather at the farm for Sviat Vechir. The generations had done that since the farm had been built at the turn of the century. For myself and my parents' generation I envied them their togetherness and their permanent home on the farm.

May your holidays be happy and safe. And if you can, have your family around you, and - even with everyone's faults, including your own - don't take them for granted.

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