How do I write about Brazil without it sounding like a grade school essay about my summer vacation? Well, I can’t because that’s where my wife and I traveled to visit our daughter in Apucarana in Parana State.
Brazil always loomed large for me. Just a boy in the 1950s, I saw photos of our Uncle Genyo (Evhen) clad only in a loin cloth, surrounded by dark-skinned, naked people adorned by feathers and carrying spears.
I’ve since learned more about Genyo. He was one of five brothers from Lviv who were scattered across four continents in the wake of World War II. My father, Alexander, and older brother, Yuriy, ended up in North America. The youngest, Slavko, was arrested by the NKVD and died somewhere in the gulag in 1940. The oldest, Henyo, stayed in the family apartment in Lviv.
Genyo, four years younger than my father, was an adventurer who once paddled the rivers of western Ukraine to the Baltic Sea. He was also a linguist, fluent in more than 20 languages. That landed him a job with the Brazilian Indian Protection Service in 1950. His assignment? Paddle for a month up an Amazon River tributary, contact an indigenous tribe, help with health and development, learn and document their language. Over the course of that year Genyo wrote lengthy accounts. Yuriy, editor of the Ukrainian-language Novyi Svit (New World), published them in 1951.
After his memorable year in the rain forest, Genyo settled in Rio de Janeiro, becoming a leading environmentalist and defender of indigenous Brazilians. In the early 1970s, my brother Peter spent a semester abroad in Brazil and met with our uncle – his first face-to-face family encounter in a quarter century. That spurred Genyo to visit his brothers in America. I got to meet him and marvel at his prodigious language skills. He died of a heart attack in 1980 while walking hundreds of miles along the Atlantic shore – his kind of vacation.
Fast forward a decade. My wife and I were busy being parents to our newly born son when the phone rang. The caller identified himself as Gustavo Tamara. I recognized the surname. Genyo, dodging the draft during Soviet occupation in 1944, was seized and assigned to a penal battalion, condemned to die marching through German mine fields to clear a path for Red Army troops who followed. So he deserted. Fearing reprisal, upon immigrating to Brazil, he changed his name to Roberto Tamara. The voice on the phone belonged to his son, years younger than me – a first cousin I never knew I had. Gustavo tracked me down from the letter my father had written to Roberto’s boss inquiring about his brother, not knowing he had recently died. The boss kept the letter and then gave it to Gustavo who used it to connect. We exchanged letters and photographs and indeed, Gustavo looks like a Fedynsky. Communication, however, soon ended. We were both busy with family and career.
Fast forward again, to 2018. Our daughter Olesia, who majored in anthropology and languages, won a Fulbright Fellowship to teach English at Parana State University. This past summer (winter in Brazil), she requested Gustavo’s contact information. What I had, we found, was no longer current. Amazingly and unexpectedly, days later I got an e-mail from Gustavo: “It’s a long time since we’ve been in touch. 25 years ago you provided me a lot of information about my father and family and I have to thank you very much for that. I‘ll never forget it.” He’d be visiting the U.S., he wrote, and wanted to meet. Ironically, his visit would be during the very weeks in August my wife and I planned to visit our daughter. Well, we gave Olesia Gustavo’s contacts and in July she, along with our son Mykhailo and nephew Ivan, met with their uncle Gustavo, who was a wonderful host.
But about our summer vacation: Chrystia and I flew to Sao Paulo, a megalopolis of 30 million-plus people. Greater Cleveland would be lost there amidst hundreds upon hundreds of high-rise apartment buildings looming in all four directions as far as the eye can see. There are fascinating museums, terrific restaurants, vibrant street life, music and parks. After a few days, we took a seven-hour bus ride to Apucarana to be with Olesia. She now speaks fluent Portuguese and has many Brazilian friends. Chrystia and I were grateful recipients of their warmth and hospitality.
Parana State is the hub for Ukrainian life in Brazil. There’s an amiable woman, for example, a descendant of 19th century immigrants, who runs a varenyky (pierogi) stand at a weekly market in Apucarana. She doesn’t speak Ukrainian but maintains traditions and won’t let our daughter pay. The city has three Ukrainian churches. Unannounced, we visited two of them and were warmly received in both. Father Edvard, a recent immigrant from Rivne in Volyn, Ukraine, has been serving his Orthodox parishioners for the past seven years. Father Yosyf at the nearby Catholic church is a third-generation Brazilian who speaks fluent Ukrainian. He gave us a deluxe book about the Kowalski Family food company in Apucarana. The book, its cover festooned with Brazilian and Ukrainian colors, touts the company’s success and the family’s century-plus roots to western Ukraine. Who knew?
From Apucarana, we went to Curitiba, capital of Parana, where we visited the impressive Ukrainian park with a wooden Hutsul church, folk art exhibits, Holodomor monument and giant vinyl pysanka. We chatted in Ukrainian/English with two young men who staff the “monument” and run the gift shop. The next day, wandering at a huge municipal market, a woman behind a cash register overheard my wife and me speaking Ukrainian and, without accent, engaged us in dialogue: she’s also a third-generation Brazilian, her grandfather arriving after World War II. Ukes are everywhere, we found, including Bar Baran, a Ukrainian gathering place, packed on the Friday night we dined, enjoying the same food you’ll have in Lviv, Toronto or Parma, Ohio.
At the end of August, we flew home to Cleveland. Mere hours later, we welcomed Gustavo who generously extended his stay for nearly a week. Upon departure he vowed to learn more about his Ukrainian/Brazilian roots and instruct his daughter, Carolina. What a summer: connecting with present, past and, I hope, future in a fascinating part of the world.