I’ve become a writer of books or rather of a book only reluctantly. It’s tough work, with few prospects of financial success. My book is a simple thing. It’s the story of my wife’s parents, Ukrainian peasants both. This book isn’t meant for financial success. I am writing it for my wife, my children and my nieces and nephews. The title is simple too, Gus – A peasant’s journey through the Twentieth Century. I hope to finish it this spring. I’m self-publishing it. Here is a draft introduction.
This is the story of my wife’s parents through much of the Twentieth Century. The starting point for both Gus and Olga was Ukraine. Both were peasants. Both wound up in suburban middleclass America. Between those two endpoints were: WWI, the Russian Revolution, Collectivization of Soviet Union agriculture, the Great Depression and WWII on both the German eastern and western fronts. This is not a history of monumental people. Those Twentieth Century histories have long been written. It’s a story of story of peasants finding their way through the monumental times of the Twentieth Century.
Sometimes it takes a while to connect the dots. I must have been married for eight or nine years before it occurred to me that my father-in-law, Gus, not only lived through the Russian revolution but likely was old enough at the time to have recollections of it.
I knew he was born in Ukraine in 1908. I knew ethnically and culturally he was German. I knew he immigrated to Canada in the 1920s and then to the US. I knew I had married into a closely knit extended family and most of my wife’s aunts and uncles came to the US following WWII. I knew my mother-in-law was something of mail order bride. I knew she had fled from Ukraine into Austria with the retreating German army in WWII. I knew Olga and Gus had not met prior to her arrival in America. I knew many things and I knew nothing.
Mostly we live in the present. Our personal histories extend primarily to our memories and those shared with others. What I knew about my in-laws was mostly what I knew of them in the present: they were devout Baptists; their social lives were centered on their extended family and church community; and both groups we’re largely populated by ethnic German immigrants and first generation Americans.
Almost ten years after my wife and I had been married we were celebrating Thanksgiving with her parents. In the course of conversation it finally occurred to me that Gus would have been eight or nine years old at the close of WWI and the beginning of the Russian Revolution. My own memories go back to when I eight and before. So I asked Gus if he remembered the Russian Revolution. He did and vividly.
Throughout the following winter, I visited often, with a tape recorder, and let him tell his life story. That spring I transcribed those interviews and began writing this book. I knew it would be a mammoth project and I also knew I was not a writer of books. Good grief, I was an industrial salesman.
After drafting the first few thousand words I thought it was time for a reality check. The story I was writing was a combination of Gus’s narrative, family profile and a more detailed history of times and places Gus had told me about and also about the places Rita’s extended family were at in given times. As a writer this all this adds up to tough transitions. Though, I didn’t know that.
I attended a writer’s workshop to get feel for if what I was doing was any good and worth the effort. I was told something about tough transitions. In a similar vein, that fall I returned to college and enrolled in class on writing non-fiction for publication – more talk on tough transitions. There was something about climbing up and down the ladder abstraction too. Ladders of abstraction and tough transitions aside, the feedback from the writer’s workshop and non-fiction writing course was positive.
That summer, a friend of mine started a legal publishing business and needed writers. Suddenly I found I was a legal journalist reporting on environmental legislation, litigation and regulation. The family history project was placed on a back burner and ultimately tucked away in a closet to be returned to at some later date. Big projects tucked away in closets are things thought of with dread – hard work and foreboding with fears of inadequacy. They are thought of it’s there and ought to be worked on. And at the same time, the dreadful conclusion is I really don’t want to go there.
That later date turned out to be twenty years into the future and some four or five operating systems later. Thank God I had the wisdom to save my work in an ASCII text format.
About Christmas time last year, Rita asked, when are you going to finish my father’s history? By next Christmas, I told her. “It will be a Christmas present.”
That wasn’t going to happen. But it was a deadline. Some deadlines are set in stone. Some are meant to be broken – in place only to keep a project moving forward. Mine was one of the latter. Now there was much work to do – history to brush up on: the great depression, WWII and the like. Some of the history I needed to know was only just being written. The history of Stalin’s collectivization program only started to come to light in the early 1990s.
A formal history of European displaced persons at the end of WWII was first published in 2011, as I write now. It’s a huge story. But it was overshadowed by so many other huge stories of WWII it’s almost forgotten. Other stories, such as the Battle of Los Angles are found in old newspaper accounts and in more recent but obscure military histories.
The twenty year lag time was both a blessing and a curse. If I had known then, what I know now, I would have been more able to question Gus and Olga for details and could have presented their narrative fully. But I cannot go back. Both are dead. I am sorry I can’t say to them “tell me more.”
I am sorry too that I can’t go back to both of my parents and say tell me more of your lives, of the times before I was born and of the times neither my sisters nor our brothers can remember. We live in the present after all. Our histories mostly consist of our shared memories and shards and bits of memories from what we know from parents from those times before we were born. There is always the courtship story, after all.
These things become like the frozen and dissolving pixels on our digital TVs when the signal goes bad. Lost. For our roots we try to piecemeal them back together through genealogy and elaborate family trees.
I had the luck once to connect the dots – to ask a question and to say tell me more.
In the end, that simple question resulted in this story. This story is a very simple gift of love, first to my wife and my children. After that it’s a gift wife’s brothers and cousins and their children. And finally, this is a gift to the many people who share a similar history. And in retrospect it is a gift to Gus and Olga. It says I remember.
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