A Century of Untold Ukrainian Stories

By Olena Wawryshyn

Author Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch, editor of the recently published anthology Kobzar’s Children: A Century of Untold Stories, writes that as a young girl “I longed to read books about Ukrainian immigrants, but I could not find any.”

To address this dearth of published Ukrainian stories, Skrypuch, decided to write books for young people on Ukrainian themes. Her published titles, include Hope’s War, about a teenager whose grandfather is accused of being a Nazi war criminal, and two children’s books–Silver Threads, about a young Ukrainian couple who start a new life in Canada only to face internment, and Enough, set during the time of the Famine in Ukraine.

Skrypuch was contributor to, and a driving force behind, Kobzar’s Children. The collection contains historical fiction, memoirs and poems covering 100 years of Ukrainian history, written by Ukrainian-Canadian writers from Quebec, Ontario and Western Canada.  The contributors are all part of a circle of writers that Skrypuch met or mentored through an internet-based writers’ group that she set up.  The group’s members, both established authors and novices, read and critiqued each others’ works.

When they had gathered a considerable amount of material, Skrypuch told one of the editors at Fitzhenry &Whiteside, a company that has published some of her books, that she has a collection of “hard-hitting” stories. The editor became intrigued, and this conversation eventually led to the publication of Kobzar’s Children.

One of the first writers to be mentored by Skrypuch was Paulette MacQuarrie, a freelance editor and producer of the English-language Ukrainian radio program, Nash Holos, in British Columbia. MacQuarrie says she found [Skrypuch “to be the most wonderful receptive warm person. She wanted to develop a stable of Ukrainian Canadian writers,” says MacQuarrie.

“My fiction writing is really due to her encouragement and help,” adds MacQuarrie, whose short story “Christmas Missed,” set at the time of the Orange Revolution, is part of the new collection. 

Among the other authors whose work appear in Kobzar’s Children are award-winning author Larry Warwaruk, whose contribution "Bargain," set in Saskatchewan, is based on a true story, and the Winnipeg-born and -based Brenda Hasiuk whose fiction has been published in leading literary journals. Her contribution to the collection, “It’s Me Tatia,” is set in Western Canada in 1919.

The collection also contains material by new voices as well as poems by Linda Mikolayenko, from Ethelbert Manitoba, Sonja Dunn, who has worked in television for almost 30 years, and by a high school student from Quebec, Kim Pawliw, who wrote a tribute to her baba who, as a child was imprisoned with her family at the Spirit Lake Internment Camp.

“The Many Circles of Hell,” by Stefan Petelycky, a Ukrainian survivor of Aushwitz who now lives in British Columbia, is undoubtedly the most horrific story in the collection. Petelycky vividly describe the barbaric treatment suffered by him and his fellow former prisoners, many of them Ukrainians.

The anthology’s title takes its inspirations from the Kobzars, the minstrels and bandura players who were murdered en masse by Stalin who wanted to silence them because of their role in promulgating Ukrainian history, culture, traditions and stories.

In the Preface to Kobzar’s Children, Skrypuch draws a parallel between their stories and those of Ukrainians in Canada, which have been to a great extent lost because they were not documented.  With this new collection, some of these stories are finally being told.