Walter Kish

I write this on Father’s Day, and as befits the occasion, I can’t help but reminisce on the life and experiences of my own father who passed away almost a decade ago. I too, am a father, and though we may have shared a common heritage and generic parental responsibilities, I cannot help but wonder at the immense contrast between the very different life experiences that we each had.

Some seventy five years ago, a poor 18-year-old youngest son from a peasant family of ten grubbing out a meager existence in a small selo called Sokoliwka west of Brody, decided to leave home and seek a future almost half way around the world in an unknown land called Kanada. That young man was my father.

Though he was exceptionally bright, the village school provided him with a minimal education, little more than learning how to read, write and do basic arithmetic. He knew little of life beyond the village and its nearest neighbours. The closest large city, Lviv, might as well have been in a foreign country.

Life in the village was an endless round of toil, hardship, births, marriages, and death. Facilities were primitive. Electricity, gas and machinery were still decades away. The drudgery was only relieved by religious observances and the love of their energetic and colourful folk culture as expressed in arts and crafts, song, music and dance. Other countries, other cultures, and other people were but abstract concepts at best and mostly unknowns to the average Ukrainian.

As an immigrant in Canada, he faced decades of hard labour and often exploitation before he was able to establish relative financial comfort and a decent middle class standard of living for himself and his growing family. Though life was definitely easier and offered much more opportunity for him in Canada, he was for most of his life still shackled to earning a living, with little opportunity for leisure, recreation, travel, education or what we have come to know in our age as self-actualization. His social and cultural life was also tied to the Ukrainian community, and though he had acquaintances among the English, the French and the other ethnics where we lived, clearly he would never have considered himself as anything but a Ukrainian first and Canadian second. Concepts such as multiculturalism, cultural mosaics, melting pots and the like never really intruded into his day-to-day life.

I am my father’s son, but my life bears little resemblance to his. Largely due to his hard work and upbringing, I am a college graduate with a successful career garnered with a number of large multinational corporations. In just the past six months I have traveled and seen more of the world than he had in his whole life.

I am just as comfortable making my way around Kyiv or Lviv as in Paris or London, Tokyo or Singapore, Sydney or Istanbul, Denver or New York, Toronto or Vancouver.

I move comfortably between the Ukrainian community where I am actively involved, the largely Anglo- world of global business where I spend my working days, and the French environment of Quebec where I was born and raised. I have seen and experienced the sights and cultures of a good part of the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia.

I probably have more books in my house than probably existed in the whole raion where my father was born and raised. My exposure to arts and culture covers the broad spectrum of all that a rich multicultural country such as Canada has to offer. Through the wonders of computer technology and the Internet, I have access at my fingertips to a vast storehouse of information that literally boggles the mind. I exchange e-mails in real time with friends, relatives, and acquaintances in Japan, Ukraine, Sydney, Canada and throughout Europe.

The real wonder is that all this has happened in one lifetime. In the space of seventy five years, my father was witness to political, social, cultural, technological and psychological change that exceeded the cumulative sum of all of mankind’s previous existence. It may not have changed his essential character, perspectives and values, but it certainly profoundly affected the lives of his children and myself in particular.

One thing however, hasn’t changed. My father always had a deep love for his Ukrainian roots and culture. That gift he passed onto me, and it has remained a fundamental cornerstone in my life. “Vichnaya Pamyat”!