“Fibre and cloth are a universal part of human life. They fill an almost endless number of roles in our practical, personal, emotional, social, communicative, economic, aesthetic, and spiritual lives.” — Beverly Gordon

The Ukrainian Fabric of my Family

My last name reveals my Ukrainian heritage. My grandfather was born in Canada and grew up in a Ukrainian-Canadian family. For the first several years of his life, he spoke nothing but Ukrainian. For those few years he was, for all intents and purposes, as Ukrainian as anyone living in what is now Ukraine — ethnically Ukrainian in a non-Ukrainian land (in the 1930s, when he was born, Ukraine was split between the USSR, Poland, Romania — from where my great grandfather escaped — and Czechoslovakia). When he went to school with other Canadian children, however, he literally had the Ukrainian beaten out of him. Because his dad moved from farm to farm to find work, my grandpa experienced this with a series of new schools. According to my grandpa, this is when he became Canadian, and from that point on, that’s what his parents wanted him to be.

But he still spent time with the generations above him, especially with his baba and his aunties, and they were all still Ukrainian. The adults kept the children out of specifically Ukrainian spaces, like dances, where they would speak Ukrainian and be Ukrainian while the children became more and more Canadian. My grandpa was not raised, then, to be Ukrainian.

This doesn’t mean that my grandpa ever fully stopped being Ukrainian. His Ukrainianness would show up throughout my childhood in the form of physical artefacts. The pysanky (Easter eggs) were brought out at Easter to adorn the house, and us kids would learn how to do the basic waxing and dying of the traditional eggs. That was always more fun than the North American style Easter eggs. If we were on holiday for Christmas Day, we would celebrate Ukrainian Christmas on January 7th — this mostly involved eating a lot of varenyky (what most people call pierogis — dang Polish subjugation!) and halubtsi (cabbage rolls).

The rushnyky (embroidered towels) would line the table at all major family holidays. Most of the year they would be tucked away in the closet, but they always came out for special occasions. They were a fibre still woven into our family, despite the generations of Canadianization. My dad was buried in a traditional Ukrainian embroidered peasant top — it mattered still to my grandpa that this be the case.

I always felt the Ukrainianness because of these small things, which is why I later studied Ukrainian history. When I went to Ukraine, I visited a distant cousin of mine (the granddaughter of my grandfather’s uncle, I think…), Leysa, who had come to Canada for 6 months in the late 1990s and lived with my grandparents. Leysa, her husband, their son, and her parents still live on the same property that my family has lived on for generations, nestled in a village outside Chernivtsi in southwestern Ukraine. Hospitality in eastern Europe is different than it is here — it’s, well, more hospitable and full-service.

Leysa and her husband Dima showed me around the area. One day they took me to a tourist spot in the Carpathian mountains. There, they became very insistent about one thing — that they buy me an embroidered top. This, it seemed, was the pinnacle of Ukrainian hospitality.

Honoring those who came Before

Larisa Sembaliuk Cheladyn has extensively studied Ukrainian and Ukrainian-Canadian folklore and the associated material culture. She wrote her Master’s thesis Ukrainian Canadian embroidered pillows, podushky, as “stitched narratives.” She points out that podushky production and display in Canada peaked in the 1950s-1970s — the artisans who produced them died off after this. Podushky became primarily heirlooms and artifacts and less living life-documents.

My embroidery now — the reasons behind it and its current and ongoing outcomes — fulfills roles across several areas quoted at the beginning of this post. It is personal, it is social, it is communicative, it is emotional, it is aesthetic, and it is spiritual. Embarking on the task of learning to embroider and choosing and executing designs that are personally meaningful is a relatively simple one. It bears no connection to anything outside of myself — I am not performing something that inherits the history and meaning of a people.

When I decide to embark on Ukrainian embroidery, however, that will carry such weight. It will carry the weight of my family’s story, of Ukraine’s story, and of its cultural and social symbology and webs of meaning. When I eventually try to do it, I want to be cognizant of whatI am using, of what narratives I am stitching together to make my own. I want to delve further into Larisa Sembaliuk’s work — not only does it allow me to learn about the general Ukrainian and Ukrainian-Canadian meanings attached to stitching, something which I’m sure is touched on by many other authors, but I think it would mean more for me to use the maps of meaning discovered and described by someone to whom I have a personal (though admittedly tangential) connection.

Larisa is the daughter of Paul Sembaliuk, known for designing the Vegreville Easter egg. Mr. Sembaliuk, who passed away last year at 90 years old, was a really lovely Ukrainian Canadian man who made many other substantial contributions to Canadian arts and Canadian Ukrainian culture and who contributed substantially to Ukrainian studies at UVic. I met him and his wife at a UVic donor dinner when I was doing my undergraduate degree. He was very quiet, but he was very kind and surprisingly funny. He and his wife were clearly so pleased to meet and interact with someone who benefitted from and appreciated not their money but their heritage, their stories. That interaction became a part of my fabric.

Embroidery is a deeply personal endeavour for me, so I would rather not treat it as an academic one. The Ukrainian embroidery goal, in particular, is deeply tied to my personal and family identity and history. Larisa Sembaliuk may be an academic, but the brief yet meaningful connection I had with her parents does a lot to demonstrate the weaving and stitching together of personal, familial, and cultural histories that Ukrainian embroidery represents.