Letter from Publisher - April 2022
Mar 29, 2022 04:25PM ● By Dave Korba
Our extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins were at Grandma's this particular day as we gathered for a family meal after Grandpa’s funeral. My dad’s father, Harry, a Ukrainian immigrant, was born in 1897 in a small village located just inside Poland’s border. I didn’t know my grandfather well; I was too young and he was too sick. I remember riding with my dad regularly to pick up the oxygen tanks that supplied Grandpa’s breathing after decades as a coal miner. I remember that Grandma set an empty place setting at the dinner table that day.
Soon after Grandpa died, I went to live with Grandma—the first grandchild to do so. We lived right next door, so the commute wasn’t far. I stayed for several years, and then swapped places with my younger sister. Grandma’s house—even though that’s where I slept for a few years, is where we all received our formal Ukrainian upbringing, which included food, work ethic, dance, holiday traditions, prayers and church, with a heavy emphasis on the prayers and church. There were no Ukrainian altar boys more adequately trained than me and my brothers.
When I was
6, I laughed and played on the porch after my grandfather died. I was a child,
being a child. Today, 6-year-olds in Ukraine are laughing and playing in rubble
as bombs rain on their homes and porches. They are children being children,
finding a way forward to feel good, live simply and laugh more. Slava Ukraini!