by Ted Onulak

Created on: June 14, 2009

Excerpt from Mountain Girl's Song

On the surface, very little had changed in the remote mountain village in Western Ukraine. After the Red Army's liberation of the vast tract of Western lands ceded to Poland after World War I, the Red Army's occupation was relatively benign.

The old rugged wooden church was closed, of course, but the priest, Father Stepan remained as the unofficial holder of the village records, as the only records of births, marriages and deaths were kept in his ancient elegant hand. No one for 50 kilometers had ever seen a scrap of paper that proved their existence on God's earth.

Soon young men and women in the bright red neckerchiefs of the Komsomol were all about the village trying to institute grand plans from the Central Authority in far away Moscow. Almost immediately schools were established to teach the Cyrillic alphabet to a generation of children and youth whose only exposure to reading was the Latin letters from Polish. Precious few had even that knowledge, as one needed to pay the Polish authorities hard-earned money and swear a loyalty oath to even send their children to school.

The wise old heads in the village, like Ivan Stefurak, who everyone called Curly Ivan thought education was a good thing. It was free and it kept the damned Commissars away from his home.

Ivan was prosperous by village standards. Being largely self-sufficient, the only things they needed money for was kerosene for the lamps, salt and matches. Everything else they made for themselves. Ivan's only little vice was to frequent the tavern owned by Moshko the Jew. Ivan would go there several times a week and drink Moshko's homemade beer and spirits. Whiling away the night playing his fiddle and entertaining the crowd with his bawdy improvised lyrics.

Born a citizen of Austria-Hungary, Ivan avoided the slaughter of the First World War by cleverly faking a lung condition by smoking the potent Bulgarian tobacco he grew illegally until he was a wheezing wreck. As he convalesced, he proceeded to sire 13 children with Anna, his stoic hard-working wife. The villagers joked that all Ivan had to do was throw his trousers on the bed to get his wife pregnant.

Anna literally ran the Stefurak concern, teaching her sons and daughters the meaning of hard work and punishing laziness with a willow switch.

Anna was a master weaver in her youth and taught the girls to make beautiful wool blankets with hand-carded and

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>