High Park, Toronto, Canada

I’m from a non-traditional evangelical Russian Mennonite family which means, for those of you who get confused between Mennonites, Mormons and Amish, my ancestors originated in Northern Holland in the mid 1500’s and were followers of the converted Catholic priest, Menno Simons, the founding father of the faith. Because of persecution by the Catholics during the reformation, the Mennonites moved to the Vistula Delta in present day Poland where they prospered for 250 years building dykes and farming. When invited by Catherine the Great in the late 1700’s they moved to Russia, where they settled and prospered in present day Ukraine.

My grandparents were born and lived in Ukraine, which was considered part of the Soviet Union at the time. They lived in a Mennonite village called Einlage which was part of a group of villages called Chortitza. My maternal grandfather was 17 the year of the Russian Revolution and remembers the family residence being bombed and raided.

My grandmother died just after her fourth child was born. Her bones lie in the ground close to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

My paternal grandmother and grandfather were both teachers and when my grandfather was recruited to the White Army he went to Moscow to get passports for his family, then they boarded the train and eventually emigrated to southern Manitoba.

My parents met in Steinbach, Manitoba. My mother was a WWII refugee who had arrived in Canada in 1948. At school in the year 1951, my father sat at the back of the class and watched my mother study English. She ignored him. But several years later when he offered her a ride in his own car to Saengerfeste, a Mennonite singing festival, she couldn’t say no.

The rest is history, my history.