My grandfather emigrated to America via Canada in 1912, when he was 20. His name was Yakim Zanichkowsky. After I discovered a family in Canada with our same name (because of a book I’d published), I drove to the national archives, housed in Ottawa. My grandfather travelled alone, on a ship from Rotterdam. His signature on the ship’s manifest looks exactly like my father’s, whose name was Martin. Although Canada “imported” many thousands of Ukrainians as grain farmers, Yakim was a tailor and furrier. He eventually settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where my father was born. I don’t know that Yakim ever went to college, where he learned his trades, or what he thought of America. Martin was the second of Yakim’s three children. The youngest one, my father’s sister, died in a fire when she leapt over a smoldering leaf pile as a kid.
My father never talked about his father, but Yakim disowned Martin for converting from eastern Orthodox to Roman Catholicism. This, we think, in order to marry my mother, whose parents came from Lithuania. But we don’t know; our folks were silent on this subject. Older siblings confirm that my father couch-surfed among friends for a while after being unhoused. My father and his father were known to argue, as both were strong in their beliefs. My father and I argued as well, mostly about religion and politics. He’d confront me with questions which I was too young to answer. When I burned my draft card, he (and my mother, to my dismay) disowned me. Only then did I wonder if Yakim had left Russia for Canada because he sensed the impending Great War, and what he might’ve thought of my actions. Also, I could never understand why, after Yakim disowned Martin, my father was so intolerant of my decision about Vietnam.
Yakim was born in 1892 in Berestechko, a town in Ukraine which, back then, was part of Russia. We kids thought of ourselves as Russians all through childhood. I liked my grandfather. He was short, handsome, quiet-spoken, and kind. He sometimes scolded my father about the size of our family (14 kids); he offered that my father keep his zipper up. This didn’t go well; my parents wanted “all the children God thought to grant them,” in my mother’s words. Yakim never learned to drive a car. He’d walk two miles from the bus station to our house, with little boxes of animal crackers for us kids. He never learned all of our names. Maybe we were just too many. He never mentioned his own siblings. Possibly, he was uncomfortable with English. He lived to be 91.
I wish now I’d known enough to ask him more about his past. I never met Yakim’s wife Katherine, who died when I was young, and never met my mother’s parents, who died on the same October afternoon in 1946, before I was born. Yakim belonged to the onion-domed Transfiguration Orthodox Cathedral in Williamsburg, where the Consecration of the Host takes place behind screens, as if such things were forbidden knowledge. I don’t know how serious a Christian he was.
Ukraine is a translation of Krajina (from Polish: Ukrajina, which loosely translates as “borderland.” Over the centuries Ukraine has had many rulers: Poland, Kievan Rus’, Mongols, the Ottoman Empire. By 1922 Ukraine was Soviet territory. Yakim’s actual nationality depends not on where he was born, but when. But that applies to a large number of “Americans,” does it not?
My grandfather died in 1983. He didn’t get to witness the dismantling of the Berlin Wall or the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He might’ve despaired for Ukraine by the time Andropov took over the USSR in 1982. He didn’t experience the loss of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. I didn’t attend his funeral, not wanting to give my father solace for his loss. Perhaps a sad moment for us both, and one of my few regrets.
Russia, land-mass wise, is the largest country on earth, and the current war they wage in Ukraine makes no sense. I fear it’s a stepping stone to my mother’s homeland, and Latvia and Estonia. I fear the apparent lack of outrage in Europe. Happy isn’t the right word, but I’m relieved that Yakim Zanichkowsky is not here to see this latest invasion of his country.