I was born in Toronto in 1936. I lived above a hair salon and barber shop run by my father and my mother, aunt and two uncles, and Seaton on Queen Street in Toronto. The smell of solution finger waves and the unique scent of a standing wave would still lead to an explosion of memories of the game in the store. I did not speak English until I went to the Duke of York public school, I need it. Games on Seaton St., I did not know he was English. There were lots of families in Ukrainethe street was like a tribal village or circle of tents in the desert, so they were not aware of the surrounding population.
Our Ukrainian community was so sure I could play on Seaton St. all day while my parents worked. If I did not come home for lunch, never mind. I just ate all the other children in the house we happened to playing. Hot, wrinkled old baba mourning seemed to be everywhere.
On Sundays and public holidays, the tribe Ukrainiandragged the Holy Eucharist Ukrainian Catholic Church on King Street, near the River Don. Today, forty years later, while the Don Valley Parkway to Richmond St. exit ramp and go over the old site of the church, are flooded with memories of weddings, plays, baptisms and religious holidays. I swear the smell of incense, wax, and the musty smell of the basement hall, there are twenty years later the church was demolished. Sometimes I still feel the priest's deepbooming singing voice Os PODi Cadilla pomelui as he waves the smoke of incense in a golden chain.
For eight hours, I survived the horrors of the Ukrainian Saturday school where I was threatened with life in an eternal hell or even be an alter boy. I've always been under relentless pressure from two main sisters. My parents were never able to get me back to school after the Ukrainian nuns forced me to try on clothes alter boy to show me how beautiful Isaw in them. They promised me a life in heaven, where, as a nun says: "You can apply at any time you want." I still see her turn, removed his face framed by her white dress as she bent close to mine and whispered this sacred secret.
When I was five, I was in hospital with a severe case of sore throat. No one understood me when I whined and complained in Ukrainian and my condition deteriorated. Frustrated, my parents whisked me from the hospital, they would never swearagain to speak Ukrainian at home. They never did, except when the Ukrainian visitors came through the old town. I slowly became aware that not all Ukrainian Canadian word.
I never realized what a poor student, I was until recently. After the death of my father, I found some of my old report cards grades four five documents. Report cards that contained only rank in class, a theme after another, there are no data, no scratches, only rank in class, and a section at the bottomthe number of pupils in the class to give. I noticed that there are 44 students in class and my vote for the academic subjects to read 44, 43, 38, 41. While it has never been asked to repeat a grade, my parents are angry when the school wanted me in a special program for slow learners. But it was wartime and positioning materialized.I since I learned it takes a student of second language for seven to ten years to reach the level of his colleagues approach the ability to use English. Myrelationships hurt the fourth, represented my functional level after five years of learning the English language. By the end of grade eight, after nine years of English, my grades were enough to gain access to, and eventually graduated, Upper Canada College. Later I completed BA and M.Ed. graduated from the University of Toronto.
I am amazed at how long it takes to learn and understand peers lanaguage enough to compete with one even if one was born in Canada. Streamingthe children of newly arrived immigrants in programs or programs vocatinal terminal repeats over and over again.
Neither my mother nor my father ever taught to read or write English. There were no newspapers or magazines in our house. I've never had a story to read to me I can not remember tell the stories. Goldilocks, Winnie the Pooh and Hansel and Gretel came to be known only to me as an adult, and there are numerous references to literary figures that appear in childreneveryday conversation, which passed right over me. I remember two books that went into the house. One was a tattered old book of poems of Taras Shevchenko Ukrainian patriot. The other was a second book on eye diseases - a medical book to my father bought my brother Walter. He was told to read it because he went to a doctor, as I realized that was supposed to be a lawyer. I've never seen anyone take both books. But my dad is consistently votedimportance of education. He had never gone to school in Ukraine, but it was determined that her children would have up for his lack of schooling.
My father and eleven silent partner bought a pub, the Riviera Hotel on King St. near Sherbourne. Our family moved in upstairs, and my mother and father ran the hotel personally. Frankly, it was a brothel and a hangout for the legendary band Mickey McDonald. My father has a temporary license for three months provided thatif he could clean up prostitution and get rid of the gang, would have a permanent license. I have watched many a fight through the guardrail posts, and I will always remember the night my father Mickey McDonald joined the group at the hotel until the police arrived. He stood defiantly at the door, bloodied, shouting his thick accent, "You would not leave when I asked you, now stay until I let it go!" He got his permanent license.
Life began to calm down a bit '. Netclockwork, my father opened the hotel door every day at noon. Employees of the cookie factory across the street Christie beers poured into the afternoon. A man was out. He wore a black Homburg hat, a black jacket, a black suit and black tie. Every day he ordered a draft, opened the newspaper and read for twenty minutes, finished his beer and left. One day my father, in his broken English, said: "Sir, you look like an intelligent man My son is in grade eight I want to send to him ..a good school. The best in Canada. Can you tell me a good school? "
The man does not like noise. Suddenly, he replied: "One of the best schools in Canada is here in Toronto. It's called Upper Canada College. The newspaper snapped open with each other. "Where is this school, sir?"
"On the Road Londsale" was a response to short out from behind the newspaper. My father arranged for an application for my brother Walter to school to participate. Over time, my father received a letterWalter was not accepted.
By the end of June, as my father had made the beer ritual, the man in black Homburg left his papers and said: "By the way, have you ever applied to his son to attend Upper Canada College"
"Yes," my father said, "but they say no."
. This annoyed interest of the lord and he asked my father continued his request, my father looked through her box of an office and produced the letter of a sentence said. "We do not feelyour child would fit well here. "The man asked my father if he would still like to send his son in Upper Canada." Of course, if you think it's good school, I send! "My father answered.
He asked my father if he could take a letter from a couple of days and then left. About an hour later, the headmaster of Upper Canada College men arrived at the hall of the 'Riviera Hotel to inform you that my father had only one opening, and the college would be happy if he would accept the Walter'vacancy. The man in black Homburg was a governor of Upper Canada College, who has spent his law firm out of a beer and a quiet reading room on. Although my father could afford, we have three boys Diakiw started fifteen years of roaming the hallowed halls Upper Canada College. What a strange twist of fate! That a change in culture weird! My five years in college were a combination of joy, pleasure, boredom, humiliation and anger. I liked sports andother extra-curricular opportunities available. Despite the strong loyalty, I still for the College, the terrible boredom and monotony of my lessons are difficult to justify the reputation of first class. Parents paid exorbitant reputation, and the students did not dare ask the teaching staff. But in many ways from school, I acquired the status. As adults learned about the school that I visited, they gave me an unnecessary increase in social status, not unlike the respect they mayhave shown that a graduate of Oxford or Harvard.
Until I entered Upper Canada College, I never realized how Ukrainians, or rather, as non-Canadian who I was. Attending the College presented the socio-cultural hierarchies that I had unconsciously. For me this privilege was not without a price. In 1957, two years after graduating from Upper Canada College, I worked during the summer training Royal Canadian Navy (UAE) for cadets. I came to the officers 'mess' in Montrealmy shoulders to my assigned quarters backpack and introduced myself to my roommate, Milton Zysman, lying in bed reading. "What kind of Diakiw name?" he asked. "Ukraine," I said. "Ah, another black man," he shouted. I looked at - surprise - as the lights flashed in my thoughts and memories fell and unfolds like a kaleidoscope. I never thought that way again, had a fundamental truth about how I felt and the experiences that I had exposed. What was a Ukrainian anda jew in common with a black man? Why am I so easy to identify with this statement? Although the differences in experiences were great, we had all known intolerance, prejudice and second-class status. Milton and me, this status was confirmed by law. Our parents had emigrated to Canada at a time in which decisions under the Immigration Act of 1923, European immigrants are classified as preferred (Northern Europe), non-preferred (Eastern Europe, including Ukraine) and specialClass License (Southern Europe and all Jews, except British citizens, whatever their nationality). The day I arrived at the naval base in Montreal, I no longer speak or understand Ukrainian. I was born in Canada and had never visited Ukraine. I have not had relations with the Ukrainian Church from the age of ten years. I belonged to any clubs or organizations of Ukraine, Ukraine celebrated a feast or festival. I was almost not Ukrainian at all, except that my identity wasdefined and confirmed to me by English Canadians. They described the group had found that I belonged, and that the group was somehow inherently inferior.
I was not aware of this inferior status, until I went to Upper Canada College, where I was confronted with the impenetrable wall of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. I do not remember personally offended, except for a French teacher. He regularly kicked and pushed me out of my chair and onto the floor while screaming like I wasborn from my mother Ukrainian black deep swamp.
Otherwise, I was treated as an equal and fully accepted in school life. No door was closed or occasion for me. I was welcomed by my classmates as one of them. Yet I felt like an outsider. The culture of the college was English public school. This tradition has been so heavily guarded that the school is always an English headmaster to ensure that these core values have been maintained introduced. (A few years after my graduation, theappointed the first Canadian school principal.) Accepting, as I learned my culture, my parents, my lifestyle, my past were not acceptable. I think I know well hidden from my classmates - they never knew himself. As such, they revealed their feelings and attitudes. Even today I can not share with my good friends in those years, the subtle distinctions and their unconscious to me. They do not remember, or suggests that I was allergic - Isure you do not understand. The distinction was ruthless ethnic jokes, ridicule the way foreigners talk and clothing, their language on immigration - "PS bloody messed up in this country" - the understatement of other cultures - "the only cultural achievements of the Ukrainian the decorated Easter egg. "A Note on an Italian, a Hungarian jew or painted to me with the same brush. They welcomed me as one of them, but when she joked about immigrants, I have defined andI'm offended.
In college, we were trained to simulate the English language correctly. We have been taught Latin and the classics. We are committed to memory, while the Church daily prayers in the chapel of England, as British patriotic songs such as "Jerusalem" - "Neither my sword sleep in my hand until we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land." I came to the attention of the government and all the "pink bits" on the map. The Upper Canada College Cadet Battalion their links with the Queen'sGuns, I learned courage, history of the regiment in training, defend and protect the Empire. Prince Philip, patron of our reality, made periodic visits to school for our right connection at the top confirm. My classmates and I learned about the power and that power was held by English Canadians, we have been trained to correct the English Canadians. Many of those same classmates dominate every corridor of power today.
This was not an environment in which I have spokenproud of my heritage. I retired and assimilated as quickly as I could. I was very ashamed of my background. I was particularly ashamed of my parents. Compared to the parents of my friend, my ignorant and seemed crude. It is not never met a classmate of my parents or my house visited during the five years I attended college. I have visited in their homes, but not until the end of thirteen years of degree, I did not want to invite my friends. Only then did I begin to realize that, despite differencesculture and wealth, my parents were among the best.
For me, my mother and father were largely without prejudice. (My wife says she loves me.) But the ethnic group who are victims of abuse and discipline from my parents was carrying Canadian English with a British accent. My mother has always felt ashamed and humiliated in their presence. If one of us "broadcast", as arrogant, pompous, arrogant or overbearing, they would say: ". Do not be a Bronco," "A"Bronco" was an English person, and our house was the most devastating insult could be done. As a young man, I never understood this hostility. But Upper Canada College and in the years that followed, I began to understand the boldness of the "dominant culture". I have come to understand and sympathize with the Jews evil stereotype Gentili, with the pursuit of the blacks against the whites, the radical feminists demolition men. Reverse discrimination, the response slow fermentation of inequality,often accompanied by anger and hostility. I remember when my older brother Walter was an English girl my mother warned me not a "Bronco" dating married because "when you have a fight, throw him in the face that is not a real Canadian." (". Broncos' All three of our marriage) How often I hear:" Why not just become a Canadian? " expressed disappointment and frustration by a wasp that understands what is a Canadian. They want to be like them.
Even a friend who lives inMetropolitan Toronto, where the majority of the inhabitants of a non-English speaking background, the discussion of a draft of these memories I asked, "Do you feel more Ukrainian or Canadian?" The depth of ignorance revealed by staggers me that question, but is characterized by suspicion and misunderstanding that Canadians of British immigrants. Even my father, a Ukrainian patriot, born and raised in Ukraine, a man who passionately loved his heritage, loved Canada.He considered it an honor and privilege to be a Canadian. He would not understand my next question. It 's like asking someone if they have more white or more Canadians.
I still struggle to control and understand my bias. Although I have very few properties that are usually belonging to a cultural group, such as language, religion or customs, my pride of my Ukrainian roots run deep and strong. I feel somehow connected to the men and women in sheepskin jacketsettled in the area west of endless waves. I still feel that somehow a Ukrainian Cossack dance is my kind of dance.
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