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From the Diary of a Ukrainian Housewife MEN AT WORK by DMZ In the fifties, when I was about eleven or twelve, my family moved from Baltimore to Jersey City. We were new immigrants, looking for a permanent place to settle. We had some connections in Jersey City and that was a deciding factor. One needed to be with one's own people; it made the adjustment in the new world easier. My father was not yet permanently employed and in order to survive, any work was welcome. Fortunately, many of the older immigrants in the community helped newcomers by finding them jobs or just by hiring them to do odd chores about the house. In our case, it was Mrs. Bilobram from across the street. She was an elderly widow who owned a dry goods store. Her first husband was a distant cousin of my uncle, the husband of my mother's sister. This was stretching the extended family a bit far, but in those days we appreciated even such remote connections. That spring she hired my uncle and my father to paint the iron fire escapes on her house. Both men were highly cultured with a classical education and were attorneys by profession. Neither had ever held a paint brush in his hand and neither had ever seen a fire escape before coming to America. But they were full of enthusiasm, like two young boys setting out for a new adventure. I accompanied my father and uncle and Mrs. Bilobram to the hardware store where she bought brushes, green paint and turpentine for clean up. She instructed them to wear old clothing, which turned out to be old mismatched suits of prewar vintage. The job began the following morning. She took them up to the top floor of her small apartment building, brushes and paint can in hand. Out the window on to the fire escape in the front went my father and on to the fire escape in the back went my uncle. Seeing them both set up three stories above the side walk, I went to school, expecting to see Mrs. Bilobram's building wonderfully transformed by the time I returned home for lunch. And so the world began to turn green that Spring. As I approached Mrs. Bilobram's house at lunchtime, I saw that not only were the iron cages of the fire escapes a new bright green, there were touches of fresh green on the walls of the building and the sidewalk below. It was difficult for me to determine which was the more startling sight -- that of two men, splattered with green paint from head to toe, or my grandmother's face as "the old dama" looked at her two sons-in-law. Grandmother made reference to a Polish anecdote - something about a herring being painted green and hung on a tree, to which my father replied with a quote in Latin and my uncle concurred with a wide grin. My mother and aunt lamented the total destruction of the old mismatched suits, which while quite worn, according to my mother, still had some life in them. The most interesting reaction was that of Mrs. Bilobram, who did not choose any fancy words in expressing her chagrin about the green patches on the walls and sidewalk of her building. Neither man, however, has ever admitted that he was a sloppy painter; on the contrary, my father painted a lot after this and considered himself an experienced painter. He often referred to my house as an example of his expertise as he had helped paint it shortly after my husband and I were married. The dear man never knew that my husband repainted everything he painted. Forty years later, living in the sprawling suburbs of Philadelphia, I found myself in Mrs. Bilobram's shoes. A new wave of immigrants from Ukraine had come to America and just as in my father's time, they were looking for work. And so I hired Ivan from Ternopil to do some yard work. Ivan was a tall husky man with a low voice. He moved phlegmatically, but exhibited great strength and diligence in the cutting of tree limbs and splitting logs for our fireplace. My husband and I left him to his labors, asking only that he made sure at the end of the day to gather and put away all the tools. Before driving Ivan back to the city, I invited him into the house to have some borshch. He had done a lot of hard work that day and I was pleased. I placed a large bowl of borshch in from of with a side order of bread and asked if he had put away the tools. "Yes, yes," Ivan said slowly as I was getting him a second helping of the borshch. "You have to tell your husband,” he said, “that the garage door 18 ’’НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ЛИСТОПАД 1997 Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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