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You will not take my tears with you — They are till later stored! But I shall give you for the fight My kiss, a piercing sword. That you may have 'mid whistling steel - For shouts or silence made - Lips like a musket's stem discharge, Hard as a sabre-blade. Excerpt from O. Telehi's "Verchirnia Pisnia", translated by Vera Rich, in The Ukrainian Poets: 463-464 A spear, a fang, a claw, a hoof A brave man here held foes aloof. Here mammoths bellowed. Here the bear Strode shaggy to his cavem-lair. Here the hawk wheeled in shining skies, While on the lake a black swan plies. Excert from O. Liaturynska's "Zub, ratyshche, kopyto, pazur..." from The Ukrainian Poets: 441 and very reserved, she became the talk of the town in the Ukrainian emigre community, as a poet and a very successful sculptor. When World War II broke out, Oksana Liaturynska was already well known for her collection of poems Husla (1938) and Kniazha Emal (1941). Like many Ukrainians, Oksana Liaturynska left Prague for the West in 1945. In 1946, she published the novel Materynky and a collection of poems for children entitled Bedryk. After a stay in a Displaced Persons Camp in Ashaffemburg, Germany, she managed to come to the United States., settling in Minneapolis and establishing contacts with Ukrainians in Ottawa, Winnipeg and Toronto. It was a blessing in disguise that Liaturynska found herself in Minneapolis for as one of the oldest cradles of Ukrainian immigration in the United States, the city was also the cradle of the pysanka in America. It is indeed in that city that the technique of writing pysanky was introduced to the American public as a heritage intrinsically Ukrainian. This was done by Maria Procai (1897-1993) in the 1910s in the Minneapolis Public Library. When Oksana Liaturynska arrived in Minneapolis, it was this same Maria Procai who welcomed her into the Ukrainian community and offered her a place to stay in her own home. The pysnka which sustained Liaturynska in her spiritual survival in this adoptive foreign land is immortalized in the book Velykodnii Peredzvin (translated as Easter Pearls) which was published posthumously in 1986. In this jewel of book we find a collection of twenty poems, each poem facing splendid photographs of pysanky by Oksana Liaturynska. The book also includes a bi lingual reproduction of an article she wrote on pysanky in 1952. Liaturynska remained single; her health was always very poor and she increasingly lost her sense of hearing. This further isolated her from her surroundings and prevented her from entering mainstream American society, a move which might have secured financial means for her existence. She passed away on June 13, 1970. Olena Teliha, bom Shoheniv, reached Prague via Poland with her family. In 1922, after the Bolshevik invasion of Ukraine, her father and brother were evacuated to Tarnow, Poland; Olena and her mother joined them soon afterwards. The Shohenivs then moved to Podebrady in the former Czechoslovakia and Olena enrolled in the Prague Pedagogical Institute. Upon graduation, she married Mykhailo Teliha, and in 1929 they moved to Warsaw to assume teaching posts. Ten years later, when the Germans bomb Warsaw, the couple moved to Cracow. Olena became deeply involved in the struggle against the Bolsheviks and the Germans and returned to Lviv and ultimately to Kyiv. There she boldly edited the weekly journal Litavry (The Kettle-Drums) and became head of the Union of Ukrainian Writers. In 1942, she and her colleagues were arrested. Orysia Prokopiw summarizes the last days of her life in the introduction to Boundaries of Flame, a collection of Teliha's works published posthumously by Smoloskyp in 1977: In 1942, however, during the German occupation of Kyiv, the poetess was arrested on charges of nationalism, specifically for not allowing any panegyric works about the enemy to be published in her newspaper. On February 13, 1942, in Babyn Yar in Lviv, at the age of thirty-five, Olena Teliha together with her husband courageously faced death before a firing squad of Gestapo. [19] “НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, КВІТЕНЬ 1999 17
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