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classified as Ukrainians because the Ukrainian Republic had been proclaimed in 1918. But under the dictatorship of G. Vargas (1930-1945), priests were forbidden to preach in Ukrainian and know ledge of Portuguese was emphasized especially for Brazilian-born children. The third wave of Ukrainians came after WWII, between 1947 and 1951. About 7,000 im migrants arrived from the displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria. Some stayed and others joined relatives who had settled in Canada or the United States. Helena Kolody (Olena Kolodij) is a Bra zilian of Ukrainian descent. Her father, Michael Kolody (bom in 1881), left cholera-stricken Eastern Galicia in 1893 and settled in Brazil in 1894. Her mother, Victoria Kolody, nee Szandrowsky (bom in 1892), came to Brazil with her parents in 1911. The family settled in the south of the state of Parana in Cruz Machado. In a 1988 interview with SERUR, Helena Kolody noted that her parents married on January 13, 1912; she was bom on October 12, 1912, in Cruz Machado and spent her childhood in Tres Barras (Santa Catarina), later moving to Rio Negro. In a 1986 interview, she recalled her mother reading poetry by Taras Shevchenko, claiming that these readings influenced her to write poetry. But the stigma which victimized the children of her generation prevented her from expressing herself in Ukrainian; she bloomed as a Brazilian poet, writing in Portuguese. Helena was a brilliant student. From 1920 to 1922 she attended school in Rio Negro, com pleting her primary education. From 1923 to 1924 she studied concurrently at the Colegio Divina Providencia and the Escola Intermediaria. After graduating from these two institutions, she was eligible to teach biology and in the department of Education and Allied Studies. In 1928, the Kolody family moved to Curitiba permanently. There, from 1928 to 1931, Helena attended the Teachers’ Col lege (Escola Normal Secundaria), graduating with honors. She was later appointed Inspector of Education, and served in that function from 1950. It was in Curitiba, that in 1928, at the age of 16, Helena Kolody published her first poem in a student review. Two years later her poetry appeared in another more popular review, Marinha. Her first book of poetry, Paisagem interior (Inner Lands capes) appeared in 1941. Her work was not only well received but also acclaimed, and she soon became known as “the poet of Curitiba.” In 1988, a poetry competition was created in her honor. Helena Kolody lived to hear her poetry put to music and performed all over the world. Today she is honored by a Web site and several links to literature, art, and scholarly articles. It is, in fact, a scholarly publication that triggered my interest in this woman’s voice from Brazil. As I Googled for “Helena Kolody,” an article by Dr. Antonio Donizeti da Cruz appeared. Titled “A poesia de Helena Kolody: busca do essencial” (Helena Kolody’s Poetry: Looking for the Essential), the article is in Portuguese. The abstract (in English) announced the following: This article presents the process of the poetic creation of Helena Kolody who is a Brazilian poet, daughter of Ukrainian emigrants and who was born in Cruz Machado city in Parana state, Brazil . . . The current themes included in Kolody’s lyric are time, contemplation, permanence, loneliness, memory . . . With twelve published books, a lot of anthologies and complete works, Kolody, while realizing a poetic “doing, ” looks for synthesis in her work . . . She chooses synthetic form poems such as distiches, tercets, quartets, epigrams, tankas and haicais (Japanese poetry), (www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero 26/kolody.html5/5 2007). I contacted Professor Antonio Danizeti da Cruz via email, and he responded! He informed me that the article in question was in fact a chapter of his M aster’s dissertation which he defended in 1993. He also promptly emailed to me his whole study, entitled “Helena Kolody: A Poesia da Inquieta 9 ao” (Poetry of Anguish) and sent me a copy of the last anthology of Helena Kolody’s poetry, Luz Infinita (Everlasting Light or Bezko- netchne Svitlo), published in 1997 by the W omen’s Club of the Ukrainian Museum of Curitiba. It is a bilingual volume in Portuguese and Ukrainian; all the poems have been lovingly translated by a group of Ukrainian poets. Reading the translated poems is a very moving experience— each one transposes a universal human experience into a handful of words. At the heart o f the poems is the constant anguish of the first generation of foreign-bom children tom apart between two cultures, two languages, and two identities. An enthusiastic reader of Ukrainian extraction, I naively looked for poems written in 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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