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22 WWW. UNWLA.ORG “НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ЛЮТИЙ 2013 As this issue goes to print, the UNWLA is finalizing its preparations for a presentation of the English translation of Juliana Starosolska's exile m emoir, first published in the late 1960s. Juliana Starosolska, honorary member of the UNWLA and long - time editor of Our Life (1972 - 1990), passed away in D e- cember of 2011, three months short of her 100th birthday. Woman in Exile: My Life in Kazakhstan was t ranslated by Marie Chmilewsky Ulanowicz and published by iUniverse in 2011. The book presentation will take place on February 1, 2013, at the Ukrainian Museum in New York , with participation of the translator Ms. Ulanowicz. For those of our readers who are not able to attend this event, we include a chapter f rom Juliana Starosolska's book. Juliana Starosolska Chapter 13: God's Christmas Tree (Dedicated to Oliusia Terletska - Smal) Christmas, our first in these steppes of Kazakhstan, was approaching. Winter was raging. It was, perhaps, the fiercest of all the winters that we spent there. But maybe it only seemed that way to me; it was our first in this land and we were unaccustomed t o its deep freezes and its snows. The snow was so heavy that, for months in some places, you could touch the tops of telegraph poles by standing on top of a snow - drift. Som e- times a house would be so covered with snow that a tunnel needed to be dug to the entrance. Our neighbors, in order to enter or leave their house, had to open up a part of the roof to their adjoining stable and then use a ladder to climb down from the roof. The roads too, were covered with drifts. Trucks had a very hard time making the ir way through, and then only in the wake of a snow - plow. After a while, even that became impos sible. Finally, it fell to the sturdy and patient oxen, pul l- ing convoys of sleds, to deliver the mail that had arrived at the distant railroad station. Even so, the trip took between a week to ten days so that the eagerly awaited letters from Lviv arrived very rarely and very intermittently. Packages had stopped coming alto gether; they were probably being stored in warehouses along the way, awaiting more auspic ious weather and cleared roads. These parcels had been eno r- mously helpful to us. Now we had to make do with whatever we still had on hand — whatever we had managed to save from the preceding fall. Whoever did not have access to such provisions went hungry. S ome people didn't survive the wi n- ter. In the midst of this struggle for life, for food, for warmth another struggle was also being waged — against hopelessness and despair. Cons e- quently it became unthinkable for us not to cel e- brate Christmas, to ignore the birth of the Son of God. So how were we to prepare Sviat - Vechir , the solemn Holy Christmas Eve Supper? Well, perhaps not with the traditional twelve meatless dishes, but not in total hunger either. There were beets for the borscht and there was wheat for the ritual kutia (albeit without the honey). Someone had managed to get some frozen fish and kept it in our unheated room (a natural refrigerator) to preserve it for the holiday meal. Someone else had saved a few crystals of saccha rine to sweeten the meal for a better future. But what about a Christmas tree? In the barren steppe where we lived it was rare enough to find a poplar or a willow — and even these had been planted and cultivated by human hands. In our village there was only one solitary tree and it grew beside the only freshwater well. So could we even begin to think about a fir tree? Never theless, there were those who refused to give up. Would you believe that a desiccated wormwood shrub — growing naturally tall and sturdy i n these parts — might be preserved and serve as a sadly deformed Christmas tree? Human ingenuity and imagin a- tion knew no bounds. Long before Christmas, during every spare moment, we began making Christmas tree ornaments using packing mater i- als from parcels t hat had been sent to us, from newspapers and from old textbooks. Objectively speaking these ornaments probably were not very pretty — yet consider how much imagination, deeply felt longing and love went into their ma k- ing! We received a miniature Christmas tree constructed from two hard book covers; it had been given to us by two elderly women who were no longer capable of hard manual labor. Their patient hands had drawn boughs, cut them out, and cleverly glued them together to create a
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