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1 2 WWW.UNWLA.ORG “НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, СІЧЕНЬ 20 20 Ukraine and Ireland Some Random Observations on Cultural and Hi storic Parallels by Natalie Mason Gawdiak My husband Ihor emigrated from Drohobych, Ukraine, to the U.S. as a teenager and was always sure that one day he’d marry a Ukrainian girl, or at least one of Ukrainian descent. Well, it didn’t work out that way, and 57½ years into the bargain, he is still married to the same Brooklyn - born, now 77 - year old, whose lineage is 95 percent Irish, according to a DNA read - out. Go figure. Before our marriage, however , I had to pass an important test. Ihor took me to Orchi deya , a Ukrainian - owned restaurant in Manhattan. He said th at if we married, I would have to learn to speak Ukrainian, give our children Ukrainian names and bring them up “Ukrainian.” I agreed to all of this, but there was one more crucial test. I can stil l see the trepidation on his face as I tasted my first vare nnyk, his all - time favorite food. It was made of potatoes — what was there not to like? In my Irish - American household, we probably had potatoes four times a week, baked, boiled, mashed or fried. Ye ars later , when we visited Ireland as tourists, we had to l augh at the Irish love of potatoes. In an upscale restaurant ( perhaps i n Kilkenny ) , before the main meal , we were expecting some bread might be served, as is often done in American restaurants. Inst ead, however, out of the kitchen came a bowl of boiled pota toes, even though we had ordered entrees that included potatoes! My favorite potato dish to this day is potato pancakes, especially the thin crispy ones I tasted in Ukraine. Ireland has many s tone walls lining its country roads: here embedded in one i s a millstone (to the right of the author’s husband, Ihor Gawdiak) in the small village of Doolin in western Ireland in 2003. Perhaps millstones were used thus because there was no more grain to be milled. The potato, of course, holds a singular place in Irish history. A major cause of Ireland’s famine between 1845 and 1849 was the decimation of the potato crop by a blight, successive years of bad weather, and an overdependence on this single, norm ally easily grown food source. As Ukrainians know, the caus e of their famine was Stalin, who , as historian Timothy Snyder said , imposed “the greatest engineered famine in the history of the world.”
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