BORSCH BELT
BY Andrew Evans, Executive summary by darmansjah
The homemade pierogiare spot-onand the borshct is rich with
dill, just like in Ukraine. But the old country is thousands of miles away; I’m
on a patch of Canadian praire in ALBERTA,
site of the biggest Ukrainian settlement outside of eastern Europe.
Specifically, I’m at the Ukrainian Culture Heritage Village, eager for a taste
of the land where I once lived.
I’m normally wary of old-timey villages, where
calico-clothed employees play scripted roles. But Jeffrey Larocque is good at
his job; he pulls me into a lumber shop, offers me a pig-bristle brush to paint
the new barn, then takes me around back so I can choose fro man assortment of
nails. Out in the rustling wheat field I spot Natalya Vanovska. “I came to
Alberta from the Ukrainian city of Ternopil
few years ago,” she says. But with her white head kerchief, she looks
the part of a Ukrainian immigrant circa 1900. Playing a new homesteader, she
motions to a sod home. “My husband and I built it!” she exclaims. “Others
helped, and we finished the whole thing in five days.”
Entering the house, I touch the poplar logs and eye a
decorated wood chest from the old country. This, I decide, is the real value of
village museums-they’re-create scenes from the past and make sense of the
present.
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