More About the Book
My mother, Mary Chopek
Growing up as a child of immigrants Elias and Mary Chopek, I learned very early on to keep my American street and school life separate from my Ukrainian home and church life. The Mattapan bullies, hearing the heavily accented yells of my mother calling me from our kitchen window, threatened me with "Go back where you came from, you stupid, hunky greenhorn." My Boston Public School teachers could not find Ukraine on their maps and assumed I was lying about where my parents came from.
The stories my mother told me began at the time of my parents' births in the late 1880s and included their lives in the town of Kozova, and their separate, immigrant arrivals in Boston, Massachusetts just before WWI. The pictures she painted of life on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean were idyllic.
The stories my mother told me began at the time of my parents' births in the late 1880s and included their lives in the town of Kozova, and their separate, immigrant arrivals in Boston, Massachusetts just before WWI. The pictures she painted of life on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean were idyllic.
My father's stories concerned the complicated history of Ukraine and how he came to be a staunch Ukrainian patriot while being a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He served unwillingly in their army before his marriage, and then, soon after becoming a father, was conscripted again. Seeing that a war was coming, he knew he could not give his life for another country. His decision to go AWOL and flee to America early in 1913 dismayed my mother. She refused to leave her family and take their six-month old daughter, Anna, into the void called America. Convinced by their parish priest a year later to join her husband, she braved a terrifying ocean crossing. When WWI struck, safe in America, they worried endlessly about their families whose lives were threatened by the battles raging through their streets.
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Coping with life in the slums, learning a baffling language and a new multicultural way of life while struggling to find jobs was depressing to my mother and a challenge to my father. They were comforted by observing what they could of their culture within the Ukrainian church community which, unfortunately, was at that time caught up in the controversy between the Ukrainian Catholic and Orthodox churches of America. My father developed into a leader of the community and my mother found lifelong friends.
Fourteen years after the birth of their first child, Anna, and a year after they had built a house in the suburbs, they had a new baby, Stephanie, me. Three years later, the Great Depression struck. The threat of losing the house because they might not be able to pay the mortgage was a daily terror after my father lost his steady job. My mother became the major provider by working two nighttime jobs.
Fourteen years after the birth of their first child, Anna, and a year after they had built a house in the suburbs, they had a new baby, Stephanie, me. Three years later, the Great Depression struck. The threat of losing the house because they might not be able to pay the mortgage was a daily terror after my father lost his steady job. My mother became the major provider by working two nighttime jobs.
Me and my sister, Anna Chopek
The book also follows the contrasting stories of Anna and of myself. Anna lived a constrained life in the slums with Ukrainian as her childhood language. I grew up in the suburbs, free to roam the streets and woods, with both English and Ukrainian in the home. Anna took night classes at all-women Portia Law School, passed the bar and became a lawyer in 1936 and then faced a strong bias in Boston law firms against hiring women lawyers. Relief from the Depression came for my parents that same year, more than twenty years after their arrival in America. Both parents found steady jobs at a private school my mother as cook, my father as janitor. It was then, at long last, that they truly began to feel American.