The struggle of the Ukrainian people did not just begin in February of 2022 but much earlier– as is abundantly clear in the pages of A Generation of Leaves; A Ukrainian Journey. It is the coming-of-age story of a young man born in Western Ukraine in 1923, a now vanished rural landscape lovingly depicted in the memoirs of the late Ivan Kochan, son of a prominent Ukrainian politician. Often charming and sometimes frightening, the story not only dramatizes Ivan’s growth, but a grim and violent chapter in Ukraine’s struggle for freedom and independence.
Much of this tale is set against the flaming background of the Second World War and the dilemmas of being caught between two monstrous evils; the Nazi Fascists and the Russian Communists. His many narrow escapes culminate in a flight from the Bolshevik Red Army.
Yet these memoirs are not just another war story, as extraordinary and unique as this one is; they chronicle the transition of a child into a man. At the same time emerging quietly is a powerful and very moving love story between Ivan and a beautiful young woman, one that will remain with the readers long after the last sentence is read.
To a child growing up in the magical world of my Ukrainian village, the sun really did seem to rise from a cradle of branches and sink to sleep in a bed of leafy treetops. After all, only a mile and a half away, the mighty River Buh marked the place where the East began, while the smaller Variazhanka, even closer, traced the border with the West. Both streams were lined for miles on end with tall elms, poplars, and willows, all waving majestically whenever a summer thunderstorm approached.
That’s how it seemed to one particular child, anyway, one who always had a strong imagination; because that little story about a quest to find the sun’s resting place is about the earliest fragment I can excavate from the many-layered bank of memories I’ve accumulated throughout a long and varied life.
Trees marked the approaches to the North as well. From horizon to horizon, rising sheer out of the nearby fields, a wall of trees marked the edge of what we could only call The Forest. Despite more than a thousand years of Christianity in Ukraine, whenever we entered The Forest, to pick mushrooms or hazelnuts or simply to cut a fir for Christmas, some deep layer in our Slavic souls snapped awake; for beneath those ancient oaks and gnarled hornbeams all was still hallowed and haunted. Mischievous sprites and pixies lurked behind the hazel bushes and beneath the mushroom caps. Legendary bandits, now an improbable several centuries old, might snatch us and carry us off to their hidden lairs. And where the River Variazhanka swung in from the west and met the Buh, cleaving through The Forest, the still pools beside the swampy edges were, our mothers assured us, inhabited by female rusalka, just waiting to pull young boys under the surface and keep them forever in labyrinthine underwater grottoes.
When autumn twilights fell, you could hear the deep sonorous hooting of eagle owls somewhere in The Forest. Oracular ravens dwelt there, too. In winter the endless ranks and files of trees lay shrouded in a white blanket of secrecy. Come spring and early summer, when the full moon rose you could see from the village the roe deer grazing in the nearby fields and, more exasperatingly, the wild boar rooting up the potato crop. The boar was the only dangerous creatures in those leafy glens—at least until battalions of two-legged monsters arrived. But that would come later.
Only when I grew older did I realize The Forest, our Forest, was just one component in an immense band of interlinked woodlands stretching hundreds of miles from someplace called Warsaw in the west to another and more magical place, for Ukrainians, called Kiev in the East. So north, east, and west were wilderness, and had remained so, seemingly, since the first Germanic and Slavic tribes entered them many thousands of years ago.
But when I was a child, if you climbed a tall oak and looked to the south—well, a very different scene would meet the eye.
There, stretching farther and farther in an ever-expanding triangle with its apex at our oak, were the limitless smiling fields and meadows, sprinkled with hamlets and villages, of old Halichina, the Ukrainian province more widely known in Austro-Hungarian times as Austrian Galicia, one of the three crownlands of that Empire. If we were like the ravens circling and cawing high above, we could see this beautiful country rolling onwards, past that loveliest of Austria-Hungary’s provincial capitals, Lviv, and up the slopes of the wooded Carpathian Mountains, along which the base of that triangle ran, some 125 miles away.
This vast sweep of countryside is agricultural land to feast the eyes upon. No sandy grit underlies it like it does The Forest, for the subsoil here is the legendary chernozem, the rich black humus six to ten feet deep in places. It was so deep you never found a rock in the fields of Halichina.
Looking down from out perch in the oak tree to the scene at our feet, that younger version of me is pointing out a storybook village of whitewashed, thatched-roof houses, all fronting a red-brick main street, all the chimneys trailing wreaths of smoke, and he is telling you this place, with its lanes and footpaths and far-flung fields just south of The Forest, was my first home, my much-loved but long-lost Tudorkovychi.
I was born in Tudorkovychi on August 20, 1923; but that date could just as easily have been 1823 or 1723, for the village seemed suspended in time and only brushed, albeit unhappily, by the twentieth century. It was a middle-sized village with around a hundred houses and its red-brick main street, called burok, ran from north to south through its midst, passing the church before joining a dirt highway angling from southeast to northwest, from our county town and nearest railroad juncture, Sokal, about seven miles away on the Buh, to Hrubieszow, some twenty-five miles beyond the belt of forested country. During the spring and autumn rainy seasons, that dirt highway became a muddy, potholed mess, especially for heavily loaded horse-drawn wagons. But you could walk dry-shod down Tudorkovychi’s brick-paved burok.
Not that we entertained many visitors in those days, the dirt highway being our bypass. The occasional tinker or merchant passed through, and if he needed to repair any of his iron fittings he could stop by the blacksmith’s forge in the center of the village. There I used to hang out, fascinated by the deep red glow of hot iron. When I grew a little bigger the shop’s owner, a man named Korolchuk, permitted me to pump the harmonica-like bellows, making the coal burn so hot the iron turned orange and became more pliable. The smithies could make anything for you, but they spent most of their day fashioning two staple items. One was horseshoes; they could hammer them out in their sleep. The other was iron rims for wagon wheels. Circular and spoked, wheels of every imaginable size leaned against the shop walls. Most of them had damaged iron rims and were awaiting new ones, for tight-fitting rims were what held wooden wheel-frames together. Ukraine at this time ran on horsepower—horsepower and wagon wheels.
The only other regular visitors were theater troupes and itinerant musicians. When they arrived, they filed into a large brick building near the blacksmith’s forge. This was Chitalnya, a kind of one-stop community center dedicated to the activities of “Prosvita”—“Enlightenment”—a Ukraine-wide cultural and educational organization, founded in Galicia in the nineteenth century, that played a very influential role in village life at this time. In that building was a co-operative store where villagers could buy such daily necessities as sugar, salt, kerosene, and yeast, paid for with either money or chicken eggs valued according to size. Next to the store was an auditorium for those concerts and theatrical performances. Its stage was also used for village festivities, dances, political debates, and every other conceivable assembly. Portraits of famous Ukrainian poets and statesmen hung from its walls, but one corner in particular displayed a large canvas depicting a broken cannon over the inscription: “For Those Who Died Fighting for a Free Ukraine.” I remember this vividly because underneath it was a list of names—one of which belonged to my uncle and namesake, Ivan Kochan, who at the age of sixteen had joined my father in that fight but had never returned home.
Adjacent to the auditorium was a small room that served as the village library. This was the proper chital’nya or “reading room” so stocked with books, magazines, pamphlets, and other educational materials on Ukrainian history and the Ukrainian language, supplied primarily by Prosvita, that we came to call the whole complex Chitalnya. Here old men might gather to discuss politics, one longing for the good old days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, another grumbling about now being shoved into the new Second Republic of Poland, while yet a third corrected him by claiming he should call it instead “Occupied Ukraine.”
But whether argument, dramatic performance, or festival of traditional song, Chitalnya’s central importance to the village cultural life was further underscored by the adjacent building: The village school, complete with an apartment for its one teacher.
All of that—blacksmith’s forge, Chitalnya, schoolhouse—was part of “downtown” Tudorkovychi, so to speak. We might even have boasted a municipal park, for the stream bisecting “downtown” was not only spanned by a substantial wooden bridge but was also flanked by long, pleasant, grassy swales. Unfortunately, those swales had been colonized by the village geese, and take but one step onto the grass and the ganders would come at you, hard and fast—a terrifying experience for children.
The Industrial Revolution had also reached Tudorkovychi. No automobiles yet, that I can remember; but steer your team down the burok, past the church on the south of town, turn left on the dirt highway as if you were going to the train station in Sokal, and on your left you’d pass a steam mill that made flour from our grain. The local housewives baked fragrant rye and wheat breads that were so delicious I can still taste those loaves today. Turn your team around, clop north up the burok toward The Forest, and you’d find the local distillery for making horilka, or Ukrainian vodka; and near that a small poppyseed oil factory, which extracted a savory and non-narcotic cooking oil from the seeds of the opium poppy. Poppyseed oil was a staple in the village diet; during Lent, it was the universal substitute for butter or pork fat. The dry, biscuit-like byproduct, called makookh, was fed to the pigs to fatten them up. What the pigs didn’t eat went to us children. It was kind of tasteless. But it filled an empty stomach.
Tudorkovychi was overwhelmingly a Ukrainian village. Of the twelve hundred or so residents on the 1930 census, there were only forty Poles and ten Jews. The rest of us were Ukrainians, almost all communicants of the Greek Catholic Church. You won’t find many of those outside of Ukrainian-speaking areas with roots in Halichina, or Austrian Galicia. Ukrainians living beneath the heel of the Tsar had their Greek Catholic churches ruthlessly razed to the ground in favor of Greek Orthodox ones. Here is the difference: In the seventeenth century, the Roman Catholic Poles ruling the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth then stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea finally compromised with us, the Ukrainian minority. If we acknowledged Papal supremacy, we got to keep our cherished Byzantine Greek rite. St. George’s Cathedral in Lviv then became our mother church. That’s the simplified version, but it will suffice.
Tudorkovychi was a wealthy village surrounded by good soil, a good supply of lumber, and industrious farmers. Grandparents, parents, and children lived together as one family in one house containing four or five rooms and surrounded by flower and vegetable gardens. Those were the domains of the women, all of whom, from the very oldest to very youngest, wore the traditional headscarf sometimes called babushka in the West. Barns and stables, the domains of the men, stood just outside the gardens. Every roof on every structure was thatched, the cylindrical shape of a threshed wheat blade being an ideal insulator, keeping the house warm in winter and cool in summer. Hence the gigantic mounds of straw seen towering behind most of the barns.
The all-important well, lined with cement, was always located close to the house. You drank your water from your well and you excreted it in your equally important outhouse. There was no indoor plumbing and no electricity. In summer, you could always keep a stoppered earthenware jug of water cool by attaching a rope to it and hanging it down in the well. Most villagers also had free-standing brick cellars, set deep in the chernozem and covered with a layer of insulating soil and the heavy door insulated with straw mats. Sour milk, a ubiquitous staple of the Ukrainian diet, stayed cold and pleasantly refreshing in these cellars.
Spiders, for some reason, liked them, too. When we were young, my cousin and I used to catch these spiders and, being boys, remove their legs. We found no explanation for why the legs continued to jerk after being separated from the spider’s body.
At our northern latitude, summer days were long, and twilight lingered most of the night. The reverse was true in winter; the sky always seemed dark. You saw either the moon riding high in the velvet sky or a billion stars dancing around the Milky Way. Inside the house, the only light, besides the flickering reflections of the hearth fires, came from the fitful glow of kerosene lamps. Bedrooms were usually cold, especially in winter. But there were usually enough brothers and sisters around that many could pile in a few beds. Families were important in Ukraine. And since many generations lived beneath one roof, every child knew everybody on both his maternal and paternal sides—every child but me, it seemed.
As far as I knew, I was an only child without parents.
Throughout my earliest years, I lived with my paternal grandparents, Semen and Marina Kochan. They were constantly reassuring me I did have a mother and a father like other children. But seeing is believing, and I never saw any parents.
I did see a number of uncles around, all of them older than me. Even though I was never neglected because Babunya Marina was always reminding those uncles of my existence, I often felt lonely. Nobody knew just what to do with little Ivan.
When I reached an age when I could comprehend more, the explanation shifted. My father, I was now told, was an important man, something called a Posol, or representative, to something else called a Sejm, or parliament, in that faraway place called Warsaw, and my mother was with him. Soon I learned his name, Volodimir Kochan, but had no face to match it with. Then I discovered he was the eldest of Didoon Semen’s seven sons, all of whom had reddish-blond hair and most of whom were tall and rangy men. That was some help in now imagining what he might look like.
Yet I knew nothing whatsoever of my mother and her family. Of course, I couldn’t know that in the deeply religious world of old rural Ukraine not only was divorce unthinkable but so was even the idea of marital separation. Being too young to understand that, I would have been deaf to the whispering behind my back, whispers telling how my mother had left my father and returned home to her parents, who were living on a farm only a stone’s throw away from ours. Apparently, she had been there for quite some time.
Somehow those whispers must have reached even my small ears, because I remember that when I turned five years old, I resolved to go meet her.
I can’t recall how I knew the way. But I marched down to the bridge and turned up the grassy swale toward the back of a certain farm someone must have pointed out to me. I don’t even remember the details of that first encounter because I was so traumatized by the hissing and pecking ganders hurtling toward me that the only thing I recall is, when leaving to return home, my mother’s voice telling me next time to carry a stick: “Listen to me, Ivasyu, you are bigger and stronger than the gander and when you hit him once with the stick, he will run away!” Alexandra Kindrat, for that was her maiden name, was a farm girl from sole to crown.
I was a proud little boy for finally introducing myself to my mother and I would never let that relationship fray again. I know now what she saw in me, that tall, slender child with the round face and hair with a yellowish tint in its curls: She saw a shy boy who nevertheless had braved the geese to come and meet his mother.
I ventured into the grassy valley many times thereafter, always to the consternation of the resident geese. I tried sneaking around them, but the ganders were vigilant and inevitably one of them saw me as soon as I entered his territory. If he extended his long neck with his sharp yellow beak, then I knew he would rush hissing and clacking and chase me over the banks of the creek. Then he’d return to his harem, spread his wings, giggle maniacally, and dance his little victory jig.
Yet each time I had won, because I was back in my mother’s house, visiting with her and my three-year old brother, Yaropolk, whom we always called Yarko. I was also meeting a new set of grandparents, Kindrat and Maria Dula, as well as one of my new aunts, Stefonka, whose son and my first cousin, Mitonko, would become the lad who helped me pull those legs off those spiders.
I had found my other family—and it couldn’t have been more different.
My two families, I now clearly saw, were a study in contrasts. Semen Kochan and Kindrat Dula, for instance, were both close to fifty years old when I was a child. But in every other respect they were opposites.
Didoon Kindrat, my mother’s father, was a character straight out of Ukrainian folklore. He was an impressive man—tall, well-built, and very strong. His was a round face with a bushy gray mustache and his head was encircled with a long white pageboy haircut. In good company, he liked to drink strong alcohol, to smoke homegrown tobacco, and to sing Ukrainian songs—songs that brought tears to your eyes but always restored your flagging soul. He had a deep, resonant voice and his friends said in his younger years, it even carried as far as the neighboring villages.
The one idiosyncrasy his wife and daughters found abhorrent was his habit, while handling a juicy piece of meat, of passing his greasy fingers through his hair to keep it shiny and untangled.
Didoon Semen, my father’s father, was much more reticent. He, too, was tall, but he was clean-shaven and always wore his hair trimmed short. He was not particularly sociable, seldom spoke, and surely never broke out in song. Semen once smoked heavily, when I was young, he had quit that habit due to fits of uncontrolled coughing. By that time he could never tolerate tobacco smoke or smokers anywhere near him. Nor was he the most efficient farmer. The twenty acres he had purchased from the Stechishin family only grew progressively smaller, as we liked to put it, as he sold off one parcel after another. What he really cherished was horses, a love picked up from years of service in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry.
Didoon Kindrat, on the other hand, only owned about five acres. But his people were deeply rooted in this corner of Ukraine, and he was an excellent farmer, loving his family, his animals, and his soil almost equally. He not only talked to us grandchildren; he also held conversations with his pigs, the storks nesting on his roof, even with the trees in his orchard. Kindrat was an uneducated man from whom I learned much about life. He taught me how to hold a broom to sweep more efficiently, how best to grip a rake, how to spade or how to use a scythe to cut clover for hay. From him I learned to be more thorough in my everyday tasks and to appreciate a job well done. He always told me, “I know you will not be a farmer but even a doctor has to know how to do ordinary things properly!”
Whereas Didoon Semen did not like priests and rarely went to church, Didoon Kindrat was a devoutly religious man. I can still hear the prayers he softly murmured every evening when making his bed. He endured severe pain in his back without complaint and, several years before his death, he walked bent over double. He treated his varicose leg ulcers just like he treated those on his horses: he burned them with creosol. He loved his domestic animals and considered that they, as he himself, had a purpose to fulfill in life.
Didoon Kindrat was married to Maria, my mother’s mother, who was a tiny woman. I remember her most clearly carrying large loads of leaves cut from the harvested sugar beets, leaves she used to feed the pigs. She piled the leaves onto a linen sheet, tied two diagonal corners, and carried the bundle on her back by holding onto the other two corners. Beneath that load she was invisible. One could see only her skinny legs walking beneath an enormous pile of leaves. My own mother was cut from the same cloth; she resembled my grandmother in so many ways, physically and temperamentally.
My father’s mother, Marina, unlike Didoon Semen, ran the affairs of her household very efficiently. Hers was a demanding job because she had to feed and care for all those boys, my uncles. Yet I never heard her complain. The first compliment I ever gave a woman was to her. When I was six years old, she and I were sitting at the window through which rays of the setting sun illuminated her hair and made it shine like gold. Gazing at that, I told her she had the prettiest hair in the whole world. She kissed me and I saw tears in her eyes. Ukrainian farm women, I realized, lived hard lives and seldom had the opportunity to express their feelings.
The one opportunity that did give them solace, however, was afforded by the church.
Our church, although standing to the south of the burok, was the beating heart of village life. There I was baptized by the Greek Catholic priest, Father Osmak, whose granddaughter became my playmate. Although in communion with the See of Rome, the Greek Catholic Church permits its priests to marry and have families. There was no more respected a figure than the priest in an old Ukrainian village. Whenever it was sunny and warm, Father Osmak would stroll on the church lawn while reading his breviary. Every woman who happened to walk past would greet him, then bend and kiss his priestly ring.
Villagers both old and young went to mass every Sunday morning and attended all church celebrations and festivities throughout the year. No musical instruments were ever used in our church; instead, a choir composed of young people sang a High Mass that lasted nearly three hours. There were no benches to sit upon and I disliked standing for such a long time. The adults, however, had learned how to rock from one foot to the other in immemorial rhythm with the ancient mass. The church building, however, had been newly built, the former one having burned to the ground.
Ours was a rich parish. Father Osmak not only had a rectory, attached to the new church, in which to live, he also had the rights to over a hundred cultivable acres belonging to his benefice. The villagers gladly sowed and harvested them for him, for nothing was so abiding in old Ukrainian life as the intertwined rhythms of the church year, the agricultural calendar, and the cycle of the seasons. One year nearly resembled another. The generations of men and women danced accordingly, with little disruption but one—a succession of violent and cataclysmic storms sown not by God but by men.
Ukraine means “borderland.” That name might have been coined around Tudorkovychi, for in 1914 it had been the northernmost Ukrainian village in the entire sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was the apex of the Galician triangle whose base ran along the Carpathians. For the lands just east of the River Buh and just north and west of the Variazhanka—the lands where the sun woke and where he went to rest—had then belonged to an old, old enemy: Russia.
And the reason our old and much beloved church had burned to the ground? It had been struck by a Russian artillery shell.