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maryxmasThe big question of Frosties vs borshch
From: Meelena Oleksiuk <meelenochka@rogers.com>
TOP
The big question of Frosties vs borscht
By Graham Bowley
FT.com site; Nov 05, 2003
One evening, my wife might say: "Chy ty khochesh borshchu, Natalochko?" This translates - I am told - as "Natalka, do you fancy borscht?" In our household, the boiled beetroot soup, a national dish of Ukraine, is a delight for everyone else's palate, but not my English one. "Tato ne dbaie (Daddy won't mind)," my wife adds helpfully.
My two-and-a-half-year-old daughter glances up from her toys. "Borshch! Tak! Tatu?"
"What?" My Ukranian being minimal, I am in the dark on what is being offered. "Oh, sure," I wave.
взято тут.
далі -- під жж-катом.
When the steaming bowls arrive, my Ukrainian family tucks in while I play down the humiliation of being hoodwinked again. Usually, I employ the father's trick of a practical joke, like pretending to balance dumplings on my nose. This also disguises the fact that I'm not eating the borscht. But it brings another rebuke.
"Chy tato paiats?" says my wife. "Kha Kha Kha." This, I've pieced together from storybooks, roughly translates as "Isn't daddy a clown? Ha Ha Ha." My daughter and her mother haven't worked out yet that I understand this. "Tak (Yes)," replies Natalka, her lips plastered with purple borscht. "Tatu ty paiats!"
Nearly three years ago, I became the proud father of a Ukrainian daughter, but since then I have gradually become a stranger in my own home. The above scene is typical of the sort of trouble a man can get himself into when he doesn't understand the tricky second tongue spoken by the rest of his family. In the cultural melting pot of the US, such conflicts occur in many households. Yet, as Europe opens up, and more UK marriages straddle international boundaries, it is an experience that's becoming common over here, too.
Do you really know what your wife and child say behind your back?
I remember very clearly how my long road to familial exclusion began. On a sunny afternoon about six years ago, I dropped on one knee in my girlfriend's apartment and asked her to marry me. After our first raptures, she leaned forward and added one condition. "Yes, but if we have children, they will have to speak Ukrainian." She looked quite severe.
My wife is Canadian. Her maternal grandparents, like thousands of Ukrainians, fled from old Europe to North America after the second world war. On the plains of northern Alberta, their blood and culture thrived. Now, transplanted to England, my wife was as keen as her forebears to preserve her community's cultural and linguistic inheritance.
So what could I say? Well, of course. Yes. I wanted to marry her, didn't I? Anyway, it was all so hypothetical. Such a long way off.
But I had not counted on my wife's determination. Four years later, I began to appreciate first-hand just what it takes to nurture a foreign tongue in a sea of Englishness. As soon as Natalka arrived, in a Toronto maternity ward in February 2001, and following our return to London six months later, we embarked on a strict regime of induction into Ukrainian orthodoxy.
At first, I only slightly resisted. It wasn't just the wall-to-wall Ukrainian I found irksome. Our education was cultural as well as linguistic. The embroidered shirts with ribbons and lace! They are supposed to be the epitome of Ukrainian peasant manhood but I find them, well, slightly ridiculous, not to say feminine. (My wife usually mentions Morris dancing at this point.) And as for the food, I like varenyky, kovbasky, even holubtsi. But, at Rizdvo (Christmas), 10 courses of pickled herring and cabbage! (And what's wrong with turkey and stuffing anyway?)
As for the language, I really did appreciate its benefits. The whole Slavic world from Warsaw to Kiev to Novosibirsk would be open to Natalka in a way it would never be for me. The literature of Tolstoy and Gogol! The poetry of Pushkin! And of course, a second language would be supremely useful in my daughter's future professional life.
I knew all this, yet nevertheless inside me there still existed some kind of atavistic revulsion to the foreign. Was it wrong of me to want my daughter to speak my native language? I admit I took a guilty pleasure whenever she seemed to prefer English to the Slavic rival. Also it was just so damned tiring to have everything repeated twice.
"What's that?" Natalka would say. "Tistochko," replied my wife.
"What's she pointing at?" I asked.
"C-O-O-K-I-E."
"Oh . . .coo . . ."
"If you say the word, I'll kill you!"
"Tistochko," I said. "Tatu, kazhy tistochko!" smiled my wife.
"Cookie," I whispered petulantly.
"Grahaaam!"
I received assistance in these culture wars from my parents. They are sturdy dairy farmers from the English Midlands. They couldn't disguise the fact that all they had ever wanted for a grandchild was a little English Jack or Emma. Often I caught my mother substituting white sliced bread for our stodgier Ukrainian variety (usually involving caraway seeds), or buying Heinz ketchup, or slipping a bowl of Frosties onto Natalka's lap.
Early on - at about one-and-a-half years - Natalka recognised the difference between the two languages. She associated one very clearly with her mother and one with me. While she was comfortable replying in Ukrainian to her mother, she insisted on speaking po anhliiski to her father. I took this as a sensitive attempt on her part to forge a sympathetic cultural connection with me. I was doubly pleased when her English took on some of the recognisable sounds of my native Leicestershire.
Yet gradually, under sustained brainwashing, my daughter - the turncoat - went over to the other side. Her domestic linguistic immersion triumphed, while my attempts at Ukrainian wilted.
God knows, I tried to keep up. But as I stumbled over the rudimentary vocabulary of the one year-old baby, like potty or spill, mess, yes, goodbye, or sorry, she leapt forward to complicated verbs and phrases, like Tatu ty paiats! Thus, soon Natalka happily took her vanna in the evening, combed her volossia, brushed her zuby, and tucked herself up in the lizhko. She read knyzhky, drew rysunky, and sang pisni.
As is the child's way, my daughter appreciated the rewards her mother gave her for compliance. Ingeniously, she also recognised the benefits of colluding with my wife in family disputes. Far easier to get a mutually satisfying outcome when just two of you are haggling and the third, sometimes difficult, member of the triumvirate is kept safely in the dark. Their Ukrainian fifth column became a formidable alliance in our household.
But then, finally, not long ago came my own conversion. Perhaps it was inevitable all along. My resistance promised to be a lost cause when Natalka's Baba, her grandmother, arrived to live with us. But, ultimately, it came about in a way I had not looked for.
We live in the heart of central London. At Thames-side playgrounds, Natalka began to mix with - and talk to - other local children. Slowly her English accent started to change. Out went the Midland guttural oohs and ahhhs, and in crept the sharper cadences of the Thames Estuary.
I was shocked. My little daughter, standing before me, was turning into a southerner! My own linguistic and cultural defences kicked in. No disrespect to real Londoners out there, but suddenly I understood how my wife felt.
Now, I take it all back. I need her help in this new cultural battle of my own. So give me borscht, varenyky and holubtsi! And my embroidered shirt! And, proshu, enr oll me in the nearest Ukrainian class, shvydko.
Tato ne khoche buty paiatsom.
graham.bowley@btopenworld.com
From: Meelena Oleksiuk <meelenochka@rogers.com>
TOP
The big question of Frosties vs borscht
By Graham Bowley
FT.com site; Nov 05, 2003
One evening, my wife might say: "Chy ty khochesh borshchu, Natalochko?" This translates - I am told - as "Natalka, do you fancy borscht?" In our household, the boiled beetroot soup, a national dish of Ukraine, is a delight for everyone else's palate, but not my English one. "Tato ne dbaie (Daddy won't mind)," my wife adds helpfully.
My two-and-a-half-year-old daughter glances up from her toys. "Borshch! Tak! Tatu?"
"What?" My Ukranian being minimal, I am in the dark on what is being offered. "Oh, sure," I wave.
взято тут.
далі -- під жж-катом.
When the steaming bowls arrive, my Ukrainian family tucks in while I play down the humiliation of being hoodwinked again. Usually, I employ the father's trick of a practical joke, like pretending to balance dumplings on my nose. This also disguises the fact that I'm not eating the borscht. But it brings another rebuke.
"Chy tato paiats?" says my wife. "Kha Kha Kha." This, I've pieced together from storybooks, roughly translates as "Isn't daddy a clown? Ha Ha Ha." My daughter and her mother haven't worked out yet that I understand this. "Tak (Yes)," replies Natalka, her lips plastered with purple borscht. "Tatu ty paiats!"
Nearly three years ago, I became the proud father of a Ukrainian daughter, but since then I have gradually become a stranger in my own home. The above scene is typical of the sort of trouble a man can get himself into when he doesn't understand the tricky second tongue spoken by the rest of his family. In the cultural melting pot of the US, such conflicts occur in many households. Yet, as Europe opens up, and more UK marriages straddle international boundaries, it is an experience that's becoming common over here, too.
Do you really know what your wife and child say behind your back?
I remember very clearly how my long road to familial exclusion began. On a sunny afternoon about six years ago, I dropped on one knee in my girlfriend's apartment and asked her to marry me. After our first raptures, she leaned forward and added one condition. "Yes, but if we have children, they will have to speak Ukrainian." She looked quite severe.
My wife is Canadian. Her maternal grandparents, like thousands of Ukrainians, fled from old Europe to North America after the second world war. On the plains of northern Alberta, their blood and culture thrived. Now, transplanted to England, my wife was as keen as her forebears to preserve her community's cultural and linguistic inheritance.
So what could I say? Well, of course. Yes. I wanted to marry her, didn't I? Anyway, it was all so hypothetical. Such a long way off.
But I had not counted on my wife's determination. Four years later, I began to appreciate first-hand just what it takes to nurture a foreign tongue in a sea of Englishness. As soon as Natalka arrived, in a Toronto maternity ward in February 2001, and following our return to London six months later, we embarked on a strict regime of induction into Ukrainian orthodoxy.
At first, I only slightly resisted. It wasn't just the wall-to-wall Ukrainian I found irksome. Our education was cultural as well as linguistic. The embroidered shirts with ribbons and lace! They are supposed to be the epitome of Ukrainian peasant manhood but I find them, well, slightly ridiculous, not to say feminine. (My wife usually mentions Morris dancing at this point.) And as for the food, I like varenyky, kovbasky, even holubtsi. But, at Rizdvo (Christmas), 10 courses of pickled herring and cabbage! (And what's wrong with turkey and stuffing anyway?)
As for the language, I really did appreciate its benefits. The whole Slavic world from Warsaw to Kiev to Novosibirsk would be open to Natalka in a way it would never be for me. The literature of Tolstoy and Gogol! The poetry of Pushkin! And of course, a second language would be supremely useful in my daughter's future professional life.
I knew all this, yet nevertheless inside me there still existed some kind of atavistic revulsion to the foreign. Was it wrong of me to want my daughter to speak my native language? I admit I took a guilty pleasure whenever she seemed to prefer English to the Slavic rival. Also it was just so damned tiring to have everything repeated twice.
"What's that?" Natalka would say. "Tistochko," replied my wife.
"What's she pointing at?" I asked.
"C-O-O-K-I-E."
"Oh . . .coo . . ."
"If you say the word, I'll kill you!"
"Tistochko," I said. "Tatu, kazhy tistochko!" smiled my wife.
"Cookie," I whispered petulantly.
"Grahaaam!"
I received assistance in these culture wars from my parents. They are sturdy dairy farmers from the English Midlands. They couldn't disguise the fact that all they had ever wanted for a grandchild was a little English Jack or Emma. Often I caught my mother substituting white sliced bread for our stodgier Ukrainian variety (usually involving caraway seeds), or buying Heinz ketchup, or slipping a bowl of Frosties onto Natalka's lap.
Early on - at about one-and-a-half years - Natalka recognised the difference between the two languages. She associated one very clearly with her mother and one with me. While she was comfortable replying in Ukrainian to her mother, she insisted on speaking po anhliiski to her father. I took this as a sensitive attempt on her part to forge a sympathetic cultural connection with me. I was doubly pleased when her English took on some of the recognisable sounds of my native Leicestershire.
Yet gradually, under sustained brainwashing, my daughter - the turncoat - went over to the other side. Her domestic linguistic immersion triumphed, while my attempts at Ukrainian wilted.
God knows, I tried to keep up. But as I stumbled over the rudimentary vocabulary of the one year-old baby, like potty or spill, mess, yes, goodbye, or sorry, she leapt forward to complicated verbs and phrases, like Tatu ty paiats! Thus, soon Natalka happily took her vanna in the evening, combed her volossia, brushed her zuby, and tucked herself up in the lizhko. She read knyzhky, drew rysunky, and sang pisni.
As is the child's way, my daughter appreciated the rewards her mother gave her for compliance. Ingeniously, she also recognised the benefits of colluding with my wife in family disputes. Far easier to get a mutually satisfying outcome when just two of you are haggling and the third, sometimes difficult, member of the triumvirate is kept safely in the dark. Their Ukrainian fifth column became a formidable alliance in our household.
But then, finally, not long ago came my own conversion. Perhaps it was inevitable all along. My resistance promised to be a lost cause when Natalka's Baba, her grandmother, arrived to live with us. But, ultimately, it came about in a way I had not looked for.
We live in the heart of central London. At Thames-side playgrounds, Natalka began to mix with - and talk to - other local children. Slowly her English accent started to change. Out went the Midland guttural oohs and ahhhs, and in crept the sharper cadences of the Thames Estuary.
I was shocked. My little daughter, standing before me, was turning into a southerner! My own linguistic and cultural defences kicked in. No disrespect to real Londoners out there, but suddenly I understood how my wife felt.
Now, I take it all back. I need her help in this new cultural battle of my own. So give me borscht, varenyky and holubtsi! And my embroidered shirt! And, proshu, enr oll me in the nearest Ukrainian class, shvydko.
Tato ne khoche buty paiatsom.
graham.bowley@btopenworld.com
