Universal Themes
In writing my grandmother’s and mother’s memoir, I am struck by the universal themes that are peppering my pages. Love, death and destruction. Woven through all of this is the need to belong, a universal theme. To belong to a community whether it’s based in a church, mosque or synagogue. Or on a badminton court or in a writers’ group. Or online in Facebook.
The other need–we all have–is to have a piece of the earth that we can call your own, whether it’s an apartment, a house, or half a boxcar, which is where my grandmother lived with six children during World War I.
My mother was born in 1915, left the Ukraine when she was 14 for Canada in 1929, but it was this church in Kivertsi that she wanted to see most of all when she returned to visit in 1988. The church where her family prayed, laughed when her brother got married, and cried when her father died. It was this sense of belonging, this sense of community that she carried with her her whole life.
Lovely post, Diana. It’s fun to think about what we’d most like to see if we went back after a long hiatus to the town where we grew up. I did that once and was shocked to find that the house was long gone and there was only a vacant lot! I just couldn’t accept it, so I decided I didn’t have to and in my mind the house reigns on–