About Immigrants, Restaurants and Dreaming Big

I heard a repeat broadcast on  CBC radio this past Victoria Day where Rachel Phan was interviewed about her new memoir, Restaurant Kid.  The conversation struck some of the same notes played in my middle grade novel, Waltraut. Similar tones included the immigrant school lunch, the busy immigrant parents, the guilt, the shame, the lack of connection between parents and the very children they’re making such self-sacrifices for. Rachel Phan’s family has a Chinese/Vietnamese background.  During her childhood, she lacked understanding of her family's challenging and traumatic past.  As a restaurant kid she felt her basic needs were often overlooked as her ‘hard-working’ parents put all their energy into the restaurant. 

Back in March, I attended a 100th birthday celebration in a newcomer’s ethnic restaurant. Jimmy (his Canadianized name) comes from Pakistan. Along with his wife and five children, the restaurant is his dream of success. Let me share a wee bit of the fascinating story behind Jimmy’s Pakistani restaurant, Barbecue Hut, here in Winnipeg at 445 Notre Dame Avenue.

Irma, Jimmy, his wife and 4 of his 5 children

Jimmy was flying solo to Canada from Pakistan when he sat beside my friend’s mom, “Irma,” once a post-Second World War immigrant from Schlesien (now part of Poland).  The flight was long and the two travellers struck up a friendship. Imagine: a young man sets out to improve his fortunes in a foreign country and meets Irma, a little old lady returning to Canada after visiting her daughter (my friend, who’d been living in the Middle East). Irma invites Jimmy to stay at her place until he gets settled. She opens up her tiny apartment and her life to him. Weeks turn into months ... turn into years. Finally, after much hard work along with Irma’s generosity, he’s ready to bring his wife and young children to Canada, because Jimmy now has his own restaurant—the Barbecue Hut.

Irma turns 100!

Back in March, Irma from Schlesien, turned 100 and Jimmy hosted a wonderful birthday party for her in his authentically furnished Pakistani restaurant. I was privileged to be an invited guest. It was a wonderful occasion to celebrate life, along with the dreams of immigration, and the power of kindness and friendship … with some excellent, traditional Pakistani food.

Seriously good food and a story to warm your heart. 

Barbecue Hut, 445 Notre Dame Avenue in Winnipeg

And now on to some seriously bad poetry, but with well-meaning enthusiasm. 

Want to eat some ‘real’ good food, but …

Not sure where to go?

You should try the Barbecue Hut.

Enjoy your life … take it slow.

Tell me again ... where and what?

Best food in town at the Barbecue Hut!

But, but, but? ... no but!

Get your butt out of your rut …

And try, just try, the Barbecue Hut!

On Omens

Striker

Omens can be bad or good. Here's an example of each. First the bad one. 

Before Striker, a black lab mix, I had Buddy, a golden lab mix. Buddy and I were returning from a camping trip to Hecla, our favourite place on earth, when we stopped at Winnipeg Beach for a break at their dog-friendly shoreline. We passed a man who was leaning against the base of the water tower. 

“Can I pet your dog,” he asked.

I nodded.  “Buddy loves attention.” 

“Such a beautiful dog.” The man smiled. “I had one very similar. They don’t live nearly long enough. Enjoy him while you can.” 

Buddy

Buddy had no known health issues, yet he died a month later. Now Striker is 12 years old and slowing down. Dogs never live long enough.  

Now onto the good omen.

After one of my regular swims a few months back, I was relaxing in the sauna when a woman I hadn’t seen before came in. The sauna is usually a quiet place where we respect each other’s silence. But this woman was chatty. She shared how she’d survived breast cancer and that she was happy, strong and grateful to be back at the pool. It was a strange conversation … quite one-sided. I’d never met the woman before and I’ve not seen her since.

Turns out that now it’s me who has breast cancer and I start treatment tomorrow. Today, though, I go for my regular swim. It’ll be a while before I can go again, but hopefully, not too long. I can’t wait to meet that woman again. I’ll have something to tell her … about being happy, strong and grateful … and about omens.

Victory Day

We don’t celebrate Victory Day here in Canada. Instead we have a Victoria Day holiday on the third Monday of May honouring Queen Victoria (British monarch) and officially opening our warm weather season. It’s a weekend where cottagers open their summer homes and gardeners begin plotting their flower beds. 

My first experience of Victory Day was in Kyiv, back in 2004. We accidently stumbled upon some rehearsals for the big parade that was to be staged … not on May 8th, when Nazi Germany officially capitulated, but on May 9th, which was due to the time zone difference.  That parade rehearsal, complete with tanks, artillery fire, and military music was a jarring reminder that we’d entered a country where war was a visceral memory. 

Zhytomyr, Ukraine, 

In May, 1945, peace deals may have been signed, but for millions of people the worst was yet to come. Homelessness, hunger, separation from loved ones, disease, long term disability… these would be the consequences of those six years of war.  

Today’s war zones … spreading like wild fires in a world gone mad …. will breed more instability and more distress.  Victory Day wounds take a long time to heal, and now those wounds are being re-opened.

My dad, captured by Soviet forces on May 11, 1945 spent five years in a coal mine near Moscow. His children died of hunger and his first wife, assuming he was dead, entered a new relationship. My mom, captured by Soviet forces at the end of February, 1945, no doubt spent Victory Day traveling on foot or by train to the Urals (I explore this in Crow Stone). Her two sisters never made it out of East Prussia before the war ended. I’m exploring their experiences as I write a new novel set in East Prussia as it transitioned into Russian Kaliningrad in the aftermath of Victory Day, 1945.

‘May Victories?’  Nazi Germany’s capitulation eighty years ago, was an end and a beginning. Putin’s bizarre re-imagining of Nazi terror in his war against Ukraine exposes him as a manipulative liar as this short clip from Berlin by President Steinmeier underlines.  Eighty years later, fear festers anew.

Building New Homes

My dog and I discovered who the fort construction workers were in the little woods we frequent on our morning walks. Turns out they’re two teenagers from Ukraine … one from Kharkiv and the other from Odesa. So now we say Pryvit (an informal hello).

Our city has welcomed many refugees from war-torn Ukraine. My oven was repaired by a man from Kyiv. My new windows and door were installed by Ukrainian newcomers and I bought the most the most delicious sourdough bread at a local school craft sale. Today I’m meeting one of my former Ukrainian students whom I supported while volunteering with Immigration Canada. She’s integrating well (after a few speed bumps) and transferring her accounting skills into a new career here in Manitoba. 

Pryvit to these wonderful newcomers. You’re making Canada a better place. But I'm sad about all the talent and youth that Ukraine is losing. Knowing that it’s now signing away its mineral rights to the USA feels disturbing. Is this Ukraine’s future? Is this rich country being drained of its people, its resources along with its land and culture? Will these Ukrainian newcomers to Canada keep their cherished homeland alive through art and culture? Will they be able to return to their country to show their children where they once grew up?    Once my mom left her childhood homes in Ukraine and East Prussia there was no going back.

Truth is, sometimes you can never return and building a new life might be difficult but it's rewarding too.  After all, building a fort in the Manitoba woods sure beats hiding in the woods of a country at war. 

 

Brennessel

One of those curious German words that I’d hear growing up alongside Wanzen, (the dreaded bedbugs of Mom’s gulag days), and Quasselwasser (a type of drinking water that made little girls chitchat too much) was Brennessel.

Skalle-Per Hedenhös

Mom and her sisters or other women with similar immigrant and refugee backgrounds from the church would reminisce about ‘Brennessel.”  They talked about Brennessel soup, tea, salad or using it as an ointment.  They talked about Brennessel as if they loved it and as if they hated it.  Brennessel belonged ‘over there,’ in the faraway, dark and gloomy past.

Lo and behold, ‘Brennessel’ has an English translation. Of course! It’s the stinging nettle and it’s sold in health food stores as a nutritional superfood and as a possible tonic for arthritis. An interesting side effect of consuming brennessel is that it’s been known to cause miscarriages. That’s a useful bit of trivia for my writer-brain.  

I’m working on a novel set in East Prussia at the end of the war. My characters are hungry. It’s April and they’re in the woods trying to avoid the Red Army. What will they find to eat? Brennessel, of course... along with some mushrooms. Haven’t looked into those yet. But I’m encouraged by the fact that East Prussia and rural Manitoba share many plant species and have a similar climate. So, like my characters, I’ll be in these early spring woods foraging for edibles.  At least I don’t have to dodge enemy bullets, or drunk rapists while I meander. 

Cycling through the Kaliningrad region back in 2019, we passed fields of stinging nettles. I’m so grateful that we kept going. Grateful that we had no need to rely on wild brennessel for food, to end unwanted pregnancies, or to soothing our aching muscles … unlike my aunts, cousins and mom did almost eighty years ago. 

I found comfort in seeing the wild brennessel ... a confirmation to my mom's stories. 

Sumy and Memories of Second World War

The city of Sumy in northeast Ukraine has made headlines in recent days because of the horrific Palm Sunday attacks where dozens of Ukrainian civilians died during Putin’s continued ‘special operation’ that has devastated countless lives over the last 3 years. So many needlessly broken lives. Why?

Sumy is the main city in a region I’d been hoping to visit someday. Near the ancient monastery town of Putyvl, it’s an area that has seen the horrors of war before. One of my father’s friends, an agronomist, had been stationed in Putyvl during the Nazi invasion back in 1941. 

Ernst was also from Schleswig-Holstein, like my dad, and had immigrated to Canada in the early sixties.  He’d written his memoirs and in the mid-eighties, asked me, a recent German MA grad, to translate his memoirs into English. 

I knew my family had a lot of war memories and I’d been trying to figure them out through various means … travel and oral histories, and 20th century writers like Heinrich Böll, Günther Gras and Thomas Mann so I welcomed this opportunity to get an insider’s view of that war.

Fotosergio:  Molchansky Monastery

Ernst shares his efforts to keep his Nazi taskmasters happy and fed while feeding a partisan army hiding in the Sumy/Putyvl marshy woods. He shares how he supposedly manipulated the Soviets & the Nazis, killing indoor plants with too much un-drunk vodka, never being sure who to trust and even faking his own grave in an effort to hide.  It was a fascinating account and while on the outside I was a newlywed with her first house and an empty sandbox calling to her, on the inside I was learning about Nazis, partisans, Soviets and war. 

I’ve never stopped being fascinated by those years and those places. A grim reality is once again settled over  Sumy, in northeastern Ukraine and all that eighty-year-old history still matters. I’m so sad that the ‘bloodlands’ (Timothy Snyder) continue to bleed.

From Königsberg to Kaliningrad

Eighty years ago, on April 9, 1945, General Otto Lasch surrendered Königsberg to the Red Army. Where is Königsberg today? Its buildings in ruins, including the once famous Königsberg Castle, its people dispersed … washed away by war and now by time, like a sandcastle. You’ll only find it on historical maps. After 700 years as a Prussian city, with its most famous citizen being Emmanuel Kant, Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad in 1946 … a name that also applies to the Russian oblast, an enclave surrounded by Lithuania to the North, Poland to the south and the Baltic on the west.  Along with the city, the entire province once known as East Prussia, is renamed and divided amongst the victors.  And like East Prussia before, Russian Kaliningrad remains separate from its mother land. Always in its own detached world.

By April, in 1945, many German civilians would have managed to escape the Soviet onslaught, or have died trying as they fled for  Baltic ports.  My mom had been captured during her flight earlier that winter and by April she was on her way to the Urals as a POW. Meanwhile, her two sisters and cousins were stranded … also not reaching port cities like Pillau … perhaps saved from drowning on ships like the doomed Wilhelm Gustloff. My aunts remained behind in the ruins of East Prussia.

I’m grateful to have visited Kaliningrad back in 2019. The Russian settlers who have made Königsberg their home have learned to love the city and appreciate the history and ruins of that brutal war. With the Germans are gone, the victors have had eighty years to claim Kaliningrad as their own. 

But Königsberg remains a symbol of home to the scattered survivors and now their descendants. My recent ‘cousin’ reunion down in Mexico this past winter reminded me of how memories fade away … like castles in the sand … unless we make the effort to put them into narratives. 

public domain Königsberg Castle