Ghosts in a Photograph by Myrna Kostash

Author:Myrna Kostash
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NeWest Press
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The girl from Dzhuriv settles in

It began on Baba’s wedding day.

If the photograph is to be believed, the photographer is standing far enough back from the front yard of 12518–83rd Street to include the entire party in the frame. I count seventy-four people, including the wedding couple; the groom’s brother; one baby; a handful of children; and in the front row, the tsymbaly (zither) player and a fiddler. The crowd is overwhelmingly young men, presumably still unmarried, all in white shirts and ties, some with moustaches but no beards, bearing fine heads of well-groomed hair. The young women wear long white dresses — this is 1914, none is a “flapper” yet — some belted or pinned with rosettes and some with bits of frippery on their coiffures. An older woman stands in no-nonsense white shirt and tie — could she be a teacher? — but otherwise the female guests look like handmaidens attending the Queen of May. As in the Old Country, this will be a wedding that lasts two days.

The photo, 105 years old, is in its original cardboard frame. I turn it over and read, still legible in a hurried Cyrillic script: “Ukrainian wedding! In Canada, in the city of Edmonton, a wedding took place in the year 1914, the month of May.” Another hand in green ink has added: “Comrade Nikolai Maksymiuk.” Each face in the crowd is as clear as though illuminated, waiting for the photographer’s lamp to flash so the merriment can begin. I am looking, from face to face, and there, at the very edge of the group as though he had just inserted himself, uninvited, is a short man wearing suspenders but no tie or belt. The suspenders are holding up his baggy trousers that are too short in the leg and balloon around his hips. He must be a “comrade,” but he is visibly poor and, perhaps like Palahna, feeling a stranger amongst smart immigrants who had already formed a compact community, into which she will eventually be assimilated in the hall of the Ukrainian Labour-Farmer Temple Association (ULFTA). But she doesn’t know that yet.

Baba is framed by the doorposts of the house, in front of which the crowd has assembled, and we see the stamp of proprietorship, the numbers 12518, on the same plain, shingled, and wood-framed structure that will be in the background of so many of my mother’s photos. But on this wedding day nothing yet has happened: my grandparents stand at the literal threshold of their (foreshortened) future. In five years, the groom will be dead; the clean-shaven youth standing behind Baba’s right shoulder in the crowd, a rosette pinned to his shirt, the groom’s brother and groomsman, Andrew, will be the new proprietor; and my mother will know him as “father,” or formally as stepfather, the man who will raise her and her half-sister, Annie, and I will know him as Dido. It is as though Nikolai’s role in the scheme of things was to bring his

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