Ukrainian in Spirit and Maybe Genetic Heritage

I was raised by my mother to believe that my heritage was half German via my father and Czech, "with a little French," via her side of the family. We actually knew very little about my father's biological father. My father was the result of an affair of a senior German officer with a young mathematics professor. The affair was short and my father was born in 1944 in what was then East Germany. His mother married a cruel man and had twin daughters by that man a decade after my father was born. My father was abused terribly by his step father and I think much of the abuse that he heaped upon me was transference from his own childhood. He died in 2016 and I was long estranged from him at the time.

My husband Andy is fascinated with genetics and heritage. My father's mystery father was a puzzle that Andy was determined to solve. When Andy hit a roadblock on his own family tree, he had me submit a cheek swab to Ancestry.com to see what he could learn about my ancestors. I honestly did not care about the results, what mixture of European countries were part of me, or whether I had any unknown relatives in North America. I was of the mind that it was a past I didn't want to exhume. My own parents were so abusive that I had zero desire to look past them to see what else was lurking in my shadowy genes.

Andy's research findings did not disappoint. He found my paternal grandfather and discovered that the man emigrated to Toronto, Canada just a few years after my own father arrived in the United States, via Mexico, in the mid 1970's. I have cousins that live in Canada, though they are about a decade older that me. Andy reached out to the youngest cousin on my behalf. She told him that her family knew of her father's affair, but it was not talked about, and none of them knew that my father had lived in New York City.

My father knew the year that his biological father died. His mother called him from Germany and told him. She had kept tabs on the father of her first child. Whether or not my father knew that his father lived for decades just a 12 hour drive north of him is unknown. I was around eight years old at the time. I recall that I said to both my parents, very proudly, "Good, that guy was a bastard for not taking care of you." That was apparently the wrong thing to say, even though I genuinely meant the comment to be supportive.

My father never became a citizen of the United States. My mother became a citizen shortly after she arrived in 1969, coming to the United States via a refugee camp in Austria that was established after Russia invaded then Czechoslovakia. I think that my father technically could have applied for citizenship and become a US citizen. He had a green card and paid income taxes his entire life. However, my father was strictly rule bound and I think that since he originally came to US illegally he decided he did not deserve citizenship. He was an atheist and had a complicated, often contradictory, moral code.

Based on the Ancestry.com results, my genetic makeup is far more complicated than my mother described. I think her own parents either fictionalized their knowledge or more likely just did not have a clue about their backgrounds. I am more than 50% German, so my mother had some German heritage. She came to the United States as a fluent speaker of Czech, Russian, and German. She began to learn English in the Austrian refugee camp and was baseline conversational by the time she arrived in New York. Though she spoke daily in German to my father, and Czech to her lifelong friend Zdena, that she met in the refugee camp, she avoided speaking Russian at all costs and actively hid her knowledge of the language from everyone she met. She would only speak Russian if it was absolutely necessary, or if she wanted to berate a Russian person in their own tongue. I witnessed that phenomenon once when we were in Pennsylvania. We had a cabin in a large developed vacation community, Eagle Lake. Our lot was spot 4 in Trailblazer Terrace. Though this was decades before VRBO, it was common for some owners to work with a realtor to rent their cabins during the summer, to offset ownership costs. One day, my mother was working in her garden and a family drove by in their golf cart. They stopped to ask directions for the clubhouse and pool. The family was Russian and spoke limited English. My mother tried to explain, in English, that the clubhouse and pool were two separate locations, miles apart, and that the family could not go to both places at once. She offered to give directions to the clubhouse, which was closer, and would have maps of the development. The mother of the family became upset. Who knows what she heard in my mother's description. She began talking furtively in Russian to her husband, gesturing angrily towards my mother. Whatever that woman said, my mother understood clear as day, and she unleashed vitriol in Russian that made the parents and two children on the golf cart gasp. The father quickly turned the golf cart back on and sped away from my still ranting in Russian mother. I asked my mother what she had said and her only answer was, "I gave them directions."

My mother had endless opinions and became fiercely patriotic over her decades in the United States. She always blamed the Russians for forcing her to leave her birth country. She was what would now be described as a social activist and was resolutely opposed to communism. Her parents and older brother embraced communism; her brother reported her activities to local leaders and had she not fled the country, she would have been arrested and sent to a work camp in Siberia. I inherited my mother's antagonism towards authority. My cousin inherited his father's self righteousness and desire to sow insecurity.

My genetic makeup showed over 50% Germanic and around 25% Moravian. The third largest known contributor is Swedish, at around 15%. The rest of my makeup is a mix of Eastern European that changes regularly as more people use Ancestry and the program is better able to identify those unknown origins. I haven't checked the exact distribution in about a year, but since Russian invaded Ukraine, I closely followed the war and wonder whether a fair chunk of my missing heritage is Ukrainian.

Andy's paternal grandfather had a longtime live in caretaker named Yuri, who was from Ukraine. When Grandpa Hosmanek passed away in January 2021, Yuri had already given notice that he needed to return to Ukraine to care for his mother, who had health problems of her own. Yuri had a US green card but still had his own health care in Ukraine, and he returned there shortly after Grandpa passed away. I met Yuri only once, under auspicious circumstances. Yuri was a man of habit, around my age, and he had been subordinate to Grandpa's five adult children the entire time that he cared for Grandpa. He worked six days a week and loved Grandpa. Andy's Aunt Joan offered to me to stay in the loft in Grandpa's house in January 2020 with Baby Celine, so that I could show in Grayslake, IL and not need to get a hotel room. I could not stay with Joan, who lived across the street, because she has a cat that absolutely hates all other animals. I took Joan up on the offer and my stay fell on Grandpa's birthday, the last he would have on earth. I brought a cheesecake and Joan made a large meal that we all enjoyed. Andy stayed in Iowa as it was the beginning of spring semester and he couldn't miss teaching days. I had some wine on the night of Grandpa's birthday dinner, Grandpa had a beer (with a straw in the bottle, which he hated). We were all in good spirits. Celine slept in her kennel in Grandpa's house, since dinner was at Joan's house. She was exhausted after her first day of showing.

After dinner, I stayed a while longer with Joan and Hank while Yuri took Grandpa home to get him to bed. I went back later, walked Celine, and was surprised that Yuri himself was still awake when I got back from the walk. Yuri wanted to talk, so I listened. He apologized for being gruff with me the first two days of my stay in the loft. He said that Joan told him I was coming to stay for a few days, back in December, and he got very upset. He told Joan that having a visitor would be bad for Grandpa, that it would be too disruptive to his routine. Joan told Yuri that was nonsense, that it would be good for Grandpa, and Grandpa loved dogs as well. At this point in the conversation, I was smiling and knew exactly where it was going. Yuri himself laughed, and said, "I myself was upset that there would be another Hosmanek woman here, to tell me what to do and criticize my care of Dr. Hosmanek." I couldn't help laughing out loud at this point and said, "Yeah I figured you were being a bit of an asshole on purpose, so I decided to just wait you out." We both laughed hard and Yuri told me that he was sorry for misjudging me and that he enjoyed having me, and especially Celine, in the house. I got back to Iowa a few days later. The WHO declared the start of the covid-19 pandemic a few weeks afterwards, and Grandpa died of heart attack a few weeks before his next birthday.

After Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year, Andy and I both worried about Yuri and his family. Joan was able to reach Yuri by email and verified that he was already back in the United States before the war started. I support Ukraine and have donated several times to UNICEF outreach earmarked for Ukraine. I'm one of the few Americans that support enforcement of a NATO no fly zone over Ukraine. I think that Russian leaders are crazy but not stupid. They won't escalate to WWIII if the odds are The Free World versus Russia. Putin knows that his allies in China and the Middle East are not going to stick their necks out for his dumb ass. Dictators only stick together when it's convenient for them; they are the ultimate fair weather friends. Any actions beyond words won't translate into military support.

The world now knows Ukrainian Spirit and will never forget. I saw a kindred spirit in Yuri, and so many Americans are finding kindred spirits in the writings and speeches of Ukranian leaders. Just today, I laughed out loud while reading news from Ukraine. The Ukranians hit a massive Russian warship a few days ago with two Neptune missiles, developed by the Ukrainians. The Russians claim there was a fire on the ship, and it wasn't hit by missiles. The damned ship sank to the bottom of the Black Sea while being towed by Russia back to its home port of Sevastopol. Today, the Ukrainian defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, posted several tweets mocking the Russians and stating that the "flagship" would become a popular diving attraction after Ukraine won the war. Mr. Reznikov is a diver himself. I had to take a screenshot of the New York Times article to share with a few friends and decided it was so excellent that it deserved an entire blog post. This is the kind of irreverent shit I would say if some fool gave me the job of defense minister. I would also have told the Russians to fuck off, which is how Ukrainians responded a few weeks ago when the very same ship gave orders to people on a military outpost to surrender.