The individual doing the telephone survey wanted to know my ethnic origin. It’s easy enough for me to say that I am Canadian. I was born in Canada. My birth records indicate I was born in the Rural Municipality of Hanover – not very precise but, nevertheless, in Manitoba, and therefore in Canada.

My family had somewhat less precise birth records. My parents’ passports, issued to Katarina and Cornelius Falk on November 27, 1928, in Zaporozhye (Zaporizhzhia), were provided in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian, and French. Their three young children were listed on those same documents, but the places of birth of my parents and siblings were not mentioned. No doubt they had been entered in the records of their church, but I am inclined to think that all such records may well have been lost long ago.

On May 19, 1937, my father was granted the status of naturalized British subject at St. Pierre, Manitoba, as were the children named on his passport. My mother is not named on his naturalization certificate. The children born into our family in the intervening years are not listed either.

It was more than a decade after my parents and their three pre-school children arrived in Canada that I was born, in our home in the community of Rosengard, approximately nine miles southwest of Steinbach. All that to say, I was introduced to my family’s immigration stories at an early age. My memories of that time long ago have evolved from the stories of others, many heard repeatedly. Sometimes the circumstances under which I heard these stories conveyed fresh perspectives.

The older I become, the more I realize that my journey through life has been shaped by innumerable factors. That, of course, is true of all of us. For me, the fact that my parents, and my older siblings, were immigrants is becoming more and more relevant to my personal story as I reflect on it from the vantage point of my life experiences.

When I was younger I gave no thought to any of this. It was simply my reality. Some other children and young people also living in Rosengard, where my family lived, were in a similar situation. We were, simply put, “Russlaender,” to use the common identifying phrase of the day, and in our context, no further explanation needed to be given.

There were, however, a sizable number of children attending the Rosengard School over the years who had a somewhat different history. Their awareness of the immediate historical origins of their families had little resemblance to mine. Some of these Rosengard families had numerous members of their extended families living in the community or in other communities nearby. Some of them had grandparents whom they could visit. For a number of us, ours were only two-generation families – namely, our parents and us, their children.

The ancestors of these other Rosengard families also had historical roots in Ukraine. Furthermore, all the families of our community were Mennonite, both from a faith perspective and culturally. And all of us spoke Mennonite Low German. For most of our families it was the dominant language of our homes, although some families also spoke German at home. When it came to religious exercises, however, our prayers and hymns, and our church services, were, to the best of my knowledge, in German. In many ways, Rosengard families were profoundly connected.

The Rosengard families whose ancestors had arrived in Manitoba during the 1870s, approximately fifty years before my family did, had their own stories of hardship and survival, and had also experienced loneliness and personal losses. They had established places of worship and their own private schools. The later arrivals had not experienced the harsh conditions under which their Mennonite neighbours had built homes and communities. Those arriving during the 1920s were met by fellow Mennonites, with whom they shared a common language. The families who came half a century earlier did not have that cushion.

In spite of having evolved under very different circumstances over a period of approximately half a century, Rosengarders were able to live in community. Each group had, of course, experienced its own evolution. For me that is an example, one of many, of how to live in the world, in spite of our different life experiences and our individual understanding of the world as we know it.

Being the child of immigrant parents meant that, in a sense, I lived in two worlds. I have lived in Manitoba for most of my life, the exceptions being a six-month sojourn in Guyana, and living and working in Nunavut for approximately five years. I have always felt at home in Canada, the land of my birth. The fact that my parents were immigrants, however, gave me an awareness of another community, in another country, that figured significantly in my parents’ worldview and their understanding of history. By extension, I, too, was exposed to an entirely different world. This faraway place, now known as Ukraine, had been home to my parents and to their parents. It had been a place where our ancestors could thrive. It also was a place where many had experienced trauma of immense proportions, including the First World War, a civil war, and anarchy, in addition to famine and epidemics.

Going to school in Rosengard during the 1940s and 1950s provided me with an education, the significance of which I value more and more as time passes. In that context I became interested in maps, at an early age. As was the case throughout Manitoba and possibly throughout Canada, we had two large maps affixed to the wall at the front of our school classroom. One was a map of Canada, and the other one of the world. The world map highlighted in pink all the British colonies, including Canada. Indeed, we were told, “The sun never sets on the British Empire.”

This map concealed the fact that many families living in Canada were not of British origin. We nevertheless also had important stories. Indeed, all of those non-Anglo families, including First Nations families, had other stories, stories that reflected their own view of their place in the world. These stories did not fit neatly within the educational curriculum, which was determined to make proud British subjects of us all.

My parents spoke of various locations in the land of their birth, but the place names were foreign sounding, to say the least, to someone growing up and educated in Canada. Even today, with the aid of online resources, it is challenging to pronounce or learn to spell place names so far removed from our current reality. I must say, however, that having heard my parents speak of the places so familiar to them, I find it relatively easy to pronounce those place names which are now mentioned regularly in the context of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

My parents’ stories gave me an awareness of some of the events of the early twentieth century as they related to my family and the environment in which they experienced life in Ukraine. During the First World War, the Russian Empire was at war with Germany. My father was conscripted to serve his country, and was assigned to serve as a medic on the trains transporting the wounded and dying from the front to the nearest hospital in the rear. The brutality of that war, for which imperial Russia’s forces were ill-equipped, resulted in the death of one million of their men in just its first half year. It is impossible to imagine the effect on all who were involved in that violent chapter of human history. My father did not speak about that period of his life, as I think is not uncommon among those who have seen the cruelty of war. Nevertheless, as I reflect, I begin to understand, little by little, how profoundly those experiences must have shaped the rest of his life. Suffering and death were constant, daily realities on the troop trains, which carried the wounded as well as casualties of louse-borne typhus, which caused the deaths of millions of soldiers on the Eastern Front.

It is impossible for us to begin to relate to the experiences of those who cared for the wounded and dying in a war zone, when we have only experienced illness or medical care under well-regulated, orderly conditions. I have no doubt that this experience was one of the many reasons that family meant so much to my father. He had learned that life can often end with very little warning.

Perhaps those wartime experiences, and witnessing and experiencing the suffering and deaths of his own loved ones, was what prompted my father to put a notice in the German-language newspaper Die Mennonitische Rundschau in 1951. In that notice, my father requested genealogical information of the descendants of his grandfather Jakob Falk, born in 1818 in what is now Ukraine.

I am amazed at the prodigious volume of material my father accumulated and arranged in meticulous handwritten entries, amounting to more than one hundred pages. My father died suddenly, after a very brief illness, in 1959. That he was able to amass so much material in such a relatively short period of time is truly incredible. What is even more astounding is that he was able to achieve this monumental work without the use of a computer, or even a typewriter, and without access to a telephone.

My mother, Katarina Falk, nee Sudermann, was born in 1903 in Kamenka, in what is now Ukraine. The stories my mother told us as she sat next to the wood-burning stove in our Rosengard home, darning socks, provide me with a view of her early life and youth that is like a rich tapestry, albeit fraught with tragedy and hardship.

My mother used to tell us that she did not have an advanced education, and that her mind had been focused on family events outside the window of her school. I never gave the comment all that much thought. As far as I was concerned, my mother had lived her life with a measure of strength and courage for which no educational advancement could have prepared her.

When my mother was eight years old, her father, Abram Sudermann, died of the dreadful disease of tuberculosis – the “wasting disease,” as it has been called, because of its effect on the body. Small wonder that my mother’s young mind tended to focus on her home life, with its realities of disease and death, including cases of infant mortality.

The typhus epidemic which ravaged troops on the Eastern Front in the First World War also spread to the civilian population. When my mother was seventeen, her mother died of this plague. My mother, although she became deathly ill, survived. Not so, however, for her next older sister and her next younger sister, both of whom succumbed to the epidemic.

During my mother’s early adulthood, the land of her birth experienced a devastating world war, a revolution, civil war, and anarchy. In the midst of those conditions of social and political upheaval, and in addition to epidemic disease, famine afflicted the land. My mother, whose family had in the meantime become a very large blended one, observed many, many decades later, in words reflecting the deep anxiety she experienced as a young woman, that “by ourselves we might have had enough.” Her stepfather’s marriage to a widow who had a large family meant that food shortages became her reality. My mother set for me a powerful example through her life. She knew not only how to take life in stride, but also to flourish, in whatever circumstances presented themselves.

Dr. Catherine Meeks, author of the memoir A Quilted Life: Reflections of a Sharecropper’s Daughter, was recently asked about the relevance of her book for today’s world. Meeks responded: “I think this is a moment that calls us to be grounded in whatever we believe deep within us can hold us together. You can’t count on external circumstances to be anything other than chaotic. Right now, at this moment in history, we have a real invitation for people to find out what truly matters to them beyond just the externals in life.”¹

In a very real sense, my parents, Cornelius and Katarina Falk, learned from their own experiences that life can be very chaotic at times. They, too, had to focus, again and again, on what it was that truly mattered to them.

As I reflect on what being the daughter of immigrant parents has meant to me, and how that reality continues to inform my life, I am reminded of the words of the late Frederick Buechner, who wrote: “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”²

Indeed, all moments are key moments.

Maria Falk Lodge is the daughter of immigrant parents. Her early childhood education at the one-room school in Rosengard laid the foundation for her further educational pursuits. Maria graduated with a law degree from the University of Manitoba and has practiced as a lawyer. Her interest in local history is evidenced by her articles published in The Carillon over more than thirty years. In 2018, Maria was presented the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Historical Preservation and Promotion.

1. David Crumm, “Dr. Catherine Meeks Transforms the ‘Rags’ of Family Trauma Into a Beautiful “Quilted Life,” Read the Spirit, Apr. 1, 2024, https://readthespirit.com/explore/catherine-meeks-a-quilted-life-memoir-interview/. ↩︎
2. Frederick Buechner, Now and Then (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), 87. ↩︎