| Notes |
- EARLY DAYS OF THE PASNAKS
by Pat Delore & Joan Knowles (as told to them by Anne Knowles)
Grandma was born in 1890 Maria Zaich somewhere in the Ukraine (which Jim Pasnak has identified now for us as being the village of Putiatynce near the town of Rohatyn or Rogatin in the western Ukraine).
She emigrated to the United Stateswhen she was about 15 years of age and settled in Rochester, N.Y. She Lived with and worked for a Jewish family as a servant or hired help. Although she was in this home as an employee, they treated her like family and even gave her a little wedding when she married John Pasnak. Their first child, Anya, was born April 1, 1912.This was our mother who later became Anne Knowles.
With their first child at about 1-1/2 years of age, this couple moved to Alberta where they secured land at a place near Boyle called Bondiss. They lived here for about five years.
They then moved to Vegreville where Grandpa worked in a store. It was there that Mom started school. Up until then she had been homeschooled by Grandpa to read and write. She started school in the summer and by January she was ready to move into grade three. It is uncertain how long the family lived in Vegreville. According to my brief notes made from what Mom told me (Joan), the family then went to Lamont to live for about 6 months. After that they moved to Edmonton for three years where Grandpa worked in a store for a group of businessmen.
In Edmonton Grandpa became editor of a newspaper. At that time he went into real estate. He became the owner of about 20 farms which he rented out.
When the Depression broke out, the government ruled that no family could be put off the land they were renting regardless of whether they could pay the rent or not. Since there was no money coming in to pay the taxes, Grandpa lost his farms. Mom said that Grandpa would have become a millionaire had it not been for the loss of these farms.
At this time, Mom had been teaching school for (we think) three years. Her first year of teaching was in a small two-room country school at Bruderhaim.
She was responsible for grades 7 to 11 and was also the school Principal.
She then moved to another school situated between Mundaire and Chipman where she taught for two years.
Mom enjoyed teaching and was doing well at it.
However, since Grandpa had lost his means of living due to the failure of his renters to pay him, he was forced to find another source of income.
He therefore set up business of another country store. He asked Mom to loan him her savings for the necessary capital. He and Grandma talked Mom into quitting her teaching job and going to work for him in his store. Mom hated working in the store.
This kind of work did not appeal to her at all.
When Grandpa was financially back on his feet, Mom quit work in the store and followed her heart's desire which was to come to the west coast and settle in Vancouver.
Rather than apply for new teaching credentials, she opted to
work at another less busy type of job which would allow her more • social time.
She went to work for BC Tel as an operator. This was considered to be a very respectable job for a woman at that time. In time Grandpa paid Mom back the money she had loaned him. The store Grandpa had bought was in Andrew.
Grandpa and Grandma had never been impressed with Mom's chosen profession of school teaching.
This must have been disheartening to Mom as she loved
the job and we believe that she had a gift for it.
- Family History: What do I know?
by J. Pasnak
One time, Grandma and Dad were looking in an atlas of mine, and they said something about the family having come from a place called Przemysl (pronounced something like Pshemeesle).
This is a small city (60,000 1979 est.) that at this point in history is in Poland, just across the Ukrainian border, down near the Carpathian Mountains. We are credibly informed, however, that the family came from the village of Putiatynce, near the town of Rohatyn or Rogatin in the western Ukraine: if you look at the map and find the cities of Lvov, Tarnopol and Ivano-Frankovsk, Rohatyn is in about the centre of that triangle. Przemysl may have been a staging area, where emigrants went to catch the train.
There seems to have been two kinds of Ukrainians in that part of the country, Galicians (Balychyna, and Bukovinians, perhaps corresponding to those who lived on the plain and those who lived in the hills. Grandma occasionally used the term "bukovin" as a putdown of someone she did not think much of. Other peoples mixed into that area, too; there are in Alberta Ukrainians named Shandro, who were originally Shand
or maybe Shannon, Irish who somehow settled in the Ukraine!
And grandpa's parents, his father was Wasyl, and his mother
was Maria Shurgot (sp.?), a name that sounds German in origin.
She was a midwife. There were five children in that family that we know of, that, is who came to Canada. Pearl (Paraska) was the oldest; she came over in 1923, after she had married and started her family. John was the oldest boy. Then came Frank (Onufry), Nick and Annie, who married a Burzminsky.
Frank seems to have been a rather colourful character: he served in World War I, apparently on both sides, and he may have spent time in a prisoner-of-war camp. He was a bit of a ne’er-do-well while he lived in Alberta. Nick was loved by all. He is the only one I ever met, when he came to visit Grandma after Grandpa died, and it gave me an awful jolt (I was only eight) because he looked so much like his older brother.
Nick lived to be into his nineties, I believe, and I came across him when I worked for Historic Sites, one of my colleagues had gone to inspect an old building the owner of which was a Nick Pasnak: did I know him? Yes, Uncle Nick, my grandfather's brother. A fine old gentleman. Of Annie Burzminsky, I know little save that she died of a brain
tumour. Down the generations, Auntie Pearl's daughter Mary Chamzuk lives in Edmonton. Uncle Nick had at least one son, named Benny (Basil). There are a few other Pasnak’s living in Edmonton, but. I do not know them or what relation they are (there was apparently also a cousin of Grandpa's in Alberta).
Grandma had an unhappy childhood. She was (I believe) the only child of a mother she loved and who died young. Her father (surname Zaiych? or Zaychuk:) then married another woman who had children of her own (two hoys, at least), and favoured her own offspring at the expense of the step-daughter. When she was fifteen Maria borrowed some money from an aunt, and with a group of other girls, emigrated to America, coming to Rochester, New York, where there was a Ukrainian community established. For a time she worked for a Jewish woman. Among the flotsam and jetsam of our family possessions is a rather large photo of a wedding party that, seems to show Grandma as one of the bride's maids.
John and Maria were married in Rochester, where their first child, Anya was born. They were by all accounts an ill-assorted pair. She was shy, inward-looking, wary, ever
suspicious to the point of paranoia. He was gregarious, the life of the party, a leader of his people. They had known each other from the old country, being from the same place; Grandma told me once, yes, I knew him, I knew his family, but, I didn't know anything about his ideas. Talking to her another time, I mentioned that I was a little concerned about, my brother, who seemed just then to be spending a lot of his hours hanging out and having a good time. Just like his grandfather! she cried. Well, well….
Grandpa is said to have been a cabinet-maker, but he seems not to have ever practised that trade in Canada. In 1913, Mr. and Mrs. Pasnak and child, lured, one supposes, like so many others, by the chance of free land, moved to the province of Alberta in the country of Canada, and took up a homestead by Skeleton Lake, which is just east, of the town of Boyle, some ninety miles north of Edmonton. Their quarter-section came down almost to the shore, and Grandpa pre-empted a sliver of land to give them a lakefront property. Their second child, Myron, was born there in 1916. In addition to working the land, Grandpa also did railway construction to make some ready money; and they ate a lot of fish (to the end of their days, neither Grandma nor Dad cared much for fish: Ah! tastes fishy) •
The house they lived in: one of the things I did at Historic Sites was to edit a monograph entitled "Ukrainian Vernacular Architecture", I showed it to Dad, and he said, yes, that's the kind of house they had, with the thatched roof, the mud-and-dung plaster walls, the sleeping platform for the whole family over the stove. How well would he have remembered that? (Models of such houses exist now at Elk Island Park and the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village, and you can still sometimes find the original in the farming country of northern Alberta, still in use for animals or grain).
Grandpa's parents may have lived with them there; the story goes that, newspapers were used for insulation inside the walls, and the old man used to shuffle around reading the walls. Dad's place of birth is given as Bondiss, a whistle-stop that does not really exist any more (and scarcely did even then. When I was in my teens we took a day trip up that way, had a picnic in the campground and a swim in Skeleton Lake. Seem to recall seeing an old sign that said "Bondiss", but, if anything remained of the old homestead, my father could not find it.
That area is, I believe, not prime farming country, and in any case, Grandpa had other ideas for his life than being a mere tiller of the soil. Unfortunately, I can discover little for certain about the family's life over the next ten years. I do not know where the third child, Nadia, was born. We know that they lived for a while in Holden, a town about fifty miles southeast of Edmonton; Grandpa had a store there, in partnership with Uncle Nick, at least, and possibly also with Uncle Frank. The only story I have from that time is that the place had two wells, one salt and one soda, and dad remembered collecting tubs of snow in the winter, for water.
The Pasnak’s make their first appearance in Edmonton in the city directory of 1929. The story goes that the move was made because the children were getting older and needed better schooling; given the timing, the birth of their fourth child, Louise, may also have been a motivating factor. They took the house at 10856-93 street, purchased from a Charles Greenough. Amazingly, that house is still standing. It may have undergone a few changes over the years -- looks like the front porch has been removed -- but it is undoubtedly the same house. For those unfamiliar with the city, that is a venerable neighbourhood, with a lot of old and essentially unchanged houses. To the west is downtown, skid row, Chinatown (97 street) and Little Italy (95 street). Just a block or two to the east is Commonwealth Stadium. There are big houses (10856 is fully three stories), little houses with oddly-shaped porches, large brick buildings that have been various churches at different times; there are many old trees, on a sunny summer afternoon, 93 street reminds one of an old neighbourhood in Vancouver. They lived there till just after the war, when they moved to the house most of us grandchildren would remember, at 10742-102 street, just across from Victoria High School. That house is, of course, long gone.
Grandpa had a varied career. A homesteader and a small town storekeeper in his first years in Canada, he is given the occupation "real estate" in the 1929 directory. In subsequent years he is listed as the manager of the Alberta Settlement Board (1930) and the manager of the Ukrainian News (1931-2) (as a sidebar, the 1931-32 directories also mention a certain "Anne Pasnak tchr". In 1933 he was the proprietor of Pasnak's
Grocery, at an address south of the river. This turned out to he a building I go by every Friday on my shopping rounds. It is on Whyte Avenue, on the edge of the district known as Old Strathcona, an area of heritage buildings, some dating back before the turn of the century, and trendy, high-priced shops and restaurants. The building at 10008 is at present a bicycle shop. For whatever reason, Pasnak's grocery was in operation for only that year or so.
There is a story that Grandpa had a store at St. Michael, a small place about thirty miles northeast of the city, he was there during the week, and took the train home to his family on weekends. I understood this to have been during the first few years of their life in Edmonton, but that cannot he correct, I think. In the 1935 directory Grandpa’s occupation is given as "clk Andrews", a listing that puzzled me until I remembered that Andrew no - s) is a town just on past the fly-speck of St. Michael. There were a great many Ukrainian settlers in that area. How long the St. Michael business lasted, I am unable to determine. The next several years list him as "merchant" or "merchant whol". The firm of J. Pasnak and Co. wholesale footwear makes its first appearance in 1947, in the basement of the Regis Hotel on 101 street. By the following year this concern had moved to a building on 104 street, which some of us may remember, a grey stucco structure with a large signboard of a woman's shoe. These locations are gone now, the address on 104 street is a parking lot and the hotel has been subsumed in the bulk of the Edmonton Centre complex. Around 1951, J. Pasnak and Co. built its own warehouse, at 10249-106 street, and that building is still there, renovated inside, but the yellow brick exterior is largely unchanged. Now, all of these business addresses are in the heart of downtown Edmonton, and it was a bit of a shock to me to discover that in 1950, 106 street was residential, the Pasnak Building was the first commercial structure on that block. It was a fascinating place, we got our boots and shoes there when I was little. Later on, when it was a rental property for Grandma, I picked up some pin money going around once a week to mop the corridors and sweep the sidewalk. Cine Audio, one of the tenants from that time, is now in possession of the whole building.
Grandpa did not live long to enjoy his empire. I have the memory of seeing him less and less, we would go to visit Grandma, in the house on 102 street, and he would not be there, he was out on the road selling shoes. Well, he did not like to he home, anyway. His wife was always reproaching him to stay home, but he would rather go out, playing cards, visiting with the priests, going to Knights of Columbus meetings. He rose high in the hierarchy of K. of C., and we have his sword to prove it. He died on the road, of a heart attack, in his hotel room in Willingdon, another widening of the road about twenty miles on past St. Michael. His firm carried on for a few years under the management of Uncle Wally and Uncle Johnny, then it was sold to an outfit called Canada West Shoe, under a man named Leckie, who ran it into the ground.
My memories of Grandpa are necessarily fragmentary. One incident stands out in my mind. The neighbours, the Sachkiw’s, had an elevated front lawn, with a sharp two- or three-foot slope down to the Pasnak's yard that was just right for a little kid to roll down. Sachkiw did not like little kids rolling down his lawn, and we were forbidden to do it. But of course we did when we figured no one was looking. One day, a group of grandchildren (wh all? Sinclairs? maybe a couple of Knowles's? cannot remember now was indulging in this taboo pleasure, when I spotted Grandpa coming down the street. I immediately stopped rolling and sat on the front steps. He came up and angrily ordered all children into the back yard, and there was yours truly, sitting there with this halo glowing above his fair head. The old man was not fooled by that nonsense, and I remember him shaking a finger at me and saying, Don't you lie to me, Jimmy! Mostly I remember my grandfather as a man who seemed to give off heat like a radiator. I also recall this as being a not entirely pleasurable sensation.
And then, for every positive word about Grandpa, you get a negative one about Grandma. Hard to get along with, never went out, never had any fun, never wanted him to have any fun. To be sure, she had a falling-out with all of her children except perhaps Auntie Louise -- the one with my Dad was particularly traumatic. Well, I don't care. My memories of her are nothing but good. Her pirohy are one of the golden notes of my childhood, which I have ever since searched in vain to recover. And whatever she may have said to others, whatever she may have said about me to others. She never gave me a cross word. She had seen a lot of hardship, of a lot of different kinds, she had no illusions about the world, and she was sustained, I believe, by faith, by work, that, and the memory of her beautiful mother, and of Louise, the golden-haired child whom god chose to take from her. The house that Grandma lived in, for more than twenty years after her husband died, it ain’t there any more, indeed the bulldozers practically came in the back door as she was going out the front. Her marvellous garden is now an apartment parking lot.
I never talked to Grandma about the old days as much as I should have. But one time she told me a little about her mother, and said she had a beautiful name: Nariwney (as I believe it, would be transliterated from the Cyrillic alphabet. Can you say that? she said. I tried: Is there a v in it? No, no v, she said, end repeated it till I got it right, or approximately so. Na-ree-wnee. There are similar surnames around Edmonton now, and I suppose that these days that spelling would be pronounced Naroony. But that is wrong.
Na-ree-wnee. Nariwney.
|
Jerry and Margaret Yacyshen Family
1889 - 1953 (~ 64 years)
