Blessings - Ukraine - poem

Literary Review, Wntr, 1999 by Steven Boyd Saum

This is a country which tends to sharpen one's sense of irony, whether or not one likes raisins. Gogol studied in Nyzhyn, a small city not far from Kiev, even if he's recorded in posterity as a Russian writer. Amid the April furor over corruption and inefficiency in the government, the Kyiv Post put together a front page to be proud of: Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs declaiming in the lead story that the Ukrainian government needed to work night and day on tax reform and passing a budget to keep Ukraine from being left behind by the changes taking place in this part of the world. In the lower left: a story about how the Ukrainian government had announced nine days of holidays.

Every year, what with May Day and Victory Day, the beginning of May slows down the motion of the country to almost static. But this year the Ukrainian government piled up Soviet holidays, religious holidays, and threw in a couple more days for good measure. Between Easter Monday and May Day there were only two working days, so the Ukrainian government decided to call a spade a spade: they decided to let a country of citizens who have come to survive on home-grown vegetables pick up the garden tools for a few extra days. Rather than pretend students would return for classes or that workers would return to work, they offered more than a week for Ukrainians to get away from the city and plant potatoes. An additional benefit was that if they were already away from the city before May Day, they weren't likely to come back to stage a protest -- a traditional pastime for old leftists in post-Soviet Ukraine. As always, the potato diggers can pray for rain during the summer and that the Colorado beetles don't get the plants.

So that the holidays wouldn't be a complete drain on the economy, the parliament transformed two Saturdays into working days. I learned long ago that the weekend is not inviolate in Ukraine. Near the end of my first semester teaching in Lutsk, a sign appeared alongside the class schedule board in the Department of Foreign Languages at the university: Classes will be held on Saturday, December 24th so that January 2nd can be a holiday. I understood that New Year's was a much more important holiday than katolicheski Christmas, and that orthodox Christmas, which came January 7th, was also more important. But I was surprised by the short notice: the sign appeared on the afternoon of Friday, December 23rd.

The economy may be a shambles, but Ukrainians will always survive with patience, with resignation that if they can just weather the worst years, then something a little better is on the way. In a couple months it will be August, when the whole country goes on vacation for a month. But before then: nine days of holidays, and at the end of the month come Kiev Days, a three-day street party when the chestnuts are in full bloom, before the deep green of spring fades into the dustiness of summer. Coinciding with the city fest: the opening of the first two McDonald's in Kiev, complete with the mayor cutting a ribbon at an invitation-only ceremony and the inauguration of the drive-thru window.