How fish forged my friendship with a Ukrainian doctor who fled the war
When I took up fishing last summer, I didn’t actually care about catching a fish. And I definitely didn’t want to eat anything from High Park’s Grenadier Pond, a short walk from my apartment. But the idea of just sitting in one spot for a few hours, left alone, away from the world, was incredibly appealing. It didn’t matter that I had no idea what I was doing.
he’d caught a bass not long before. “I brought this plastic bait with me from my home country. I don’t know where you can get them here, yet, but they will work.” Instead of ending it there, he reached into his fishing fanny pack and helped me get set up on one of his lures – mysterious, squirmy little plastic fish and special hooks that would help with avoiding reeling in the weeds, a thing I was exceedingly good at doing.
how common it was for Ukrainian diaspora kids to lose prime Saturday morning cartoon hours to get a full suite of lessons on Ukraine’s history, art, geography and literature in vacant elementary schools. It was a cultural survival tactic against a centuries-long Russian effort to erase Ukraine’s identity. In what amounts to geopolitical gaslighting, Russia, then and now, paints Ukraine as a misguided brotherly nation without a unique identity.
“Little did I know Russians would attack Kyiv from the north. … I expected they would strike from the east,” he went on, echoing a sentiment in Ukraine that Russia wouldn’t attempt an invasion of the capital. Once his family was out of danger, Max considered his next step. “I visited a military registration office. They took my information and told me they didn’t need me at that moment, but would call if they did,” he said. In the meantime he weighed his options. He had a sister-in-law in the United States helping his in-laws from Vorzel’ immigrate there, although visas to the U.S. were hard to come by.
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