We Are What We Know :: Culture Death Cultural Essays

We Are What We Know I screamed incoherently from worship and frustration regarding my predicament, (Arthur 5), when suddenly the word death became morbid reality. Death is a disgusting, sad word that strikes people when least expected. When my grandmother passed on to timelessness a few days ago, I realized that one of the quartette link up I had to my ethnic background was asleep(p). Despite one of the links being severed, my cultural beliefs, knowledge and lineage is clear and important to me. Although she is gone now, she has taught me, and left me with the knowledge of who I am. finished the constant celebration of cultural customs, I am well acquainted with my heritage and identity.One could only if imagine a more beautiful place than the one my family and I come from. With continual blue skies and golden grain growing nevertheless than a human eye can see, Ukraine is known as the tummy of Europe. It stretches from the Carpathian Mountains on the west to the Caucasus Mo untains on the east, just north of the Black Sea. Through out history many Europeans and Asians prolong invaded Ukraine. They wanted to control its bass invokeland and mineral resources. Ukraine has withstood border disputes with other surrounding Slavic countries. Since 1700, the Ukrainians belonged to tsaristic Russia, and western Ukraine lay in the Austrian Empire. In 1917, czarist Russia cruel and Ukrainian tried to set up their own nation. During World state of war I, Ukraine became the battleground for the Poles who together fought the Bolsheviks. Ukraine also was the battleground for World War II, with Ukraine locomote into the hands of Soviet control. It was during that time that my grandparents and great grandparents were forced to leave everything substructure and flee their burning homes and villages with only their clothes on their backs. Landing up in a Displaced Persons Camp in Germany in 1949, they settled there with others Ukrainian families awaiting host fa milies to sponsor their journey to America, the home of the free. They may have had only few possessions with them, but when our family landed at a Mennonite farm in Ohio, they brought with them their ethnic heritage, culture, identity.America was a land that accepted whole ethnic people, giving the immigrants the opportunity to make a better life. My grandfather, who was the studious one, was not much help on the farm.