Doris Lechner

Interview with Marina Lewycka

Marina Lewycka was born to Ukrainian parents in a German Displaced Persons camp in 1946, from where the family emigrated to Britain in 1947/48. Lewycka holds a degree in Philosophy and English (joint honours) from the University of Keele, a BPhil in English Literature from the University of York and a Postgraduate Certificate in Education from the University of Leeds, and works as a lecturer in Media Studies (Journalism) at the Sheffield Hallam University. She has published three novels to date: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005) is told by second-generation Ukrainian-British Nadia and brings together two sets of first-generation Ukrainian migrants when Nadia’s father Nikolai, a post-World War II émigré, falls in love with Valentina, a post-1989 economic migrant. Two Caravans (2007) deals with the current situation of economic migrants at work in Britain. It relates the stories of several migrants, mainly Eastern European, but also Chinese, African and South American, while the plot centres around the romance between the Ukrainian protagonists Irina and Andriy. Lewycka’s latest novel, We Are All Made of Glue (2009), depicts the friendship of Georgie, a Yorkshire woman writing for the magazine Adhesives in the Modern World, and Mrs Shapiro, a German Holocaust refugee. In their encounter with Palestinian migrants, the novel also addresses the Israeli-Palestinian con- flict. The interview was conducted by telephone on 5 August 2009.

DL: In your short story ‘The Importance of Having Warm Feet’, you tell the story of a British-Ukrainian girl who is bullied by classmates and singled out by teachers while wanting to ‘blend in’1 – possibly a reference to the Gov- ernment's directive towards DP refugees to Britain at that time.2 How was it for you to grow up as a second-generation Ukrainian in Britain?

1 ‘The other kids laughed at my sensible shoes and woollen socks. They sniggered at my long plaits, and my funny name, and my brand-new school satchel. I burned with secret shame, but I pretended not to notice. I wanted more than anything to fit in – no, to blend in, to be invisible.’ Marina Lewycka, ‘The Importance of Having Warm Feet’, in Ox-Tales: Earth, ed. by Mark Ellingham and Peter Florence (London: GreenProfile, 2009), pp.105-116 (p.108); the short story was first broadcast as part of the BBC Radio 4 Second Generation Series on 25 January 2005. 2 Colin Holmes notes with regard to the British Government’s recruitment of Displaced Persons and Eastern European refugees in its European Volunteer Workers scheme: ‘Gov- ernment policy was based on the premise that they would soon have to stand on their own feet. They would have to “blend in”. We can recall here the emphasis in the 1949 Royal Commission on Population on the desirability of newcomers “becoming merged” in to what was called “the host population”’. Colin Holmes, ‘Hostile Images of Immigrants and Refu- gees in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain’, in Migration, Migration History, His- tory: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, ed. by Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen (Bern: Lang, 1999), pp.317-334 (pp.330f.). 452 Doris Lechner

ML: When you’re a child, you don’t know anything about this. You just know what’s immediately around you. I didn’t have any understanding of what the Government’s regulations were. My parents, I think, had to report to the police regularly. I only know that I had trouble from the children at school. And I think this certainly happens to many children who are immi- grants. If you’re the one child who is different, that’s what happens. So if I’d had glasses or been extra fat or had ginger hair, they probably would have picked on me as well. So I don’t think it necessarily had to do with my back- ground and ethnicity. Rather I think if you have a visible difference to the other children, then they will pick on you.

DL: So there wasn’t a big Ukrainian community where you grew up?

ML: No, we never lived in places which had a large Ukrainian community. There were some places – Bradford is one and Leicester is another – where there are many Ukrainians and where my parents could have spent their whole social lives with other Ukrainians. And then probably I would have had more of the Ukrainian identity. The Ukrainians usually went to work in textiles and therefore lived in the mill towns in the North of England. And a few of them, but more Poles than Ukrainians, went into coal mining. But because my father was an engineer, we ended up living in places where there was an engineering industry with not so many Ukrainians. My parents did know one or two other Ukrainians, they knew a few Poles and they had a German friend, who lived near them. The people they made friends with were often not the most strictly English people. They were people who maybe were foreigners or who had married somebody foreign. Or they were a bit intellectual or a bit peculiar. After I left home, a lot of the Ukrainians I knew were in Bradford. There were quite a lot of Ukrainians in Leeds. And my parents corresponded with a lot of Ukrainians, so we were conscious of them. They had friends who were Ukrainian later on after I’d left home. But we did not live in the Ukrainian community. I think I’d have been a very different sort of writer if I had grown up in the Ukrainian community.

DL: Did your parents speak to you in Ukrainian?

ML: They’d speak to me in Ukrainian. But I had an older sister who went to school and my father spoke English. I learned English when I went to school, but when we first came to England, we stayed with rather wealthy families in the South of England who employed my mother as a domestic servant. They taught me English and so actually I think I learned English quite early.