Les Lutic PRAIRIE PIONEERS — the ROMANIANS

PART 13: THE DAY WHEN THEY HAD TO SAY FAREWELL “LAW AND ORDER”, “GOOD GOVERNMENT”, “CHURCHES”, “SCHOOLS” ... “The Romanian land” said great writer Liviu Rebreanu, “seems as if it can only produce Romanians. And so, the destiny of the land where we were born and which fed us had to command also the destiny of our nation. It imposed on us for centuries on end a vegetal existence, an existence of torment and humiliation which only the peasant could bear. The more the sufferings with the passing of time, the more obstinately patient the Romanian peasant was. His love for the land grew more vigorous. The dust would keep melting with the forefathers’ ashes and bones, and their ghosts and souls kept filling the heaven above. Nobody could uproot him, no force and no torture...” However, a number of Romanian peasants did emigrate, seeking a rescue, as they were no longer able to feed their families and were deprived of the land which, as Liviu Rebreanu put it, they had grown to love more and more “vigorously”, and were unable to pay their debts and hoped that God would help them survive. It was God, they thought, that had brought there the immigration agents sent to Europe to tell the peasants that Canada’s prairie was the Promised Land. James H. Gray reproduced in his book “Boomtime” a poster from the paraphernalia of those agents, which showed Canada as a magnet attracting even the United States farmers. As a matter of fact, thousands of settlers from the big country in the south deserted their homesteads and went to Canada. “Good bye South Dakota, Hurrah for Canada” advertised the then newspapers. What was there in store for them beyond the Boundary Line? Says the poster: “Golden Opportunity”, “Law and Order”, “Home Rule”, “Good Government”, “Churches”, “Schools”. Nonetheless, the same J.H. Gray said, many of the settlers come from America soon changed their mind and returned to the States, “when they discovered that in Canada, they got twenty percent less for everything they sold and paid twenty percent more for everything they bought, thanks to freight rates and tariffs”. 246 Likewise, the Romanian peasants, allured by the opportunity to till for awhile the wild land in Canada and come back home with money to buy land in their village, were carried away by that dream and took the risk, endangering their lives and forgetting about the possibility that they might never see their native land again. Whereas “Uncle Sam” could go back home when he discovered how tough the life in Canada’s prairie was, as the distance was small and the train fare cheap, the Romanian peasants, most of whom wanted to return to Romania after the first days spent on the homesteads, couldn’t. The train and ship fares overseas had cost them, when they came to Canada, almost all the earnings of their lifetime (house, a few acres of land, cattle, orchards, farm implements, etc.); they couldn't have possibly started back before working hard to earn money for tickets. And when some of them had managed to gather the money, the First World War was sweeping Romania. And so, it happened that the Romanian peasants remained in Canada, forever separated from the destiny of the Romanian land and longing for it until their last. Most of them bequeathed on their children and grandchildren the command to go to Romania and bring back dust from the yards of their native houses in order to spread it on their tombs. Dust from the land of their destiny that had been diverted from the course of the ancestors’ history. Starting with this chapter the reader will find dramatic, unique episodes from the history of those families who dared part with the native land but whom, with a will characteristic of the Romanian peasant, with matchless dedication and dignity, helped build modern Canada. Seeing themselves hopelessly trapped by the endless prairie, the Romanian peasants did their utmost to adapt themselves; the call of the land was the same as it had been in Bucovina or Dobrogea. Canada's land had to be tilled, attended to, caressed by the flowers of crops, and tamed by skilled hands. Or, what else could the Romanian peasants’ hands do better than tame the land? Actually, that was the explanation of the pioneers’ baffling resistance and patience in the inhospitable, unworldly prairie, when the tilling of the land was, for years on end, the only meaning of the life on the homestead and the only alternative to despair, begging, abasement and even the only alternative to death. Well, we will go back in time with awe, in order to try and describe what happened in the Romanian peasant’s soul and house the day he left his home and village and ventured into an unknown world. Of invaluable help are the interviews written down during the trip in 1983, which conjured up for me pages of history recounted with charm and truthfulness to facts. The respondents remembered with emotion their childhood spent in their native village. Or, as noted by great philosopher and poet Lucian Blaga, “The most congenial and productive environment of childhood is the village and it is just as true that the village, in turn, finds its supreme thriving in a child’s soul.” This explains how come after 70 or 80 or even more years there still are people in Canada who are unable to forget their native village in Romania, the tragic day when they had to say farewell to its “cosmic horizon” (L. Blaga). MOTHER’S CURSE The Story of Mrs. Valeria Mihalcea, 97. Regina: “When l left Saraiu, Dobrogea, in 1907, I had an 8-month-old baby girl, Ileana. My husband was Marin Mihalcea. Father, lon Ciurea, was the village mayor; he had 20 acres of land and a garden. But my man was poor, he had put it into his head to get rich in Canada and then come back to spite the village. He wouldn't 247 go alone, so he took me with him. My parents didn't agree to my leaving. On the day of departure, mother spirited my Ileana away saying she would bring her up. She wanted to make sure I would come back... The women in the neighbourhood were crying and pitying us and urging her: “Give her back her baby, llinca, and let her go if it is fated so...” Poor mother... I had been of help to her with the weaving and the house chores. How could she let me go? ‘Valeria!’ she would cry desperately, holding Ileana tight to her breast, ‘Why do you break my heart, Valeria? Is this my reward for having brought you up, my daughter? If you're not afraid of God, do as you like, but leave the girl with me! Give me this comfort, have mercy, Valeria!’” “Father understood that I was bound to go ahead and follow my husband so he took the baby from her arms and gave her to me, blessing us. While we were getting in the carriage of an uncle which would take us to Hirsova where from we would board a ship to sail on the Danube to Germany, mother was a little more composed, she turned eastwards and, leaning to the gate she shouted aloud, crossing herself: ‘Go away, Valeria, my girl, across nine seas and nine lands, and may you never find comfort if you leave me alone!...’” “All my brothers died in the world war. Father was lost in Transylvania. I was never able to go back, first because of the war and then ‘because I hadn't money. Mother died having no one to comfort her... Oh, God, how can I make her soul in the heavens forgive me? Even now, after 76 years, I can see her crossing herself and cursing by the gate…” GRANDMOTHER'S BREAD The Story of Mr. Ilie Lupastean, 77, Regina: “After three years spent in Canada, father, Ion Lupastean, returned to the village, to Bancesti, to take mother and the four children. But mother wouldn't follow him and my old man returned to Canada in 1911. A stray bullet hit my mother's heart in 1918. I lived hard and parentless until 1923 when father sent a friend of his to take me to him. I was 17 on the day when I went to grandmother to say good bye. It was granny that had brought me up, together with mother’s brother, Mihailo Pascal. They were both in the yard, looking at the trees planted by me: sweet cherries, apples and pears. ‘Where are you going?’ asked grandmother. ‘Well, I’m going to find a job in some town. Maybe Radauti. But my granny suspected the truth was different and started weeping, I kissed her hands white with wheat flour; she had prepared the bread and asked me to wait until she would take it out of the oven so she may give it to me for the travel. ‘Who knows, Iliuta, my boy, where that town of yours might be...?’ I left without waiting for the bread. I never saw grandmother again, or Mihailo Pascal. Nor have I ever tasted again bread like the bread Maria Lupastean used to bake.” TICKETS FOR THE TITANIC The Story of Mrs. Domnica Lupastean, 71, Regina: “‘I don’t go’, said mother. ’I prefer my poverty to a foreign land.’ Father had a passport for the whole family. God, he had bought tickets for the Titanic. Seeing that he couldn't convince mother, he sold the tickets and bought just one ticket for another ship.

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