“No matter where you are or where you go, you will always see Ukrainians”

Hanna Cherin is a poet, writer, and literary critic. Living on the other side of the ocean, she devoted all her creative heritage-over 50 years of writing — to Ukraine, her native land. Each of Cherin’s books is filled with pain, love, and hope for a better future for her ancestral country. She is a member of the Slovo Ukrainian Writers’ Association (US) and since 1993, a member of the National Writers’ Union of Ukraine.

TRAVELOGUES

Cherin’s first, “continental,” travelogue Come with Me is an account of the author’s journey from the ruins of Berlin through various US states and Canadian provinces, ending in Washington, D.C., where the Shevchenko monument would later be unveiled. Her book was published in Buenos Aires in 1965 and immediately attracted a wide audience. Craving the new and exotic, the writer did not “go to sleep physically or mentally.” After 25 years in Florida she published her second, “global,” travelogue Come with Me Again.

An experienced observer and acute psychologist, Cherin describes her travels to faraway and exotic countries around the world: Hawaii, four European capitals (Paris, Rome, Athens, and London), Brazil, Mexico, Japan, Hong Kong, China (the Land of the Red Dragon), Jamaica, the Scandinavian countries, Peru, the American city of New Orleans, Australia, and Fiji. She ends her quest for “heaven on Earth” in New Zealand.

In the preface to the new edition the author writes: “My intentions may not encounter the readers’ sympathy and gratitude, but believe me, I took you along on my trips: I looked at everything through your eyes, collected news and information for you, often sacrificing my own comfort and finding myself in awkward situations. Not everyone enjoys walking around with a notebook in hand, peering into every corner, and going on dangerous tours. Others would prefer to sit on a veranda under a palm tree, sipping a tropical cocktail.”

To Kyiv Cherin brought a pile of pictures and impressions from every trip. She was invariably accompanied by her husband Stepan Pankiv, her faithful companion and bodyguard, who is a keen photographer.

We must give Cherin her due: she is a perceptive observer, who can find something funny or optimistic even in tragedy or dull monotony. Her writing style is smooth, marked by witty observations, poignancy, and sometimes sentimentality. Her travelogues combine documented facts and apocrypha, accounts of different lands and excursions into the past, fascinating encounters, comical situations, advice, and reflections. Sometimes poetry is mixed in with prose. Like everything else she has written, her travelogues make for very interesting reading; they are a door to exotic lands as well as to the Ukrainian diaspora, its problems and the traditions and customs it has maintained. At the same time, they are a journey through the human soul, the most complicated and most beautiful of all. Finally, they are also an opportunity for the reader to get to know the author — the outgoing, friendly, ironic, and self-critical woman she is.

In 1994 Mandry (Travels) were published in Kyiv with the subtitle Travelogue. The author writes: “No matter where you are or where you go, you will always see Ukrainians. If not a Ukrainian picnic, then at least a few Ukrainians, at least one, and at least in passing — but you will see them. It seems there aren’t any Ukrainians on the moon, but I haven’t been there yet.”

Making fun of Brits, she writes: “England pays more attention to fuel shortages than the US, but as our guide said, ‘God, as everyone knows, is an Englishman and He will always find a way out of every predicament.’ So, thanks to the English God, oil deposits were found in the North Sea. We, Ukrainians, also need to understand that our God is Ukrainian; then He, too, will start helping us!”

This theory also holds that England was once part of the European mainland, and the Thames was one of the Rhine’s tributaries. But then God decided to modify the geography, so He cut off England and created the English Channel, turning Eng­land into an island.

Cherin was very favorably impressed with the Brazilian province of Parana, which has a large Ukrainian community. “Owing to historical and natural circumstances, in Parana the Ukrainian cause is probably the strongest because young people still... cling to their own kind. In North America young people are Americanized, while in Ukraine they yield to the Russians, so the only hope is Brazil. As a rule, poverty fosters national consciousness.”

Here is how she described the Japanese: “On the streets they wear jeans, and at home — kimonos. They are being Americanized on the outside, but on the inside they remain invariably Japanese.”

Cherin was born on April 29, 1924, into the family of Ivan Hrebinsky, who was a choirmaster, teacher, and a graduate of the Kyiv Theological College. Because of his social background and participation in the famous Republican Choir founded by Oleksandr Koshyts, he was blacklisted and had to hide nearly all his life, retraining as a plumber. In the horrible and hungry 1930s his large peasant family was on the brink of total extinction.

Hanna grew up in Kyiv. She began writing poems when she was still a child. Her penchant for poetry was encouraged by Mykhailo Kybalchych, a teacher of Ukrainian language and a brother of the famous inventor, as well as by Pavlo Tychyna, Andrii Malyshko, and Ivan Nekhoda, all of whom occasionally visited her school.

EMIGRATION

The war swept Cherin into a foreign land, where she was placed in a camp for displaced persons (DPs), which was “sometimes only a little better than the GULAGs.” This is where she started writing in earnest. Returning to Ukraine was out of the question because nearly all returnees who were overcome with nostalgia and went back home were exiled to Siberia. There, in the camps for eastern Ukrainians, in conditions of extremely hard labor, a new exile literature was brewing, featuring such figures as Leonid Poltava, Vasyl Onufriienko, Heras Sokolenko, Leonid Lyman, Myk­hailo Sytnyk, Yosyp Dudka, etc.

In 1949 Cherin’s first book of poetry Crescendo was published in a DP camp in West Germany and was highly praised by local critics. From that point the author adopted her lifelong pseudonym Hanna Cherin (cherin means hearth floor) partly for reasons of security because even abroad she had to beware of the long hand of Stalin’s inquisition. The author’s witty, piercing, and often scathing writings resemble a hot hearth. This is how she explains her choice of pen name: “This pseudonym was unlike those nice ones chosen by contemporary poets, such as Skelia, Rusalsky, Balko, etc. I am a city girl, and I first saw a cow when I was 14, but I have always loved peasants. They are the wisest and most honest people on earth. So I chose Cherin to be closer to the black soil.”

Soviet refugees were gradually sent to the countries that had agreed to accept them as laborers. In the early 1950s Halyna (her real name) and her child arrived in the US. With great difficulty she found a job, working as a nurse in a children’s hospital. After that she worked in a university library and continued her education at the University of Chicago, where she graduated with a degree in linguistics and another one in library science. “The job of a librarian is a poet’s dream!” she said. She changed jobs and from 1964 to 1988 she headed the Inter-Library Loan Department. She collaborated with the main libraries of Ukraine and helped expand the University of Chicago library’s Ukrainian collection. Eventually she retired and moved to Florida with her husband.

Cherin has worked in a variety of genres. She has written over 30 books, including the versified novel Slovo (Word, 1980, Toronto-Chicago; the first one of its kind in the diaspora). She worked on this novel for 12 years. It was reprinted several times, and in 1991 it was published in Ukraine. “At the time nobody was hoping for this. Neither was I, but I had a gut feeling that something was bound to happen and it did. Whatever happens from now on, the people have woken up and become enlightened. There is no turning back.”

The author’s autobiography states: “Foreign lands are the best school of love for your Motherland. It teaches you to fight for your native land with the weapon God gives to poets — the WORD.”

Critics have written that Cherin is a “champion of versification. Rhymes and rhythms come easily to her, and words interweave as if in a dance, creating a musical whole.”

Once she took a train trip and in 30-something hours produced a collection of over 50 poems with the telling title Vahonetky (Trolley Cars; Chicago, 1969). “In those hours,” she wrote in the foreword, “I managed not only to visit the places we went through by train but to all the ends of the earth and heavens, where the cruel, insatiable firebird called Inspiration took me on its wings.” Naturally, she did not bypass Ukraine, to which she was able to return for the first time only in the early 1990s.

THE DIASPORA

We used to call Ukrainians abroad “the emigration,” and they were hidden behind seven locks. Now we call them the diaspora, “Ukraine abroad,” and we often have high expectations of them. The channel of communication is wide open.

Cherin was once asked for whom she writes. “For Ukrainian in the whole world,” she replied. “For Universal Ukraine. Thanks to the diaspora this Ukraine exists. However, young Ukrainians in the diaspora do not have a sufficient command of Ukrainian to read books. There is more hope for Ukraine proper!”

Not so long ago, after a break of several years, Cherin had an opportunity to visit Kyiv — not as author of books but as a person of flesh and blood — lively and curious, deeply moved and critical as she was. She came with her daughter Inna, who was named after Tychyna’s poem “O, panno Inno.” She met people at the Vasyl Symonenko Library in Kyiv, where she was reunited with her old friends, including her school friend, the actress Natalia Miliutenko, and fellow writers and admiring readers. There were reminiscences, recitals, questions and answers, tears of joy and sorrow, and sincere words of hope for Ukraine.