The Language of Home

by Mariya Mykhaylova

Increasingly it feels as if my life in the United States doesn’t make sense anymore.  My life is here and has been here for twenty two years. My career is here. The language I think and dream in is usually English. Physically I am here, but mentally and emotionally, I am 6,000 miles away. My home country is at war and my American citizenship feels irrelevant every time I am flooded with my memories of Ukraine and Odesa. I have not been back home in six years and lately, I am counting down the days until I can return. 

In many ways, my homesickness feels like a deluded fantasy–longing to return during a time when many others were forced to leave, fearing for their lives, with many homes in ruin, and every home, including ours, being at risk. I am razom–together–with those in Ukraine, and my experience is very different from theirs. Not only am I not there for the war, but I have also been largely absent for over twenty years of context that dictates the coming-of-age of the Ukrainian nation. I emigrated in grade school, and subsequent summer visits only scratched the surface of sociocultural immersion. Just like I know I will always have gaps regarding American history and pop culture, I probably have even more gaps when it comes to Ukrainian culture. Forevermore in-between, simultaneously both and neither.

Occasionally I daydream about going back and helping to rebuild a post-war Ukraine. Other times I ask myself, Da komu ya tam voobshe nuzhna? Who needs me there anyway? I fear I’ve compiled a useless skill set: I am a psychotherapist, but I practice in English; I am a native Ukrainian, but my mother tongue is Russian. I scramble for ways to feel useful. What to do when you’re homesick for a place whose language you can barely speak? In my lower moments, I catch myself feeling ashamed because I speak Russian and not Ukrainian. However, I remind myself of how this came to be: a linguistic rupture shaped by the repercussions of Soviet history and the timing of my emmigration to the United States. 

I was conceived in the USSR and born in independent Ukraine, arriving during a time of colossal political transformations. I have early memories of spotting some Soviet-era coins around the house, now rendered monetarily worthless–a trivial artifact of an earlier time. In addition to the change in their pockets, Ukrainians experienced a shift in their nation’s official language, from Russian to Ukrainian. In a city like Odesa, whose population predominantly spoke Russian, this meant that some things changed and some things stayed very much the same: a hybrid, bilingual way of life, with news channels, billboards, legal documents and public schooling in Ukrainian, but Russian spoken conversationally all about, such as around the dinner table and at the grocery store. 

In the media, there was equal access to content in both languages. I remember us watching Russian television in the evenings mixed in with a few Ukrainian channels: the news program Vremya (Time), the Russian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, and the children’s program Spokoynoy Nochi, Malyshy! (Good Night, Little Ones!). One of my favorite TV shows to watch with my mother was Kamesnskaya, a detective show named after its strong female lead and based on a book series by Alexandra Marinina. These are some of the cornerstones of my childhood nostalgia.

Russian was and always will be my mother tongue: a truth that has become contaminated, imbued with consequences of Russia's imperialist past and bloodthirsty, war-driven present. At the same time, as a small child, pre-immigration, I also remember occasions where I spoke Ukrainian freely. My favorite lullaby that my mother sang to me was the Ukrainian folk song “Nich Yaka Misyachna” (“What a Moonlit Night”). I would watch soap operas with my grandmother in Ukrainian, too. The language was always a part of my life, albeit peripherally.

Like many immigrants, we left because my parents were seeking a better life for our family. Most of the Ukrainian general public struggled to make ends meet throughout the nineties: after the USSR disbanded and ownership of private property became possible, people who were close to power seized (that is, stole) a lot of the wealth, which did not leave much for the average person. With few exceptions, it was far from a land of opportunity to make a decent, honest, living back then. My parents struggled financially, and my mother’s parents did their best to help us out. At one point my mother, who worked for the Black Sea Shipping Company, had not been paid for a year and eight months. Something had to change. My father sent his resume to 300 companies in the US and received only two responses. He got an offer from a company in Silicon Valley and moved out to California. My mother and I followed him four months later. 

I remember thinking that coming to the United States meant adopting the local language and culture. I was wholeheartedly committed to the task of assimilation. No one ever told me to think this way–I came to it on my own. The erasure of my Ukrainian self started on my first day of school. When the principal asked me my name, I quickly replied, “Mary,” much to the surprise of both my parents. I don’t think it ever crossed my mind that I could go by Masha, the shortened version of my full name, Mariya. To this day, it feels a little strange to hear someone call me Masha in English. At this point, Mary feels like a name I made up but grew accustomed to, and Masha and Mariya only sound right in their languages of origin.

Over the years, I tried to maintain my Russian through conversations with my parents, consuming Russian-language books and films, and making return visits to Odesa. Today my grasp on the language is pretty solid but nowhere near what it would have been had I stayed in Ukraine. Meanwhile, I forgot the Ukrainian I knew without ever realizing that I was losing something that would one day feel so precious. No one in my life spoke Ukrainian to me. If I did encounter some Ukrainian and couldn’t get the gist based on my existing knowledge, cognates, and context clues, it was easy enough to tune it out, as it usually was not essential to what I was doing, and anything essential could be translated by others who understood it better than I. 

But then the war started. I learned about it through a push notification in English on my phone. I knew that I did not want American news to be my main source of information about this war. I wanted to hear what was happening from my fellow Ukrainians. And for the first time since I arrived in the US many years ago, I faced a language barrier. I turned on Ukrainian news channels but I couldn’t fully comprehend what I was hearing. I got the gist of things, but not without difficulty. Reading felt even less accessible. Large swathes of text were intimidating and overwhelming. 

Ukrainian news would occasionally broadcast in Russian in order to reach Russian-speaking viewers. Most of the time, the broadcasts were entirely in Ukrainian. On occasion, journalists interviewed Russian speakers, seamlessly switching from one language to the other. In the first few weeks, the news was the only thing I had on my television. And with every passing day, I noticed how comforting the sound of Ukrainian was to my ears. 

Much of what I saw on the news and online made me confront some misconceptions I had internalized over the years regarding the affinity between Ukrainians and Russians. I had spent the majority of my life thinking of Russian culture as adjacent to my own. Now all I see is a world of difference between Ukrainian and Russian identity. Ukrainians are united to withstand Russian aggression while Russian soldiers are committing enumerable atrocities on our land and the Russian general public continues to soak up propaganda. They trust in what they are told by their media, such as the man who unemotionally declared that Ukraine needs to be “wiped off the face of the earth.” I don’t think I can ever forget his face or how I felt when I heard him say those words. We were a few weeks into the war at that point, a few days before the news about the Bucha massacre started to come out. I was stunned. Never had I ever imagined that I would hear someone say something so hateful and annihilatory about the entirety of my country in my native language. That was the moment when I understood deep within myself that Ukraine and Russia are not brotherly nations, and that even though Russian was my mother tongue, it was no longer the safe language of home. 

At first, I did not know what to do with these thoughts and feelings. I was grieving and I felt so much rage. I still do. It is infuriating that Putin, this small man of a dictator, with his false pretenses of protecting Russian speakers in Ukraine, gets to possess Russian language and spoil it for those of us who have been using it our entire lives. The Russian language is a home that has been defiled. It is a home that should never have been a home, yet due to historical circumstances, home it is. While the thought of switching to the Ukrainian language seemed daunting, I did not want to forsake contact with my fellow countrymen at such an urgent time. What’s more, I understood that I was not the only Ukrainian faced with an important choice: countless others spit out the Russian language to rid that bitter, metallic taste of blood from their mouths. 

Throughout the days that followed, I was bereft. I needed to restructure and renegotiate much of my worldview with respect to my history, my culture, and my future. I needed to properly grieve what the Russian had always meant to me. It felt unbearable until it was no longer–as with everything in life, time helps. The answer was simple–if I wanted to remain connected to my Ukrainian identity in the years to come, I needed to improve my knowledge of Ukrainian.

According to a statistic I found online, Ukrainian and Russian have a 62% vocabulary overlap. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that I was more than halfway to Ukrainian fluency  already. At the same time, I knew I had a long way to go, especially when it came to speaking the language properly. I looked into various options for language learning, because listening to the news was not getting me as far as I had hoped, and some of the English to Ukrainian options felt too elementary due to my preexisting knowledge. I weeded through several language apps before I found something that was engaging . 

What is the difference between learning and remembering? I reflect on  this a lot.  I once devoted an entire evening to memorizing the months of the year in Ukrainian, during which I kept mixing up March (Berezenʹ) and September (Veresenʹ) because the words sound similar. I was frustrated, certain that there was a time in my past when these words once came to me with greater ease. There were moments when it felt like I had to start from scratch and the realization that I had lost much of my native language only brought on more grief.  

That’s when I realized that it might be easier to learn Ukrainian from Russian rather than English. So, I enrolled in an online Ukrainian course for Russian-speaking Ukrainians living in the US. We are a small group of women who meet on Saturdays to work on grammar, learn vocabulary, and chat. The class strikes a good balance between challenging me while engaging me on a level that motivates me to learn. Our teacher mainly works with children, and reflects genuine encouragement and warmth. Perhaps my inner child, the one who once knew Ukrainian, is getting coaxed out by her gentleness. 

In class, we discussed melodiynist’: the melodic nature of the Ukrainian language. While Ukrainian and Russian share some similarities, they are actually quite different. Ukrainian is much softer and well-balanced, with more open syllables and fewer consonant clusters. I had been listening to Ukrainian music for weeks at that point. Even without full comprehension, I found the songs beautiful and soothing. Lately, I have been incorporating music and lyrics more intentionally into my language practice. I listen to songs while reading their lyrics, translating when needed. I’ve also started writing Cyrrylic cursive again for the first time in decades.  My Cyrrilic is careful, delicate, while the Latin alphabet is habitual, rushed. Most recently, I started rereading my favorite childhood book series in Ukrainian. Having read it in Russian and English before, I’m now completing the circle. I am crafting a unique curriculum for myself, each facet a portal for homecoming. 

***

Recently my parents and I gathered at an event for Vyshyvanka Day–an annual celebration of Ukrainian culture and traditional embroidered clothing. I pestered my mom about when she was going to teach me how to make borscht the way she does it. My father and I exchanged stories about our respective Ukrainian language journeys: the efforts we’re making, the challenges we’re facing, our observations of the ever-shifting language landscape. As usual, we inserted English words here and there into our conversation. But this time, we also did something different: we sprinkled in some Ukrainian. We’ve never done that before. Bulo dobre. It felt good. 

Russian will always be my mother tongue, but Ukrainian is my homeland’s tongue. For me, at this moment, it is not about saying no to Russian–it is about saying yes to Ukrainian. I do not know what my future holds. For now, I stick to learning Ukrainian day by day as a way to feel whole.

Kate Tsurkan