Immigrating from Ukraine

Tatyana Lipskaya, Childhood

The second of a four-part series about three generations of Ukrainian women who immigrated to the United States and settled in Southeast Missouri at different times in history, this story features the childhood of Tatyana Lipskaya, who grew up in Ukraine while it was part of the Soviet Union. The story of how she came to America will be featured in next month’s issue of TBY.

Tatyana Lipskaya stands for a photo wearing traditional Ukrainian attire and jewelry. Lipskaya lived most of her life in Ukraine, growing up under Soviet rule before coming to the United States as an adult. AARON EISENHAUER

Tatyana Lipskaya loves magazines.

On the surface, it may seem like an interest we take for granted. After all, magazines are readily available, and many people subscribe to them, enjoying flipping through the pages or reading from cover to cover. But for Tatyana, the impact magazines have had on her life goes deeper: magazines first led her to question the injustice she faced as a child growing up in poverty under Soviet rule in Ukraine. Later, they gave her the courage to hope for something better. This led her to America, to settle in Perryville, Missouri, and then in Cape Girardeau.

Tatyana Lipskaya playfully wraps herself in a scarf as she models her traditional Ukrainian attire at her daughter’s home in Cape Girardeau.AARON EISENHAUER

Her story goes like this: born in a village near the capital city of Kiev in 1963 while Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, her family struggled to make ends meet. Tatyana recalls that as a child, she did not have shoes, did not have breakfast and often did not know if she would eat each day. She recalls one specific story when she was hungry: older children from the village collected goose feathers, made a fire and cooked the feathers. They gave them to the younger children to eat, telling them they were “fried feathers.” It had rained just before the children did this, and Tatyana’s mother did not have enough money to buy soap which was expensive, so she scrubbed the mud stains out of Tatyana’s clothes with rolls of grass.

“They had not even anything to feed us in the morning. No,” Tatyana recalls. “We just get up, going all day you eat or not, I don’t know. I did not remember if I ate during the day. … Everything was expensive. Everything was difficult.”

Tatyana Lipskaya serves a slice of traditional Ukrainian cake during a gathering at the home of her daughter Anna in Cape Girardeau. AARON EISENHAUER

Tatyana says her parents did not work for money; rather, they were paid in food such as flour and sugar, but not meat. When they could afford to buy shoes for their children, they bought them too big so the kids could wear them longer as they grew into them. Because cameras were expensive, her family did not own a camera until Tatyana was around 15 years old; thus, she has only a couple of photos from her childhood. Because of this, photography, too, is an element of the magazines she does not take for granted.

Tatyana says she was “embarrassed” by her poverty and felt like “nothing,” “zero in this world,” a feeling further enforced by her classmates when they laughed at the patch her mother had sewn on the outside of her vest with white thread when she raised her hand one day in geography class. This incident was why Tatyana learned to sew and later became a designer with a Master of Fine Art in clothing design. Tatyana says she felt like only those with money were accepted within her society.

Tatyana poses for a photo with her daughter Anna in Ukraine before moving to the U.S. Submitted photo.

When Tatyana was four years old, her family moved to Crimea, Ukraine, where her father took a job as an engineer because the government was working to develop the city. Under Communism, “everybody was the same,” Tatyana says. It was here, however, that her family’s financial situation began to improve. Her parents were able to buy rubber boots for their children, her father was given a company car to drive even though hardly anyone had cars in the city, and they had “nice” floors in their house rather than the mud floors in Tatyana’s peers’ homes.

“I start to sound negative, but it’s how I was raised,” Tatyana says. “No information, no TV, no nothing, and only in Crimea when we came, we bought small TV and shoes, and [my parents] begin to have some money.”

It was here, too, that Tatyana first discovered magazines and books. To understand the privilege of books and magazines, it’s important to know that information was scarce within the Soviet Union. Tatyana says people were often busy working and therefore did not have time to pay attention to magazines. Additionally, there were no free magazines that people could take from public places, except for government fliers.

“In our country, magazines cost big, big money,” Tatyana recalls, saying that when making the choice, people had to spend their money on food rather than magazines. “Information was very expensive. Especially if they came from other countries to our Soviet Union.”

Tatyana found a way around this, however. Her school had a recycling program in which children went door-to-door to the more affluent homes of teachers and presidents of companies to ask for donations of materials such as metal and paper for recycling. The children turned in the materials they collected, and the school then kept the money from the recycling as funds for education. Tatyana enlisted her friend — a boy she says was in love with her — to help her take the magazines, newspapers and books that people gave to her to recycling. Because they didn’t have a bag to put the reading materials in, they hid them under their shirts until they could read them or hide them somewhere.

Through reading, Tatyana discovered there was a different way to live.

“I was like, ‘Wow, another world,’ and I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, I would like to be in this world. I don’t want to stay in this. I don’t want it, I don’t want it,’” Tatyana says. “Instead of complain[ing], I [cried]. Because my goodness, [I wondered], can it be different? Always I had this question to myself. I saw in the magazines [and wondered] why [do] people have this life? Why should I have this life? I did not ask my parents, I did not ask anybody, but I just [kept it] in my mind.”

Her mother did not like that Tatyana enjoyed reading because she needed Tatyana to be the caretaker of Tatyana’s younger sisters while she took care of the animals, gardened and did the rest of the work at their home. Tatyana’s father was a Communist and followed the rules of the Communist Party; this posed a problem for Tatyana’s reading, too. Afraid of her father’s and mother’s disapproval, Tatyana hid the books and magazines that she took from the recycling program. Her mother often found them while cleaning and threw them out.

After she was finished reading them, Tatyana cut pages from the books, magazines and newspapers into small strips, which she made into a journal. On these pages, she began writing what she wanted in her life and what she wanted to buy. First, her dream was to buy shoes — “normal” shoes, not ones made of rubber. When her parents bought her some, she marked off the dream. Next, she wanted a certain kind of skirt; when she received it, she again marked the dream out in her journal. She saw that as she wrote dreams down, they eventually became true. As this happened, she says she became more and more excited that perhaps she could escape the life of poverty she had always known.

By this time, Tatyana was a teenager, and even though she says there were fun things to do in Crimea and she learned a lot there with her parents through hard times, her dream was to move back to Kiev to be with her grandmother, to return to the area where she was born, with the seasons, geography and traditional culture she was familiar with. It was her grandmother, too, who had taken her to church even though it was forbidden under Communist rule. Tatyana says at this time, she did not even think about money, but rather just wanted to be back where things felt “normal.” After she finished school, she followed this dream and moved back to Kiev.

As she reflects on the dreams that have been fulfilled in her life, she thanks God.

“Many things in my life, I had answered,” Tatyana says. “Of course, I have more questions on my goal which I need to have answered, and I would like to have miracle, miracle, miracle, but this is God’s will, and I trust God. And I know if he promised to me, he will make it. … God will never show it to you, will never give you feeling about something if he will not finish this. He begin, and he finish.”