Ancestral Home

My mother’s and my father’s parents,
babushki, dedushki, cousins galore
were born in Ukraine, in towns and cities,
whose names make up familial lore.

Odessa, Zhytomyr, Kyiv — known to me places
comprise a timeline, whole lines of descent
that emanate from memories, where half-familiar faces
return and sweeten them like a beloved scent 

There are so many drops of blood, 
or, if you will, strands of hereditary code,
that on an inborn, cellular level
Ukraine is a constant, an abode.

Ukraine, my ancestors’ ancestral home —
indelible, yet bleak now, bleeding, another Somme. 

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Olga Stein holds a PhD in English, and is a university and college instructor. She has taught writing, communications, modern and contemporary Canadian and American literature. Her research focuses on the sociology of literary prizes. A manuscript of her book, The Scotiabank Giller Prize: How Canadian is now with Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Stein is working on her next book, tentatively titled, Wordly Fiction: Literary Transnationalism in Canada. Before embarking on a PhD, Stein served as the chief editor of the literary review magazine, Books in Canada, and from 2001 to 2008 managed the amazon.com-Books in Canada First Novel Award (now administered by Walrus magazine). Stein herself contributed some 150 reviews, 60 editorials, and numerous author interviews to Books in Canada (the online version is available at http://www.booksincanada.com). A literary editor and academic, Stein has relationships with writers and scholars from diverse communities across Canada, as well as in the US. Stein is interested in World Literature, and authors who address the concerns that are now central to this literary category: the plight of migrants, exiles, and the displaced, and the ‘unbelonging’ of Indigenous peoples and immigrants. More specifically, Stein is interested in literary dissidents, and the voices of dissent, those who challenge the current political, social, and economic status quo. Stein is the editor of the memoir, Playing Under The Gun: An Athlete’s Tale of Survival in 1970s Chile by Hernán E. Humaña.