Florencia, my mother-in-law, has roots in Kiev; in the era that her parents decided to emigrate to Argentina, the Ukraine experienced loads of political upheaval. Her family was culturally and linguistically Ukrainian, but borders in that era were in constant flux, and post-WWI, Kiev was invaded by and became part of, at one time or other, the territory of Germany, Austria, Poland, and Russia, before being absorbed into the Bolshevik empire of the USSR in the 1940s.
To hear my suegra describe it, her teenage mother would go to school, and from one year to the next, classes would be held in German, Polish, Russian. Her family, like so many others of the same generation, tired of the upheaval and destruction, decided instead to take their chances and strike out on their own, seeing a golden opportunity in South America. There, they could have a relatively peaceful, if hardscrabble life, and work the land.
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