What was that name again?

Your great-grandfather came to Manitoba as a pioneer from Ukraine in the 1890s. His last name was Yashchyshyn (or, as it said on his emigration papers, Jaszczyszyn). Your surname is Yashyn, your uncle's is Shyn, and your other uncle's is Yash. You're all one family. How did that happen?

The Ukrainians who began arriving in Manitoba 120 years ago had many hardships and hurdles to overcome. Adapting to and integrating into the predominantly English milieu was difficult, to say the least. Their language and even surnames were not welcome (the pressure on names lasted well into the mid-20th century). While most kept and treasured both, some tried to assimilate by changing or modifying their last names. For this reason, while many Ukrainian names are immediately recognizable, there are very many "secret" Manitobans of Ukrainian descent out there, and even they may not know the story of their early ancestors in this province.

Over the generations, any or all of these happened to the original Ukrainian surnames: translation, mis-translation, transliteration, mis-transliteration, and mispronunciation. Names were abbreviated, misunderstood, invented and re-invented. Documents in German or Polish or Rumanian (from Bukovyna) did not represent the exact Ukrainian sounds, with each of the three languages spelling them according to their own phonemes.

Take into account two very different alphabets are involved, the phonetic Ukrainian (Cyrillic) and the non-phonetic English, and all Hades breaks loose.

Soccer: short and sweet

Short and sweet.

It was the advice from his father that Winnipegger Peter Manastyrsky had running through his head as the St. Nicholas Men's Club honoured him with the Ukrainian Sportsman of Year Award at its 47th annual dinner on May 11.

"I was always told by my father not to speak long and to keep my presentation very short," Manastyrsky said recently at his North Kildonan home.

"On the other hand, it was a bit longer than the norm because I wanted to thank the people that really helped me get to where I am today."

I say kubasa, you say kielbassa…

It's one of those bitterly divisive debates that can result in newspaper editors beating each other senseless with their abridged dictionaries.

I am referring to the unfortunate fact some words have roughly a billion different spellings, an awkward situation that causes the members of newspaper style committees to experience serious heart palpitations.

As a former copy editor, I understand their pain. There should be one word for one thing and it should have one spelling, a spelling that everyone agrees on.

Unfortunately, that's not the way the world works. Take the simple European garlic sausage, for example.

Homemade home run

To keep up with these Joneses, all you have to do is love eating Ukrainian food at Shaw Park.

Maryanne and Rick Jones, both 58, have been operating Yorko's Ukrainian Kitchen for four years, though the famous Ukrainian food venue has been a staple at every Winnipeg Goldeyes game since 2000.

Yorko's Ukrainian food experience is part of the Winnipeg baseball experience. Perogies, kubasa and cabbage rolls go with baseball at Shaw Park like mustard goes with a hotdog.

Faces of our Ukrainian community

Wasyl and Mary YaciwThe first Ukrainian residents in Winnipeg and Manitoba. They came to Manitoba in 1882 after selling their farm in Ukraine. Without enough money to follow the first trainload of Ukrainian setters in Canada to Edmonton, they stayed here. Wasyl began working in construction until the couple saved enough to buy a farm near Ladywood in 1898. When he was born, their son, Frank, was the first native-born Canadian of Ukrainian descent.

Taras FerleyHe was born in Ukraine in 1882, went to Lemberg (Lviv) University before coming to Canada in 1903. He married a Ukrainian immigrant, and they later had a son and a daughter. He was a director of the Ukrainian Publishing Co. of Canada, president of the Ruthenian Farmers Elevator Co. and a real estate broker. He ran unsuccessfully for Winnipeg's city council in 1913, but became the first Ukrainian MLA when elected for Gimli in the 1915 election. Later, in 1932, he was elected to Winnipeg city council. He died in 1947.

He’s been dancing with an eagle for 36 years

He's been lacing them up every Thursday night for the past 36 years, but Brad Richliwski admits there was a time when he resented his beloved red boots for standing between him and Bobby Hull.

It was the early '70s and the Winnipegger, like many of his North End peers, spent every Friday night learning to bust Cossack moves on Main Street, at the Ukrainian National Federation School of Dance.

"Our family had season tickets to the Jets, and half the games were on Friday night," he recalls. "What am I doing? Going Ukrainian dancing instead of going to see my favourite player."

He got over it. In fact, Richliwski, 51, is pretty sure he's the oldest Ukrainian dancer in the city still performing regularly.

Processors feed appetite for traditional Ukrainian food Perogy paradise

Relax, Baba.

According to people who should know -- the ones selling it -- Winnipeggers are not losing their appetite for traditional Ukrainian food.

One day last December, the four-member perogy crew at Transcona's Sevala's Ukrainian Deli & Catering set a new company record for the most perogies made and cooked in a single day.

They made 13,200 of the dumplings (1,100 dozen) that day, and cooked 15,600 (1,300 dozen). That includes extras they had in the freezer.

Bookstores still thrive — although one is in a museum

For many generations of Ukrainian immigrants in Winnipeg, North End bookstores and reading halls were lifelines to the homeland.

Decades later, those reading halls are long gone, but two bookstores still exist: Kalyna Ukrainian Book Shop, which is still a going concern on Main Street, and Ukrainian Book Sellers, which has found new life in a museum in Ottawa.

Kalyna Ukrainian Book Shop, a Ukrainian co-operative, has served Ukrainians for more than 81 years at 952 Main St.

Two years after the Ukrainian Veterans' Association was founded in 1928, the organization announced it was opening the bookstore to serve as the Canadian representative and distributor of the Chervona Kalyna publishing co-operative in Lviv.

Soccer brings world ‘home’

KHARKIV -- There was no prouder moment for me than on June 13 as I sat at the Metalist "Spider" Stadium in my home city of Kharkiv with more than 20,000 Dutch and German soccer fans watching a historic rival match of the 2012 UEFA Euro Cup.

Those fans got a taste of my country, something they wouldn't have ever experienced if it wasn't for soccer.

The contrast between the past and the present was staggering. Politics aside, most Ukrainian politicians, businesses and residents came together to showcase the country to the world. When I left Ukraine, the second-largest country in Europe in the 1990s, it was recovering from the economic collapse of the Soviet Union and hyperinflation, and facing an uncertain future.

Like many generations before me, I left Ukraine looking for a better life abroad. Since 2003, I have called Winnipeg my home, a city where one in six is of Ukrainian descent.

Ukrainian community, scarred by Holodomor, helped shape Winnipeg’s cultural mosaic

The letter writer denied the Ukrainian Holodomor, in a letter to the editor two years ago in the Carillon newspaper, which serves southeastern Manitoba.

The Holodomor, the state-imposed famine that starved millions of Ukrainian people to death in 1932-33, never happened, the writer argued. He called it the "supposed Russian-induced famine of 1933," and twice referred to it indignantly as "the phoney famine."

"Why do I have a problem with this particular famine of 1933? Because all the population demographics that can be dredged up for Ukraine in 1933 show an increase in population, not a 10-million population decrease."

Of course, the letter is beneath debate. But when such a claim is so easily refuted, it might as well be.

Angels in the architecture

People sometimes ask Ben Wasylyshen why his immigrant great-grandparents didn't anglicize their Ukrainian surname, which is the Slavic equivalent of "Williamson."

It was a matter of cultural pride, says the architectural design consultant, who is also a painter, sculptor and passionate gardener.

That pride was still strong when Wasylyshen, 50, was growing up in Garden City.

His artistic mother made pysanky (Ukrainian Easter eggs) and taught him their ancient symbolism. (His older brother, Dave, is now well known for innovative pysanka mosaics.)