Make sure you’ve read part 1 first! Or maybe read it again, to refresh your memory?
“In the previous edition of Story Quilt, the trio of Russian refugees, eight-year-old Olga Provatoroff, her mother and grandmother, fled the Soviet Union in 1953, leaving behind Olga’s father, whom she had never met, and settled briefly in Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay, where they applied for admission to Canada, and eventually received mail from him. The story now continues…”
Six more letters from her father were to arrive in Asuncion before Olga and Valentina left Paraguay for Canada in 1956, unaware that they were on a circle of their wandering that had taken an upward northerly swing, and that Montreal was now much closer to Moscow than Asuncion had been. On their flight over the Andes, they were accompanied by a Steiff teddy bear sent by grandmother Babusya from New York. The bear has, like Olga herself, since obtained Canadian citizenship, and recently celebrated his sixty-first birthday. It was largely due to Babusya’s efforts that the family was able to acquire landed immigrant status upon landing on Canadian soil. Despite the difficulties of adjusting to yet another very different culture and climate, and to learning two more languages, Olga and her mother and grandmother, who later joined them here from the United States, all flourished in their new life, first in Montreal, where Olga excelled at ice skating and at school, and later in Ottawa, and it was to Canada that a number of letters from Yevgeni began to arrive. The first of these came in 1959, and was followed by one in 1963, another three the next year, four in 1965 and a further two in 1966. They revealed by degrees that he had been officially “rehabilitated,” bore no ill-will against the authorities who had imprisoned him, and was working as a doctor among indigenous people in an unspecified region of Siberia. His apparently complacent acceptance of his arrest, conviction, and imprisonment is attributable to the likelihood that his letters had been written under the vigilant eyes of Soviet censors, as information about his living conditions remained vague and sketchy, and the tone of his letters unnaturally cheerful.
In the meantime, the years passed with increasing speed. Olga’s beloved Babusya died in 1969. “Throughout her life,” says Olga, “my grandmother had appealed in prayer to the Mother of God and believed in her merciful intervention and help.” She was buried in the Russian Orthodox cemetery in Rawdon, Quebec, secure in the knowledge that her family was now happy, settled and safe, and that she had done her duty by them. When her daughter Valentina died in 2001, she was laid to rest beside her in the Rawdon cemetery, some years after retiring from her post at the CBC. Valentina had never re-married, but had “dedicated all her life to me,” says Olga, “living modestly, even parsimoniously, devoting herself for fifteen years to daily volunteer work at the Queensway-Carleton Hospital in Ottawa, and taking an active role in bringing up her own grandchildren.” For by this time, Olga had completed her M.A. degree in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, married Nikita Kiriloff, who worked as an interpreter for the Government of Canada, and they together had two daughters, Vera and Elena, both of whom were baptized as Russian Orthodox Christians. Olga, with a facility for foreign languages she shares with her husband, taught elementary school in Ottawa, and trained future teachers in second language methodology and practice at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Education.
The Arbat, pedestrian street in Moscou.
Photo taken by Alex ‘Florstein’ Fedorov.
