Zoey Duncan
Perogy and cabbage roll lovers take heed: the Ukrainian Literary Society Hall, purveyors of Ukrainian culture and edibles for decades, has shut its doors.
The hall recently was purchased by Dave Petsnick for “future considerations,” he said in an e-mail.
“We had to sell it because we’re just getting too old to run it and we don’t want to cater anymore,” said society president Dorothy Wepruk.
As well, the family of current members are unable—or uninterested—in taking on the roles of their mothers and babas (grandmothers) who promoted Ukrainian traditions here for so long, added Wepruk.
Finally, the financial burden was becoming too much for the remaining members of the society to handle.
First put up for sale in 2008, it took until this year to find a buyer for the hall, which Petsnick described as “relatively solid and well-built for the most part.”
So in those intervening years, members of the St. Anna’s women’s group, well-known for their Ukrainian catering skills, literally paid their bills with perogies (or, as a baba might say, pyrohy).
“Since ’08, it’s been a struggle,” Wepruk admitted. “We’ve just made cabbage rolls and froze them and sold them that way and pyrohy, just whatever we had here.
“We were able to pay our gas, our insurance, our taxes, and that’s what’s kept us going,” she noted.
“It’s so sad,” Wepruk added “It’s a good feeling but it’s so heartbreaking.
“And if I don’t have to come here anymore, it will be OK because I’ve got work to do, too.”
Wepruk and other remaining members of St. Anna’s recently shared laughs and memories just hours after they handed over the keys to the hall permanently.
The hall was built, probably sometime between 1926-28, on donated property on McKenzie Avenue with materials purchased by whatever Ukrainian men had a few dollars.
The labour was done by volunteers in the community.
Wepruk suggested it may have been dubbed a “literary society” due to a mistranslation—the founders, unfamiliar with English, may have meant to call it the “Ukrainian Language Society.”
“That’s how the Ukrainians stayed together when they came to Fort Frances,” she said. “We had church here because there was no money to build one.”
The hall quickly became the hub of life for the Ukrainian community here in Fort Frances. In the early years, before St. George’s Orthodox Church was built, mass, weddings, and funerals were held at the hall, with receptions and luncheons continuing there long after the church’s cornerstone was laid.
In those earliest days, women would have to haul buckets of water to the hall to make dinner, said Linda Rajala, recalling her baba’s stories.
It was a meeting place for people of all ages through multiple generations.
The hall also hosted countless nights of music, dance, and Ukrainian-language theatre—long-beloved entertainment that’s since been squeezed out by television and the Internet, the women agreed.
“This is where our tradition has been kept,” stressed Wepruk. “Our kids are having one hell of a time keeping it because they’re all over the place, except here, so it’s hard for them to keep it.”
Catering came into the hall as a way to help pay the bills on the building. As it grew into a business, the society formed two women’s groups—St. Anna’s and St. Lesia’s—because they couldn’t all fit into the kitchen at once.
They catered for weddings, parties, ethnic dinners, and community pyrohy dinners, sometimes toiling over rows of unpinched pyrohy in a boiled cabbage-scented kitchen (never with any air conditioning) late into the night.
“It was three days of really hard labour,” Wepruk said of preparing for a large event. “But it was all fun.
“And people would tell you how good the food was so you were ready for another catering.”
“Every day you went there, you learned something different about cooking,” added Rajala, a sentiment her fellow society members shared.
Along with the storied pyrohy and cabbage rolls, the women also made Easter paska and babka breads as well as litres upon litres of borscht. Some occasions called for other fare, including one holiday where the caterers were challenged to prepare massive 40-pound turkeys they likened to hogs.
But catering, like the other activities steeped in Ukrainian tradition, has slowed down in recent years, partly due to a dwindling numbers of cooks.
A final pyrohy supper, with 300 dozen of the dumplings made by hand, was held in June, with both sittings sold out and attendants expressing regret that there would be no more such suppers in the hall.
The loss of Ukrainian culture locally has the women of the society concerned, but resigned.
“It’s unfortunate because the kids now, this next generation like my son . . . this is going to be lost,” Rajala lamented.
“I mean, we still celebrate Ukrainian Christmas, Ukrainian Easter, but that’s as far as it goes. The Ukrainian language, it’s lost. . . .
“My baba spoke to me in Ukrainian but I answered her in English . . . I should have answered her back in Ukrainian, but I didn’t.”
But some of those traditions will continue in the basement of St. George’s Orthodox Church, across the street from the hall, where Wepruk and the others have fitted the basement with a small kitchen.
It’s not perfect, Wepruk said, especially because the stairs make it less accessible for many members,. But it will be a space to do Easter egg demonstrations and perhaps even share some more laughs over pyrohy dough.
“We all had our own homes, but by golly that was our home,” Wepruk said.
