LUBA GOY

1. Date and Place of Birth: Haltërn, Germany
   

2. Date of Interview: December 17, 2015
   

3. Place of Interview: Toronto, Ontario
   

4. Interviewer: Sophia Isajiw
   

5. Length of Interview: 02:03:23 (raw)
   

6. Mother (Survivor): Olga Iwaniuk (maiden: Sczerbatska), b. February 29, 1923 in village of Vinnytsia, Ukraine
   

(Excerpt):

LG: Really it was as an adult that I remember.

Interviewer: Like, how oldish? Twenties?

LG: Yes, I would think, I wasn’t even really in my 20s, I wasn’t that aware of the Holodomor because they didn’t talk about it. My mother didn’t talk about it, until I was much older, probably in my 30s, 40s maybe even. And then they would celebrate at gatherings and talk about it, later. But, my mother would tell me the story of her father who got very weak during this year of famine, dreadful famine, and he became quite ill. So if there was food he’d make sure the children would get it first and then his wife, and he would take very little for himself; he became very weak, until he was just bedridden. And мама was beside him, and they had a little orchard. So they had a pear tree, they had cherry tree, they had apple tree. And, towards spring, my mother, мама would say her father, as he was about to die, and she didn’t know, and he called her and he said, “Olia, go to the orchard and get me a pear from the tree.” And she said, “You know, тато, there are no leaves on the tree. It’s still very early spring.” And he just passed away in that moment.

So, pears are very, мама was very connected to pears. I brought some, there’s a green pear and then there’s a little pear here that’s, when she was in the retirement home in Toronto, St. Peter and Paul’s residence, there were many pear trees that they had planted in the garden. And so these little pears, like they were just little ones, right, they never grow very big, and they were really hard and green. And мама loved when I would pick the pear and I would let her hold it, and she would love these little pears. So I gave her a little pear, and she put it in her pocket, and forgot about it. And a few years later, when she passed away, this jacket, I kept it because it was good for shoveling snow it was really light. So I reached in and I pulled out something like, what is this? And it was like, oh! It’s мама’s грушка, [mother’s pear] and it’s completely petrified. And I didn’t have the heart to throw it out because pears are very, I’m very connected somehow to the pear, the beautiful pear. The full-figured pear.

CROSS REFERENCES:

• Luba Goy, English Voice-Over for Producer-Director Ariadna Ochrymovych’s film Holodomor: Voices of Survivors, 2015.

https://vimeo.com/148047499

• Lynda Sea, “Q&A: Royal Canadian Air Farce veteran Luba Goy,” May 7, 2012, West Jet Magazine. http://www.westjetmagazine.com/story/article/qa-royal-canadian-air-farce-veteran-luba-goy

• Wikipedia contributors, "Luba Goy," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luba_Goy

• Royal Canadian Air Farce web page: http://www.airfarce.com/info/bioluba.html

• “Luba Goy,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/luba-goy/

• Governor General Performing Arts Award, 2008: http://www.macleans.ca/general/the-ggs-performing-arts-awards-gala/

http://ggpaa.ca/photo-gallery/2008/gala-2008.aspx?year=2008

• Kobzar Literary Award, 2014 for Luba, Simply Luba one woman play http://www.openbookontario.com/news/one_woman_play_scoops_kobzar_literary_award

and https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2014/03/06/luba_goy_wins_kobzar_literary_award.html