BORISLAW BILASH BIO
Date and place of birth: b. 1964, Winnipeg, Manitoba
Mother: Dorothy Ukena, b. 1927, Belmont, Manitoba
Father: Borislaw Bilash, b. 1929, Winnipeg, Manitoba; d. 2021, Winnipeg
Borislaw Bilash II is a high school science teacher, author, playwright and a 5th-generation Ukrainian Canadian. Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, he was raised in a traditional Ukrainian-speaking home, learning the language of his ancestors from his mother who learned to speak Ukrainian as an adult as she is of East Friesian and Mennonite descent. Both his parents were born in Manitoba.
His great, great grandfather, Petro Waroway, was part of the first wave of Ukrainians to settle in Canada, arriving in 1897 and in 1902 became the first Canadian citizen in the family. On his mother's side, his great, great grandfather, Abraham Flaming, immigrated in 1874 from Molotchna, Ukraine. Abraham was also the first in that family line to become a Canadian citizen.
Borislaw’s father, Borislaw Bilash Sr, who was raised in Ward, Manitoba, a town north of Dauphin, became a distinguished educator, philologist, linguist and prolific author. He was the co-founder and president of the Ukrainian World Congress’s International Educational Coordinating Council (IECC) and was once hailed as the “patriarch” of the Ukrainian language in Canada. He went on to become Deputy Director of foreign languages at Winnipeg School Division No. 1, and was among those who initiated the bilingual Ukrainian school program in public schools in Manitoba.
Borislaw earned a degree in physics from the University of Manitoba and a Masters in Science Education from Rutgers University. He is a regular speaker at state and national science education conferences, has authored several books on the teaching and demonstration of chemistry, physics and biology, and developed science curriculum materials for various publishing companies. He channeled his passion for teaching into That Chemistry Show, which played to audiences off-Broadway in New York City from 2017 until the show had to close due to the pandemic.
In 2018, Borislaw began spending part of his summers in Lviv, Ukraine, teaching teachers methods of science education as part of the Summer Institute which is sponsored by the Ukrainian World Congress’s IECC – the body co-founded by his father. An active member of the Ukrainian community, Borislaw has served as a trustee of St. John’s Ukrainian Baptist Church, in Hunter, NY, and has been a lifelong member of Plast Ukrainian Scouts, most recently serving as the secretary of the Plast Foundation of Plast-Newark. He has also worked as an international election observer during the 2004 and 2014 Presidential Election in Ukraine.
In 1982, during a Plast Jamboree held in East Chatham, New York, Borislaw met his future Ukrainian American wife, Natalia Voronka, of Maplewood, New Jersey. In the same fashion he was raised, Borislaw always speaks Ukrainian with his children, the way his parents always spoke to him and his siblings throughout their lives.
INTERVIEW EXCERPT
Date and place of interview: November 13, 2021, Toronto, Ontario
Length of interview: 1 hour and 21 minutes
Interviewer: Ariadna Ochrymovych
Language: English
Interviewer: Tell me your mother’s full name and where was she born?
Borislaw: My mother’s name is Dorothy or Dorothea as everyone calls her and she was born in southern Manitoba.
Interviewer: Tell me about her parents
Borislaw: My mothers parents, her father immigrated to Canada just prior to World War I from Austria Friesland or East Frisia, which is presently a province in north western Germany. Her maiden name, Ukena is a well-known name in Friesland because it's one of the founding famiies of that kingdom. My mother's mother, her family came from Ukraina from a village called Molochna which is just south of Zaporizha. Her family was a family of Mennonites* who immigrated to Manitoba back in 1874 and her family name then was Fleming.
Interviewer: Tell me about your father, his hobbies, interests, profession.
Borislaw: What's unusual about my father was that he finished high school at age 15.
As a result my father started teaching school at age 15. This happened during World War II when there was a need for teachers.
My father continued his education, got his bachelors, go this masters and he wrote one of the first Ukrainian language textbooks in Canada called Ukrainian with Ease … that ended up being certified by the province of Manitoba and used in public schools in Manitoba. His specialty was Ukrainian Canadian education.
His masters thesis was actually about Ukrainian bilingual schools that existed back in the times of World War I. So there was a period of time in Manitoba that Ukrainian was the language of instruction in Manitoba public schools.
Interviewer: Did your mother speak Ukrainian?
Borislaw: So my parents met at a normal school which is a Teacher’s education school in Winnipeg and so she did not speak Ukrainian at that time and after their romance they got married [and] she learned Ukrainian from my father and she also learned Ukrainian from his father. My mother told me the story that she used to write letters to her father-in-law in Ukrainian.
Eventually my mother developed her Ukrainian language skills so well that she became a teacher of Ukrainian language at night school in the public schools in Winnipeg.
I asked my mother how does she identify her self and she said you know I identify myself as Ukrainian although she wasn't Ukrainian born, she said that when she was young they never in her family had a sense of cultural identification other than being Canadian, she explained to me that her father was viewed as a German even though he was east Friesian everybody considered him German because he was German speaking and to avoid discrimination he told everybody that he was Swiss. That was the time of World War I and there was a lot of racism and prejudice directed towards the Germans, including Mennonites.
Interviewer: You obviously believe that maintaining your Ukrainian identity is important for you and it's important for your children, why is it so important for you?
Borislaw: Because it’s who I am, it's who I've always been and I think that's what humans do, they are very protective of who they are and I like who I am so I raise my children in the same kind of tradition, in the same image probably like any parent would do.
CROSS REFERENCES:
The interviews can be accessed at the UCRDC. Please contact us at: office@ucrdc.org
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