JAMES ALEXANDER LOW  BIO

Date and Place of Birth: May 2, 1997, Ottawa, ON

Father: James Low, April 26, 1964, Montreal, PQ

Mother: Larysa Rozumnyj, March 14, 1963, Sudbury ON

Alexander obtained his BCom. (2019) from McGill University in Finance and Business Analytics and since July 2019 has been working at Chubb Insurance Company of Canada as Team Lead. As a child and student he attended Ukrainian school on Saturdays, the Ukrainian scouting organization Plast, and Ukrainian summer camps near Montreal, Toronto, Jasper, Vermont, and British Columbia. Alex spoke English, French and Ukrainian at home with his parents and identifies as Ukrainian Canadian. He is also very proud of his Scottish and French-Canadian heritage and celebrates those holidays and traditions with his paternal grandparents, who also enjoy the Ukrainian holidays and traditions. Alex visited Ukraine in 2019, meeting with close relatives for the first time.

Alexander’s grandfather, Professor Jaroslav Rozumnyj, was Head of the Department of Slavic Studies at the University of Manitoba from 1976-1989, from 1995 Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Ukrainian Free University in Munich and later honorary professor at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine. He has received numerous awards and served on many boards and organizations, including president of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Canada.

INTERVIEW EXCERPT

Date and place of interview: July 24, 2024, Toronto, ON, Canada
Length of interview: 45 minutes
Interviewer: Ariadna Ochrymovych
Language: English

Interviewer: Do you remember any particular family traditions, jokes, stories?

Alex: For sure, yeah. So I think one of the favorite traditions is we still do 12 meatless dishes every year for Christmas.

So we actually did it a bit differently where we would celebrate initially on the 24th and that was to include both sets of grandparents.  So on my dad's side, the Scottish grandfather and the French Canadian grandmother, I guess my grandmother, my dad's mother, they very much liked to be a part of this tradition. 

And so for them, it was a good time to get the whole family together.

So we would do things like look for the first star before eating, bring in the teak and set it in the corner.  We would throw a bunch of kutia unto the ceiling to see what the year was supposed to look like. l’d eat all 12 meatless dishes.

We would fast all day in addition to that.

Interviewer: So if you have children, would you transmit the Ukrainian traditions, language and culture to them?

Alex: Absolutely. As much as I can.

Interviewer: Did you have one particular memory that you can remember that was striking (about trip to Ukraine?).

Alex: The entire trip was striking.
I think for me, it was very interesting seeing where I guess my family came from in the West and just seeing how it's still very much is a very rural, very, I don't want to say disconnected, but it’s still very basic. Just things like floors and heating and cooling.

It's very different than what we grew up with here. And just seeing how as much as it is a European country, there are portions of it like in Lviv and Kyiv that are very industrialized and very first world.  There’s still a large majority of the country that is living in different conditions.

And just how important family and kind of getting together is for these people.  So they had never met me. I had never met them.

The family connections were pretty loose at this point.  It's second and third cousins and distant relatives. But they welcomed me like they were, you know, long time family members that we'd seen every single year. 

And the drinks and the stories and the food that we shared over those days were super marking. And this past weekend, actually, I got to kind of reminisce a little bit because my friends were asking me about Ukraine and visiting.

So I went back through all the pictures and had a big smile on my face and was proud to kind of show people and tell people about my experience there.