Three years after the invasion of Ukraine, I feel both the destruction and the resilience in my bones

Marusya Bociurkiw is a filmmaker, writer, and Professor Emeritus at Toronto Metropolitan University. As a kid in the 1970s, I found Ukraine, The Ukraine back then, embarrassing. The anthem (Ukraine Has Not Yet Died). Letters with Soviet stamps, from an aunt we’d never met, asking after us by name. My father, exiled, a Holocaust survivor and refugee, with stories he couldn’t or wouldn’t share. Ukrainian Saturday School, boring and unfair. It wasn’t until I first travelled to Ukraine in 2003 and met my very modern cousin, and avant-garde artists, and student organizers, and queer folks, that I understood: the diaspora...