Paulo Yaztrzembski:

Nobody in my recollection ever went out of his way to wax poetic about what a nice guy my maternal grandfather, Paulo Yaztrzembski, was. 

I just heard a lot of stories from my uncles and aunts about his strict and demanding ways. It was mostly bellyaches about chores and curfews, the usual stuff that concerns rebellious kids.

Yaztrzembski. That might not be exactly the way his family name translated from the Cyrillic script, but close enough. It was hard to pronounce even for Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles, and many of his neighbours who arrived from eastern Europe roughly about the same time, took the liberty to simply abbreviate it to Yastrob, which translates to Hawk in some of the east European dialects. It was darkly hinted that for some, Yastrob could have been not so much a name as an allusion to his character.

Not that he cared. He came to Canada around the turn of the 20th Century, bringing with him my grandma Anastasia, and a generous measure of the will to succeed. Here was a brand new country with lots of farmland up for grabs and opportunities unavailable to him back in Europe. He was not about to squander the chance to make his private dreams and ambitions into reality here in the new world.

This was the time when MP Clifford Sifton from Manitoba brought to the Canadian parliament’s attention the fact that if we don’t settle the west, the Yanks will soon do it for us on their own terms. Parliament's answer was to get the survey teams going all over the west and offer 160-acre homesteads at $10 to anyone willing to settle and work the soil. 

$10 sounds like not much today, but in the year 1900, it was worth about $150 in today's dollars, so it wasn't small change.

They advertised it in Europe. That brought a wave of would-be land barons from the European countries, Paulo Yaztrzembski among them, steaming across the Atlantic.

He had what it takes. A high-energy personality, he worked hard and thought smart, expecting the same of the people around him. My mother, the eldest of his seven children, was born in a wheat field where her mother was helping with the harvest. Grandma simply wrapped the new baby in her apron and walked home across the stubble field. 

No, he wasn't a cruel SOB or a wife beater. This was the year 1905 in the Eastern reaches of the Saskatchewan prairie and that’s the way time was prioritized if the gardens and crops, representing a full year's work, were to be gathered and stowed safely before the early snowfall.

It did not take grandpa long to acquire as much land as he could cultivate and the farm machinery he needed to cultivate it. As the years went by, he was one of the first among his group of arrivals to own a brand new McLaughlin Buick convertible. His home was wired for electricity and there was a powerful Windcharger out on the hill and large glass batteries in the basement. A steel wind turbine pumped water for the livestock. Everything was high tech for its day.

Contrary to what our young environmentalists think, wind turbines were not invented by Al Gore and David Suzuki. They've been around for a couple of thousand years in one form or another.

All of that happened before the US stock market crash which precipitated the Great Depression back in ‘29. That event put the brakes on the headlong rush to prosperity as credit became scarce or non-existent, but it was not in grandpa’s character to give up. With energy undiminished, he picked up the pieces and set about to rebuild his little empire.

His farming community was centered on a meeting hall they called Pretty View, an aptly named location overlooking the scenic Assiniboine watershed to the south. In time, it became a nest of Communist sympathizers, people who were moved to blame the free market economy in the new world for the stock market crash. 

Having had their plans for a successful life derailed, it did not take much effort for an aspiring Communist party politician to convince the local farmers of the merits of Karl Marx’s Utopian visions as relief from the world of shattered dreams they now lived in.

You’d think an industrious dude like my grandpa would have seen through such propaganda as an economic vision that failed to take human nature into account and, as a result, was destined to fail right from the start. Apparently, he did not. It was one of the straws people clutched at when all they had worked for slipped away from their grasp with US stock market manipulations that had nothing at all to do with farming.

But the political climate had little bearing on how Grandpa’s friends and family regarded him. Mostly, hand-me-down information has it that they saw him as a tough guy who demanded maximum effort from people around him and tolerated no nonsense. While there is no actual evidence that he went around looking for a fight, neither was he especially known to back down from physical violence when he thought the occasion warranted it. 

My own memories of him are those of a serious, not particularly warm, thoughtful personality with a neat handlebar moustache. Clearly, he was a man on a mission, and not the easiest guy to get to know, but he did give me books to read. It was mostly political literature based on communist theory, matters of less than zero concern to my grade school mind. 

My father, whose views on communism differed somewhat from my grandpa’s, kindly offered to file that literature for me, did so, and promptly forgot where. It mattered little, since I never asked.

What inspired grandpa to pick me from among a couple dozen of his grandchildren as the beneficiary for his books still provides me food for thought in my most private moments. Usually, I catch myself wondering if I should feel proud or guilty.

Grandpa died young, before I was in my teens, and before I could actually get to know him on more than a superficial level. The high physical demands he put upon himself were the most probable contributing factor to his early demise. He was laid to rest in the Tolstoy cemetery north of Verigin, SK. Anastasia joined him there about 35 years later. Their joint tombstone is red granite.

Family photos of grandpa show him looking very much like some pictures of Wyatt Earp, the US marshal made famous by the gunfight at the OK Corral. That image was enhanced somewhat by whispered rumours of a six gun in grandpa’s possession. I do not recall any talk of him ever threatening anyone or actually using it, but my childish imagination led me to wonder if by any chance it was a Colt 45 Peacemaker and if he ever wore it in an open leather holster slung low on his right hip.

Tough guy? Sure, why not? Those were tough times. 

But there was another side to this man. My mother liked to recall an incident when she was a little girl playing with her second in line, her younger brother, my uncle John. While playing in the farmyard’s wooded perimeter, Josie and John discovered a red squirrel’s storehouse. It was late fall and they found this hollow tree trunk filled with hazel nuts. 

Bonanza! The annual fall chore of gathering a winter’s supply of hazel nuts to munch on before a warm fire in January took a couple of weeks for an individual to fill a burlap bushel bag. Hazel nuts grew everywhere in the forest underbrush and you had to know where to look. Here was a batch all ready picked. John’s straw hat was not big enough to contain all the nuts and they also filled their pockets, according to my mother. 

They brought their find back to the farmhouse and showed it off proudly to their parents.

“Where did you get those?” asked grandpa.

“We found them in a hollow tree out behind those grain bins,” said my mother.

“You take those nuts and put them right back where you found them,” he scolded. "Those poor squirrels worked hard to put in a supply for the winter. What are they going to eat if you steal their food?”

Thus having received their marching orders, Josie and John went and scooped the nuts right back into the hole in the tree trunk.

Tough guy? Wild West-type character? Maybe. But also, beneath that tough and unyielding exterior, there was a genuine streak of compassion few individuals other than Anastasia, Josie, John and the red squirrels were able to access. 

Grandpa wasn't about to see a hard-working little red rodent suffer the fate he himself was destined to endure about ten years later with the Great American stock market crash. 

(Note: The red squirrel is about half the size of the black and grey squirrels in Toronto.)

Despite all the stories of demands and uncompromising effort, that one incident alone inspires in me feelings on the warm side of ambivalent for my grandpa with the unpronounceable name, Paulo Yaztrzembski.