Leaving Lviv
Turning to poetry to parse a long history of loss and exile
Farewell by August Macke via WikiArt. Zupa nic literally means “soup nothing.” In postwar Poland, some families who were “repatriated” from western Ukraine whipped up milk and egg yolk with sugar and served it with rice or sweet rolls. It fills your stomach fast. So does borscht. And солянка. And gołąbki, with cabbage soaked in vinegar to make it soft. Lviv cuisine.
My great-grandmother served the meals she learned to cook in Lviv to my father in post-Stalinist Poland. Born and raised in Lviv, she survived World War II in the city and must have felt that she was being relocated to a foreign land, to the great unknown, when she and her husband were told to pack up
