If even the mayors of Osasco, Carapicuíba and Itapevi have spoken about the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, nor will I be silent. Can’t talk about anything else.
We live in one of those times when the dominant subject is something that 99.99% of people know nothing or almost nothing about. Should you shut up? Of course not. Because it impacts everyone’s lives, no matter how far away it is.
I also know very little about Ukraine. Never been there. The closest I got was Curitiba. Paraná has an important community of Ukrainian descendants.
A representative of this group is Júnior Durski, owner of the Madero cafeteria chain. He also has a restaurant named after him, near Largo da Ordem, in the historic center of Curitiba.
The menu is a succession of wild and expensive international dishes – steaks and lobsters and risottos. Except for a certain “Slavic feast”, a sequence of Ukrainian and Polish dishes.
This “Ukrainians and Poles” has always intrigued me. Is it Ukrainian or Polish anyway?
Durski’s family comes from Prudentópolis, a city in the heart of the state of Paraná, also known as “little Ukraine”. The immigrants who populated it came from a territory called Galicia – nothing to do with the homonymous region of Spain.
Slavic Galicia, throughout history, was autonomous, Ukrainian, Polish and Austro-Hungarian. Currently, the western portion is in Poland and the eastern portion is in Ukraine.
Returning to the “Ukrainian and Polish” feast, it’s a sequence of dishes featuring borscht (beetroot soup), platzki (potato pancakes) and pierogi (a type of ravioli), among other things.
I went to Durski’s and ate the feast a couple of times, a long time ago, when I didn’t even suspect that the businessman’s political preferences would make me resent any business he owned.
Everything was delicious, I hate to admit it. Especially the chicken Kiev, breaded breast stuffed with parsley butter, moist, perfectly done.
The Durski is a formal, expensive restaurant with silverware, two-hundred-thousand-thread-count tablecloths and scalloped chandeliers.
Much nicer is BarBaran, a Ukrainian bar in a club in the Ukrainian community in Curitiba. It is famous for the meatball. An ordinary but very Ukrainian meatball. Every country has its version of the meatball.
When I was there, there was a vodka drink called “ukrainian trauma“. The joke was bad enough, but I love bad jokes; in the current scenario, it completely loses the fun.
It’s disheartening to think that I’ve lived half a century to face the misfortunes of my grandparents’ time: plague, famine, the rise of fascism, the specter of total war.
Tragedy in Ukraine is not that far off. Affects the price of bread. It affects thousands of Brazilian families who have relatives there. It will have consequences that we cannot foresee right now, but it could be left for everyone. For everyone.
History is very much alive, and human misery is as universal as a meatball.
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