Ukrainian poet Julia Dasbach connects her holocaustic past with the present in hopes to educate and impact the lives of others for the better.
Dasbach was six years old when she fled Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, to the U.S. as a Jewish refugee to escape the former Soviet Union’s antisemitism in 1993. Leaving everything but a Barbie doll behind, she and her family settled into the D.C metro area of Rockville, Maryland.
“To say I am devastated and horrified doesn’t put into words what I am feeling [about the Russia-Ukraine war] as someone who came as a refugee, as a descendant, as someone who carries the history inside of my body,” Dasbach said.
“Seeing Russia using repetition and bare witnessing genocide happening again on the same soil, the world is not doing enough, just like it didn’t during WWII before it was too late,” Dasbach said.
At 16, Dasbach watched her 80-year-old great-grandmother suffer and relive the tragedies of WWII. She said her grandmother would have and reenact visions of a Nazi coming back to life to get her as well as many others that her grandmother would not talk about. The murder of her great grandfather during that time was also a part of the unspoken.
It was through the reenactments that Dasbach was able to second-handedly experience the trauma and devastation her people went through and make it her mission to fully understand what took place during that time.
“After my grandmother died, [poetry] was my way of continuing to connect with her and reconnect with my family’s past that I never knew. I wrote about it creatively and studied it, traveled to Poland and did research,” Dasbach said. “I went to Poland when I was pregnant with my son. That was what really brought my past and present together, seeing how my ancestry past was being passed on to the next generation. That’s where they come together; the two are interwoven.”
Her transition into motherhood influenced her more popular poetry book, “The Many Names for Mothers,” which was published in 2019.
The collection is an “exploration of intergenerational motherhood” where “its poems reach toward the future even as they reflect on the past hovering around history, trauma, and absence.”
The stories give insight into Dasbach’s concerns over how the weight of her Jewish-refugee immigrant experience influences her raising of a first-generation, bilingual, and multiethnic American child.
As a new mom, Dasbach sometimes found it hard to find time to write about her experiences. As a result, she created a blog extending the works of her book.
“As a new mom, sometimes all I could do was squeeze in a short Facebook post with one sentence regarding the topic and then turn right around and tend to more mom duties. The blog is what kept me connected to writing when I did not have time to write,” Dasbach said.
Now, further along in motherhood, Dasbach gets to practice her passion daily as a Murphy Visiting Fellow in Literature and Language poetry and literary theory professor at Hendrix College with students who are just as passionate.
Some days of writing are harder than others, however, as she watches the Russia-Ukraine war unravel before her.
“There are some instances where I may have to turn the page and revisit at a later time. Right now, I am struggling with images coming from things happening in Ukraine. I know that eventually, I will talk about what’s happening in the present, just not yet,” Dasbach said. “… as writers, this is what we do. It is our job to take on the difficult subjects and write through them.”
Dasbach’s website includes links to her work and can be found at juliakolchinskydasbach.com.