Childhood, social relations and languages. Languages spoken together

Did you mother speak Ukrainian to you?

Yes, always, she always spoke to me in Ukrainian. I had never been to Ukraine but I learnt Ukrainian from my mother. It isn’t literary Ukrainian, but colloquial Ukrainian. I speak it very well. In 1964, when I first went to Ukraine, I could communicate very well with people. I remember one episode, there was a newspaper on the table and my uncle asked me to read something. I had never learnt Ukrainian but I managed to translate the article from Ukrainian to Russian. Perhaps by intuition, but with no problem. It’s true that I don’t speak literary Ukrainian, but colloquial Ukrainian.

Was it strange to be speaking Ukrainian at home and Russian at school?
Oui je l’ai ressenti quand je suis allé à l’école, mais il y avait très peu de familles russes “de souche” (chisto russkie), je ne me souviens que d’une seule, Yes, I felt it when I went to school, but there were very few “pure” Russian families (chisto russkie), I can only remember one, the foreman’s family, and all the others were exiles.