Brownstein: Feeling helpless, Montreal Ukrainian musicians to perform benefit concert

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Norman Nawrocki is generally among the most jovial people around town. A nonpareil multitasker, he is a musician, actor, director, author, artist, poet, playwright and composer, not to mention a self-styled pierogi-making king and vodka connoisseur and blender. He has never been at a loss for words. But on this day, he is.

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Nawrocki just caught TV footage of the carnage that took place in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv. Bodies, young and old, some executed with their hands tied behind their backs, strewn on obliterated streets and in ditches.

“It’s so devastating, so distressing,” he finally musters up. “I was sickened to my stomach. These are my people.”

They are. Nawrocki, whose mother was Ukrainian, has been to the country several times and has strong connections there. He has performed, written and composed three plays about Ukrainian-Canadian immigrants over the years, including one particularly hard-hitting piece about 9,000 Ukrainian-Canadians rounded up and arrested during the First World War.

Nawrocki has managed to get in contact with some family members and friends in Ukraine. They have described him the hell of trying to survive with sirens going off all the time and Russian bombs targeting their homes and hospitals.

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“They’re teachers, musicians and painters helping others resettle or trying to get them out. Some are cooking for and feeding others on the front lines. Some of them are even saying they’re going to pick up guns for the first time,” Nawrocki says.

“I ask them what I can do. They tell me to pray for them. I tell them I’m not religious. So they say they’re desperate for supplies and ask if I could help raise relief funds for medical supplies and so much more.”

Nawrocki is in the process of doing just that. He has reached out to fellow musicians in the city with Ukrainian or other Eastern European roots and has organized the benefit concert, Music for Ukraine, Friday at La Sala Rossa. Among the nine acts, featuring 16 musicians playing pro bono, are Nawrocki’s quintet DaZoque!, Ukrainian alt-rockers Bosonizh, Ukrainian folk singer Olga Cotilliar-Lemeshko, Ukrainian classical pianist Serhiy Salov and the Bagg Street Klezmer Band — with whom Nawrocki became the first non-Jew to perform on occasion.

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“I was just feeling so helpless. So I thought the best thing I could do here would be to get musicians here of Ukrainian or Eastern European background to come together to contribute to the Polish/Ukrainian grassroots humanitarian aid group, the Fundacja Folkowisko Foundation. It was set up by a couple of festival organizers who would host touring musicians at their B&B home in Poland near the Ukrainian border and arrange concerts for them.

“That’s what this couple did before the war. Now they’ve opened their doors to Ukrainian refugees. They’re feeding 150,000 refugees a day and they’re sending 15 truckloads of food, medical supplies and clothing a day to the southwestern region of Ukraine, where my family is from,” says Nawrocki, whose father was Polish.

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Nawrocki concedes it wasn’t difficult to recruit musicians like Cotilliar-Lemeshko to the cause.

“The feelings I have are the feelings of pain. I feel pain every day, waking up and watching the news,” Cotilliar-Lemeshko says. “I am nearly speechless. My mom is still there. My close friends and family are there and in the army fighting. My mom has no wish to leave the country. When I ask her to come to stay with us here, she says: ‘No, it’s my land. I will stay here until I die.’”

Nawrocki has protested wars most of his life.

“You see all these atrocities of war and yet it doesn’t always register as it should because it’s so far away,” he says. “But when they start bombing, shooting and killing your family and friends, it hits closer to home, and it really wakes you up to the horrors of war there and everywhere.”

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What mystifies Nawrocki and Cotilliar-Lemeshko most is the formerly strong bond shared between many Ukrainians and Russians.

“People I knew always spoke of Russians as their friends and family,” Nawrocki says. “There was no ill will between them. They spoke Ukrainian and Russian interchangeably. They shared so much in common, despite past history.”

“I’m still trying to understand why there are some Russians who think we are bad and should be killed… kids, women, the elderly,” Cotilliar-Lemeshko says. “We used to speak the same language with them… I had many precious friends in Russia, and most of them are against the war and have been urged to leave the country. I have friends here who are Russian but are not influenced by the propaganda of the Putin regime. They have Ukrainian flags on their balconies.

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“I have so many mixed feelings… But I still can’t understand how this could happen in the 21st century.”

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AT A GLANCE

The Music for Ukraine benefit takes place Friday at La Sala Rossa, 4848 St-Laurent Blvd. Doors open at 6:30 pm Admission is $30 at the door; $20 in advance at thepointofsale.com/tickets/czz220322001. All proceeds go to the humanitarian aid group Fundacja Folkowisko Foundation.