After 86 years, this Etobicoke senior remembers her family’s long journey from Macedonia, and an unexpected gift that Christmas

The fact that Luba Neshevich is alive today, hale at 92, sitting happily at her dining room table with a son and daughter-in-law in Etobicoke, is due in no small part to a decision her father made in 1936.

Risto Vasilevich was a sojourner who supported his family by travelling the world for work, sending money back to his wife Ristjana and two daughters, Luba and Ilinka, in Macedonia, and visiting occasionally.

Ristjana and the girls lived in a village in a house with cattle on the ground floor and a fireplace on the second, where the extended family would gather in the evenings, in chronological order, the oldest members closest to the fire, for greater warmth.

Risto Vasilevich followed world politics closely. In 1936, he told his wife to sell everything and join him in Canada. Germany had reoccupied the Rhineland, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, and Vasilevich believed another war would soon engulf Europe.

Ristjana did not want to leave Porodin. Illiterate, she had someone write a letter for her, stained with tears, explaining why. They had a farm, a house, cows, a wagon and a vegetable garden. They lived with extended family. They were prosperous enough. She didn’t want to move to a country where she couldn’t understand the language.

Her husband insisted, and in those days, in that place, a husband’s word was law, and so Ristjana and the girls made the voyage, which took weeks, by train and boat and train again, through Europe, to Antwerp, Quebec City, Toronto, and finally, Cabbagetown. Luba and Ilinka were seasick every day of the ocean voyage, vomiting over the side of the small ship that bore them across the Atlantic.

When Luba met her father for the first time, he informed the girls that they would no longer be sleeping with their mom. They had their own room now, and he and their mother had theirs. Luba was grateful to be stationary, but confused about losing her place of privilege with her mom.

Nine months later, their mother gave birth to her sister Mary, followed several years later by a boy, Andrew. They adopted Canadian names: Risto became Chris; Ristjana became Christina; Ilinka became Helen.

It was the Great Depression. When the bottom fell out of one of her cheap shoes, Luba walked the streets with one bare sole, one covered sole and a limping gait. They went to Sunday school because after Sunday school, there were cookies, and there were no cookies at home.

No cookies, no toys and definitely no Christmas. It wasn’t celebrated in their home in Macedonia at the time, Luba says, and there was no money to participate in the celebration in Canada.

“Parents in those days never bought toys for you. You were lucky to get clothes, in fact,” she says.

When a Toronto Star Santa Claus fund box showed up at their Cabbagetown door that year, Luba was amazed. In her memory, it was enormous and filled with everything — she draws her hands wide apart to show how large it looms in her memory — although she realizes now, it was probably close to the size the boxes are today, a large shoebox.

The joy of receiving it sends tears down her cheeks, 86 years later.

She remembers that there was one box for her and her sister, and that it was “filled” with hats and mittens and socks, “everything,” she says now. And a doll. Her only toy, which she dearly loved, but which she quickly had to give up to her younger sister.

“I still hold it against her,” Luba says now, laughing.

Mary and Luba live in the same condo building today, a few floors apart.

Luba’s struggles didn’t end there. Her father quickly moved the family to a better neighbourhood in the west end of Toronto. He worked in a factory, before striking out on his own as a middleman in the laundry business. The family took in boarders. Luba worked in a laundry after school from the time she was about 13 years old.

“It was hot. You know how many times I fainted in the summer there? It was terrible,” Luba says.

She was still a teenager when met her husband, Milorad Neshevich (Mike), at a Toronto church. His family had emigrated from the neighbouring village of Velushina in Macedonia, arriving in Canada in the nick of time, in July, 1939.

Luba’s mom was happy for her daughter. The men from Velushina had a reputation for being kind to their wives.

Luba and Mike were married for 73 years, until his death in September, 2021.

“He was exactly the kind of a man I wanted — just over six feet tall, blond, curly hair, blue eyes, and very, very nice personality,” says Luba.

“I’ve never seen a man more handsome than my husband.”

They had four children, and Luba says she thoroughly enjoyed raising them, while her husband worked in the restaurant industry.

She has never forgotten what it was like to be a child expecting nothing at Christmas, watching the rest of the world celebrate with trees, platters of food and gifts.

She has been a Toronto Star subscriber her whole life — it lands every morning outside the door of her condo, and she has contributed to the Star Santa Claus Fund as often as she was able, including in 2022.

“It’s wonderful. It makes some children very happy.”

If you have been touched by the Santa Claus Fund or have a story to tell, please email santaclausfund@thestar.ca

Francine Kopun is a Toronto-based reporter covering city hall and municipal politics for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @KopunF

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