Yaroslaw's Treasure: A Novel

Myroslav Petriw

Born June 5, 1950, in Munich to post-war immigrant refugees, Myroslav Petriw came to Canada from Germany with his parents the following year and grew up in Toronto a Canadian citizen. Known to acquaintances as "Myron," he became a product of Toronto's vibrant ethnic community and, attending Saturday school, emerged fluent in Ukrainian.

Graduating from University of Toronto in mechanical engineering, he began his career with Ford of Canada. Cars were more than his livelihood, however. As a young man Myron's instinct for sports found him racing formula cars at Mount Tremblant-St. Jovite in Quebec and at Watkins Glen, New York. After moving to British Columbia, he added sailing to his sports repertoire. He is also an avid mountain biker, cross-country skier, and kayaker.

Myron and his wife, Luba, have raised three sons, the eldest of whom he coached to the Canadian autoslalom class championship in 2005. Today they are grandparents.

In 2004 Myron volunteered as an election observer from Canada's Ukrainian community for the October 31 first-round of presidential elections in Ukraine, serving as one of four observers in the city of Kharkiv in the "russified" eastern part of the country. When he chose to monitor voting in the poverty-stricken Moskovsky Raion, he could observe first-hand what James Mace called "a post--genocidal society." At the time, he recalls, people feared that staged incidents could cause the election to be declared invalid, leaving the incumbent president in power. Patrolling this territory, he identified breaches of the election law but drew them to the attention of the authorities, resulting in them being promptly corrected.

Following this first election, Petriw visited Ternopil and Lviv, as well as the capital city of Kyiv, talking there with Ukraine's youth and a number of the intellectuals of the democracy movement. Doing so, he was able to gauge the build-up of energy, months before it exploded into the Orange Revolution.

With that experience, and after taking early retirement, he applied his efforts to complete the object of his passions, this novel Yaroslaw's Treasure.

At a December 6, 2008, "National Leaders" ceremony in Edmonton, Myron Petriw was awarded the Taras Shevchenko Medal by Canadian Ukrainian Congress for his "outstanding leadership in community development." It is the highest honour that can be paid to a citizen by Canada's Ukrainian community, having previously been awarded to prime ministers John Diefenbaker and Brian Mulroney for their leadership in Canadian-Ukrainian relations.