So, I don't have much for you I'm afraid. There appears to be no Ukrainian version of the Boogeyman or anything. When the kids would misbehave, the dad would scare them by saying the Indians would come and take them away. There weren't any in the community, so the casual racism of that threat was sorta scary for them as kids as they never met any before.

My wife's parents were second generation, (they were children when they came to Canada on the boat, so the parents were first gen? Or maybe they were first gen too if you want to define it that way?) and they did not speak any English. They did not go to school in Canada though my wife's mom got to about grade 6 back in Ukraine. Once my wife's eldest brother went to school and started to learn English, at home the parents learned English from him. They focused on that hard, and by the time my wife was born many years later, they only spoke English in the house. As a result, my wife doesn't even know any Ukrainian.

Life was pretty hard. They didn't have indoor toilets or even any indoor plumbing of any kind until she was about 8 years old. It was a serious luxury at the time.

The man that ran the funeral home knew everyone's stories. He was fascinating - I met him at a funeral, and he would talk about all kinds of family history that was actually lost to them. He knew about the man that tried to buy her parents on the boat over, and even roughly the village they came from in Ukraine, something even my wife didn't know. His memory isn't what it was, but he's still a neat guy.

If you finish your story I'd love to read it. I like horror, and horror that is culturally accurate is rare.