PARMA, Ohio -- Freshly shaved loaves of ham, salami and head cheese sit stacked high in the deli case at Lviv International Foods in Parma. Cakes with fluffy frostings line bakery shelves under spotless glass. Five kinds of European butter wait side-by-side in the cooler.
Any day looks like an ethnic holiday at this sparkling Ukrainian grocery store. And with the unusual concurrence this year of both Orthodox and non-Orthodox Easters this Sunday, things will only get busier.
Forty-one-year-old owner Irene Povroznik, interview-ready in her ruffled blouse and satiny black pants, remembers the trek to Cleveland's East Side for jars of beloved pickled herring or certain kinds of kielbasa. It gave the former business student from Ternopil, Ukraine, the idea to open her own store. Six years after she landed here in 1988, it was up and running. She is still amazed by it.
"I think now, 'How I open store,'" she says, sitting with her hands folded at a card table in the back room. "Two children. No language. No education."
What she had were opportunities that she and her family readily took. Her husband, Andrew, worked a machine-shop job for 78 hours a week. Her mom, Stefania Penkalsky, helped watch their children while Irene went to work, for a time at the nearby State Meats. Povroznik also had the patience to start small, graduating from a 700-square-foot store to one 1,500 square feet, to the current one, twice the size --with a new addition.
The fall of the Soviet Union's controlling communism gave her the freedom to come here and also provided the new wave of fellow immigrants to help her and other stores thrive. All those new customers wanted herring and kielbasa and the other tastes of home.
The city as a whole is celebrating the immigration, including last year's designation of a section of State Road as Ukrainian Village.
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Lviv International Foods
Where: 5689 State Road, Parma.
Call: 440-887-1199.
Hours: 9 a.m.-8 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 8 a.m.-8 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
Erik Tollerup, Parma's director of community services and economic development, who lives in the village, said he hears foreign languages on the street, sees children filling culture classes and new families reviving churches. The upcoming federal census will tell how many Ukrainians have moved here, but Tollerup estimates a few thousand -- enough to help stabilize the population of a shrinking city and the gradual loss of an older population.
"We're also hearing from a lot of Ukrainian professionals -- dentists, lawyers and photographers -- who want to open a business here to serve the Ukrainian audience," he said. To serve her audience, Povroznik buys locally, but also imports from New York, Chicago and other metropolitan areas with large Ukrainian emigre populations. She has pilmeni (small meat) pierogi from Canada, phyllo dough from Serbia, Polish butters, Bulgarian feta cheese and Italian salami. The cold cuts are noticeably different from most U.S. brands, both in their rich flavor and lower salt content.
She and her staff make a wide assortment of their own pierogi. They bake Vie de France bread from purchased dough several times a day, and will gladly explain to customers how they can make a torte from thin sheets of wafer and caramel sauce she sells by the can.
This is also where you can buy your very own babushka (floral head scarf), coffee mugs printed with Ukrainian names, and baskets of pysanky, the ornately decorated eggs.
After the great rush of the holiday, Povroznik will spend Easter with about two dozen family members, feasting on her mother's fresh ham, smoked ham, hard-boiled eggs, paska (sweet bread), kielbasa with sauerkraut, beets with horseradish, stuffed cabbage rolls, and salad.
Her mom, who speaks only Ukrainian, was too shy to be interviewed, so Povroznik gave us her family's recipes for marinated fresh ham, smoked ham and the sweet, eggy paska.
The meats are a long production: cooking and chilling a marinade, three to four days of soaking in the refrigerator, five hours of marinating with garlic and mayonnaise and three to four hours of cooking. For garlic lovers, the cooking aromas are almost as good as the taste of the transformed meat. It's served with traditional beet relish made with horseradish, a kind of Ukrainian hot sauce.
The bread, made with an overabundance of eggs, is particularly important in conveying a sunny color to signify spring -- as well as Easter's celebratory, religious meaning of resurrection. It, too, sweetens the air in the home (and makes great French toast, if there's any left).
Povroznik's Easter menu is a bit richer than it was in Ukraine, but she still cherishes the memory of her childhood Easters back there. There was no Easter bunny, but she did have a grandfather who knew how to celebrate the only granddaughter among five grandsons.
"He always brought me chocolate," she said.