PERSPECTIVES: Assimilated but not melted (03/08/98)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

Assimilated but not melted

The Ukrainian Museum-Archives has dozens of photographs from the 1910s, '20s and '30s of various choral, musical, political, religious, theatrical and other groups that kept Ukrainian culture vibrant in Cleveland during the years preceding World War II. Most major American cities and many small towns had similar communities. Inevitably, the homogenizing influences of American culture began to prevail, the Ukrainian language took a back seat to English, and by the time I came to America as an infant soon after World War II, the older, established Ukrainian community was beginning to fade away, its members blending into the fabric of American life.

Now, as I look at the pictures of the young singers in their embroidered shirts, the performers gathered round the dancemaster Vasile Avramenko or the sober-faced members of the Ukrainian National Association standing frozen in rows at a picnic long ago, I wonder what ever happened to the descendants of these people who had once defined themselves by their membership in a Ukrainian church, dance group or choir.

Some like the Szmagalas of Cleveland or the Kuropases of Chicago never left the community. The grandchild continues to serve with as much dedication and sacrifice as the immigrant once did. But what about the others? Is it inevitable that having become Americans and severed their ties with organized Ukrainian life they are forever lost to the identity that animated their grandparents? Does the same fate await my own grandchildren?

Our son is a second grader at Goldwood Primary School in Rocky River, a suburb of Cleveland on the other side of town from Parma where the bulk of the Ukrainian community is located. In January I was asked to be part of the school's Heritage Days, where parents and others tell the children about their ethnic heritage. About 20 cultures were represented. I was pleasantly surprised when the principal, Mrs. Rounds, greeted my wife and me and mentioned that she was half-Ukrainian. "One of us..," I thought.

We were assigned to a classroom where we set up the props - pysanky, embroidery, an inlaid wooden dish, a small sheaf of wheat and a magnet board with animals from the Ukrainian folk tale "The Mitten." The room mother assigned to help had an Italian surname. "I'm Ukrainian, too," she said; I found out we had gone to the same high school just a few years apart and had grown up a block away from each other.

"To tell you the truth," she confided, "I didn't like to say I was Ukrainian. Now with independence, I don't mind at all."

The day went well. The children identified Ukraine on the globe, examined the pysanky and other items, listened raptly as more and more animals piled into the mitten the little boy had lost in the forest, and later in their classrooms took out their blue and yellow crayons to draw pictures of the Ukrainian flag. My son got to be a star when he read from a Ukrainian book of folktales so his classmates could hear the sound of the Ukrainian language.

A few days later, unrelated to anything I was doing at my son's school, I got a letter from Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur of Toledo. I first met her in 1982, her first year in the House. As a Ukrainian American working on Capitol Hill, I was heavily involved that year in efforts to win approval for a congressional commission on the famine in Ukraine. The Reagan administration was fighting the Ukrainian community on this issue, and we desperately needed congressional support. That's when Rep. Kaptur came forward, identified herself as a Ukrainian American, and stood up to the State Department officials who said the private sector could study the issue a whole lot better and besides, they whispered, accounts of the famine might be somewhat exaggerated. The U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, of course, was established and now no one questions the historical legitimacy of the Great Famine anymore. Rep. Kaptur deserves a lot of the credit for helping to get the commission approved.

So now it's 16 years later, Rep. Kaptur is a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, and she's writing to tell me that she reads The Ukrainian Weekly and is asking me to help, if I can, with her Rural Integrated Community Development Project, which she launched as a tribute to her mother, Anastasia, and father, Stephen, and dedicated to the people of western Ukraine, where she and her brother Stephen trace their roots.

With the help of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Ohio State University and dozens of friends in the U.S. and Ukraine, Rep. Kaptur is using her organizational skills and her political clout to assist two villages in the Khmelnytskyi Oblast in Ukraine, which the congresswoman had quietly visited for several days last August. They could be any of thousands of similar villages in Ukraine: isolated and desperately poor, cut off from markets, from communications links, from any chance of prosperity. The idea is to prime the pump for Ukraine's rural economy by creating a demonstration development project that could then be duplicated in other villages, raions and oblasts. In her quiet way, Marcy Kaptur is doing what she can to help the country her parents taught her to respect and, yes, to love.

So whatever happened to the descendants of all those Ukrainian Americans in the photographs from three-quarters of a century ago? Don't worry. They're everywhere. They're principals, primary school room mothers and members of Congress, and more and more will be showing up on behalf of Ukrainian projects. Why? For the same reason the room mother at Goldwood Primary no longer denies her Ukrainian heritage: independence.

That doesn't mean Rep. Kaptur or others were ashamed to admit their origin - far from it. Rep. Kaptur joined the fight to establish the Famine Commission in 1982 when that seemed kind of quirky to a lot of people in the State Department and in the media. Now, with independence, Ukraine is relevant and that makes everything Ukrainian a whole lot more interesting to a lot of people, from first graders at a suburban primary school to officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture who are lending their expertise to help lift the "Breadbasket of Europe" into the 20th century.

As my wife and children were leaving Goldwood Primary School at the end of the Heritage Day, Mrs. Rounds thanked us and told us that she does pysanky herself. "It's so relaxing," she said. After my presentation to five classes of primary school kids, I understood why she needed to relax.

As for the room mother, she told me it might be fun to make some pyrohy for her Italian-Ukrainian-American children.

Me? I'll be saying a prayer for Congresswoman Kaptur and the Anastasia project. I hope it works.