Diverse Ukrainians of Houston united by common goal of preserving heritage (11/05/00)

Diverse Ukrainians of Houston united by common goal of preserving heritage

by Roma Hadzewycz

HOUSTON - The Ukrainian Americans of Houston defy easy categorization. Perhaps the best way to describe them as a group is to say they are diverse.

Eugene Kuchta, a former New Jerseyan (he's from Hillside), who was the initiator and the prime mover of the 25th anniversary celebration of the Ukrainian American Cultural Club of Houston (UACCH), related much of the Houston Ukrainian community's history to a visitor from the East Coast.

The "hromada" here is a mix of post-World War II immigrants, the third wave of immigration and others who came later because of job opportunities. There was a major influx of people between 1976 and 1984, thanks to an oil-driven economic boom, he explained. Then, in the late 1980s there was an outflux due to the city's economic collapse.

Mr. Kuchta, 44, a chemical engineer, and his family arrived in 1981, as he was transferred by his company, Union Carbide, to a newly created venture, UOP. In addition to his wife, Irene née Majnich (originally from Willimantic, Conn.), the family now includes two native Texans, sons, Andrew, 8, and Joseph, 3.

Mr. Kuchta, whose father arrived in the United States after World War II and whose mother's parents arrived before World War I, explained his community involvement: "As a youngster I was fed hors d'oeuvres. Now I want the full meal. I didn't suffer the burnout that many Ukrainians who are very heavily involved in community life do."

"And now, it's for the kids," he emphasized.

A quick perusal of the UACCH's 25th anniversary book shows Mr. Kuchta active in a variety of roles at a variety of events, from cultural displays to political events, from bowling to festivals. In 1998 he was the chairman of the Ss. Cyril and Methodius Slavic Heritage Days Festival, and he is also a former president of the UACCH.

The anniversary book features a quote from one of Mr. Kuchta's articles in The Texas Trident, the newsletter of the UACCH that was published in 1985-1988. "In trying to achieve ... success, the Houston Ukrainian community has the greatest resource of all: you! Let us maintain our heritage, not just for ourselves, but for generations to come. United we stand, divided we fall. Come join us!" Those appear to be words the Houston community lives by.

Speaking with many community members during the UACCH's anniversary weekend, The Weekly learned that most, like Michael and Oksana Danylyk, came here in the years following World War II. The Danylyks arrived from the displaced persons camps of Germany, where they had heard of Texas from a friend, Victor Balaban, who was headed for Houston to join his uncle. Thanks to that connection, the Danylyks were sponsored by a local Ukrainian, Bill Kory (Vasyl Koryvchak) and arrived in Houston on March 14, 1949.

In 1950, Mrs. Danylyk recalled, "we began to discuss what type of community we should organize. We gathered at the Rice Hotel and discussed how we should start a club and build a church."

The first club was soon formed: the Ukrainian American Club. Its president was Mr. Kory, while Mr. Danylyk was secretary. Mr. Danylyk recalled that he even traveled to a convention of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America to represent the Ukrainians of Houston.

Next came the church. Michael Balaban donated the land for the church and the people pledged amounts of $500 and $1,000 - a large sum at the time. Donations came in also from around the country. Ultimately, the church was built in 1957. There was much activity under the pastorship of the Rev. Dmytro Blazejowsky, according to Mrs. Danylyk, who added: "Life was wonderful and everything was being established."

Then, in 1975, the Ukrainian American Social and Cultural Club of Houston was founded (the "social" was later dropped), the result of a meeting in the living room of the Danylyks' home. Anne Polewchak was the first president of this new group which, the Danylyks underlined, was formed to unite all the people to work toward the general good of the entire community.

Twenty-five years later the UACCH remains the area's most significant organization of Ukrainians.

Some members of the Houston community arrived later, like Olga Dub (nee Puzyk), a member of the UACCH who emigrated to the United States in 1965 from the ethnically Ukrainian Lemkivschyna region, then part of Poland. Her father, who was born in Elizabeth, N.J., returned to Lemkivschyna. Later, she explained, he was arrested in 1946-1947, and the family was resettled as part of Akcja Wisla in the western part of Poland.

Mrs. Dub lived at first in New York City, then for a time in Newark, before moving to Houston in 1979, where her husband, Zenon, got a good job as an electrical mechanic. It was in Texas that their children - Nadia, who is now studying medicine in Lviv, Luba, a freshman at the University of Michigan, and 15-year-old Nestor - were born.

Mrs. Dub is active also in the Ukrainian National Association, and two years ago took over the post of secretary of UNA Branch 28. In that role she is focusing her efforts on enrolling local Ukrainian families of various backgrounds as members of this 106-year-old fraternal organization.

This reporter also had a chance to spend time with the Palmers, Bill and Olia (née Holowka). She is a transplant from Cleveland who arrived in Houston in 1979, and is a librarian at the M.D. Andersen Cancer Center, part of the huge Texas Medical Center. He is a geneticist-turned-computer-guy who has worked on databases for the medical field and has lived in Houston since 1988. Mr. Palmer calls himself "an adopted Ukrainian" (via his marriage three years ago to Olia).

Both Palmers are heavily involved in the Ukrainian community, with Ms. Palmer having held practically every office in the UACCH, and Mr. Palmer doing his share in everything from providing technical support for the anniversary book edited by his wife to making varenyky.

Mr. Palmer has strong opinions about how the Ukrainian American Cultural Club of Houston could extend its reach: "I feel the club should be Ukrainian - not limited to members of one parish. ... The Ukrainian community is not concentrated in one area but is from all parts of Houston. If the clubhouse was centrally located, we could attract all segments of the community." He added, "We could also attract businessmen who would be interested in doing business with Ukraine. I would include anyone who has an interest in Ukrainian culture."

Houstonians can boast of having a most prominent Ukrainian in their midst: Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper, 37, a Ukrainian American/German American from St. Paul, Minn., who arrived in Houston just over four years ago, lured by outer space.

It was in August 1996 that this lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy was named an astronaut candidate by NASA. Since then she has completed two years of training and evaluation, and is now qualified and awaiting flight assignment - on either the space shuttle, or the International Space Station - as a mission specialist.

As she provided a special tour of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center's Space Vehicle Mock-Up Facility, which contains full-size replicas of the space shuttle and the International Space Station that are used for training, as well as the old and new Mission Control Centers, the astronaut spoke of her training and her future with the space program.

Inside the space shuttle mock-up, she explained how the five to seven members of the crew are accommodated in tight quarters, adding, "and you thought 'tabir' was bad!" This was an allusion to camps she attended as a member of the Plast Ukrainian Scouting Organization. More than a year of an astronaut's training, Lt. Cmdr. Stefanyshyn-Piper said as she pointed to the countless controls, is spent on learning the shuttle systems.

Since she holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she could be tapped as a flight engineer on the crew. Lt. Cmdr. Stefanyshyn-Piper, who is married to a fellow engineer and NASA employee Glen Piper, says her 11-year-old son thinks "it's neat" that his mom is an astronaut.

Though she was an active member of the Twin Cities Ukrainian community in her youth - most notably in Plast, the local Ukrainian dance ensemble and St. Constantine Ukrainian Catholic Church - today Lt. Cmdr. Stefanyshyn-Piper is a peripheral member of the Ukrainian community. She delivered the keynote address at the Houston community's Ukrainian Independence Day celebration in 1998, but due to time constraints of her job - including training in far-flung places from northern Canada to Russia - she has not been able to join the UACCH.

Nonetheless, the astronaut sent greetings and regrets that she could not be present at the UACCH's anniversary banquet on September 30 as that evening she was back home in St. Paul receiving an achievement award from her alma mater, Derham High School. According to Mr. Kuchta, Lt. Cmdr. Stefanyshyn-Piper recently declared that beginning next year she will become an associate member of the club.

The latest newly arrived, too, have found a home among Ukrainians in Houston.

Among them are the Litvinchuks, originally of Kyiv, who came to Houston by way of Germany and Sweden, where Dr. Alexander Litvinchuk was a research scientist and professor. Since 1997 Dr. Litvinchuk has been a research associate professor with the Raman and Infrared Research Laboratory at the Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston, which is known as one of the best research and teaching universities in the country. He is part of a four-man team led by a Bulgarian scientist that is studying high-temperature superconductors.

Previously with the Institute of Semiconductor Physics at the Academy of Science of Ukraine (Kyiv), the Max-Planck Institute for Solid States Research in Stuttgart, Germany, the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, and the Institute for Solid State Physics at Technical University in Berlin, Germany, he was a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Max-Planck Society (both based in Munich) and the European Community (Brussels).

The Litvinchuks found the Ukrainian community because they had the phone number of one of the local activists. Soon, "very naturally," Dr. Litvinchuk, 42, noted, we became part of the community, which he described as "composed of many generations, of various religious denominations - in general an accepting community."

He is a member of the UACCH, while his wife, Tetyana, who was a teacher and vice-principal back in Kyiv and now is manager of a toy store, is a member of the UNWLA as well as principal of Houston's School of Ukrainian Studies.

The school's 35 students age 3-20 meet every Sunday after liturgy to learn Ukrainian language, music, dance, history, geography and literature, as well as catechism. Mrs. Litvinchuk brings much enthusiasm to her position as principal, as is obvious from her discussion of the school's students and programs, including a monthly newsletter for students called Soniashnyk (Sunflower), and the school's involvement in broader community events.

The Litvinchuks' two sons, Kostyantyn, 19, and Andrey, 12, also have found a home and friends here.

"We were surprised that within a year we met so many people of our age, and we have become very close with five or six families." Recalling the family's time in Europe, Dr. Litvinchuk said, "There were small communities in Germany, mostly older-generation immigrants. Perhaps that's what we were missing. It is very good for us here - and we did not even expect to find a community here. We thought all the Ukrainians were in New Jersey and Toronto."

His wife agreed. "We feel as if we are part of a family here, even though there are diverse people who came here for different reasons. We are impressed with this community and the diaspora," she continued. What is especially noteworthy, she added, is that "there is no divisiveness - we all work together."

Other newcomers from Ukraine were in evidence at the Protection of the Mother of God (Pokrova) Church on Sunday, October 1 - which happened to be the parish feast day.

A young woman from Ukraine approached this writer, asking whence I had arrived, believing that I, too, was a newcomer ... from Ukraine. Lilia Lohinska, 21, from Stryi, then introduced her two friends, Volodymyr Hnativ, 29, and Ivanka Bilych, 21, also from Stryi.

Mr. Hnativ who has been in the United States for three years, had arrived in Houston several months ago, where he was later joined by his two friends from back home in Ukraine. The three spoke of home - it was made clear that they all missed the mountainous landscape of western Ukraine - and their new home in Texas with much excitement.

Mr. Hnativ, it should be noted, was nominated for membership in the UACCH at the group's meeting held later that day.

At the parish luncheon following the liturgy and a special outdoor service in celebration of the feast of the Pokrova, the trio was promptly joined by the Rev. Andrij Dwulit, pastor, who welcomed them heartily and encouraged them to become a part of the community.

Leaving the church complex, this writer had no doubt that these latest immigrants to Houston also would find a place among fellow Ukrainians who all - at one time or another - were newcomers.

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