PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

A summertime perspective

George and Ira Gershwin said it best: "Summertime and the livin' is easy." In that spirit, I vowed to take it easy and avoid anything serious in the next couple columns. I would simply enjoy the season. After all, the French take off for the whole month of August, so why can't I just enjoy the hot sun and some cool drinks? I'll go see some movies, read a few books, drop some meat on the fire and then maybe walk a couple blocks with the missus and the kids to the shores of Lake Erie to look at sail boats and watch the sun go down. The kids can tell stories about their adventures at Plast Camp and I'll tell them how pampered their generation is and how much tougher we were when we were young. "Yeah, right" they'll say as my wife laughs. Once it's dark, we'll sit on the porch while our children catch fireflies on the front lawn. Then I can write about it for my Perspectives column.

The problem with this whole scenario is the way reality has a way of intruding on your reverie. I found that out in 1971 when I was 23 and backpacking in Europe. I took 4-5 pairs of underwear, three shirts, two pairs of pants, a couple pairs of socks, a toothbrush, laundry bag and razor, sleeping bag, Eurail Pass and a wallet with a few hundred dollars in traveler's checks: just enough to get me through two months of summer travel.

Imagine my surprise in early August when I went to the American Express office in Amsterdam to change my American money into Dutch currency and instead of getting the usual four guilders for each dollar, I got three guilders and change. Overnight, the United States had gone off the gold standard and devalued the dollar. Suddenly I had measurably less cash than I had before.

I decided to splurge and buy a copy of the International Herald Tribune to find out what was going on. President Richard Nixon, it said, had good reason for devaluing the dollar. Faced with growing inflation combined with high unemployment and rising interest rates, he did what presidents have to do. By his action, the price of U.S. goods to other countries would go down, thus promoting U.S. exports and creating jobs at home. And that was good. Only now my budget was shot and I'd have to sleep in parks or on some Mediterranean beach. (With my Eurail Pass, I could get there overnight.)

And so I learned at a much later age than a lot of other people that history does not respect anyone's summer vacation. July and August are just as apt to surprise us with dramatic events as any other month in the year.

Perhaps none was more earth-shattering than the June 28, 1914 assassination in Sarajevo of the heir to the Austrian throne. This precipitated a crisis like no other. Throughout July, diplomats exchanged ultimatums while generals mobilized their armies. By August, young men from all corners of Europe were marching toward the borders of their respective countries to begin four years of mechanized slaughter.

That July, my grandmother Antonina was five months pregnant with my father. When he was born in December 1914, his first cousin who had been among the first to be mobilized that summer, was already in his grave, killed near Ternopil in the first days of the war. By the time it was over, millions had died, four empires had collapsed and the seeds were planted for future cataclysms.

The minor inconvenience I faced in August 1971 was trivial compared to the way vacations were disrupted during that long-ago summer of 1914. The same catastrophic disruption happened again on June 26, 1941 when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. That came as a huge shock. Just two summers earlier in late August, Stalin and Hitler had signed a Non-Aggression Pact dividing Europe between them and pledging to assist each other's ambitions. Now, the dictator Hitler was betraying the dictator Stalin. For the next three years in winter as well as summer the Nazis and the Soviets clashed throughout the length of Ukraine.

In June 1944, America entered the war in a big way with the invasion of Normandy. All summer, the Allies drove the Germans out of France. A year later, on August 6 and 9, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war in the Pacific.

Since then, there have been plenty of dramatic summer events. In August 1961, for example, Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev ordered the construction of the Berlin Wall, dividing a city and giving the world a visible symbol of the moral bankruptcy of communism. For all their happy talk and propaganda, the Soviets couldn't answer John Kennedy when he delivered his inspiring "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in June 1963 or Ronald Reagan 24 years later in June when he hurled the challenge: "Mr. Gorbachev! Tear down that wall!"

In 1968, another Soviet dictator, Leonid Brezhnev, chose August to invade Czechoslovakia. (That was also the summer that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles and the Democratic Convention imploded in Chicago. I was working in a hot, smelly factory in Cleveland and watched it all on TV.) It was an August day in 1964 when Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving President Johnson open-ended authority to wage war in Vietnam and it was August when President Nixon resigned from the presidency ten years later.

No August in my memory, though, has been more memorable than 1991. It began with President George Bush's regrettable speech to the Ukrainian Rada on August 1.

There was no connection, but the very next day Iraq invaded Kuwait, launching the Persian Gulf War. Two and a half weeks later, on August 19, a bunch of drunken KGB and military officials in Moscow attempted a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. It failed, as we know, and on August 24, Ukraine declared her independence.

Summer, most of the time, is really grand and I have more than my share of marvelous memories: lots of trips, weddings, concerts, the mountains, the beach, Soyuzivka and a never-to-be-forgotten "forced march" along Chicago's lakefront one hot August day. But there was also that day in July when I took my mother, terminally ill with cancer, to the hospice and she never came home again. That summer, the house felt pretty empty.

So it's summertime and the livin' is easy. May it always be that way; and indeed that's the way it's always been. Except for when it wasn't.

A few years ago, I was in the car with a business associate on a trip that lasted a couple of hours. In casual conversation, I remarked that I had been to a number of funerals lately. Indeed, I had. There was Stephan Zorij's. For nearly fifty years, he produced a Ukrainian radio hour on a number of Cleveland radio stations. He also worked at the credit union. He knew me from when I was a little boy. Mr. Zorij signed the application for my first savings account. He was considerably older than I was, but he was a good friend. How could I not go to his funeral? He would certainly have gone to mine.

Then there was Mr. Fur. To support his family, he ran a grocery store business in Cleveland's Tremont neighborhood. His real job, though, was community leader: among his many accomplishments, he took the initiative to set up a Ridna Shkola in Cleveland, the Ukrainian Saturday School that helped to prepare dozens of Clevelanders to take leading roles in Ukrainian American life. These are people who worked on Capitol Hill, at the Voice of America, the Commerce Department, the U.S. Information Agency, the American Embassy in Kyiv and American law firms that do business in Ukraine, not to mention state government in Ohio and the private sector. Certainly, I wanted to pay tribute to this wonderful man. So did a whole lot of other people.

There was also Zenia Kaminsky, my sister-in-law's mother. A tiny woman with a giant heart and boundless courage, she embodied the grit that her whole generation demonstrated. Her family contributed immeasurably to the struggle for Ukraine's independence and found themselves forced to emigrate to America in the late 1940s to flee Stalin's oppression. She was firm, gentle and wise, she was a great grandmother, plus she told great stories about the war and the peril of coming to the West just days ahead of the Red Army advance. I had the honor of bearing her coffin. Of course, I came to her funeral.

Upon hearing my casual remark that I had been to a lot of funerals in recent weeks my friend told me that he hadn't been to a funeral in twenty years. Hadn't been to a wedding in a long time either. I didn't pursue it, but obviously we were worlds apart and it all involved community - I was part of one and he wasn't.

I saw what that meant last week at the Pysanyi Kamin (Painted Rock) Ukrainian Plast (scout) camp.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, July 21, 2002, No. 29, Vol. LXX

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