LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (03/09/03)

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Another Ukrainian victim of 9/11

Dear Editor:

In your January 12 edition (2002: The Year in Review) you published a list of Ukrainian victims of 9/11. Newsday of Long Island, N.Y., published biographies of the victims on a daily basis for months. The stories were so personal that you felt you had to read each one to honor each victim. Enclosed is one of a young Ukrainian girl who survived Chornobyl only to become a victim at the World Trade Center.

Betty Towner
Levittown, N.Y.

Editor's note: According to the clipping from Newsday (undated) sent by our reader, Helen Belikovsky, 38, was an assistant vice-president of Fred Alger Management, an investment firm with officers on the 93rd floor of WTC Tower 1. She had arrived in the U.S. eight years earlier with her husband, Boris, and their son, Eugene (now 13), from Kyiv, Ukraine; they settled in Mamaroneck, N.Y. "Ironically, we survived Chornobyl," Mr. Belikovsky told Newsday, explaining that they were on their honeymoon and away from Kyiv at the time of the nuclear disaster.

Ms. Belikovsky is the 10th victim of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers who is known to have Ukrainian roots.

News from Ukraine a depressing affair

Dear Editor:

Reading The Ukrainian Weekly, as well as the other sources of information about Ukraine, has become a depressing affair lately. This state of affairs is accentuated by the great but unfulfilled promises of national rebirth in 1991.

After nearly 12 years of independence, the ruling oligarchic cabal under President Leonid Kuchma is in full control of all social, economic, political and police levers in the country. And the cabal intends to keep a firm grip on the power into the foreseeable future.

On the opposing side of the equation, the inept actions of the democratic opposition can be best described as being full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. And under the skillful and cynical manipulation of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the administration of the country is sliding back into the swamp of Soviet/Russian imperial past.

The situation does not look much better in the diaspora. Some in the ranks of our once proud and intellectually proficient academic elite have reduced their potential for positive accomplishments to recycling of Soviet propaganda about all things Ukrainian. One has to go no further than "Encyclopedia of Rusyn History and Culture" by Profs. Paul R. Magocsi and Ivan Pop, recently reviewed in The Ukrainian Weekly. The book parrots the Moscow line regarding Ukraine, and it is hard to say if this is due to the intellectual ineptness of the authors, or simply to the lack of original thought on their part. But that does not stop Prof. Magocsi, who holds the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto, from adding insult to injury by proclaiming that: "The book is not written for Ukrainians." The audacity and arrogance of this statement implies that Ukrainians, to him, are some sort of a separate and intellectually inferior group, not capable of comprehending the pearls of his wisdom.

In this generally dismal and depressing landscape of our intellectual present it was refreshing to see a ray of sunshine and hope in a story celebrating the 132nd anniversary of Lesia Ukrainka's birth. It is the brilliance of Ukrainian culture reflected in the works of such literary giants as Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko and Lesia Ukrainka that has preserved our national consciousness and identity for so many centuries of foreign oppression. And it is the greatness of Ukrainian culture that will assure our continued existence as an ethnic entity for centuries to come.

Ihor Lysyj
Austin, Texas

Addendum

Donations to the Ukrainian Eye Project referred to in a letter to the editor headlined "Eye project seeks support" (February 24), may be sent to: Dr. William Selezinka, (Account No. 10896-03083), 12176 Sand Trap Row, San Diego, CA 92128. Tax-deductible donations will be acknowledged in writing.

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