"An unidentified guest," and our family collections (PART I) (04/09/06)

"An unidentified guest," and our family collections

by Yaro Bihun

PART I

WASHINGTON - To most Ukrainian Weekly readers, he was the "unidentified guest" sitting next to Metropolitan Myroslav Ivan Lubachivsky in the 1979 photograph accompanying a "Community Profile" feature about Apopka, Fla., in the issue dated March 12.

For those who lived in the Cleveland area between the late 1940s and mid-1960s, however, there was no doubt whatsoever about his identity. He was Msgr. Dmytro Gresko, pastor of Ss. Peter and Paul Ukrainian Catholic Church, then the largest Ukrainian parish in that part of the country. He oversaw its rapid expansion into what later became four parishes, one of which - St. Josaphat, in Parma - would become an eparchy for the region.

He also built a parish grade school in Parma - then named after the two apostles and now called St. Josaphat Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral School - that has educated hundreds of its children, many now prominent in their professions and active in developing our communities in this country as well as in Ukraine.

As is the case with many old photographs containing "unidentified" guests, neighbors, colleagues, friends and even possible family members, there is always a good story or two behind those now-deceased and too-often forgotten faces. Seeing these two clerics sitting next to each other in this photo and being familiar with their relationship, I was reminded of that old Biblical dictum about "the last shall be first."

Our family settled in Cleveland soon after the USS Gen. Harry Taylor brought us and a boatload of other lucky post-war refugees into New York harbor in 1950. After a couple of months on a farm near Colver, a coal mining town in central Pennsylvania near Johnstown where my father's sister Maria Fedorka had settled back in 1913, I was glad to enter Ss. Peter and Paul parish grade school in Parma. There, unlike the first few months trying to learn without knowing English at the school in Colver, the nuns and most of the other teachers could help me, my brother and other recent immigrant children along with a bit of Ukrainian.

The parish priests taught classes as well. Not Msgr. Gresko, of course, but his assistant, the Rev. Andrew Ulicky, taught a class, as did the new 36-year-old priest to join the parish, the Rev. Myroslav Lubachivsky.

Being the lowest-ranking of the three, Father Lubachivsky also seemed to get most of the early morning liturgy assignments, funerals and a good share of the Saturday weddings. He also got to drive the yellow school bus, although most of the immigrant children in the early 1950s were bussed in from the poorer Cleveland neighborhoods in rented city buses. And, to keep boredom at bay while teaching the seventh-graders, he would introduce us to some Greek, Latin and Hebrew in his lectures.

The grade school was unique in many other ways as well. We did not have any team sports, but we had a symphony orchestra. Filling its 50 or so positions was no easy feat for Jane Keller, its first conductor, especially from a pool of new Ukrainian immigrant children who, for some reason, only learned to play either the piano or violin at home. Many a young pianist was forced to learn an additional "non-conventional" instrument to fill in the orchestra vacancies.

Msgr. Gresko retired in the mid-1960s, to Florida where he died in 1986. Father Ulicky later got his own parish and the rank of monsignor in Johnstown; he died in 1983. And most every Ukrainian knows what happened to Father Lubachivsky. The last became the first: he became a cardinal and the head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church worldwide, residing in Lviv, in newly independent Ukraine. He died in 2000.

Seeing the photo with "an unidentified" Msgr. Gresko in The Weekly reminded me, once again, of the movie "Everything Is Illuminated" I saw last October. It wasn't the best of the handful of movies I saw last year, I'll admit, but on a very personal level, it was the most memorable.

By that I mean that it keeps coming back to me - when I saw The Weekly photo, when my sister Marta Kowcz (married by Father Lubachivsky, as was my younger sister Christine Gross ) mailed me a few more of Mama's 1930s photographs from Peremyshl (Przemysl) over the holidays, and just about every time I go to the closet and, reaching up for my hat and gloves, I see one end of that old, finely decorated wooden box.

It's our family "tabernacle," a portable sanctuary, like the one carried by the Jews during their wanderings from Egypt. It has sheltered the physical evidence of much of our history - its photographs, documents and other precious mementos - for more than 70 years, through a world war, occupations, incarcerations, dislocations, emigration, as well as, thank God, a long period of peace and prosperity in America.

Those who have seen "Everything Is Illuminated" or have read the novel it is based on by Jonathan Safran Foer will understand why it comes to mind. The film tells the story of Jonathan, a young Jewish American who travels to Ukraine to find "an unidentified" woman standing next to his grandfather in an old photograph, who, he is told, saved his grandfather from the Holocaust.

We all have countless "unidentified" old - and even not so old - photos in our family collections. Indeed, as the years go by, more and more of them pass into that category. And that's a shame, for this not only deprives us of our knowledge of some long-removed people and events; we lose a part of ourselves, of what made us what we are today and what our next generation will be tomorrow. We inherit more than just genes from our ancestors; what they did and endured is passed on and becomes a part of us as well.

And there are a lot of very good "unidentified" stories waiting to be discovered.

Continued in the next issue of The Ukrainian Weekly.

PART I

CONCLUSION

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