FOR FATHER'S DAY: Our fathers' gifts (06/18/06)

FOR FATHER'S DAY

Our fathers' gifts

by Anisa Handzia Sawyckyj

In tribute to my Tato, Zynovij Sawyckyj

November 26, 1912 - May 30, 2006

When Father's Day comes around, we think of gifts and cards and special surprises for our fathers. As we think of what we could get them - tool kits, ties, car accessories or even trips abroad - we also sometimes, but not always, recall what it is that our fathers gave and continue to give us on a daily basis.

For those of us whose fathers are no longer among the living, there can no longer be the giving and getting of material things. We are by necessity left only with things of the spirit: the memories of what our fathers said, what they did, what principles they lived by and what legacy they left us.

Good fathers in every generation leave wonderful gifts for their children. But every generation lives in different circumstances, and in every generation those gifts can be different.

There were other generations of Ukrainian fathers both in Ukraine and in the United States who left their children great legacies. But I want to pay tribute to one specific generation, the fathers of the World War II era who came to the United States as young men, that transitional generation of the 1940s, '50s and '60s who were born in Ukraine but raised their families in a completely different world - the U.S.A.

My late father, Zynovij Sawyckyj, who died on May 30, at the age of 93, was of the generation of the World War II period, a political émigré from Ukraine, whose life and the life of his children was shaped by the momentous decision to leave his country at the age of 32. When he, his young wife and widowed mother joined the mass of 200,000 political émigrés who left Ukraine in 1944 as the Soviet Army approached, the options of what he as a father would be able to offer his yet unborn children changed forever.

The choices of what to bring with him would echo down the generations of his family: family photos, diaries, letters, prayerbooks, his late father's, the Rev. Josyf Sawyckyj's, priestly vestments and cross. It had to be small and it had to be light. But it had to be heavy with meaning for him and his family.

The experience of World War II and the great migration westward toward freedom was the great crucible that shaped our fathers' generation.

Some were destroyed by the trauma of the experience, for others it served as a great testing ground for their spirit, for their faith in God and for their commitment to the native land that they had to leave forever. And they were made stronger by the experience.

And then came the children. Born in refugee camps in Austria and Germany, or in the early years of immigration in the United States and Canada, we opened our eyes and saw fathers who, weary from a day (or night) of work at the factory, looked at us with hope and awe, seeing their past, present and future lying in their arms. We became their inspiration.

As we grew, we became aware that our fathers were different from the fathers of other "American" kids we knew. These were dads who, after a hard day's work, didn't put up their feet, have a martini and watch TV; they came home, changed out of their work clothes, checked the pages of (the then daily) Svoboda, put on their ties and went down to the Ukrainian church hall for an UCCA meeting. In the small town of Utica, N.Y., where I grew up, my Tato wasn't playing baseball or golfing on weekends - he was at the "tserkovna zalia," (church hall), playing the piano in a Taras Shevchenko "akademia."

Our fathers showed us the dignity of hard work. No matter that they were attorneys who found themselves sweeping supermarket floors, or physicians pumping gas, or professors working on a G.E. assembly line - they were grateful to have a job that would allow them to bring food to their families and put a roof over their heads. Our fathers showed us how to bear indignities with dignity, and to fulfill their primary responsibility as breadwinners for their families with consistency and with an eye to the future.

Our fathers showed us pride - pride of the good variety, what they now call self-worth: pride in their Ukrainian heritage, pride in their children's success in school, pride in a Ukrainian community project well done.

And then there is faith. Our fathers gave us a well-grounded belief system that had sustained them in the trials of their life, an abiding personal faith. Our fathers actually prayed, and they actually went to church each and every Sunday, and weekdays on important holy days, too. They observed the fast, they held candles for the priest at the reading of the Gospel during liturgy, they sang in the church choir, they carried the "plaschanytsia" on Good Friday and they took us caroling at Christmastime. They gave us a profound respect for the institution of our Church. Along with this came the responsibility of financial support for the Church, the small but consistent contributions from their meager wages that sustained our churches.

And then there were the aunts and uncles, the cousins and the godparents. For close to 20 years, on weekends we were on the road, visiting relatives in far-flung Northeast cities. As we children played, our elders sat at the dining room table, reminiscing about their youth in Ukraine, recalling lost worlds, reliving the trauma of their migration during the war years, and in the process healing their wounded hearts, gathering strength to face the future.

Our fathers built and maintained families, but they also built a bigger family: the Ukrainian community and its myriad institutions. On the foundations of the generations of Ukrainian American men before them, and sometimes completely from scratch, they built Ukrainian Saturday schools, scouting organizations, academic societies, Church institutions. This network of organizations was a safety net for our community, a safe haven to nurture its young and old. But it was a porous net, not a solid wall that held us in. We were free to come and go. Some went, but many stayed and took advantage of our fathers' sheltering arms, that built up protection for our communities that lasted more than half a century.

Our fathers were not materialists who worked hard to acquire "stuff" to show off to their friends and neighbors. They had lived through the war, and they saw first-hand that material possessions can be gone in a puff of smoke. They lived on a different plane. They taught us about sacrifice, about delaying gratification, about saving for a rainy day, about giving up short-term pleasures for long-term gains.

We didn't get fancy clothes, we didn't get cars when we were 16, we didn't get sent to Europe on class trips. We got college scholarships based on need. Our parents were saving for their first family car, for a first house, for a particular Ukrainian organization or even for food packages to send to relatives back in Ukraine. But we did not feel poor, we were in the same boat as other Ukrainian American children, and we knew we were special and "different" from the other "American kids," but different in a good way. Our fathers taught us not to see this difference as a source of shame, but as a source of honor and pride in our uniqueness.

Our fathers gave us a sense of history, a sense that we were tied to a long line of ancestors who made us what we are and toward whom we owed a certain spiritual obligation. In the days before TV and video games, looking at family albums and listening to stories about eccentric uncles and important historical figures in our family's ancestry was actually a source of entertainment.

Our fathers gave us our language and our culture. We would not dream of speaking to our fathers in any language other than Ukrainian, nor to speak to them with disrespect. Our fathers taught us that we must speak Ukrainian not only because it is our ancestors' language, but because we were carriers of a language that was slowly being eradicated in Ukraine and we were its representatives abroad whose mission it was to save it from destruction. We were little crusaders of sorts. It was an intriguing concept to us. We often lapsed into English among ourselves, but deep inside we knew that Ukrainian was the language of our parents, and hence of our hearts.

Our fathers gave us bedrock stability. We knew that no matter what, our fathers would be there to protect us and to help us. We grew up in an age before divorce, and we knew that our fathers were there to stay, and we took comfort in that without even being aware that it could be any different.

Our fathers gave us hope. As we watched our fathers struggle with the vicissitudes of immigrant life, with traumatic memories of wartime experiences, with marital or parenting problems, with financial issues, with community challenges, we saw that with faith, hope and trust in themselves and in God, they managed to cope with all the challenges life brought them. As children, we picked up these life lessons from our dads subliminally. We began to appreciate them more fully only as we matured and became parents ourselves. Our fathers' lives were an inspiration - we knew we would be able to cope with our problems because we had seen our fathers, against overwhelming odds, cope successfully with theirs.

Our fathers showed us how to live. But another great gift, if we were really fortunate, is that they showed us how to die. With the same stoicism and faith that sustained them in their long life journey, they went to meet their maker with profound strength, dignity and amazing grace that we can only hope and pray to find someday in ourselves.

Finally, our fathers gave us the greatest gift a human being can have. In choosing to leave their beloved Ukraine which was about to fall to a totalitarian Russian Communist system that would seek to obliterate individualism, root out the ancient Ukrainian culture and the Christian faith, and crush the human spirit, they were making a profound choice not just for themselves, but for their unborn children and grandchildren. They were asserting their God-given right to a life as a free human being.

In this, they were one in spirit with the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, whose great principles established a country that has given millions of refugees like our fathers a chance to live in freedom.

In their lifetimes, our fathers of that great World War II generation were a powerful influence on our lives. In their deaths, their power is not diminished, because their power came from their indomitable spirits, which live on in us. Our memories of what they were and what they represented will sustain us from generation to generation.

So here's to our beloved Fathers, living and deceased. God bless them, every one.

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