“Lesia and I: A Progress Report and a Ukrainian-American Love Story,” by Myron B, Kuropas. Bloomington, Ind.: Xlibris, 2014. ISBN: 978-1-4990-6849-8, softcover, 347 pp., $19.99. (Also available in hardcover and as an e-book.)
Myron Kuropas’s new book is about you, and it’s about me, and – as the title promises – it also is “Lesia and I, A Progress Report and a Ukrainian-American Love Story.”
You could call it a memoir, or an autobiography, that forms a matrix on which Ukrainian American modern history is embroidered. It reminds us of many things already forgotten, some never known but very much a part of our Ukrainian American narrative from the 1920s to the mid-2000s.
Let me cite an example: My adult daughter flipped through the book and asked me, “What is ODWU?” With my 60 years’ experience writing for Ukrainian media, I told her. But then I thought, ODWU hasn’t been in the news lately; do our people still remember it? So I asked a colleague closer to my age, what ODWU stood for. He knew the organization’s background, but he couldn’t right away decipher the acronym. Can you? Yet ODWU is a major element of our Ukrainian American history. Dr. Kuropas’s “love story” is a handy book to have for reference.
For instance, when one of my grandchildren (all of whom are pupils at Ukrainian Saturday schools), asks me, “Didu, what are these Melnykivtsi and Banderivtsi?” I’ll tell him or her, “Read page 18 in Kuropas’s book. It’s all there in less than a page of text.”
Essentially, Dr. Kuropas is a teacher with wide theoretical and practical experience, and he knows how to serve knowledge in a palatable way.
By way of full disclosure, I have known Myron Kuropas for nearly 60 years, and I was present at his wedding to Lesia Waskiw, way back then. Actually the book, according to the author, was written to mark the couple’s 50th wedding anniversary. But since becoming an American citizen in 1967, I am pretty sure that I have never voted for the same candidates as Dr. Kuropas in U.S. elections. And he has never lobbied me.
The book is written on the matrix of his and Lesia’s life. And that matrix was quite out of the ordinary.
For instance, when Myron was a child, among the guests visiting his parents in Chicago was Col. Roman Sushko, an icon in the Ukrainian nationalist circles. It’s as if Yasir Arafat of the Palestinian Liberation Organization was visiting a Palestinian family in America. Col. Sushko took little Myron on a morning walk in Chicago. (A note on the PLO: I have been using this analogy with my non-Ukrainian friends in Canada and in the United States for years, saying I was born on the “West Bank” of Eastern Europe – in Lviv in the 1930s, on territory we lost to Poland that Western European nations and the U.S. glibly approved.)
Stephen Kuropas, Myron’s father, was one of those bitter fighters for independence of western Ukraine, who emigrated to America to lick his wounds and start new Ukrainian patriotic organizations in order to be ready when the time came. Myron Kuropas, as a child, lived in a house with a large portrait of Col. Yevhen Konovalets, the founder of modern Ukrainian resistance. Col. Sushko took him for walks. And “Tato” – as the author constantly refers to his father – also knew leaders of other Ukrainian American organizations, including a leader of the Hetman movement (Ukrainian monarchists) in America and took young Myron to visit them.
That was young Myron’s education in the city of Chicago and on farms nearby owned by his parents and some of their friends.
Tato Kuropas received his higher education in Czechoslovakia, but with Poland ruling over what once was Tato’s self-determined and fought-for independent country, the Western Ukrainian National Republic, it had no need of his services, unless he declared himself a Pole, or he could emigrate overseas. (Now you see why I say I was born on the East European “West Bank”? Poland, today’s best friend of Ukraine, in those post-World War I days persecuted my parents and my aunt in their own land.)
In America, Tato Kuropas got to own a gasoline service station (incidentally, with the help of Czechoslovak diplomats), and it was interesting for me to find out exactly how the U.S. government limited gasoline sales during the second world war. I didn’t have a car during World War II, but I well remember long lines during the Nixon administration when oil-producing countries (except Nigeria) cut back on oil exports to the U.S. In his book Dr. Kuropas describes the special windshield stickers on cars indicating how much and when the owners could buy fuel. As a son of a service station owner during the war, he knew the rules.
Myron Kuropas had somewhat unusual experience for a young person of his generation in America. His parents sent him to Europe, for a semester at a university. Not many Ukrainian diasporans studied abroad in the late 1950s. And the little older young Ukrainian Americans had just returned from Europe after liberating displaced persons like me from the Third Reich; they wouldn’t have wanted to go back. (Thank you, American veterans.)
Dr. Kuropas shares interesting stories about such Ukrainian National Association (UNA) personalities as the late Joseph Lesawyer, UNA president, who had been a U.S. Army captain defeating Germany during the war. Dr. Kuropas knew him well; I knew him well. Do you remember Joe Lesawyer? According to Dr. Kuropas it was Joe Lesawyer, then a UNA vice-president, who bought Soyuzivka in the Catskill region of New York state and later, as UNA president, built a skyscraper in Jersey City, N.J., for the UNA headquarters.
Although this is an autobiography or a memoir, where the author could embellish the narrative, Dr. Kuropas is brutally honest when it comes to failures in his life: the schools he didn’t get into and the jobs he sought unsuccessfully, and he does it with humor in a very readable text. Read how he applied for unemployment insurance after his White House job ended when Jimmy Carter came to Washington. You will read it three times and laugh.
Dr. Kuropas’s jobs exposed him to interesting information. For instance – where would you learn what Patriarch Josyf Slipyj thought of the Oval Office in the White House, if it were not for Myron Kuropas who worked for President Gerald Ford? Dr. Kuropas brought Cardinal Slipyj for a visit with the president. Having spent 18 years in the Soviet gulag, the cardinal, then archbishop of Lviv, was once brought to the office of Lavrentiy Beria, the head of Stalin’s secret police and of all the Soviet political prisons. Beria’s office, in comparison with the Oval Office, was grand, the cardinal told Dr. Kuropas. (Here I would have to agree with the patriarch. I have been to at least two dozen presidencies in African countries, and each one was grander than the Oval Office in Washington.) It’s not the furniture or the square footage that makes an office important. But the cardinal was not impressed and he told this to Dr. Kuropas. And now we know, too.
Dr. Kuropas, his Tato and his sons were active in the Ukrainian National Association and much of the memoir deals with the forgotten and little known facts about that citadel of Ukrainian America, and it is worth knowing and remembering the details. Earlier, Dr. Kuropas wrote a book about UNA as the “Ukrainian-American Citadel: The First One Hundred Years of the Ukrainian National Association” (1996, published in Ukrainian in 2004). I think it is useful to publish Dr. Kuropas’s books in Ukraine in Ukrainian translation, because after all these years Ukrainians in Ukraine know woefully little about us diasporans. Lesia and Myron Kuropas have worked as professionals in independent Ukraine and must have a good idea how “they” perceive “us.”
There are very good photos in the book. But, alas, it does not have an index. As in all scholarly books published in the Soviet Union (and, unfortunately, post-Soviet Union), I have been writing index notes on the back pages as I read the book to be able to go back to some parts. For instance, do you know or remember why there are two Ukrainian “central organizations” in America? It’s in Dr. Kuropas’s book: p. 169, according to my handwritten index.
It is worth remembering that it was Dr. Kuropas who did the heavy lifting for all of us and our organizations when it came to John Demjanjuk. The book has a chapter titled “The Demjanjuk Debacle.” Dr. Kuropas also lobbied successfully for a U.S. commission on the Ukrainian Famine and worked with the Helsinki Commission, which continues to monitor human rights in independent Ukraine, as it did in Soviet Ukraine.
Buy a copy of “Lesia and I” and learn some things about our community, as this 79-year-old scribe did. And enjoyed it.