Columnists

Fifty-year-old memories

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I was 20 years old in 1968 and a junior in college. The big concern for guys my age was the Vietnam War. Protected by a draft deferment, we debated the conflict, even as others who had graduated from high school with us were dying in jungles and rice paddies half a world away, their names now inscribed on the monument at the Mall in Washington. 

I was opposed to the war even as a freshman in 1965, writing an essay for an obligatory writing class how, with nearly 200,000 troops already committed, I thought it was a bad idea. 

My sophomore year I was at the University of Innsbruck for a study-abroad program. One of my adventures was hitchhiking to Vienna and the Austrian consul to Yugoslavia giving me a ride. He took an almost fatherly interest – tell me about yourself, he said, and do stay with my family when we get to Vienna.

Columnists

World Water Day – 2018

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At the end of March, Cleveland MetroParks – a 100-mile network of recreation areas, golf courses, trails, learning centers, etc. – invited the Ukrainian Museum-Archives (UMA) to be part of World Water Day. We didn’t even know there was such a celebration, but sure enough there is, sponsored by the United Nations, the World Wildlife Federation and other organizations. We readily agreed: UMA Curator Aniza Kraus prepared an exhibit and I, as “resident scholar,” prepared a PowerPoint presentation. That got me thinking about water in general, but also how it relates to Ukraine and its commonalities with Ohio and the Great Lakes – more than we realize, I discovered.

Columnists

A Valentine’s Day reflection

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February is the dreariest month, happily interrupted by Valentine’s Day, the holiday dedicated to love. Relatively new to Ukraine, it’s long been established in America. I remember exchanging flimsy cards in grade school asking every kid in the class to “be my Valentine.”

Ah love… There have been a billion songs, poems, movies, paintings, novels, operas, letters about that ineffable emotion, its absence generating as many expressions as its presence. I’ve been blessed to have both received love and bestowed it. For me it began, I know, when my parents – stateless and penniless survivors of war and imprisonment, their desperate flight from tyranny having brought them to a refugee camp in Austria nearly a thousand miles from home – discovered they’d have a child.

Columnists

Notre Dame’s Prof. McAdams

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“Call me Jim.” That’s how Prof. James McAdams responded when my wife and I introduced ourselves as Michael’s parents. At the time, our son was a freshman at the University of Notre Dame, taking “Jim’s” class on comparative politics.

Dr. McAdams, a friendly bearded man, is a world-class scholar who reaches thousands through his publications as well as an inspiring educator with popular classes of 60-plus, seminars of 10 to 20 and a counselor and mentor who meets with students one-on-one in his office, located a short walk from Notre Dame’s iconic Golden Dome and legendary football stadium.

Columnists

Celebrating revolution – or not

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In his 2005 state of the nation address, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the fall of the Soviet Union, “the greatest geo-political catastrophe of the century.” Few outside of Russia would agree, but apparently that’s what he believes. So how did Mr. Putin celebrate the centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution that brought Vladimir Lenin and global communism to power? He didn’t. For 75 years, November 7 was the principal holiday for Russia, Ukraine and the other 13 “republics” spread across a dozen time zones in the USSR and after World War II, extending west to Central European “satellites” (Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, etc.) and countries on other continents allied with Moscow (Cuba, China, Angola, etc.). Schools, factories and enterprises closed for parades, concerts, speeches and rivers of vodka.

Culture/Arts

Zankovetska Theater coming to North America

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CLEVELAND – The Maria Zankovetska National Drama Theater, in existence now for a century, is coming to North America in late October. The troupe traces its beginnings to 1917, at the time the Russian Empire fell and the Ukrainian Revolution began, when young Ukrainian activists established political and cultural organizations, including the first national theater in Kyiv. Its first production was presented at the Troyitsky National Home in Kyiv. In the 1930s, the group moved to Zaporizhia; after Soviet Ukraine incorporated Halychyna in the early 1940s, the theater moved to Lviv, where it’s been ever since under its current name. Three generations of Ukraine’s actors went through the Zankovetska Theater.

Columnists

Osyp Zinkewych, 1925-2017

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Years ago, I wrote a column dedicated to fathers – including my own, of course, but also those who served as mentors and helped to shape the person I’ve become. Premier among them was Osyp Zinkewych, the founder and tireless engine who ran Smoloskyp for 60-plus years. Beyond question, he was the most brilliant person I’ve ever known and I’ve worked with several extraordinary people. Sadly, my friend, colleague and inspiration, Zinkewych, passed away September 18 at the age of 92. I first met Zinkewych in 1974 following a presentation he made at a Cleveland-area college about the nascent dissident movement in Ukraine.

Columnists

On turning 70

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“The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”
– Psalms 90: 10
My parents, two brothers and I moved to Cleveland on my seventh birthday, September 5, 1954, just before Labor Day. I started the second grade two days later. We left Frackville in Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Region, our father driving a green ’52 Chevy on the newly constructed Pennsylvania Turnpike. That evening, we arrived at the house on Roanoke in a working class neighborhood that would be the family home for the next 30-plus years. It was a 10-minute walk for me to school and a short drive to the industrial valley where our father got a job, having networked with Cleveland’s Ukrainian American community: “new immigrants” with relationships from the “old country” going back to childhood; and “old immigrants” with roots in America established a generation before.

Columnists

Summer jobs

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It was the worst job I ever had. And it paid well. I was a “test carrier” at J&L Steel Co. Our next door neighbor was a union shop steward, and he arranged for me to be hired. I already had a job lined up in an inner-city high school in September, but I welcomed the opportunity to make good money over the summer.

Columnists

Zbigniew Brzezinski – an appreciation

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The world lost a giant when Zbigniew Brzezinski died last month. America lost a statesman; Ukraine lost a friend. I first became aware of Dr. Brzezinski in the early 1970s, reading his commentaries in Newsweek. That was during the depths of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union – with a vast military, nuclear arms, barbed wire borders and massive walls, transmitters jamming short-wave radio, an army of censors screening every word, every image, even musical notes and a network of agents, informants and listening devices spanning two continents – looked like it would last a thousand years. Across a 45-year divide, I don’t remember the specifics of Dr. Brzezinski’s columns, but I read them religiously.