Ukrainian Museum and Archives seeks to preserve a nation

The feature article below is reprinted from the Cleveland Free Times. The article published here is a slightly edited version of the piece that appeared in the issue dated September 11-17, 1996 (Vol. 4, Issue 51). The photos reproduced on these pages are courtesy of the Ukrainian Museum and Archives.

by John Hyduk

CLEVELAND - The day was over and the work was ended, and now Andrew Fedynsky had a chance to disappear and be a father again. Instead, he chose to stay a while longer in a room in Tremont and be a son.

The rooms upstairs are decorated with art: big, modern-expressionist busts of the great Ukrainian culturalist Ivan Franko and the immortal Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, both the handiwork of Ukrainian master sculptor Alexander Archipenko, and if you've never heard of any of them, well, whose fault is that?

He tapped at a computer keyboard, wandering through a field of blue screens. "I think you'll appreciate this," he says. Mr. Fedynsky is tapping as fast as he can.

"Look," Mr. Fedynsky says to the screen full of titles. "Suppose you're interested in recorded music; we've got quite a collection of 78s. So you move to the time period - the 1920s - and the kind of music you're looking for ... here, 'Orchestra Bratia' - that's 'The Brothers' Orchestra.' And these are the recordings we have."

Mr. Fedynsky sat surrounded by the shadows, the archives so obsessively and lovingly collected by his father, and all the fathers. How many things - books and manuscripts, photographs and fine art - were here? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? It depended on how you counted, and Andy Fedynsky has counted them all.

* * *

This is a story about good and evil, about collecting what has been scattered, about reclaiming what has been lost. The archivist studied memories, witnessed the simultaneous compression and unfolding of time, because he believed in the power of memories to change the size and the shape of the emptiness in the heart made by their absence. What the archivist studied was also the future: he'd seen its secrets and could feel its power.

Which is why the house at 1202 Kenilworth Ave. is home to something called the Ukrainian Museum and Archives. And why Andy Fedynsky will tell anyone who'll listen about its treasures, and its mission.

"There's an interesting story behind that photograph."

Mr. Fedynsky is wearing what he usually wears around the museum: a crisp white shirt and a dark, striped tie, dark creased slacks and business shoes, all of which conspire to make him look like the consultant that he is. The neat hair and the trimmed mustache and wire-framed eyeglasses remind you of a high school teacher (which he was), and they all ride on a face lit from within by kind of amused amazement.

He's opened these boxes before and laid out these photographs dozens - maybe hundreds - of times, and still there's this little tremor of wonder in his voice at being able to show them to you for the first time. This is a man who's earned the right to tell you an interesting story - the story behind the wedding photo of the Kozak and his bride.

"This guy fought on the losing side in World War I," Mr. Fedynsky says, "so naturally he wanted to get to America as quickly as possible. He came through Philadelphia, met a girl, got married. His name was Jacques Babenko, and the interesting part," - (here Fedynsky pulls out a faded news story with a graying photo) - "is how he made his living. He became a trick rider in a Wild West show." Mr. Fedynsky removes his glasses and bends down to the clipping, studying it until he can point out Jacques - "the Ukrainian Kozak known for his skill in acrobatic riding" - perched on a sad-looking pony at the end of the line of performers, resigned Native Americans in feathered headdresses and doughy faced cowboys, all posed during a break on a tour of the flat Midwest.

Do you know what it must be like to be able to walk among the shadows? To be able to look inside the dove-gray boxes - some wide and flat as pizza cartons, others big as dictionaries and sealed with a string clasp - and breathe life into the past?

Out of a box the color of ashes come Havrylo and Julia Woloshyn, stiff and brave as soldiers facing a firing squad, except it's their wedding day and they're facing nothing more frightening than the camera lens and the prospect of a life together. And just when you think you're in on the joke - and you allow yourself a smile - at that very grinning moment, you see another photo of the couple, thickened by 20 years and surrounded by their children, posing again on the cold steps of a church, their youngest daughter just a tiny bundle of white, lost forever in a tiny white coffin (shown on cover).

"1918," Mr. Fedynsky reads, nipping over to the back. "Might have been the influenza epidemic."

Here lives Osyp Maidanyuk, with his long greyhound face and intense dark eyes, forever young on the diplomatic passport that identifies him to the Swedish king as a representative of the independent Ukrainian Republic - a country that bloomed and died like a summer flower after World War I, only to blossom again in the rubble of the Soviet Union. There are political journals from 1925 calling for Ukrainian freedom, and Mr. Fedynsky points to the table of contents, assigning fates to the authors' names - "this guy was killed in the war, this one went to prison, this one was executed ..." - until all the bloody endings have been accounted for, the books of history closed out.

There are small, happy calculations. With the photo of the Ukrainian band dated March 25, 1912, is a real ledger, each date - Halloween parties, balls, weddings - duly noted, and the actual band hat that Mr. Fedynsky had once seen packed away until he rescued it. And the white tablecloth, with its red-and-blue border of thread flowers, which isn't linen, rather a care flour sack, embroidered hour after hour in a 1946 refugee camp, a labor of love behind borders that were definitely not flowered, during years when God, if not dead, was certainly not taking any calls. And through this infinity of artifacts was a common thread, simple and elegant in the scrawl across the last page of a passport: "Going to America."

And go they did: to Chicago, New York and Detroit. To the mines of Pennsylvania. And to Tremont, where they built the onion-dome churches and bought the frame houses and walked to work at the mills and furnaces in the smoky red mornings, and walked home under the soiled, red sun. And they survived. Better, they prospered. They became Clevelanders, bridging the generations from Franz Joseph I and Tsar Nicholas and empire to triumph in the land of the moving picture and Mickey Mouse.

And, finally, they became shadows, too, and their lives a shadow dance, destined for rest in dove-gray boxes - a dozen to a shelf - on dozens of shelves in room after room of the house on Kenilworth.

And here's the interesting part: more arrived every day. There would be a knock on the door, and a young mother in tennis shorts and a Shooters sweatshirt would be standing there with her children, their mini-van idling at the curb, and she would hand over a box that had been hidden in an attic or buried in a basement, the legacy of a great uncle or a great-great aunt whom no one remember. And you would look down and there, staring back at you, would be the long greyhound face of Osyp Maidanyuk or the sad eyes of Julia Woloshyn, except they'd be kid-sized old shadows on the little faces of the little bodies wearing the Hunchback of Notre Dame T-shirts.

Mr. Fedynsky knows the shock, the tremor, at the moment of connection. He'd been spilling the archives out on the table for an hour, the boxes whose white labels said "Mittenwald," "Munich," "Rimini," "Augsburg," and "Paris, 1919," all the canonical rush of history neatly separated by puny time and place, when out popped a pasteboard document that looked like a cross between a bus schedule and a theater ticket. "That's a milk ration card from a U.N. refugee camp after World War ll. The Innsbruck camp," Mr. Fedynsky said. "That was my card."

And it is. Or was: the name of the 1-year-old boy receiving the daily ration is "A. Fedenskyi," and although Mr. Fedynsky knows it's his, he's just as certain he doesn't remember anything about that time or the life he lived there, in the land of detention.

"The mission of the Ukrainian Museum and Archives," Mr. Fedynsky says, "is really two-track: to assist in the revival of the Tremont neighborhood, and to preserve the Ukrainian community as a national, political and cultural entity."

It's afternoon now, and Mr. Fedynsky is giving an interview in a room filled with silence. As he started he'd called out "Martha and I will be in here" to someone just outside the doorway - Martha being Martha Kraus, a soft-faced woman in a summer dress who'd grown up a few blocks away on St. Olga Street, before it was erased by I-90. Kraus had gone to Lourdes Academy, graduated Case Western as a nurse and made a career and a marriage in Syracuse, N.Y., until she came back home.

She has a niece, Aniza Kraus, who works at the museum, and pretty soon Martha was working here, too, making her rounds. Her father had been a lawyer "in the homeland" and a steelworker in Cleveland, but it was her grandfather who was the weekend scholar ("a pack rat," Ms. Kraus laughs) and, as a girl, she'd spend days with him, straightening his papers. And now Martha was remembering what she'd said to her niece on that very first day: that the archives were a challenge "that would take the work of more than two generations."

"But you have to start somewhere," Mr. Fedynsky interjects.

Leonid Bachinsky believed that, too. Mr. Bachinsky was the original archivist, and he'd begun collecting, documenting, preserving in 1952, with the help of his Switzerland-based brother Eugene. When he worked as a machinist at Warner and Swasey (and the only safe space was the coal bin under St. Vladimir's Church), Mr. Bachinsky gathered material from Ukrainian intellectuals in Europe. Then the collection moved to the attic of the house on Kenilworth, and came under the tending hand of Mr. Fedynsky's father and later, Stepan Kikta, who served as director from 1981 to 1987. And then something happened. The mission changed.

"The older generations," Mr. Fedynsky says, "saved and collected and preserved their history because they had every intention of going back. They intended to make a life here, gather some wealth and then return home. And this collection was going to be the record of their lives here. But we - the children, the grandchildren - we're totally Americanized. And we lived in fear that we'd ever have to leave!"

Some did go, but most didn't. And the lessons learned in the New World became their new inventions, even as the homeland they remembered was disappearing. "You've got to realize that to, say, Stalin, an educated Ukrainian - someone who could read and write and was aware of their history and identity - was a threat. And threats were dealt with in one of two ways: by exile, or by death. Any history except the official was something to be destroyed. So what we have here" - Mr. Fedynsky lets his hand sweep across the room - "is unique. It literally doesn't exist, especially not in Ukraine. Imagine."

He continues, "right now there's a country, one part of the Soviet Union, trying to reconstitute itself as an independent, democratic entity, and there's no history! No model! There's just this ... gap ... in time. Three generations of memories, just gone." Mr. Fedynsky smiles. "I think there's a role we can play."

Of course there was a role to play. But what makes Mr. Fedynsky interesting - and the Ukrainian Museum more than just another temple to ethnic pride, a wee voice on the low-end of our collective FM dial - is that he's absolutely convinced of that role, and of his stewardship. And who could deny him, or question his vision, seeing how far he'd come?

This was, you'll remember, the same boy who'd begun his adventure 40-odd years ago in a refugee camp, in Innsbruck, Austria, and who'd come to Cleveland, and graduated Rhodes High, and studied and worked and earned his way into Notre Dame (and how much more American than that can you get?). And when he'd returned to Europe, it was as a visiting scholar-in-training, studying at, well, Innsbruck. And he'd earned a master's degree in Soviet history from John Carroll University ... and learned five languages ... and taught at West High School ... and tucked in amongst all that ink, all that resume, was foreign policy work for Sen. Bob Dole and domestic policy work for Rep. Mary Rose Oakar, and his own firm, North Shore Consulting ... This was a boy who'd more than made good: he'd been absolutely redeemed by opportunity, in a land where opportunity was as pervasive and incontrovertible as a force of nature, and as celebrated as any folk myth. Mr. Fedynsky became his own walking testament to the miracles available for a work-in-progress.

And then his mission changed. It started when he was a grad student, driving his father - an old man with a failing heart - to the house on Kenilworth, where old men could he young and strong again for a few hours, lost in the stories. Mr. Fedynsky had seen the archives outgrowing the attic space, seen the boxes marching down the narrow stairs like the bewitched broomsticks in Fantasia. And it occurred to him what his life had been pointing toward. "I decided to take over the work," Mr. Fedynsky says. "I decided to finally be a son to my father."

And by being a son change the world.

You could hear this story around the museum, the details changing only slightly in each retelling: a visitor from Ukraine, a woman, a dignitary was making a call more out of courtesy than interest. As a member of some reconstituted political entity-or-other, she was allowed to wander the archives. It was Martha Kraus who'd gotten curious and gone to check on her. And it was Ms. Kraus who found her sitting, weeping. "Nothing like this exists at home," the visitor said, her tears dotting the table. "You've no idea what you have here."

"Credibility," Mr. Fedynsky says, again and again, "is what we're building toward."

And how do you get there? With joint projects with the Natural History Museum and ties with the Slavic studies department at Ohio State, and as a stop on the Tremont Art Walks, and most recently as a destination of the Bicentennial Caravan. With the aid of grants, including one from the Cleveland Foundation, the museum had even started cataloguing the collection, putting it just a computer tap away, for use by scholars and researchers. And wouldn't it be ironic if what had been hidden could be set free, and thereby achieve in scholarship and thought what had not been won in six centuries of fire and blood - namely, a lasting peace for a free and independent Ukraine? And wouldn't it be justice, if Jacques and Julia and Havrylo and the rest could realize as spirits what they had not been able to accomplish as mortal flesh - namely, to return home, and be heroes?

This is a story about good and evil, about hope hidden in shadow, about faith lost in the light. It is about the past and its mysteries, and the future and its promises, but mostly, this is about the work: about getting up every day because there are fine and miserable lives to resurrect, and disappeared streets waiting to be walked, and ruined onion-dome churches to raise and destroy, and shattered bell towers to set chiming and then silence, and frail daughters in white and handsome diplomats in uniform to be lost, and saved, and lost again. This is a story about the past, and our response to the pattern left there for safekeeping by our fathers and all the fathers - a pattern as intricate as the design on an Easter egg.

"Pysanky," Mr. Fedynsky says. "The Ukrainian Easter egg - a real art form." He is standing in a downstairs room of the museum, in front of a glass wallcase filled with dozens - no scores - of eggs, all brilliantly colored: some red as blood, others blue as sky, all splashed with gold or green until they glow from within, illuminated like the pages of some lost manuscript. And there's a story here, if you have the eyes to see - a code that identifies some as coming from Kyiv, while others are Lemkos and still others are painted in a style that recalls the region of Podillia.

As if on cue, a dozen schoolchildren, the oldest maybe 16 the youngest maybe 10, enter the room, their sneakers creaking the wooden floorboards as they assemble in front of the case. Some are standing on tip-toe to get a better look; their faces are reflected in the glass, and the patterns on the eggs are reflected back into the wide eyes and then you see ...

That maybe, just maybe, the story of a people can be hidden in one face. And that history might be written on an eggshell, in a room in Tremont.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, October 5, 1997, No. 40, Vol. LXV

| Home Page |