PERSPECTIVES: Reconnecting with cultural heritage (06/18/00)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

Reconnecting with cultural heritage

My family came to the United States in 1948. Along with other Ukrainians, my parents were political refugees with a strong attachment to their homeland. For them it was critical to retain their identity and culture. In America you could do that. The community was free to have its churches, youth groups, Saturday schools, etc. Still, the pressure to merge with the broader culture was overwhelming and my parents used every trick they could think of to motivate their children to identify as Ukrainians.

"Look at the Jews," they often said. "They're not ashamed of who they are. They maintain their identity. Take a lesson from them." Usually this lecture came with some unpleasant task - working your way through seven cases and three genders of Ukrainian nouns or going to a requiem service for fallen Ukrainian heroes instead of a baseball game.

A couple weeks ago, I was in Ukraine as a member of the American delegation to the U.S.-Ukraine Joint Heritage Commission. Among our visits was a Jewish school in Zhytomyr. There my parents' 40-year-old lesson was delightfully turned on its head. The leader of Ukraine's Jewish Association, Illya Levitas, speaking in Ukrainian to a group of 9- and 10-year-olds, advised them to never forget their Jewish heritage.

"Just look at Mr. Fedynsky, who's here with us today," he said. "He grew up in America, but he speaks Ukrainian and respects the culture of his ancestors."

Asked to say a few words, I encouraged the children to respect their Jewish heritage in Ukraine just as my parents in America had taught me to respect my own Ukrainian heritage. It had all come full circle. Who could have imagined?

For more than a thousand years, Ukrainians and Jews have lived side by side on the territory of Ukraine. Both peoples developed rich, colorful cultures, but rarely interacted with each. Although separate, both peoples have similar, painful histories punctuated with appalling atrocities: for Ukrainians, centuries of serfdom and bitter oppression, culminating with Stalin's Great Terror and Famine-Genocide; for Jews pogroms and systemic discrimination, reaching its height with the Holocaust.

Long suppressed by Soviet censorship, reminders of those grim events are everywhere in today's Ukraine. Just an hour after the meeting with the school children, Mr. Levitas spoke again at the dedication of a monument to several thousand Jews who were executed by the Nazis in a ravine outside of Zhytomyr. He reminded the crowd that it was independence that allowed Ukraine to honor Holocaust victims. He also noted that many Ukrainians had risked their lives to save Jews in World War II and called on the citizens of Zhytomyr to collect their names so they, too, could be properly honored.

When the monument was unveiled, a Ukrainian army band struck up the national anthem and an elite unit in blue berets fired a 21-gun salute. Irv Stolberg, co-chair of the binational commission and former speaker of the Connecticut House represented the United States at the unveiling. He made a point of addressing the Ukrainian soldiers, praising their dedication to their country. "Your valor will ensure such a thing can never happen in Ukraine again," he said.

From Zhytomyr, we went to Berdychiv. There the mayor took us to another massacre site. "Victims of 1937," he said quietly.

Leonid Novokhatko, Ukraine's vice minister of culture and the other co-chair of the commission, explained: "These were poets, professors, journalists; people who were working on behalf of Ukrainian culture. That was their crime."

Caught between Communist oppression and Nazi genocide, Jewish and Ukrainian cultures in Ukraine faced extinction; then the Soviet Union miraculously collapsed in 1991. Three years later the United States and Ukraine signed an Agreement on the Protection and Preservation of Cultural Heritage, and the Joint Heritage Commission came into existence. The commission's general mandate is to help Americans of Jewish and Ukrainian origins reconnect with their heritage.

A year and a half ago, the commission asked the Ukrainian Museum-Archives (UMA) in Cleveland to prepare a pilot project. With the commission's blessing and assistance, the UMA developed a partnership with Ohio State University (OSU) and the Lviv Academy of Art. Working with the Ukrainian Museum-Archives, OSU is now offering a distance learning course in Ukrainian history and culture. Rostyslav Shmahalo, a dean at the Lviv Arts Academy, organized an exhibit of Lviv artists at Cleveland's UMA and lectured at OSU. OSU Prof. Myroslava Mudrak reciprocated by going to Lviv for a conference on Ukrainian culture. We've now working to expand the Cleveland UMA model to other cities and universities.

As for Jewish Americans, the commission deals, above all, with the rehabilitation and preservation of long-neglected cemeteries. Starting in the late 1800s many Jews left Ukraine to seek a better life in America. Their ancestral villages and towns were largely forgotten. The Holocaust and Soviet anti-Semitism and atheism further destroyed Ukraine's Jewish communities. Entire cemeteries were abandoned.

The one in Berdychiv is now overgrown with thick trees and bushes. The same mayor who showed us the mass grave of Stalin's victims took us on a tour of the overgrown graveyard. At one time, he noted, Berdychiv was more than 80 percent Jewish. If the cemetery were restored, American Jews, he suggested, might want to visit his city to reconnect with their roots. He also gave us Ukrainian postage stamps commemorating the wedding of French writer Honoré de Balzac in a Berdychiv church. Worth a visit, the mayor assured us.

Later that evening, at a wonderful dinner near a scenic lake, the governor of the Khmelnytskyi Oblast echoed the same message. Besides the Jewish cemetery and the church, he said, there were all kinds of tourist attractions within an hour's drive: monasteries, synagogues, a massive network of 14th century forts and city walls, magnificent scenery and good fishing - not to mention the tomb of the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Jewish Hasidism.

Like the mayor of Berdychiv he wants people to visit, to stay over night, to spend money. The mayor and the governor both acknowledged that the amenities Western tourists expect do not exist yet, but that will all come, they believed. I couldn't agree more. Ukraine is no longer cut off from its past. The country is not shut off from the world. People are now free to pursue opportunities.

At the end of an emotional day during which they had visited churches, synagogues, massacre sites and graves, U.S.-Ukraine Joint Heritage Commission Co-Chairs Stolberg and Novokhatko offered toasts to friendship, cooperation, mutual understanding, and to the future. I drank to that.

Ukrainians and Jews, I realized, have a lot in common, beginning with an admiration for the way each community was able to survive genocide and terror in Ukraine and the lure of the melting pot in America. A lot of Jewish and Ukrainian Americans have common interests in the country of their origin. Wouldn't it be nice, if an obscure commission on cultural heritage could contribute to Ukraine's healing the wounds of all her peoples, while helping Americans of Ukrainian and Jewish heritage reconnect with their roots and, incidentally, with each other?

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