PERSPECTIVES: The Ukrainian Smithsonian (11/18/01)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

The Ukrainian Smithsonian

A couple of weeks ago, The Ukrainian Weekly got an e-mail from a reader who wonders what she should do with the old Ukrainian books, music, magazines, plays, programs, playbills and such that her now elderly parents collected over the course of their lives. Museums, she writes, probably have more than they need of those things but surely, they must be useful to someone. What to do?

First of all, the writer's instincts are sound. The collection is valuable and should be preserved. As for the assumption that the things her parents collected were so commonplace that museums already have them, that's simply wrong. One of the paradoxes of collecting is the more there used to be of something, the fewer there are today. That's why 1950s baseball cards are so valuable. Nearly everyone had a collection and nearly everyone threw his away - or your mother did. The same is true for Indian Head pennies, silver coins and Model T Fords: there used to be plenty; now a relative handful remain.

I don't know exactly what motivates people to collect, but I think it's related to what my American Literature professor used to say, "If you don't know where you've been, you don't know where you're going; with no past, you have no future." The class would then look at some tedious document from 17th century New England that the professor would transform into a window on Colonial America that reflected back onto contemporary society. The past gives context to the present and to our lives.

Healthy societies sense this and, therefore, preserve buildings and monuments, maintain archives and collect one of everything. Nobody's better at that than the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress in Washington.

It wasn't that way in the Soviet Union. There, instead of a National Trust for Historic Preservation, they had a ministry whose mission was to blow up churches. Instead of maintaining archives, they burned them. For Marxist-Leninists, Ukraine had no future as a nation and to make sure it didn't, they ruthlessly destroyed its past, part of a generations-long campaign to phase out Ukrainians' national consciousness. Even Neptune's trident at the fountain in Lviv was removed because it might remind people of the heraldic crest of Kyivan Rus', which had become Ukraine's national symbol.

George Orwell looked at that madness and wrote 1984. Viewed by many as prophecy, 1984 merely described Soviet reality in 1948, the year Orwell wrote his novel and, incidentally, the year Ukrainian refugees began leaving Europe's DP camps for America.

Once here, these people went to work. Helping to fuel the economic boom of the post-World War II era, they worked hard, saved money and sent their kids to college. They also built an active community whose principal goal was to block the Soviet campaign to end Ukraine's existence. This was an epic struggle that started long before 1948. It's written in the books, music, magazines, plays, programs, playbills and such the woman who wrote The Weekly would now like to toss, but just can't bring herself to do. I hope she doesn't.

Back in 1948, with their homeland mired in a system best described as "Orwellian," many Ukrainians created a personal Smithsonian in their living rooms and attics. Some went further than that. In 1952, for example, in my own hometown of Cleveland, Prof. Leonid Bachynsky started the Ukrainian Museum-Archives (UMA). In the old country, he was a scholar, but here he worked as a machinist. In the evenings and on weekends, he reverted to being a scholar.

Over the years, he and a group of similarly minded individuals, including my father, assembled a vast collection of books, posters, periodicals, artifacts, artwork, etc. from Ukraine's Revolution in 1918, from 19th and early 20th century Galicia and Ukraine's various diasporas. By now, the UMA collection has hundreds of thousands of items. Believe me, it's huge.

There are similar museums in Chicago, New York, North Dakota and Detroit. The Ukrainian Catholic Church runs one in Stamford and the Orthodox Church has one in Bound Brook. The Immigration Research and History Center at the University of Minnesota, the New York Public Library, Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, Ukrainian Free University, Shevchenko Scientific Society and others also have significant Ukrainian collections.

Inspired by my father's example and frankly concerned that the collection would be lost, I became involved with Cleveland's Ukrainian Museum-Archives more than a decade ago. Since then, the UMA has made a successful transition from its immigrant inception to an organization firmly rooted in this country: 15 of our 19 board members are native-born Americans.

Every week our staff sifts through the items that people bring to the door. Invariably, there's something that we haven't seen before and we add it to our collection.

On the other hand, there are many more items that we already have. Those we pack up and send to our new friends at the National University at Ostroh Academy, the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, the University at Zaporizhia, even the library in the village of Burtyn. These institutions have been universally grateful for whatever we send. After 75 years of Soviet rule and 10 years of impoverished independence, Ukraine has little of its own heritage and even less about the diaspora.

I would advise the person who wrote The Weekly to contact one of the Ukrainian museums and offer to donate her parents' collection. (These institutions are in the phone book and many have websites.) Each leaflet, book, brochure and playbill her parents preserved with so much love and dedication represents large outputs of energy. Anyone who's ever organized a "zabava" (dance), St. Nicholas Festival or summer youth camp knows that. It's our responsibility to make sure evidence of past events is not lost.

So please, don't throw those items away, but then don't just leave them at the doorstep of some institution. Become a member or better yet, become involved. There's sorting, cataloguing, exhibiting, mailing and explaining that needs to be done. In the wintertime, someone has to shovel the snow.

The story of how Ukrainians on both sides of the Iron Curtain fought to preserve Ukraine's existence is interesting, inspiring and important. Thank goodness there are people working to preserve the basic research materials. This is an important topic, one I plan to return to in future columns.

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