DOUBLE EXPOSURE: It's all in the name (07/06/03)

DOUBLE EXPOSURE

by Khristina Lew

It's all in the name

If you grew up like I did, you were deprived of Saturday morning cartoons because you had to go to Ukrainian School. When you were older, you couldn't go out on Friday nights because you had to do homework for Ukie school. Thursday nights were Plast (Ukrainian scouting) nights, and Tuesdays were devoted to the bandura, the many-stringed Ukrainian instrument played on the knee. (Thank goodness the trembita, the Hutsul mountain horn, was not readily available in North America, or we would have lost our Wednesday nights too.)

My sisters and I groused about the many Ukrainian activities, but we entered adulthood with a strong sense of our heritage. Then we went off to college and, like many of our friends, we explored things, um, non-Ukrainian.

In our 20s, we started our careers, traveled the world, fell in love. In the 1990s when the Iron Curtain came down, it was hip to be Ukrainian. Some of us stayed in touch with our childhood friends from the Ukrainian School-Plast-bandura days. Some continued to go to Wildwood and Soyuzivka on the East Coast, or Baraboo and Wisconsin Dells in the Midwest. But with each generation the numbers got smaller.

Now, as a 30-something, I've had a chance to kick around what it means to be Ukrainian in an American world. I had worked as a "professional Ukrainian" for many years before joining a mainstream U.S. organization. I kept in touch with my Ukrainian friends and attended the occasional Ukrainian function.

Being Ukrainian, however, took on a whole new meaning with the birth of my son last year. Suddenly, the double life to which I had grown accustomed was dragged out from under the bed, to be re-examined all over again. How Ukrainian did I want my son to be? Would he speak Ukrainian? Join Plast or SUM? Play the trembita?

I don't pretend to have the answers to these questions. My husband - who is half Ukrainian, half Irish - and I do want our son to speak Ukrainian. We want him to have the opportunities we did growing up hyphenated Americans, because for us there were many.

We met each other at Ukrainian School. Some of our closest friends are people we met at Plast summer camps. Speaking a second language and living in a bicultural home broadened our horizons, made us more open to new ideas and people. Being Ukrainian launched my career and took me to Ukraine at one of the most interesting periods in its history.

So we agreed to try to raise a Ukrainian child in an American world. Determined, we embarked on our first major decision: what to name him or her.

Naming a child is handing it a legacy that it will carry its whole life. We realized fairly quickly that A) we both had strong opinions about names, and B) we did not share these opinions.

My husband, whose name is Adrian, grew up hating his name. He said that as a kid he got teased for having a girl's name, and under no circumstances would he allow his child to suffer the same humiliation - real or imagined. He wanted something solid, unequivocal. I guess that ruled out the name Ruslan for a boy.

We both wanted something mellifluous in Ukrainian and strong in English. Something a little different. We had the added distraction of my husband's last name, which was constantly mispronounced in English: Gawdiak. (Change a few letters around, and you can imagine what telemarketers come up with.) Were he a Johnson or a Smith, we could have gotten away with naming the child something unique, like Dzvineslava, but with a name like Gawdiak, all bets on proper pronunciation were off.

Choosing a girl's name turned out to be easy, and we never second-guessed our decision. A boy's name was tough.

Most expectant parents who try to maintain a link to their Ukrainian heritage when naming their child go through exactly what we did. What sounds great in one language sounds horrible in the other. We liked the name Maksym, or Max, but it, like Christina in the late 60s, was the current name du jour for Ukrainians in America.

We started sifting through family names. Wasyl and Ihor, after the future grandfathers - tough in English. In the previous generation we had a Robert - solid, but not very Ukrainian; an Omeljan and another Wasyl, and an Alexander - not bad.

I pulled out the family tree. We had a lot of Wasyls in my family, but way back, my great-great-grandfather, a priest on the outskirts of Yavoriv, was a Hryhoriy. Hryhoriy Lew. Gregory. Gregory Gawdiak.

I turned it over in my mind. It was strong in both languages. We knew only one Hryhoriy growing up, and he was pretty cool, so we didn't have any weird associations with the name. It was easy in English. And it was a family name.

When our son was born, we named him Gregory Lew Gawdiak. And after all the thought that went into choosing his name, we call him Hryts - in both languages.

Our new columnist, Khristina Lew, who will write monthly on issues faced by young Ukrainian Americans and families, is familiar to readers of The Ukrainian Weekly. She reported for this newspaper and served three tours of duty at our Kyiv Press Bureau in the 1990s. Ms. Lew grew up in the Washington, D.C., area. She attended high school in Ridgewood, N.J., and graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., in 1989. She worked on public education campaigns during Ukraine's parliamentary and presidential elections in 1998-1999, served as public relations manager for the YWCA of the U.S.A., and currently is freelancing. Ms. Lew and her family reside in Metuchen, N.J.

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