FACES AND PLACES: Walk the talk before you squawk (05/08/05)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

Walk the talk before you squawk

In letters to The Ukrainian Weekly and other, less reputable venues, Prof. John Paul Himka has taken umbrage with those of us who defend the good name of Ukrainians against iniquitous attacks by Ukrainophobes in the Jewish community.

How dare we mention the leading role Jews played in the Bolshevik coup d'état in Russia, as well as in the NKVD and KGB, he writes. We need to confess our own sins first.

Dr. Bohdan Vitvitsky's sapient rebuttal to Prof. Himka's silliness in the April 24 issue of The Ukrainian Weekly should put to rest the lie that Jews never smear Ukrainians.

If I read Prof. Himka's solution to Jewish defamation of Ukrainians correctly, it is twofold: 1) acquiesce, or 2) engage Jews in meaningful dialogue. Unfortunately, ignoring vilification won't make it go away. On the contrary, it only encourages the depravity, suggesting that since Ukrainians don't refute it, the slander must be true.

Engaging Jews in dialogue hasn't worked either. I've been there, done that, for almost 20 years with the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the only mainstream Jewish institution willing to participate in a dialogue with Ukrainians. Result? Nada. Our dialogue partners were sincere enough but were constrained, I believe, by the anti-Ukrainian feelings of the broad Jewish community. While we were enthusiastically writing about our meetings in The Ukrainian Weekly, for example, the Jewish-American press never mentioned them. Never. It's as if our dialogues occurred in an Afghanistinian cave.

It's not as if both sides didn't try. When the AJC invited me to Israel in 1985 to become acquainted with former Soviet Ukrainian Jews, I accepted. I met Israel Kleiner and Jakov Suslensky, a Ukrainian Jew who spent time in the gulag and whose life had been saved by Ukrainians. One of the founders of the Society of Jewish-Ukrainian Relations in Israel, he dedicated his life to improving understanding between Jews and Ukrainians. When Mr. Suslensky came to the United States, the Ukrainian National Association welcomed him, graciously extending every courtesy. He flew with me to Chicago, and stayed at our home. We hosted a reception that included leading Jewish leaders in DeKalb and the Israeli consul general. Mr. Suslensky later received an enthusiastic welcome from Chicago's Ukrainians.

One word best describes Mr. Suslensky's reception by the Jewish Federation of Chicago and the Chicago Jewish newspaper: hostile. The editor of the Jewish paper who knew us not, for example, refused to interview Mr. Suslensky and, pointing to Lesia and me with disdain, asked him: "How can you have anything to do with these people?" Mr. Suslensky's Jewish reception in Cleveland was hardly any better. Despite these rebuffs, our dialogue with the AJC continued.

During one of our dialogue sessions with the AJC in 1990, the question of Ukrainian independence came up. Our partners feared Ukrainian freedom might be dangerous for Jews. Since I had been invited by the University of Kyiv to lecture on the Ukrainian immigration, I offered to meet with any Jew they knew in Kyiv and investigate. They gave me the name and coordinates of one Marc Kotlyar. Arriving in Kyiv, I called Mr. Kotlyar and to my delight discovered that he spoke fluent English as well as Ukrainian. He told me that Jews supported Ukrainian independence wholeheartedly, and that Jewish families in Russia were sending their children to relatives in Ukraine for safekeeping. Amazing. I tape-recorded our interview, brought it back to Chicago, and played it to our dialogue group. I was stunned when the response of our Jewish partners was lukewarm.

A few months later, I learned that Mr. Kotlyar would be in Chicago. We arranged a dinner reception for him in the Ukrainian Village. The questions asked by our Jewish partners were skeptical, larded with suspicion. Following dinner we took Mr. Kotlyar and our partners across the street to meet local Ukrainians. When Marc greeted them with "Slava Ukraini," he received a tear-filled, standing ovation. Our Jewish partners, however, seemed unimpressed.

During the Demjanjuk debacle (still an ongoing horror show as John Demjanjuk's citizenship has recently been rescinded a second time), the UNA Heritage Defense Committee commissioned the National Center for Ethnic/Urban Affairs in Washington to conduct a content analysis of the Jewish-American press regarding Ukraine and Ukrainians.

In a 1986 report titled "An Analysis of the Treatment of Ukraine in Jewish Currents," Nancy Olson concluded, among other things, that "Almost all of the references to Ukrainians that were made were of an unflattering nature. Most, in fact, were unremittingly harsh. Ukrainians are portrayed as strongly anti-Semitic with a history of violence against Jews ...Thus, a Jewish-American reader of a major publication such as Jewish Currents, over the past two decades would, on the basis of the images and information presented to him or her on its pages, be likely to have a decidedly unfriendly and suspicious attitude to Ukrainians and an impression of Ukrainian history as an experience of violence and hostility unless mitigated or offset by personal contacts or other data ...In fact, he or she would be explicitly warned on one occasion by the magazine to be suspicious of what it interpreted to be overtures for better relations from the Ukrainian side."

Dare we expose this kind of hate?

Like all of the Ukrainian members of the Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue, I eventually became disillusioned with the process. The Jewish establishment, I concluded, rightly or wrongly, is not really interested in a meaningful reconciliation between our two groups because they would have to revise their biases.

Prof. Himka talks about Ukrainian complicity in war crimes and squawks about our reticence to confess our sins. Would that lead to reconciliation? Hardly. When it comes to the Holocaust, Jews will tell you that "only the dead can forgive." Scores still need to be settled.

Leave your ivory tower, Dr. Himka. Spend more time with the grassroots Ukrainian community. Walk your talk. Engage the Jewish establishment in a dialogue for two decades. Look deeply into their souls, and then come back and squawk about the shortcomings of your people. Perhaps then we might be willing to listen.

Myron Kuropas's e-mail address is: kuropas@comcast.net.

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