August 25, 2017

On turning 70

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“The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”

– Psalms 90: 10

My parents, two brothers and I moved to Cleveland on my seventh birthday, September 5, 1954, just before Labor Day. I started the second grade two days later. We left Frackville in Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Region, our father driving a green ’52 Chevy on the newly constructed Pennsylvania Turnpike.

That evening, we arrived at the house on Roanoke in a working class neighborhood that would be the family home for the next 30-plus years. It was a 10-minute walk for me to school and a short drive to the industrial valley where our father got a job, having networked with Cleveland’s Ukrainian American community: “new immigrants” with relationships from the “old country” going back to childhood; and “old immigrants” with roots in America established a generation before. The latter reached out to refugee families like ours with generosity that cannot be over-stated.

Six and a half years before, our family was in a displaced persons (DP) camp in Germany; and for our parents a decade earlier, arrest was routine and violent death a daily reality: my father was in a Nazi prison in 1943-1944; my mother was forever traumatized by what she witnessed in her Nazi- and Soviet-occupied village in Podillia. My older brother, just a little boy then and a survivor from day one, was indelibly shaped by those formative years. Today, he’s a U.S. Army veteran, a retired government attorney and a wonderful father and grandfather.

In Cleveland, Yurko and I were immediately immersed in the Ukrainian community. Petro, born in Pennsylvania after we had come to America, was just 4 and had to wait a couple years before engaging in the wealth of community activities, which led him to a prominent career at the Voice of America.

My brothers and I grew up bifurcated between a Ukrainian immigrant community and the unescapable American reality. At home, we were Ukrainian: it was unthinkable to speak English to our parents. There were also Saturday heritage classes, Ukrainian scouting, summer camps, Sunday (and holy day) church services, concerts and commemorative events, demonstrations and downtown parades; you name it – for half our lives, we lived in a cocoon orienting us through song, dance and rhetoric toward the liberation of Ukraine. It was personal. My father’s brother was studying for the priesthood in 1940 when the NKVD arrested and sent him to Siberia, where he died soon after; the Soviets executed my mother’s brother-in-law; they exiled her sister to Kazakhstan. Pretty much every Ukrainian refugee family had similar stories.

But we were in America and couldn’t avoid the social environment – nor did I want to. I rooted for the Cleveland Indians and the Browns. I did my homework listening to early rock ‘n’ roll and was swept up in the ’60s wave of Bob Dylan, the Beatles and a thousand other artists. I went to Notre Dame and rooted for the Fighting Irish. I could not be more American.

My birthday was always on or close to the first day of school, so I don’t have many memories of that, but there are a few:

In the summer of 1970, three of my Ukrainian American buddies and I bought a Volkswagen microbus and drove the breadth and width of Europe, including 10 days in Ukraine. We flew into Amsterdam in June and flew back from there on Labor Day, two days after my 23rd birthday. I remember celebrating with Heineken beer before returning to my teaching job two days after.

Fifteen years later, on my 38th birthday, I was at mother’s hospice bedside. We had an utterly honest, open conversation that lasted hours before she fell asleep exhausted. I was stunned to learn how carrying me she had fought off pressure from DP camp officials to have an abortion. And, from her deathbed, she was benevolently manipulative. She gave me, her bachelor son, a small blue box: “Someday,” she said, “you’ll have a little girl. When she grows up, I want you to give her these on her wedding day:” They were my mother and father’s wedding rings. Mama died 10 days later.

Two years after that, in 1987, I came home to Cleveland to pick up on my father’s life’s work: the Ukrainian Museum-Archives. Despite its enormous treasures, the UMA in the historic Ukrainian inner-city neighborhood had been largely abandoned after my father and others had passed away and the community moved to the suburbs. I’d spend a year, I figured, and then resume my Capitol Hill career. Well – life is what happens when you’re making other plans.

Within months, I met a beautiful, intelligent woman who was working on her M.B.A. at Case Western Reserve University. We went to movies, concerts, restaurants, picnics and just enjoyed each other’s company. I had no intentions toward her until I found out she was graduating and moving back to Chicago. That was it! I proposed, she accepted, and we set a date.

As chief of staff in a congressional district office, I had a hectic, stressful job with an election on November 8 and a wedding four days later. With nuptials pending, my soon-to-be father-in-law, Dr. Jaroslav Panchuk, arranged for my fiancée and me to meet with Chicago Bishop Innocent Lotocky. He looked at our baptismal certificates and said: “You’re no longer children. You know what you’re getting into,” and gave us his blessing with wise words of advice. It was Labor Day, September 5, my 41st birthday.

As I look back on my 70 years, I’m grateful to be part of Creation; for the parents who gave my brothers and me a home, moral grounding, work ethic, a rich Ukrainian legacy and above all, love; for my wife, Chrystia; son Mykhas and daughter Olesia. All three are amazing – each in their own way. I’m sorry my parents never got to know them.

As the proverb says, “…in your 70 years, there is strength, labor and sorrow.” I’ve experienced all that and more, and look forward to the years to come. Seventy, I’m told, is the “new 50”; 90 is the “new 70.” In 2037, I’ll let you know.

 

Andrew Fedynsky’s e-mail address is [email protected]

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