July 24, 2020

Summertime in 2020 and in years past

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For me, this is the strangest summer ever. After 60-plus years of memorable vacations, this one will have to be in our backyard. An American passport, which until recently opened doors everywhere except North Korea and Iran, is now rejected in half the world. Even parts of America are off-limits for visitors. For Clevelanders, New York state – whether Manhattan or Soyuzivka in the Catskills – is off limits. Because of the coronavirus, Ohioans, along with folks from 30 or more other states, are subject to a 14-day quarantine. The same is true for tourists to New Jersey and Connecticut. There’s no point vacationing in Washington, D.C., prior to this a favorite destination for us. Just about everything is closed. California, Florida, Arizona and other states are ravaged by the pandemic while suffering 100-plus degree heat every day, so we’re not going there.

Air travel anywhere is risky with cramped, crowded space posing a health hazard for a septuagenarian like me, particularly when some passengers choose to make a political statement by refusing to wear face masks – even Texas Sen. Ted Cruz who should know better. He was photographed on a plane without a mask even as his state was recording up to 10,000 cases a day and stationing refrigerated morgue trucks outside hospitals.

And so, we’ll be at home in Rocky River – a pleasant suburb on the shores of Lake Erie. A nearby park offers bird watching, narrow beaches (which we’re avoiding) and spectacular sunsets over waters stretching a hundred miles west to Toledo and from there to the upper lakes, Detroit, Chicago and other cities on their shores. One of those is Milwaukee, site of the scaled back Democratic National Convention which we will not be attending, nor will most others. We’ll watch it on TV. Good luck with the Republican Convention in Jacksonville, Fla.

Truth be told, a backyard vacation with Chrystia, my wife of 32 years, is a delightful prospect. I’m sure we’ll have plenty of stories to share over barbecue, libations and a pit fireplace. So, it being vacation, please allow me to spill over from the discipline of a single column and reminisce. A thousand words are not enough to review my personal legacy of 60-plus summers, just about all of them spent as a Ukrainian American.

I’ve been lucky: from first grade in 1954 to college in 1965, and then teaching in a public school (1969-1978), to graduate school in 1980 – for a total of 26 years – I had the whole summer off (with the exception of three when I worked in a factory to earn money for college.) For nearly 10 summers in the 1950s and ’60s, I had an idyllic July at Plast camps as a participant or counselor, with leisurely August days following with my Plast brothers, “Vovky,” the Wolves, riding our bikes across Cleveland, enjoying parks, recreation centers and swimming pools, coming home when the streetlights came on after 9 p.m.

In the 1970s after college, my playground expanded to Europe, where I had six summers backpacking, along with trips across America. In 1972, I drove a motorcycle from Cleveland to California. The summer after, my friend Ihor Suszko and I were in Wildwood, N.J., enjoying the beach with other Ukrainians and then driving to Soyuzivka to continue our lazy East Coast trek. A truly memorable summer was 1976 when I was in a massive crowd, also at Soyuzivka, celebrating America’s bicentennial which included a hilarious and memorable play about a fictitious Ukrainian Kozak working on Gen. George Washington’s staff to help with independence. Ten days later, I joined dozens of other Ukrainian Americans and Canadians at the Montreal Olympics, agitating for Soviet Ukraine’s right to participate in the Games as an independent country.

After graduate school in 1981, I landed a job with my hometown congresswoman, Mary Rose Oakar, and the carefree three-month vacations ended, but the summer cycle continued in a new environment. July on Capitol Hill is usually a beehive with must-pass legislation. A sidebar highlight was Captive Nations Week, presided over by Ukrainian Congress Committee of America President Lev Dobriansky author of the legislation and sparkplug for its annual commemoration. Members of Congress gathered to read canned statements which mainstream media dismissed as naïve and irrelevant, and the Soviet Embassy denounced as provocative. In the perspective of time, this symbolic ritual played a big role in systematically, year after year, undermining the legitimacy of the Soviet Union and ultimately leading to its demise. Politically, it might have seemed like the geological process which carved the Grand Canyon, but it did its work. Around the country, there were Captive Nations demonstrations echoing those taking place in the halls of Congress.

In August, Capitol Hill shuts down, so I spent the early ’80s at home in Cleveland, looking after our mother, widowed and coping with cancer. I’d go to the beach on Lake Erie, read books and just be lazy while enjoying my mother’s company. She died in 1985.

After the congressional election in 1986, when my boss won overwhelmingly, I decided to move back to Cleveland to straighten out the Ukrainian Museum-Archives. Within a year, I was hugely rewarded, meeting Chrystia at a Plast zabava (dance). We got married a year later and soon after had a son and a few years later a daughter. And so, for 25 years, our summers revolved around them, starting with “Tabir Ptashat,” a day camp for 3- to 5-year-olds with their moms/dads at Pysanyi Kamin (PK – Painted Rock) in Ohio’s Amish country. Later there was the usual age-appropriate Plast “tabir” near Cleveland, Buffalo, Toronto or Montreal, as well as a Burlaky-sponsored bike camp in the Poconos. There were other Ukrainian immersions: the “Kapelia” bandura camp, Kashtan dance camp, etc. It would all end for us in August with a weeklong family gathering at Soyuzivka before the kids went back to school. It was a treat each summer to re-connect with similarly engaged parents, friends we had met at summer camp a generation before who were extending the same Ukrainian experience to their children. That’s how lifelong friendships are forged.

As we sit in our backyard for this year’s summer vacation, I will no doubt mention my most memorable vacation in 1970 when I was 22 years old and my Cleveland Plast buddies Danko Suszko (23), his brother Ihor (24) and Ihor (Ilyo) Turczynewycz (24) and I bought a Volkswagen microbus in Cologne, Germany. The van became our transportation and hotel as we traveled across Europe. It cost $1,000 – we each chipped in $250. Nearly three months later, after having driven it more than 10,000 miles, we sat with a hand-made sign on the sidewalk at the American Express office in Amsterdam offering it for sale. We got $675 and split it four ways. Which meant, it cost us about $80 each, less than a dollar a day, plus gas. Some 35 years later, I saw the same model VW bus, same year and the same color green on exhibit at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland with a label that a whole generation of baby boomers drove it in the late ’60s and early ’70s seeking adventure. Boy did that resonate. I remember how on the Riviera in France and reading a Time magazine cover article about the cultural transformations going on, I announced, “Hey guys! Listen to this: We’re hippies…”

Our major objective was to have fun but, without realizing it, we also had a mission. Our primary destination that summer was Soviet Ukraine. We had acquired a rare, Ukrainian visa/pass, which Shipka Travel in Parma, Ohio, had arranged through its Intourist contacts to spend two weeks at designated campsites, a new innovation to attract tourists and with them “hard currency,” – dollars, marks, liras, pesos, pounds and francs.

It was an adventure like no other. Driving from Vienna through Hungary on the way to Lviv, we were the only car at the border station at Chop. For three hours, the border guards dismantled everything: the wall panels, floor boards and wheels to see if we might be hiding contraband. We were questioned: who are you, who sent you, why are you here? The only damage was confiscation of a Playboy magazine. As we were leaving, we glimpsed the chief in his office, feet on his desk, unveiling the centerfold, no doubt deploring Western decadence and probably later selling the magazine on the black market.

I have a first cousin in Ukraine, Adrian, who’s the same age as me. He organized a group of his friends to meet with us. Young, carefree and without being aware of it, we had been shaped by institutions like the Saturday Ridna Shkola heritage school, Plast and, of course, the Church, to instill a love of the homeland our parents had been forced to leave. We were also unaware of how, as Americans, we were imbued with a swagger and freedom of expression that was shocking to citizens in the Soviet police state and how, by the standards of the day, we were being unacceptably subversive. Danko openly mocked the ubiquitous use of the Russian language, disparaged primitive Soviet toilets, calamitous roads, the absence of basic consumer goods we Americans took for granted. In 1970 Soviet Ukraine, such comments got you arrested with years in the Gulag, but protected by an American passport, we got away with it – somewhat: after the first few days of meeting with Ukrainians in their early 20s, two carloads of what were obviously KGB workers followed us everywhere, blocking any interaction with Ukrainians our age.

Again without being overtly aware of it, that was the vacation which solidified my determination to work to support Ukrainian dissidents and the human rights campaign which was tightly linked to the campaign for Ukraine’s self-determination.

And so my 1970s backpacking adventures included renting a car and conducting missions (in 1975 with my brother Petro) on behalf of Smoloskyp to Bulgaria and Poland to deliver books, printing equipment and encouragement to the brave individuals and their informal network whose efforts changed the course of history.

As I look back, I’m struck how nearly every summer for me had to do with organized Ukrainian social, cultural or political affairs and how that engaged idealistic, dedicated volunteers who devoted all or part of their summer vacations to preserve Ukrainian identity at a time when its continued existence was threatened. And it worked. In August 1991 Ukraine declared independence – and so, another summer highlight: the independence parade in the Ukrainian Village in Parma, organized exclusively by volunteers. This year, with the COVID-19, it’s sadly been canceled.

Every year is different and in the spirit of the Gershwin song, “Summertime and the livin’ is easy” – in 2020 it’ll have to be. Even so, I look forward to lines at the airport for flights to distant places where Chrystia and I can enjoy the cultural and culinary delights of Rome, Paris, Lviv, Kyiv, Los Angeles, Seattle, Sao Paulo, Curitiba, London, Vienna, Toronto, Montreal and a couple dozen other fabulous places we’ve had the enormous privilege to visit. And, of course, we also plan to spend another week at Soyuzivka. There’s no place like it. (“Нема так як на Союзівці.”)

Be healthy. Be safe.

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

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