Ukraine on the East River
In our mobile world, a person can have more than one home, more than one place to which he can return and find himself in familiar environs surrounded by old friends. One such place for this writer is the Ukrainian neighborhood of New York and most especially its heart, the stretch of Second Avenue from Tenth Street to St. Mark’s.
I first started coming here when researching my doctoral dissertation in the latter half of the 1970s. Banned from the Soviet Union, this writer found many of the sources on the topic of Ukrainian Communism in Soviet Ukraine from 1918 to 1933 in the New York area — the New York Public Library in Midtown Manhattan as well as Columbia University and the Ukrainian Free Academy of the Arts and Sciences (UVAN) Uptown. The Prolog Research Corporation that then published the journal Suchasnist, at the time the intellectual flagship of the emigre intelligentsia, was also nearby on 34th Street near Madison Square Garden. It was only natural that I would be drawn to the place where Ukrainians were centered. Later, as I worked at Harvard on the Holodomor and Ukrainian- Americans came to know me, I began to make friends in many communities of North America but perhaps nowhere more than in the New York area, and being invited there for the seventieth anniversary commemorations of the famine was a homecoming, more even than being in Washington where I lived half a decade and where my son still resides.
New York is to America something like Odesa is to Ukraine, the part of the country in which it resides that is so self-contained and distinctive that it becomes almost a world until itself, only far bigger and grander. New Yorkers like to think of their city as the center of the world; culturally and financially it certainly is. With the United Nations headquarters here, it is perhaps also politically as well. The competition for everything from parking spaces to professional survival seems more intense than anywhere else on the planet, and this imparts to everything a hurried intensity where everything from eating to courtship is conducted on the go. One can hear languages spoken and newspapers displayed from every corner of the world. It has long welcomed all and transformed them. Yet, it is a melting pot, in which everything retains something of its original distinctiveness and nothing ever quite melts into the larger whole. It is a tossed salad covered with the same piquant dressing, an amalgam of amalgams: the Big Apple, Gotham, Metropolis, the Naked City.
Long before the Soviet Jewish emigration of the 1970s turned Brighten Beach into Moscow on the Hudson (it is actually on the other side of the East River and thus farther from the Hudson), Ukrainians transformed the East Village in their own image, as they were themselves molded in the image of New York. As one walks south from the Second Avenue Deli, New York’s most famous Jewish delicatessen on the corner of Tenth, to the St. Mark’s Playhouse with its off-Broadway shows, one can still see the Ukrainian language signs for various business and political organizations. Just westward is St. George’s Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral bounded by little more than alley that has been renamed Taras Shevchenko Place, across from it the Surma Book and Gift Shop (once a major publisher of Ukrainian literature), and farther on Fourth Avenue the four-story building of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, transplanted from Lviv by scholars and sciences who fled the Bolsheviks and now celebrating its 130th anniversary.
Our host was the latter, which offered us a room in the center of everything and the gracious hospitality of the staff. The Shevchenko Society is now headed by Dr. Larysa Onyshkevych, longtime editor for literature of Suchasnist and one of the leading intellectual figures of the Ukrainian emigration.
The society itself, founded in Lviv and a haven for Ivan Franko, has long been a sort of unofficial Ukrainian academy of sciences for Western Ukraine, just as UVAN was an attempt to recreate the All- Ukrainian Academy of Sciences that had been gutted in Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s. Our conference there on the Holodomor attracted a packed house, among them many old friends as eager to catch up on our own recent years as to learn about new findings about events seven decades ago. And new friends were made. Like all New Yorkers, the Ukrainians of the Big Apple have grown a hard shell that instantly turns into openness, generosity, and friendship once one has become, as it were, accepted into the tribe. My wife, Natalia, spoke at the conference on eyewitness accounts based on her work as editor of the book, Holod ’33, compiled by the late Lidiya Kovalenko and Volodymyr Maniak, then was given a warm literary soiree the next evening on — where else? — Second Avenue.
For all the hurried quality of their lives and outward insensitivity, New Yorkers are basically tolerant to a fault. The Ukrainian neighborhood has lost most of its Ukrainians as upscale, largely gay young professionals of every conceivable origin take the place of those who leave for the relative serenity of the suburbs. The transformation called gentrification has been going on for decades without much friction much less visible than that between the adherents of Bandera and those of Melnyk. In general, America is a place where people can live next door and simultaneously in different worlds.
After a trip to Washington, we returned to visit old friends, John (Ivan) and Maria Fizer in those suburbs to which the Ukrainians fled, in this case near the center of Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodoxy located in South Bound Brook, New Jersey. In nearby Somerset, John, a retired professor from Rutgers University, and I could spend hours talking about ideas, trends, our very different pasts, and the times when we worked together on Ukrainian issues. Our hosts welcomed us to their lovely home near a forest bounded by a highway, from which the Fizers are comfortably isolated in a cozy cul-de-sac. The suburban cocoon offers charms the Naked City cannot, but upon entering it one of necessity leaves the hard but eternally fascinating New York. And upon leaving New York, one enters the real America. The two places seem worlds apart, even when both speak Ukrainian.
