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colliemommieVeterans' Day is one of those times when I am forcibly reminded how different my subculture is from the mainstream US. Church today was really a special occasion. Everything was decorated, we had the District Chaplain of the VFW speak during the homily, we sang all the patriotic hymns and the national anthem, the local Marine Color Guard presented, we had a roll call of the dead and tolled the bell, two buglers playing taps, we sang a vishnya pamiat (eternal memory), there were pamphlets, and then there was a luncheon.
At the luncheon, someone's brother was visiting and said something in passing about us going a bit overboard. I've never seen Father Mike get that close to being angry. I think it was only that the guy was so obviously ignorant of what was really going on that saved him.
Ukrainian Americans do not take our freedoms for granted. My branch of the family was lucky. We got out before the Bolshevik Revolution. The Soviets outlawed the Ukrainian language, any public cultural celebration, and the Church. Icons were burned, churches destroyed. People started stitching icons on linen because it was easier to hide than wood and celebrated Liturgy in homes, or out in the woods. The religious were arrested, tortured, executed, but priests still said Liturgy, and abbots and abbesses ran their monasteries.
The resistance to Soviet rule and the attempt to strip Ukrainians of their history and culture and religion was what prompted Stalin to engineer a famine that killed between six and seven million in 1932 and 1933. And even that was not enough to kill Ukrainian nationalism. After WWII, Stalin even tried to convince Ruthenian Catholic Bishop Theodore Romzha to front a Soviet-supported church. In 1947, Romzha's carriage was rammed by a military truck on his way home from an expressly-forbidden church dedication. He died that night; most sources agree from poison administered on top of his injuries. While Romzha is the best-known of the martyrs, he was certainly not the only one.
The rest of my father's family were sponsored by my grandparents and came over after WWII. My dad's cousins Andrei, Yaro, and Christine grew up in a refugee camp. The first time they saw a plane flying over in western PA they hid under the porch so they wouldn't get bombed.
The Church, and Ukrainian nationalism, remained outlawed until the fall of the Soviet Union, and Ukraine was not independent until 1996.
So our communities and churches are full of people who remember parts of eighty years of Soviet rule. When it was illegal to be a Ukrainian in Ukraine. When families were proud to have a vocation in the family, even when it was almost certain that that young man or woman would be imprisoned or killed for choosing the religious life. Most of our elders lived through the famine as children. They saw parents and siblings starve to death, while growing 80% of the wheat in the Soviet Union.
Ukrainian Americans suffered to come here, and many served to help win their countrymen that ability. We love the country that let us be what we were generations: the largest religion in Diaspora. A Church and a culture without a home. America and Canada welcomed us when Ukraine was being starved and poisoned by Soviet collectivism. We know that people died for us to be here and have these freedoms. This is not history to us. This is our grandparents' lives, our parents' lives, our lives. We are grateful beyond words to the resistance there and the veterans here that it will not be our children's lives.
And this is why we celebrate Veterans' Day. Publically,in our churches, with our community, with traditions that are specifically Ukrainian, without fear or reprisal. Because as a culture, we remember when we could not.
At the luncheon, someone's brother was visiting and said something in passing about us going a bit overboard. I've never seen Father Mike get that close to being angry. I think it was only that the guy was so obviously ignorant of what was really going on that saved him.
Ukrainian Americans do not take our freedoms for granted. My branch of the family was lucky. We got out before the Bolshevik Revolution. The Soviets outlawed the Ukrainian language, any public cultural celebration, and the Church. Icons were burned, churches destroyed. People started stitching icons on linen because it was easier to hide than wood and celebrated Liturgy in homes, or out in the woods. The religious were arrested, tortured, executed, but priests still said Liturgy, and abbots and abbesses ran their monasteries.
The resistance to Soviet rule and the attempt to strip Ukrainians of their history and culture and religion was what prompted Stalin to engineer a famine that killed between six and seven million in 1932 and 1933. And even that was not enough to kill Ukrainian nationalism. After WWII, Stalin even tried to convince Ruthenian Catholic Bishop Theodore Romzha to front a Soviet-supported church. In 1947, Romzha's carriage was rammed by a military truck on his way home from an expressly-forbidden church dedication. He died that night; most sources agree from poison administered on top of his injuries. While Romzha is the best-known of the martyrs, he was certainly not the only one.
The rest of my father's family were sponsored by my grandparents and came over after WWII. My dad's cousins Andrei, Yaro, and Christine grew up in a refugee camp. The first time they saw a plane flying over in western PA they hid under the porch so they wouldn't get bombed.
The Church, and Ukrainian nationalism, remained outlawed until the fall of the Soviet Union, and Ukraine was not independent until 1996.
So our communities and churches are full of people who remember parts of eighty years of Soviet rule. When it was illegal to be a Ukrainian in Ukraine. When families were proud to have a vocation in the family, even when it was almost certain that that young man or woman would be imprisoned or killed for choosing the religious life. Most of our elders lived through the famine as children. They saw parents and siblings starve to death, while growing 80% of the wheat in the Soviet Union.
Ukrainian Americans suffered to come here, and many served to help win their countrymen that ability. We love the country that let us be what we were generations: the largest religion in Diaspora. A Church and a culture without a home. America and Canada welcomed us when Ukraine was being starved and poisoned by Soviet collectivism. We know that people died for us to be here and have these freedoms. This is not history to us. This is our grandparents' lives, our parents' lives, our lives. We are grateful beyond words to the resistance there and the veterans here that it will not be our children's lives.
And this is why we celebrate Veterans' Day. Publically,in our churches, with our community, with traditions that are specifically Ukrainian, without fear or reprisal. Because as a culture, we remember when we could not.
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Date: 2013-11-11 01:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-11 01:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-11 05:55 am (UTC)Good for you for not taking for granted what so much of our country does.
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Date: 2013-11-11 05:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-12 01:28 am (UTC)Thank you for sharing this.
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Date: 2013-11-17 04:50 am (UTC)Do you like mysteries? You might enjoy Jo Dereske's Miss Zukas mysteries. Although the main character's family is Lithuanian, rather than Ukrainian, and the experiences aren't as immediate and intense as your family's, but they're excellent. The first one is _Miss Zukas and the Library Murders_.