Ukrainian exodus to North America

[AkMike]

I found these articles about Ukrainians that moved to the "New World" at the' Kyiv Post'and thought that you may like to hear about it too.

Nov 24, 2011 at 21:51 | Natalia A. Feduschak
Editor’s Note: Ever since the first Ukrainian soldier left for America in 1608 on an English ship to establish the first permanent English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, immigration has loomed large in the Ukrainian consciousness. Hundreds of thousands of migrants have left their homeland over the centuries in search of better lives, particularly from the territory that comprises today’s western Ukraine.Some ventured for short periods of time and returned home with a bit of wealth; others departed for good. Those who left permanently established new Ukrainian communities in their adopted homelands. Canada and the United States, with their vast agricultural lands and mining towns, proved to be magnets for Ukrainian migrants. Today each coutnry can boast fourth- and fifth-generation Ukrainians.Canada, which this year celebrated 120 years of Ukrainian immigration to its shores, is home to 1.2 million Ukrainians. The U.S. has about 1 million Ukrainian-Americans. The Kyiv Post today begins a series that explores where and how Ukrainian diaspora communities developed, what challenges lie ahead and how they feel about their ancestral homeland. This first explores the origins of Ukrainians in Canada.

TORONTO – Although other people had traveled to Canada before him, Iwan Pylypiw from the village of Nebiliv in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast became one of the first officially recorded migrants in 1891.

He played a critical role in the mass migration of Ukrainians to Canada by practicing the best advertisement possible in his era – getting in trouble with the law.
After an arduous journey to the new land, Pylypiw returned to his home village a year later and eagerly touted a Canadian land giveaway, as well as individual freedoms enjoyed by residents. Urging others to settle in Canada, his glowing reports reached neighboring villages.

As many families gave in to his tales about fairy lands, Pylypiw was arrested by police in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which then included western Ukraine.

Pylypiw was arrested “for agitation among the country folk to leave the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which meant the loss of cheap labor and young men for service in the military force,” the late Paul Yuzyk, a senator in Canada’s Manitoba province, wrote in a 1952 article describing the early years of Ukrainian migration to Canada.“The trial turned out to be a public advertisement by which news of the wonderful opportunities in Canada spread to all corners of the Ukrainian lands under Austria.”

While North America was the primary destination for Ukrainian migrants, Canada and the U.S. offered them two very different types of lives.

It was those early years that set the stage for not only how the Ukrainian communities would develop in each country, but the impact they would have on their respective societies.The politics of each country also played an important role in shaping the settlers’ life.

Almost from the very beginning, Ukrainians maintained a larger presence in Canada than in the U.S.In the last 120 years, Canada has experienced four great waves of Ukrainian immigration – 1896-1914, 1922-1939, 1946-1954 and 1991 onward.

Agriculture was the main carrot the country dangled before potential immigrants. Desperate for people who would farm its vast agricultural lands, Canada in its early years parceled out free 160-acre homesteads to anyone willing to work it.It was more property than many Ukrainians, confined to small land plots sometimes divided by growing families at home, could ever imagine owning.

When Mykhailo Zubrytskyi, a priest and a renowned ethnographer, wrote in 1906 about the business of immigration that was taking place in the Starosambir region, he was describing a scene that was duplicated in countless other towns and villages throughout western Ukraine.



First Ukrainian settlers came to Canada 120 years ago.

“Money for the trip they borrow from other gazdiv [owners of village homes]…He who has money does not travel across the ocean, because he himself needs workers,” Zubrytskyi wrote.“They take 150 zrinskies [the regional currency] and promise to send within the year, and they borrow it at 15 percent a year.



The first monies made they send to pay off the money borrowed. At first they take money only to get to the water (ocean) to Hamburg, and then, arriving there, call to have more money sent to them for the further journey.”

By the time Zubrytskyi’s article was published in Dilo, the region’s most renowned Ukrainian newspaper, emigrationby Ukrainians to Canada and the U.S. was well under way. For nearly two decades, migrants had boarded ships bound for North America, lured by the promise of a better future.

Many of these migrants were country folk escaping crushing poverty rampant in the villages of Halychyna, which today encompasses part of western Ukraine.Throngs eagerly responded to the advertisements regularly placed in Dilo by major European shipping companies, as well as word of mouth.

Ukrainian leaders also helped spur the migration process. In 1895, ostensibly concerned about the growing exodus to Canada and the fate of the Ukrainians there, the educational Prosvita Society commissioned Josef Oleskiw, a professor of agriculture at a teachers’ seminary in Lviv, to embark on a fact-finding mission.

His report from the trip commended the benefits of life in Canada which Pylypiw had voiced.

“Everything points to the fact that in a few years our farmer will build himself a good livelihood, although at present in the hardships of pioneering, he does not resemble the image of God-ragged and pitiful, his appearance does not harmonize with the free lands where he has settled,” he wrote.

Establishing farms was not an easy endeavor.To make ends meet, many men were forced to lay railroad tracks across the prairies while their wives and children worked the land.

“It does not seem that fine ploughed lands and pastures could belong to such poverty-stricken people. If some of our intelligentsia were to take to heart the fate of our people and go to Canada, they could serve as their leaders, and prevent them from being swindled. I shall be happy to show them on the map where our people have settled, and will tell them many practical things which could help them,” Oleskiw noted.



Wasyl Eleniak, Dr. Josef Oleskiw, Iwan Pylypiw

By 1914, around 170,000 Ukrainians had settled in Canada, comprising as a group between 10 and 12 percent of all immigrating Europeans to the country.
The second wave of migrants was more educated and politically-oriented then those who had arrived before them.

All had lived through the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and subsequent struggle to win Ukrainian independence. The bulk of these migrants also headed west to work the land, but others stayed in the east to work as farmers and in industry.

It is this group of immigrants that laid the foundation for Ukrainians to take part in business and politics and become professionals.Their children began to enter Canadian universities, formed Ukrainian organizations and were more active in all spheres of Canadian life.

The wave of immigrants who entered Canada after World War II beginning in 1946 were the most politically-conscious and active.More than others, they were the ones who solidified the place of Ukrainians in Canada.

Political rather than economic refugees, many had fled the Soviet occupation of their homeland, while others had been forced laborers in Germany.

“Very quickly they entered the Canadian life by renewing their professions, establishing businesses and educating their young,” noted Zorianna Sokolsky, who has been studying the history of Ukrainians in Canada for many years.

“The influx of some 40,000 Ukrainians greatly strengthened the Ukrainian urban center where a whole new string of cultural, educational, financial, commercial, religious and political institutions mushroomed.”

It is within this post-World War II migration that the Ukrainian communities in Canada and the U.S. found their greatest commonality.





Read more: Kyiv Post. Independence. Community. Trust - Ukraine - Ukrainian exodus to North America

[AkMike]

How America became home to Ukrainians seeking better opportunities

Dec 1, 2011 at 23:22 | Natalia A. Feduschak
Editor’s Note: For centuries, Ukrainians have left their homeland and ended up in many nations of the world, especially Canada and the United States. Part two of The Great Exodus series explores the arrival to America.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Ukrainians can thank one Orthodox priest from the Kyiv region for introducing poet Taras Shevchenko and the Ukrainian language to the people of the United States.

Ahapii Honcharenko, a political exile who throughout his long life would be a thorn in the side of czarist Russia, was the first documented Ukrainian on U.S. soil.Having settled in San Francisco, California, after arriving in America in 1865, he started to publish the Alaska Herald-Svoboda, a semi-monthly publication that came out in the Ukrainian, Russian and English languages two years later, after the U.S. purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867.

Along with Alaska, the paper was circulated in Siberia, Japan, China and the Sandwich Islands and also appears to have covered events in California. It seems strange today that Honcharenko published a newspaper for people in Alaska while himself stationed in San Francisco, but that’s the story. The publication survived for nine years, according to the Library of Congress.

Aimed at Alaska’s Slavic inhabitants, the paper’s first issue featured an article about Ukraine’s famed bard Taras Shevchenko and the Constitution of the United States, translated into Russian.

(The late actor Jack Palance)

Honcharenko knew Shevchenko and espoused revolutionary ideas, Orest Subtelny wrote in his groundbreaking “Ukraine: A History.”

Known for his opinionated views, the priest wrote on Aug. 15, 1869 of the Slavonian community that inhabited San Francisco at the time; there were presumably Ukrainians among that crowd.

“All of its members are more or less civilized; that is to say they are not savages,” the Alaska Herald-Svoboda reported. “The mercantile portion is principally engaged in keeping bar-rooms, saloons, coffee-house, restaurants, etc. All are prosperous. They retain all their pristine instincts of jealousy, lust and vindictiveness.”

Honcharenko would later become a prominent figure in California where in the early 20th century he would try to establish a Ukrainian socialist colony, Subtelny noted.

Another Ukrainian who came to the U.S. in its early years was Nicholas Sudzilovsky-Russel, a physician and revolutionary from Kyiv, who came to California in the 1880s and then moved to Hawaii, where he became president of the Hawaiian Senate.

It is without doubt that other Ukrainians arrived in America before Honcharenko.

(Football great Mike Ditka)

Although little is known about these individuals, the Encyclopedia of Ukraine notes that “isolated individuals from what is today Ukraine began arriving with the first white settlers in the New World.
Ukrainian-sounding names appear in references to and in the records of the Jamestown colony in Virginia and of New Amsterdam (now New York), in the rolls of the American revolutionary army, and in the U.S. census of 1790.”

Like Canada, the U.S. experienced several waves of Ukrainian immigration.

The reasons migrants left their ethnic homeland for each country in North America mirrored the other in substantial ways, with economic and political reasons leading the way.

Yet the U.S. differed from Canada in important ways.

While Canada developed a policy of multiculturalism and embraced the diverse ethnic groups, the U.S. adopted a philosophy of being the great melting pot to encourage assimilation. American cities such as New York and Philadelphia hosted a medley of diverse languages and cultures, but newcomers and their offspring were encouraged to put their ethnic heritage aside and become American.

(Actress Milla Jovovich)

In addition, if Ukrainian migrants traveled to Canada to stay – that country offered early migrants substantial free land plots – those who went to the U.S. traversed with the idea of staying in the country temporarily.

Although the work was backbreaking, the U.S. was a haven for those willing to labor in its steel and textile mills. Indeed, about one-third of all migrants who traveled to America returned home by the 1930s, historical records suggest.

Because of the sheer numbers of immigrants who traveled there over the decades, the make-up of those who eventually settled in the U.S., as well as the government’s integration policies, Ukrainians have not achieved the type of political influence their brethren have in Canada.

That does not mean, however, they have not left an imprint.

Throughout the U.S., the presence of Ukrainians can be felt, from the graveyards of Leadville, Colorado where tombstones are etched in Cyrillic, reflecting the many individuals who labored in some of the country’s most lucrative silver mines, to the memorable films made by Jack Palance, the Academy Award-winning actor and son of Ukrainian migrants from today’s Ternopil and Lviv regions.

Palance first worked as a miner in Pennsylvania before setting out to pursue a career in boxing and then acting.

(American foreign policy expert Paula Dobriansky)

The first wave of Ukrainian migration to the U.S. lasted from the 1870s to 1914.

To work a plethora of mines in the east, the majority of individuals who arrived there were men from the Transcarpathian region and later were joined by their brethren from Halychyna, which comprises much of today’s western Ukraine.

Despite priest Honcharenko’s Orthodox faith, most of these early migrants were what today would be characterized as Ukrainian Catholics.

“The unfamiliar and even hostile surroundings gave rise to a yearning for their own familiar institutions, in particular their own church, which had been the center of their social life in Europe,” Bohdan Procko, professor emeritus at Villanova University, wrote in a 1973 article about the ethnic experience in Pennsylvania.“It was the Ukrainian … immigrants in Shenandoah in 1884 who made the first attempt to obtain a priest from Europe.”

(Ahapii Honcharenko, first recorded Ukrainian in America in 1865)

The second migration wave lasted from 1920 to 1939. It was during this period that America showed its unflattering colors. Tired of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, the U.S. Congress imposed restrictions on Ukrainian migration, limiting the number to 20,000 individuals.

Starting from 1947 and up until 1955, the third wave of immigrants rushed in. Like those who ended up in Canada, many of these travelers witnessed the horrors of World War II and lived in displaced persons’ camps in Europe in the post-war years.

A final migration that began in 1991 and continues to this day was spurred by the demise of the Soviet Union. Washington created a unique program for migrants to enter the U.S., known as the green card lottery, which since 1990 has helped thousands of Ukrainians establish new lives in the USA.

[AkMike]

How to be Ukrainian in a new, foreign land

Dec 9, 2011 at 00:12 | Natalia A. Feduschak
TORONTO – Bloor West Village is filled with the sights and sounds of Eastern Europe and Ukraine.

It is here on this small swath of territory that one can purchase mouth-watering doughnuts known as pampushky at Anna’s Bakery – it is Polish – and canisters of Lviv’s famous Halka coffee just a few doors down.

Across the street, plastic holders at the Ukrainian Credit Union sport flyers offering language services for newly arrived immigrants, while individuals departing its competing credit union, Buduchnist, chatter briskly in Ukrainian.

All along the street, bulletin boards announce the latest Ukrainian choir performance or dance group set to visit Toronto.

For more than half a century, Bloor West Village was the heart of Toronto’s Ukrainian community. Today, the area is undergoing a subtle transformation.

Thanks in part to the wave of Ukrainians who arrived in Canada after the breakup of the Soviet Union, many of the organizations that made the area home are heading for the suburbs to accommodate the new migrants, who prefer the outskirts to the city center.

Others have shuttered their doors for good, unable to sustain themselves as the Ukrainian community and its interests have changed.

The transformation of Bloor West Village is one example of the quiet culture clash between the third and fourth waves of Ukrainian migrants that is being felt in communities throughout Canada and the U.S.

While migrants who arrived after 1991 are breathing life into many North American Ukrainian communities, those who arrived before them, in World War II’s aftermath, complain the newcomers are still largely absent from traditional diaspora institutions and accompanying social dialogue.

In many ways, they are right.


Ukrainians tour a salt mine in Berchtesgaden on April 11, 1946. (The Ukrainian Museum in New York City)

Although each Ukrainian migration saw the following one as strange, the third wave who came to North America after World War II did so as political refugees. Those who arrived after 1991, however, came for economic reasons, the same as the initial two waves of Ukrainian migrants did.

“The third wave brought in the politics,” says scholar Orest Subtelny, who grew up in the U.S. but has been a resident of Toronto for many years. “The fourth wave came for socio-economic reasons.”

The experience of World War II for one group, however, and life under Communism for the other cannot be dismissed when looking at the differences between the two waves of migrants, scholars and immigrants say.

Many third wave migrants were nationally conscious and shaped by the Ukrainian independence movement taking place on the territory of what is now western Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s. Their further integration as a community was solidified by post-war displaced persons camps in Europe.
“This was a very unusual phenomenon,” says Subtelny, whose “Ukraine: A History” is considered a seminal tome. “They maintained contact more than any other migration because they knew each other from the camps. The camp experience was very important. … They were organized and they just took their organizations with them.”


The International Refugee Organization used the Ellwangen Kaserne complex in Baden-Wurttemberg as a displaced persons camp for 3,000 Ukrainian refugees from 1946 to 1951. (USAREUR Main Page)

For this wave of migrants, Bloor West Village with its welcoming store fronts and Old World charm proved to be a haven.

The area became the backdrop for the many political, civic and business organizations that were transplanted from their homeland and the displaced persons camps.

Those organizations included not only credit unions established by Ukrainians to open businesses or buy homes, but those like the scouting organization, Plast.

The brownish brick building with large domed windows that housed the organization on Bloor Street was a staple in the Ukrainian community; scores of children traversed through its doors over the years.

With their political zeal, this wave of Ukrainians put a Soviet-occupied Ukraine at the forefront of U.S. and Canadian politics. In both countries, for instance, migrants and their children regularly protested Soviet policies toward Ukraine. In the U.S., Soviet Ukraine became one of the focus countries of Captive Nations Week.



Ukrainian festivals have been popular in Bloor West Village. The Toronto neighborhood was a haven for post-World War II refugees and still maintains an Eastern European flavor.(L-www.echoworld.com; R-www.yongestreetmedia.ca)

Started in 1953 and signed into law in 1959 by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the behest of Congress, the week was meant to raise public awareness of oppressed nations under control of Communist and other non-democratic governments.

This wave of migrants also helped inaugurate a major academic institution devoted to the study of Ukraine – the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Established in 1973, the institute was funded in part by donations from Ukrainian immigrants who felt it was their duty to support an institution that would promote studies of their homeland.

The institute held Ukrainian summer studies beginning in 1971 and published works by leading Ukraine-oriented scholars, including Subtelny, Frank Sysyn, Zenon Kohut, George Grabowicz, Alexander J. Motyl and the late Omeljan Pritsak.

It may, however, be unfair to wag disappointed fingers at the latest wave of migrants, Motyl says.

One primary reason this group has tended to remain uninvolved in the more traditional Ukrainian institutions is because it has no history of participation in civic organizations; the Soviets killed that inclination in its citizenry.

The conversation about integration is one Motyl, who is a professor at Rutgers University, has had with friends who belong to the fourth wave.

“When they lived in Ukraine, they didn’t have organizations, so why expect them to [belong to] something they never had?” he said.

Certainly, Motyl’s experience was different: He grew up in New York City’s East Village, which like Bloor West Village was the heart of Ukrainian community.

It was a self-contained community where Ukrainians patronized their countrymen’s shops and the larger world came into focus only when one left its confines.
“Ukrainians were very politicized,” Motyl said. “The parents were very nationally conscious, more so than others.”

While the third wave may be nationally conscious, it has done a sorrowful job in trying to integrate the fourth wave into their organizations, migrants say. There is also the question of conceit: Ukrainian migrants, particularly those for whom Russian is their first language, have heard they are not “Ukrainian” enough.

Iryna Mykytyuk hails from Chortkiv in Ternopil Oblast and has been in Canada for several years. She teaches Ukrainian to the grandchildren of those individuals who arrived in Canada after World War II.

Mykytyuk has maintained a good relationship with members of the third wave in part because she has made the extra effort; not only is she involved in several organizations, but she volunteers every Saturday to teach at one of Toronto’s Ukrainian schools.

Ukrainian school, where students learn everything from language, to literature, to history, to geography, was a ritual for tens of thousands of migrant offspring over the decades.

Yet even Mykytyuk admits to being amazed that many of children she teaches are stuck with the stereotypes brought from the Old Country.

As an example she recalls showing pictures of Lviv to her students; they were shocked that Ukraine was home to such a stunningly beautiful city. “’Are you kidding?’ was their reaction,” she says.

“There is a disconnect between what they see and know of Ukraine, what they hand down to their kids and what Ukraine really is today. Many have never been in Ukraine and they never will be.”



Read more: Kyiv Post. Independence. Community. Trust - Ukraine - How to be Ukrainian in a new, foreign land

[AkMike]

Ukrainians abroad strive to keep alive cultural traditions of the homeland

Dec 16, 2011 at 00:01 | Natalia A. Feduschak
Editor’s Note: For centuries, Ukrainians have left their homeland and gone abroad. Part 4 of The Great Exodus series explores how Ukrainians in North America define their cultural heritage.

TORONTO – Mark Marczyk’s awakening that he wanted a different life came as he overlooked a South African shantytown while peering through the tinted windows of a tour bus. “I realized I wanted to experience the world,” the Canadian-Ukrainian says, sipping a coffee at one of Toronto’s offbeat cafes.

Poised for a promising career in rugby, Marczyk, then 19, took six months off from his studies, traveled Eastern Europe and ended up in Ukraine. There, he discovered a love for the Ukrainian language and culture, which he had previously ignored.

Over the next few years, Marczyk traveled back to Ukraine several times, his longest stay lasting two years. He taught English at Lviv’s Ukrainian Catholic University and started to play with Ludy Dobri, a well-known city band, immersing himself in the country’s different musical sounds.

By the time Marczyk finally returned to Canada, he had amassed a vast repertoire. Today, Marczyk is the driving force behind Toronto’s Lemon Bucket Orkestra, a popular group that calls itself a Balkan-Klezmer-Gypsy-Party-Punk-Super-Band.

Marczyk’s journey is one example of how some Ukrainians in North America are defining for themselves what it means to be Ukrainian. For some, that identity is deeply rooted in cultural tradition, while for others such traditions are merely the starting point to explore new boundaries.

The one commonality is that no matter how they define being Ukrainian, community and a connection to Ukraine is important. Ukrainians in North America are still largely known through their traditional culture: food, dance, music and renowned painted Easter eggs known as pysanky.

Toronto’s annual Ukrainian festival, a cultural smorgasbord, for instance, is a much-awaited event. This year’s fair drew more than 600,000 people over a three-day period.

One of Canada’s best-known representatives of Ukrainian cultural identity is the women’s choir, Vesnivka. Now approaching its 50th anniversary, Vesnika’s mandate is “to bring Ukrainian classical, contemporary, sacred and folk music to life.” The choir was founded in 1965 by Halyna Kvitka Kondracki.

Since then, Vesnivka has become Canada’s premier Ukrainian women’s choir. It has collaborated with leading Canadian choirs and ensembles. Kondracki, who frequently travels to Ukraine, says her choir is evolving.

One of her goals in recent years has been to use Vesnivka to raise the profile of Ukrainian composers. Kondracki has commissioned works by Ukrainians which are performed by the choir. Some of the composers Vesnivka has worked with include Hanna Havrylets and Myroslav Skoryk in Ukraine.

“The idea of our choir has changed,” says Kondracki, who was born in Lviv. “We saw that we needed to support Ukrainian composers.”
Kondracki laments what she sees as a general ignorance by Ukrainians in Ukraine of their cultural heritage. “How can people value their culture if they don’t know it?” she says.

Ukrainian-Canadians have been able to use culture to make changes. For more than two decades, Ukrainian-Canadians lobbied for changes in federal laws that would allow their elderly to live in ethnically-oriented nursing homes.

The result of that effort is the St. Demetrius (Ukrainian Catholic) Development Corporation. It includes the Ukrainian Canadian Care Centre, a 152-bed care center.

It is located next door to the St. Demetrius Residence, a 15-story, 256-unit apartment building for the elderly and a church. Although English is spoken by staff, Ukrainian remains the primary language.

Giving a tour of the care center, employee Anne Denkova points to Ukrainian art that line corridors and walls: traditional village scenes with people clad in embroidered shirts, icons of the Mother Mary, and paintings of colorful dancers. Residents receive Ukrainian news while the daily menu posted on walls reads like those in a typical cafe in Ukraine.

The care center is so important that it has received donations from two of Canada’s wealthiest Ukrainians, Ian Ihnatowycz and Eugene Melnyk, who paid for the center’s magnificently decorated Byzantine-style chapel.

Maintaining cultural ties with her homeland is one reason why Tania Shchadrova opted to send her daughter a school in Toronto where part of the curriculum is taught in Ukrainian.

Hailing from Donetsk, Shchadrova admits that the Soviet Union was the fourth immigrant wave’s one great shared experience, rather than Ukrainian culture. Perhaps because so many immigrants from the fourth wave still have connections to Ukraine, the need to deeply explore one’s Ukrainian identity is less pressing than for previous waves of immigrants.

Still, modern-day Ukraine and its culture is increasingly becoming a defining characteristic for people like her.

“Every year I go to Ukraine and I go with happiness,” Shchadrova says. “I go to the village, it is a mess, but I grew up in this.”

Back at the coffee shop, like Kondracki, Marczyk bemoans the large influence that pop culture has on Ukrainian society. Yet his interpretation of Ukraine seems to be hitting a cord in multicultural Toronto.

The Lemon Bucket Orkestra was recently asked to perform in the foyer of Roy Thompson Hall, one of Toronto’s most prestigious musical institutions.

For nearly an hour patrons swayed and rocked and hopped to the sounds of Ukraine, Poland, Serbia and more. Marczyk couldn’t stop smiling. “They’re just great,” noted a bartender.

Staff writer Natalia A. Feduschak can be reached at feduschak@kyivpost.com.


Read more: Kyiv Post. Independence. Community. Trust - Ukraine - Ukrainians abroad strive to keep alive cultural traditions of the homeland

[fred2265]

Great research.