Assimilation Slowed Down

Lubow Wolynetz, 83, is the curator of Stamford’s Ukrainian Museum and Library. I CAME DOWN to New York in 1949, when I was 10 years old. We were refugees. The Little Ukrainian Village was already active and well established, so when we came, we came to a ready-made community: They had churches, they had organizations, they had newspapers. We didn’t feel like strangers; we just felt like we joined a different type of family. This wave of Ukrainian immigrants, the third wave, they were mostly professionals: historians, artists, teachers, economists. They realized how quickly assimilation works. They wanted somehow to slow down assimilation. And they began by organizing schools and activities for us youngsters. The major reason they were so concerned about assimilation is because we ran away from the Communists and we knew what horrible things were going on in Ukraine—how everything was stifled, how our intellectuals were sent to the Gulag or killed or shot or executed. They felt it incumbent upon them to make sure that we know our history and what’s going on in Ukraine and that we should tell the Americans, too. It was almost like a duty for our parents to make sure that we knew where we came from and that someday we should do something to correct all of the evil. I attended the very first Saturday-school class after it was organized in 1949. The school always needed new teachers for Ukrainian history, language, geography. I was interested in folk music and literature, so after I graduated from college, they asked me to teach a course in Ukrainian culture. I tried to tell my students that living in an adopted country doesn’t mean you have to negate and forget where you came from. As our immigrant group became more affluent, slowly the numbers in the community began to dwindle. People moved out of the downtown area to a better part of the city or a different state. But even if they moved to New Jersey or Connecticut, people would come on Saturdays and bring their children to the Ukrainian school or to Plast. They would come and refill themselves with the Ukrainian aspect of their lives.