from “Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet”
Megan Buskey | Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return | ibidem Press | 2023 | 200 Pages
The sky over Cleveland is typically gray, the lake a muddy blue, the grass stiff and yellow in the winter and pillowy and green in the summer. From the bridges that stretch over the Cuyahoga River you can see freight yards, and immense ships moored along the docks waiting for cargo to be loaded into their holds. When you wade into Lake Erie, dark pieces of algae lap against your calves and sharp rocks push up into the soles of your feet. Modest homes with neat yards bump up against each other in neighborhoods formed by immigrants seeking communities of their own.
When I close my eyes and think of my hometown, the elements that come to mind are not that much different from what my great-grandfather encountered when he arrived in Cleveland from his Ukrainian village of Staryava almost a century ago, in 1929.
Mykhailo and I shared a few years on this earth. When I was born, he was living in a nursing home receiving round-the-clock care. A massive stroke two years earlier had left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak clearly, but it didn’t stamp out his love of company. My parents and I visited him, my mother carrying me on her hip; he could still play pinochle with his one good arm.
He died when I was three years old. I don’t remember him, but every so often I see him in members of my family—and myself. My grandmother inherited his strong jaw. In photographs where he is huddled among friends, I can feel his garrulousness, a trait shared by my aunt Olga. Comments from my mother suggest that I bake with his spirit, not caring that I spill flour on the flour or leave buttery fingerprints on the faucet. In America, Mykhailo worked as a baker, and was known for his gusto and exuberance.
The traces of the people who came before us are everywhere, even when we can’t see them.
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Mykhailo reunited with his elder brother in Cleveland in the last months of 1929. By then, Ivan had Anglicized his name to John and made his home on the Southside, a rough neighborhood west of the Flats, where Cleveland’s heavy industry was located. The proximity to the low-skill jobs in the city’s steel mills, coal yards, and foundries made the Southside a prime destination for newly arrived immigrants. By the second decade of the twentieth century, refugees from the collapsed Austro-Hungarian Empire had displaced in number and influence the Irish who had settled the Southside almost a century earlier. Poles and Ukrainians were most heavily represented in the mix, along with Slovaks, Russians, and smaller numbers of Greeks, Germans, and other nationalities.
The Southside was an American melting pot if there ever was one, but one in which the ingredients retained their constituent attributes. New arrivals normally associated with members of their own ethnic group—more narrowly, usually those who belonged to the same parish. The modest streets of the Southside were (and still are) jeweled with churches, none more stunning than St. Theodosius, a Russian Orthodox cathedral with a profusion of green domes that sits on a bluff overlooking the Flats. Immigrants from the Carpathian Mountains had started the church at the turn of the twentieth century, electing to follow the Moscow Orthodox patriarchate rather than the Pope. John, too, had abandoned the Greek Catholic tradition he had been raised in and joined St. Vladimir’s, a Ukrainian Eastern Orthodox congregation that had formed in the Southside in 1924.
Mykhailo, who went by Mike in the United States, probably had little time to contemplate the intricacies of the switch; he was experiencing the full force of the cacophony of American life. First there was the task of getting reacquainted with John, who was starting to enjoy some good fortune after a long spell of tragedy. In the United States, John had married a woman he had grown up with in Staryava. Her name was Katherine, and she had made her way through Ellis Island about six months before he did. They welcomed their first child, a girl named Josephine, in November 1919, but she died at the age of four months. In 1927, Katherine, just thirty-two, herself died after years of suffering from kidney disease, leaving John a single father to their six-year-old daughter, Annie. John had, however, happily remarried, and his second wife, a young woman of Ukrainian extraction named Helen, would soon give birth to a son.
The culture of the Southside was a hybrid of the Old World and the new. In the summer, men in horse-drawn carriages canvassed its streets, hawking bags of nuts and recently-picked peaches. Immigrants of all extractions converged on the brick concourse of the West Side Market, on West Twenty-Fifth Street, where fresh produce was cheap and you could get your hands on a whole goose or chicken. Some residents of the Southside built smokehouses in their picket-fenced back yards and smoked the birds, saving the feathers for pillows or duvets as they had in Europe. The smoke would lift into the gray Cleveland sky, where, when the wind blew a certain way, it would mix with the coal smoke from the freight yards, the reek of rotting flesh from the slaughter houses, the exhaust of the tar and asphalt plants, and the gas emitted by the oil refineries, all of it mildly earthened by the Cuyahoga River. It was a smell like nothing else in the world, and for many it was the smell of prosperity and freedom.
In the most important ways, Mike landed on his feet. The 1930 census would show him employed at a bakery—perhaps the same bakery where John was working as a truck driver. By June 1930, Mike had the $200 he needed to open a bank account. His command of English was so poor that he reported neither written nor oral skills in the language, but his brother had both. Mike was getting by. He was doing it. He was saving money and sending it to Staryava.
By the mid-1930s, despite an economy mired in depression, Mike seemed to hit his stride. He liked baking. It involved working with his hands, just as farming had, and he did it well. St. Vladimir’s became a proper parish in 1933, opening a church about a mile down the street from the Mazur house in Tremont. Just as in Staryava, Mike made the church the center of his life outside work. He frequented the Ukrainian National Home, a former mansion on West Fourteenth Street that the Ukrainian community used for concerts, art exhibits, lectures, and other cultural events. Mike’s bakery was a union shop; he found meaning in union life and was an active member of the Teamsters.
He took such a shine to America that it was decided that he should not return to Staryava as he had planned but that his wife and children should come and live in America permanently. In 1935, he filed a declaration of intention to apply for citizenship. But the timing—oh, the timing—was bad. It was clear that the employment situation was dire, that even Mike’s good fortune was precarious. About forty-one of every hundred men on the Southside couldn’t find a job in 1934. The Southside watched the hulking factories of the Flats nervously. For a community whose livelihood depended on industry, the vile emissions of the factories were a welcome sign of health. When work in the factories slowed, everyone suffered. “The smokestacks were just empty tubes sticking into the sky,” a memoirist of the Southside of the Depression era related with dismay. “No black smoke, no white smoke, no red, yellow, or orange smoke.”
On March 18, 1938, Mike Mazur became a U.S. citizen. He would never master the intricacies of the English language, but he took great pride in his status. From there on out, he voted in every election and always for the Democratic Party, in keeping with his union loyalty. He usually dressed in a suit and tie before heading to the polls, befitting a practice he considered a privilege.
He looked forward to introducing his family to the country he had come to prize. In Staryava, his wife and children began to prepare to immigrate. But Mike wanted to wait until times were a bit better, when there were jobs to speak of and desperation didn’t crackle in the air. So they waited, thinking that a better time would surely come. What they got instead, in September 1939, was something far different from what they had hoped.
From Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return.
Copyright © 2023 by Megan Buskey.
Reprinted with permission of ibidem Press.
See Buskey March 25, 2023 at Visible Voice Books.