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. (www.ukrainianmuseum.org)
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. (www.usarmygermany.com)
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.”
Part 1:Ukrainian exodus to North America
Part 2: How America became home to Ukrainians seeking better opportunities
Part 4: Ukrainians abroad strive to keep alive cultural traditions of the homeland
Kyiv Post staff writer Natalia A. Feduschak can be reached at [email protected].
