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A LETTER FROM KIEV TAMARA STADNYCHENKO In Kiev last summer I wandered into RUKH head quarters one morning, hoping to get some good mate rial for articles that might be of interest to assorted edi tors in America. As luck would have it, most of the RUKH people had left town for the week to join friends and colleagues in Zaporizzhia for the Sich festival. The few people who were in the RUKH offices looked rather unhappy about missing the celebration in Zaporizzhia and were not especially interested in entertaining another visitor from the United States. For lack of anything bet ter to do I snooped around, tried to cajole the reluctant person in charge into giving me a story, and played interpreter for a British journalist who was having an even worse time than I locating a willing source and a good scoop. I at least was capable of hitting my head against a brick wall in Ukrainian; there was some per verse consolation in seeing him struggle to attain the same dead end in the Queen's English. After about an hour or two of this I was ready to call it quits and go back to the hotel, but I was detained by a young RUKH volunteer named Mykola who seemed more than willing to talk to someone from America. We chatted about this and that and discovered to our mut ual delight that we had a friend in common, a woman I had grown up with in Philadelphia whom he had met the previous year when she had wandered into RUKH headquarters. We went to lunch and then he took me around to all the newspaper and magazine offices within walking distance and waited patiently while I talked with editors and journalists about their work and their paper shortages. Late that afternoon, Mykola decided that we should have dinner. I assumed that we would go to another res taurant, but he led me to a telephone and called his wife and announced that he was bringing someone to dinner. He told her to start cooking as we would be there in about a half hour. Up till that point I had considered Mykola a rather fine fellow who was accomodating and pleasant and interesting company. The phone call infur iated me and I felt a genuine sympathy for the poor wife who was being ordered to cook for some stranger brought in, quite literally, off the street. Like the women who had participated in the takeover of the administra tion building at the University of California at Berkley in the late sixties, I was of a mind that unless they wanted to, “free women did not cook” on demand. I made sure that Mykola was fully apprised of this viewpoint as we walked to the small apartment he and his wife Tamara and daughter Darusia shared with his parents and a younger brother. The parents and the brother were out of town. Tamara, an attractive and very pregnant brunette, greeted us at the door of the apartment. Her condition added to my discomfort, especially when she insisted that Mykola and I sit at the only two chairs at the kit chen table while she served us the fried potatoes and onions that she had prepared for our dinner. No amount of protesting from me could make her take one of the two chairs. She and two year old Darusia stood or walked about the kitchen while Mykola and I ate. I had never had a less enjoyable meal. After dinner the four of us moved to the living room and the adults talked while little Darusia eyed the strange woman from America with apprehension and a little awe. Tamara, I learned, was Russian, a fact she admit ted in an embarrassed whisper as though she were con fessing to a social disease that isn’t mentioned in polite company or in front of children. She apologized, fre quently, for the way she spoke Ukrainian. She had learned it while she and Mykola were courting and she was determined that Ukrainian would be her children’s mother tongue. There was an immediate rapport between us. The Russian woman had chosen to “convert” to Ukrainian- Drawing: Volodymyr Stetsula Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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