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O U R L I F E Monthly, published by Ukrainian N ational W om en’s League o f America Vol. M DECEMBER 1995 Editor: TAMARA STADNYCHENKO I n t h i s b l e s s e d C h r i s t m a s s e a s o n , t h e N a t i o n a l B o a r d o f t h e U N W L A a n d t h e e d i t o r s o f O u r L i f e e x t e n d t o a l l U N W L A m e m b e r s a n d t h e i r f a m i l i e s a n d t o a l l o f o u r r e a d e r s b e s t w i s h e s f o r a j o y o u s a n d p e a c e f u l h o l i d a y . A SVIAT VECHIR STORY By TAMARA STADNYCHENKO In the mid-eighties, I lived in Atlanta, Georgia and worked at a small university just north of the city where I taught English to Cambodians, Arabs and Nigerians while learning to cope with southern accents and with a southern pace of life that was far too slow for my taste. I was, at that time, also adjusting to married life and to the lack of Ukrainian ghetto life that had been a pre dominant feature of my life up north. My few feeble attempts at forming friendships with Ukrainians in the Atlanta area were impeded by my own shyness and by a self-induced perception that Atlanta Ukrainians were mostly old, mostly wealthy and mostly too cliquish to accept a financially struggling young Yankee Uke into their established fold. And so I reconnected with my Ukrainian self by making frequent marathon drives to Philadelphia, especially making sure that I was “home” during the Christmas season. Between trips, my job and my American friends kept me busy and reasonably content. In June of 1985, my husband was awarded a grant to continue his doctoral studies at the University of Tiibingen where he would be working under the super vision and mentorship of a world renown German pro fessor. It was a prospect he found exciting and chal lenging, but one I viewed with some ambivalence. A good and avid traveler, I welcomed the chance to live in another country, and yet a part of me, already homesick for my Philadelphia and Ukrainian roots, saw this as a further separation from both. The down side of the move was compounded by the fact that I spoke “kein Deutsch.” The few weeks I had spent learning conversa tional German at Atlanta’s Goethe Institute prepared me for ordering coffee or tea “mit milch und zucker” and not much else. But the opportunity outweighed the trep idation, and off we went. In Tiibingen, our student housing consisted of a 10 by 10 room with bunk beds and a panaromaic view of the bus stop and the post office. Bathrooms and kitchen facilities were communal: the building boasted an eleva tor which broke down after every Friday night party in the basement bar. With the exception of Sang Jin, a Korean woman who had been living and studying in Germany for several years, all the other floor residents were German, most with a semi-hostile attitude about auslanders in general, and even moreso about ausland- ers who did not speak German. The friendliest among them was a law student named Horst who endured my bad chess playing and my even worse attempts at con versing "auf Deutsch" with good-natured amusement and patience and who made it a personal crusade to improve both. My other language teachers were the shopkeepers who, from kindess or exasperation, taught me to say “zwei stuck” and “halb kilo” instead of miming. While language acquisition made life in Tiibingen somewhat more palatable, my role as a non-student and non-German in this decidedly German and academic НАШЕ Ж ИТТЯ”, ГРУДЕНЬ 1995 13
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