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them, and about them. It would address their interests and their needs. Strangers in a strange land, they would have something unique and powerful: a publication that connected them to their past while helping them embrace their future. Our Life became a link, not only to Ukraine but to Ukrainian American women like themselves. Through the UNWLA and its brave little publication they could share interests and problems and questions and concerns about maintaining a home and family in a culture that was that was somewhat alien. They could find comfort in a magazine that reflected their concerns about an environment in which they and their children were sometimes uncertain whether they were fish or fowl, American or Ukrainian, or a complex hybrid attempting to reconcile cultures and customs that sometimes clashed. The decision to make Our Life bilingual was most probably a shocking proposition to some members of the UNWLA and to members of the Ukrainian American community at large. Those who argued for linguistic purity, however, were convinced by the pragmatists that the magazine was published in America, that English was the language of America, and that for the magazine to be truly viable it must have both Ukrainian and English materials. The intervening years have proved that this decision to publish in both languages was both insight and foresight. When we consider that many contemporary Ukrainian American women find it easier to read English than Ukrainian and that many UNWLA members are children of mixed marriages and do not even speak Ukrainian, we can only applaud the wisdom of those who insisted on taking this disputed path. Each new editor put her personal stamp on the magazine. Each had the vision and the passion and the determination to keep it alive and to perpetuate the goals established by the founding mothers. Because my mother is a member of the UNWLA, I first became familiar with Our Life while growing up in the Ukrainian American community in Philadelphia—in the days when most UNWLA members lived in communities where it was still possible to walk to Ukrainian events and meetings and to each other's homes. The mail to these homes brought letters and bills, just as it did to the homes of the neighbors, but it also brought a cornucopia of Ukrainian publications like Svoboda and America and Veselka and Lys Mykyta and Novi Dni and, of course, Our Life. Somewhere along the way, half or more of these publications folded. Our Life was one of those that survived. Changing times and changing lifestyles did not diminish its purpose or its comfortable and comforting presence in Ukrainian households. The summer after I graduated from college, I went to Europe, part of a group of young Ukrainian Americans who were unloaded from a charter plane in Amsterdam and then dispersed to sundry destinations of choice. During this trip, I became part of a quartet that traveled behind the Iron Curtain, to Romania. Our little expedition included a rather circuitous road trip to the back country ... farming villages along the Ukrainian-Romanian border that were geopolitically Romanian and culturally and linguistically Ukrainian. Bukovyna and not Bukovyna. Romania and not Romania. Ukraine and not Ukraine. It was a daring little jaunt into territory ruled by the same breed of communists that had caused my parents and so many thousands of others to seek freedom and security in the United States. When I returned to the United States, I had interesting stories to tell and one of the people intrigued by what I had seen and done and photographed was Lydia Burachynska, then editor of Our Life. Mrs. Burachynska interviewed me and wrote an article, which was subsequently published in the magazine. She graciously gave me an undeserved byline for the article—a generous and thoughtful gesture that was to prove one of many components that turned me into a writer and eventually led me to assume the duties of Our Life's English language editor. A couple of decades later, I traveled to Ukraine with a group of students, Ukrainian American kids whose parents wanted them to see the country they or their parents had called home many years before. This too was an interesting trip. Ukraine was still under Soviet domination, but one could hear and see and feel that the spirit of independence was in the wind. The young people I traveled with were dismayed at the poverty and the restrictions of this strange land. I saw the country through their eyes and tried to capture what they were seeing and feeling in an article which I submitted for publication to Our НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, СІЧЕНЬ 2004 5
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