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6 WWW. UNWLA.ORG “НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ЛИСТОПАД 2012 UKRAINIAN HISTORY AND MEMORY IN THE PAGES OF OUR LIFE by Olesia Wallo Recent visitors to the UNWLA website (www.unwla.o rg) might have noticed that pre - vious issues of Our Life , going back all the way to the magazine ’ s beginnings in the 1940s, are now available for browsing. Thanks to the efforts of Ihor Py lyp chuk, Branch 64 member Natalia Son e- vytska , and UNWLA administrator Olya Sta siuk, members and guests have recei ved user - friendly access to the ongoing living record of the organ i - za tion and its multifaceted work . As I perused the back issue s of Our Life , I marveled at the sense of historical and cultural continuity that comes across so vividly in the ex - perience of reading through several decades of magazine materials in one sitting. While the So - viet regime went to all kinds of extremes to inte r- rupt this continuity in Ukraine through dis - tortions and suppressions of historical facts and collective memory, the Ukrainian diaspora com - munities kept it alive, and periodicals such as Our Life played an important role in this process. This sense of continuity is especially strong in cases of UNWLA involvement in com - memorating and informing the wider public about the tragic events from Ukraine ’ s Soviet past, such as the Holodomor (1932 - 33), Stalinist repressions and deportations, or the Chor nobyl nuclear disaster. From decade to decade, span - ning altogether almost seventy years, Our Life has been preserving in its pages both the history of these national traumas and the memory of the pain and suffering inflicted by them on individual Ukrainia ns. There is much sorrow and righteous anger in these pages, but this sad mission of the UNWLA has been indispensable. Back in 1953, marking 20 years since the Great Famine in Ukraine, Our Life addressed the question of remembering the tragic events of Uk rainian history. “Here and there one can hear the remark that we hold too many sad commemo - rations,” wrote the magazine's editor in the May issue of that year. “In general, they say, we look too much into the past instead of capturing the present; and out of the past, we select things that are sad and gloomy, which makes one feel de - pressed rather than encouraged.” In response to this complaint, the brief editorial article sug - gested three reasons for continuing to commemo - rate the Holodomor: to educate th ose who have not personally experienced the famine, including the international community; to hold it up as a warning about the dangers inherent in a totalita r - ian regime like the Soviet Union; and to learn, through contemplating the shared collective tra uma of the past, better mutual understanding, responsiveness, and compassion. Half a century later, these reasons are still valid — as the more recent issues of Our Life , including the one you are reading right now, can attest. May 1953 issue of Our Life . Contemporary scholars of memory tell us that collective memory is constituted through memory events, which take the form of various public rituals, print and online publications, m u- seum exhibits, monument unveilings, etc. Over the many years of its existence, Our Life has r e- ported on numerous memory events organized by the UNWLA that helped shape the ways in which historical tragedies such as the Holodomor and Chornobyl are perceived and remembered in the United States and beyond .
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