I hope this piece allows you, as the reader, to step into the shoes of a Ukrainian-American and join us in the collective experiences many of us can relate to.

We let out a groggy groan every Saturday morning at 7 a.m., when our parents ripped the covers off our trembling little bodies and told us it was time to get ready for Ukrainian school. We screamed, we cried, and we kicked for hours before stubbornly sitting down by the dimly lit dining room table to do humdrum Ukie-school homework every Friday night.

We fell asleep on the scratchy, silver seats of our light blue minivan on the way to the Ukrainian American Cultural Center of New Jersey multiple times a week. We dreamed of the pink tutus we would wear if we did ballet and imagined the bright blue tunic we would be given if we were Girl Scouts. But, we woke up disappointed in our embroidered vyshyvkas at tantsi and yellow hustkas at Plast.

We were told we had special needs in preschool because we didn’t interact with the other children and weren’t engaged in class. We didn’t know how to tell them we simply didn’t recognize the foreign English phrases lingering within the peeling cream-colored walls of the classroom.

We almost peed ourselves in front of the class because the teacher couldn’t understand us when we politely asked to use the bathroom. We learned the foreign English phrases and were excited to practice them at home. We couldn’t wait to teach them to our baby sister. We were furious with our parents for not letting us.

We were always scared to open our thermoses during lunch. We prayed that mama had listened to us and packed us mac ’n cheese or a sandwich. We were never angry with the kids who made comments about the stench of our bizarre borscht. We were mad at our mothers for making us look different.

We dreaded the piercing stares of judgment from our peers — the scathing looks we received when we answered the phone
in Ukrainian, the disparaging glares at our fingers as we made the sign of the cross the “wrong” way.

We didn’t know what to say to our American friends when they asked us why we didn’t have birthday parties every year. We didn’t know how to explain that we had to be fair by alternating between them and our Ukrainian friends.

We didn’t know how to explain a lot of things, and our American friends had a lot of questions. And when we did learn how to explain those things, we didn’t want to. We were jealous of our American friends. We wanted to be like them. We wanted to fit in, but we were different.

Years went by, and we stopped trying to Americanize ourselves. We accepted our fate as outcasts. But as more years slipped away, that reluctant acceptance flourished into an authentic embrace of our cultural identity.

We realized that being Ukrainian is more than just going to Ukie school and speaking the Ukrainian language. It is an integral part of our very being that has molded us into the strong men and women we are today. It has given us the friends we call family, and the deeply rooted memories we will cherish into our old age.

Our heritage is no longer at the center of only our lives — it is at the center of the world. Ukraine is now at the forefront of an unprovoked fight for freedom. We are zealously proud to be Ukrainian and stand behind all the valiant heroes relentlessly fighting to keep the Ukrainian flame alive for future generations to come. The entire world watches in terror as a bloodthirsty, inhumane murderer tries to destroy democracy. He kills innocent people in hopes of returning to the glory days of the Soviet Union and Tsarist Russia. We will not let him win.

We reflect on our childhood and itch to take back the immature groans and the selfish tears we let out as children. We wish to hold those little boys and girls in our arms and make them see the world the way we do now. And so, we promise to finish what our parents started. We will push to preserve our culture, and our children will learn to value being part of something so much bigger than themselves. We will always be proud to be Ukrainian.

Anna Salewycz, Class of 2025

Published on April 3, 2022 at 10:16 pm

Contact Anna: aasalewy@syr.edu