So the Mazurs waited in their village, thinking that a better time would surely come. He wanted times to be a bit better, for jobs to be more plentiful and desperation to stop crackling in the air. His citizenship came through by 1938, but he elected to wait to bring his family over. “No black smoke, no white smoke, no red, yellow, or orange smoke.” “The smokestacks were just empty tubes sticking into the sky,” a memoirist of Depression-era Cleveland related with dismay. It was clear that the employment situation was dire, that even Mykhailo’s good fortune was precarious. But the timing-oh, the timing-was terrible.
In 1935, he filed a declaration of intention to apply for citizenship. Mykhailo took such a shine to the United States that it was decided that his wife and kids should join him permanently in America.
He found meaning in union life and was an active member of the Teamsters. The church he attended was just a mile’s walk from the house he shared with his brother, as was the Ukrainian National Home, a former mansion that the Ukrainian community used for concerts, art exhibits, lectures, and other cultural events. Within a few years, he had hit his stride. The job involved using his hands, just like farming did, and he did it well. He made his way to Cleveland, where his elder brother John had settled a few years earlier, and found work in a bakery. He was lucky: despite the advent of the Great Depression, he landed on his feet. With the money he earned in the United States, he planned to finance a house for his family in the village and purchase fields that could sustain them and generations to come. In the years before he left, he took pride in helping found the village’s branch of Prosvita, an organization that promoted Ukrainian language and culture. At the time, it was part of the Republic of Poland, but the village where he lived, Staryava, was ethnically Ukrainian for the most part. As difficult as his life there was, Mykhailo loved the land of his birth. So, like many Ukrainians of his time and place, he took advantage of a relatively new opportunity: to work in the United States. He wanted better for himself and his children. Like generations of his forebears, he faced a life of grinding labor, occasional famine, a crowded home. He had left his wife and children behind in a picturesque hamlet in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, not because he wanted to, but because he had no choice. He was barely literate in Ukrainian, his native language. A lifelong farmer, he didn’t know any English. At the moment, they are multiplying daily.Īt the time of his arrival in the United States, Mykhailo was 31 years old and the father of three. It is one of the uncanny resonances of my life with his. I live a few blocks from the Brooklyn waterfront, and sometimes when I stroll along it, I imagine his ship sailing up the East River, smoke billowing from its row of stacks. Protesters in London against war in Ukraine (Garry Knight/Flickr)Īlmost 100 years ago, in November 1929, the SS Leviathan steamed into New York City, carrying my Ukrainian great-grandfather Mykhailo Mazur on his first trip to America.