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    Ukrainians of Metropolitan Detroit
    Ukrainians of Metropolitan Detroit
    Ukrainians of Metropolitan Detroit
    Ebook178 pages38 minutes

    Ukrainians of Metropolitan Detroit

    By Nancy Karen Wichar

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    About this ebook

    Ukrainians have contributed to the diverse ethnic tapestry in Detroit since the arrival of the first Ukrainian immigrants in the late 1800s. Bringing their history, culture, and determination to achieve, they established a foundation for the resilient community that would continue to emerge during the decades to come. Ukrainian neighborhoods formed on both the east and west sides of the city. This is where they constructed the churches, schools, cultural centers, and financial institutions that would allow them to maintain their cherished ethnic identity while integrating into the American way of life. This book is a pictorial history of the people and events that created a community that would come to be known as the Ukrainians of metropolitan Detroit.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439639399
    Ukrainians of Metropolitan Detroit
    Author

    Nancy Karen Wichar

    Nancy Karen Wichar is a proud second-generation Ukrainian. Throughout her career in education, she created several ethnic pride units utilizing her rich Ukrainian heritage background as a model for her students to find and appreciate their own ethnic identities. Ukrainians of Metropolitan Detroit is her gift to her parents, Stephen and Nadia Wichar, and to the Ukrainian community, past, present, and future.

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      Book preview

      Ukrainians of Metropolitan Detroit - Nancy Karen Wichar

      emerge.

      INTRODUCTION

      I was not born in Ukraine. My parents were not born in Ukraine. Still, this enormous feeling of ethnic pride consumes me. How did this happen?

      My grandparents, who emigrated from Ukraine to Detroit, certainly influenced me in many ways, especially my grandmother, Katherine Iwashkewych Wichar. I can still hear the sound of her voice as she put into words the chronicles of her childhood and then her journey to America, never to be reunited with her family or homeland. My parents, Stephen and Nadia Wichar, active members of the Ukrainian community in metropolitan Detroit, modeled a lifetime of commitment to Ukrainian culture and causes. This has become my legacy. I am grateful.

      When my grandfather Michael Wichar passed in 1967, my father, Stephen M. Wichar Sr., expressed his thoughts about his legacy in the passage below.

      Silent Echoes of Heritage

      As I begin this message, I become deeply moved by the death of my father. I strive to recall nostalgically some of the events in his life that had deep-rooted meaning other than that of a good husband and father.

      What were his thoughts in Rohatyn, Ukraine . . . in the village of Dybriniv where he made a decision to emigrate? I wonder what misgivings he had, knowing that he possessed only the barest of essentials in formal academic training, to embark on this adventure to a new land.

      Although the struggle for economic existence was difficult in a society that was indifferent and adversely hostile to foreigners, he was able to transmit his ideas to a foundation of cultural, social, and political life in Ukrainian community living. It was John F. Kennedy who said that American history can, in a general sense, be interpreted as a factual episode of the immigrant’s part in his own personal development of America itself. My father was such a man.

      Sometimes sociologists call my generation cultural hybrids . . . persons living and sharing in the cultural life and traditions of peoples . . . and we have been identified with the land of our birth and its institutions. Despite this, in the process of learning the mother tongue, the standards of morals and religion, sentiments and patterns of foreign thoughts through such media as Ukrainian schools, dancing groups, stage and other folklore, the assimilation has been successfully possible for many of us. . . .

      And with the old country ways that my dad taught me, I have been acutely aware of the vastness of the world and its many treasures . . . and although his approach and means of intellectual training was frugal, he was able to cohesively inject into my consciousness that Ukrainians are a nationality, a group that is specific in culture.

      The passing of my father is perhaps just an incidental biological expectation . . . but to him, as to many other old immigrants who passed before him, my generation owes a lasting debt . . . a tribute to those who had the courage to build pillars of Ukrainianism in a foreign land. I am humble in my tribute to a father I knew so well.

      To my father I can silently say that I am proud of my Ukrainian heritage. This is my dearest legacy.

      Stephen M. Wichar Sr.

      I am indebted to the many Ukrainian-Americans in Detroit who opened their hearts to share their legacies through the treasured photographs that appear in this book.

      After almost three weeks at sea, Tatjana (Krawziw) Mojsiuk and daughter Tamara arrive in New York on June 24, 1950. Husband and father Myroslaw Mojsiuk was also aboard the carrier, SS Blacthford. Carriers were used to transport new immigrants because the numbers emigrating from the displaced person camps was so staggering. The Mojsiuk family made their way to Detroit with help from their sponsor, Denys Kwitkowsky. (Tamara Petraszczuk.)

      One

      FAMILY AND COMMUNITY

      Katherine Wichar and her husband Michael pose for a family portrait with their three children, from left to right, Eugene, Stella, and Stephen,

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