UHEC Audio Collections

Michael Andrec: All right, this is an oral history with Virlana Tkacz recorded in New York City at the Shevchenko Scientific Society building on December 8th, 2025. Interviewer is Michael Andrec for the Ukrainian History and Education Center. OK, thank you for coming. Thank you for joining here. And also, in interest of full disclosure, I am... Virlana and I have worked together professionally in the past, so just... Over the course of many years, I guess. [cell phone rings, recording paused] OK, so primary focus of this interview will be on memories related to life in New Jersey, in the Newark, Newark and Newark area and other places in New Jersey, prior to Virlana's move to New York, I guess. So, I'm not sure where best to begin. Maybe you're...

Virlana Tkacz: I was born in Newark, at St. James Hospital. It was the hottest day of the year, because it was June 23rd. And I'm always cold. [laugh] What can I tell you? We lived in Irvington at that moment, right near where they eventually built the Parkway. It was still cherry gardens to some degrees, or parts of it still were. I don't remember any of that, of course. And then we moved to Newark, Smith Street, which was more in the Vailsburg section, but near South Orange Avenue. And we lived in a house on Smith Street. And my best friend was Roseanne. Her parents, I assume, owned the place, but I really don't know. It was a two-family house. And Rosanne and her family spoke Italian, we spoke Ukrainian, everybody else spoke something else. You know, we only spoke English in stores and in schools. [cell phone rings] This is not gonna stop. [recording paused] I mean, people don't believe it, but it's like this.

MA: All right, uh, where were we? You moved, uh...

VT: Oh yes, so I moved...

MA: Speaking English only and...

VT: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, actually I spoke no English. Neither did Roseanne. And we played all day long. And we talked all the time, my mother said. And when I asked her what language she spoke, she said "I don't know. You probably spoke Ukrainian. She probably spoke Italian. You had no problem communicating." And this is, I think the inspiration for all my plays, or actually, this is the assumption behind all my plays, that everybody understands. If you want them to, they'll understand what you're saying. Or you can communicate with anybody in the world, it doesn't matter.

MA: Yeah, so what other sort of early memories, especially perhaps related to the Ukrainian community?

VT: Okay, my grandmother, for instance, never learned English really, you know, and I... She used to take me shopping because, and I was like really little, but I'd be the translator [laughing] or I'd just kind of say what I think she wanted, you know. I didn't always ask her ahead of time, but I remember learning that "kapusta" was "cabbage". Yeah, I remember that because that happened in the afternoon and towards the evening, we, I was with Rosanne, we were always sitting on the back stairs, you know, because it was a kind of indoor stairs in the back to our apartment, and we always played there. And so she asked me what we're having for dinner. And I said, "gabbage". And she thought I meant "garbage". And she was like, "Ugh, gross!" You know, because in Newark it was kind of pronounced the same way, the two words. And she was like making fun of me and I was crying and her mother ran in and grabbed her and there was a lot of screaming in her kitchen and then my mother came out and grabbed me. She's like, "What's going on?" I said, "I don't know." [laughter] You know, so yeah. So I remember that, that I remember distinctly.

Um, and I remember my first Koliada. I remember more from the telling of my family than actually remembering it. And this, I've just told the story in an essay I wrote, so, I kind of, you know. Somebody asked me to write about the Koliada in, in US, uh, in one of the Kyiv publications. And I, I said, what I really remember is my mom, like, uh, is that there were these very big people in my house standing near the tree, and they were... But they weren't scary because they were all speaking Ukrainian. And then they sang some Ukrainian songs. And then they started singing the song I just learned from my grandfather "tut zhe tut zhe tut zhe tut", which I thought was one word, no kind of idea. And so when they got to that part, I knew that part, and I was like singing along, really having a good time, and everybody started laughing.

And they asked me what my name was. And I said, "Maria mu maty", because that was the next line of the play, I mean, of the song. Somebody had told me my name was not only Virliana, it was also Maria. And, well, everybody just died laughing. And I didn't kind of understand why really, but okay, I laughed too, you know, why not? And that was my first Koliada. And I remember I really liked "Na nebi zirka", I thought that was a great song. And that's why my sister's named Zoriana, and also because my favorite angel is Zirka, this girl who came with Sviatyi Mykolai always.

MA: Yeah, and so we're looking at the photo "1950s St. Nick VT-AT plus angels" and referring to the girl on the top right.

VT: Yeah, that's me. And A.T.'s my brother, who's over there. And I didn't even see my other brother on the other end. But yes...

MA: so Virlana is the far... is the rightmost in the second row, and her brother is third?

VT: Yeah, from the end.

MA: Third from the right.

VT: But those were all our close friends, actually. And I mean, this is the kids I grew up with. We were some of the oldest kids in our community in terms of... I was born in '52. And what happened is there was almost nobody older than me. There were very few people older than me. St. John's, the school I went to, St. John's Ukrainian Catholic School, they had just finished building the school. The first and second immigration had pooled their resources and had finished building the school. The church was still downtown, but this was in Vailsburg section, on Stanford. And there were like 10 kids in some of the older classes. And in my class, there were 72 kids. And you can see it from the photos, you know, of the classes. Like, Marta [Zaikevych?] is one of the few people I know who's older than me, and she's only one year or two older than me. Same thing with Tanya Lesnetska, there's another one.

But there was very few, because people didn't have kids in, you know, DP camps, or... My parents actually met here, so, you know, and had gotten married in '50. My mother came in '49, so, you know, it's like, you know, she was a teenager, kind of. Yeah, she was... No, by then, by the time she had me, she was like 20 or something, you know. But, so that was true for all the friends I had in grade school, really. You know, this is not our grade school class. This is more like the Plast group, I think, or maybe Ukrains'ka Shkola or something like that. And yeah, so the fact that we could read and write is just kind of amazing because there were so many kids and one teacher, you know. But then it got smaller again, you know, but not that drastically. So we were this huge, you know, boom that what had taken in America from '45 to '57, all happened between '52 and '57 in the Ukrainian community. So there was this huge, like, lump.

So we were, for instance, what would happen is we were the "sestrychky", we were the leaders of the Ukrainian scouts and everything else when we were just a year older than the kids we were leading. Although we ourselves had this wonderful scouting, what do you call it, "master", "sestrychka", you know, "sister" in Plast, Olenka, who really was inspirational. It varied from 8 to 12 girls who became part of our troop, and really went on to do amazing things. I mean, given the fact that we were 72 kids in a class, and who knows? I mean, I couldn't even see the board and I was "T" all the way in the back. I had to talk to find out what was there because I needed glasses and I didn't know.

And at the same time, you know, she took us to the Met Museum and taught us how to paint. If you didn't have a paintbrush, you could do it with your hair and all this kind of stuff. I mean, all this cool stuff when you were a kid, you know, how to make "vytynanky" and all that. She always had all these great ideas, and she was just very inspirational, I must say.

So that in my group, we were, there were like four PhDs eventually, you know, and everybody kind of finished top in their field. There was this, not competition, but this kind of expectation that this would just happen. And she was... You didn't want to disappoint her, you know? So you did whatever you could, kind of. And on that level, I was very lucky that she was with us, you know, from when we were little till we were, you know, graduating high school, basically.

MA: And just to clarify, "she" in this case, is?

VT: Is Olenka [Hordyns'ka?], who was our "sestrychka" in Plast, you know, she was the leader in the Girl Scouts.

And also, we had... I know we all complained about Ukrainian school, but we had some very great teachers also, because, you know, it was that first emigration, the schools had just started, and a lot of people had, you know, were people who had PhDs in these fields, and, or were writers, like Pani Kolens'ka, who was our group, our teacher. She didn't have so much experience in teaching as in writing. I mean, she was a writer. And for instance, when we got to be too much, she'd just sit there quietly and start reading out loud. And then everybody shut up because you wanted to hear what she was reading. And she was always reading something really interesting. I mean, not her own work, but like Tychyna, or [?], or whatever. And it was just amazing stuff she'd read to us, just out loud. And I think that's where I really... That and my grandfather reading [to] me at night is really kind of what made me interested in Ukrainian literature.

MA: Which grandfather?

VT: It was my mother's father.

We know very little about my father's family. My father barely spoke. Partly because he comes from an area, he comes from Poland really, from a Ukrainian family in Poland. But like Zakopane, that's... Not even the craziest Ukrainian would think that's Ukraine. It's just the teachers were sent out to Western Poland or Southern Poland. And so he was the only Ukrainian in the village. And so he didn't speak much because of that. And in general, him and his brother didn't speak much. And then recently, I found out why. It's because their mother died very early on, and his father hired a girl who was deaf to bring them up because nobody else would hire her. And also he thought, "Well, that's good. She won't be speaking Polish to the kids", you know. But he didn't know how to chit-chat or all that kind of stuff, you know. He'd just be very quiet. So everybody loved him because he was agreeable and he'd make "mmm" kind of sounds, and so it sounded like he was listening. And so he knew how to do all that. But in general, he never said anything back. So my family, which was my mother's family, which was intensely talkative, adored him because there was an audience always, you know. And my mom was talkative, but it was what her brother [?], it was just unbelievable.

MA: So the grandfather in question would have then have been?

VT: Grandfather in question who was, which one?

MA: The one that told the stories.

VT: Oh, oh, that one, that I knew was my mother's father. And he started... His name was Kost' Kysilevs'kyi, and he, he was born in the 1890s and he started... he actually graduated from... he got a PhD in University of Vienna right before the war as a philologist. But then he got married, it was like '13 I think, 1913. He got married and he should have gotten a job, and he would have, then the war started, and then after that it was Poland, and no Ukrainians were allowed to be in the university, and blah, blah, blah. So he taught remedial reading, or something like this, and then there was a, somebody dropped a bomb in school, and all that kind of, you know, the excitement of the '20s and '30s in Ukraine. And he wound up spending time with his various... he had like, he was the second oldest of 12 brothers, or 10 brothers. Oh, big, a lot. And he would visit them. They were mostly priests, Ukrainian Catholic priests, in various villages in the Karpaty and Tysmenytsia region, that's where he's from, kind of. And he wrote down the "hovirky". And so I think that was his big work. And actually, we're sitting at the Shevchenko Society. He's one of the people who worked here forever, kind of. From the moment he came in '49 to, I don't know, probably into the '60s, I would guess.

MA: What else do you remember about him?

VT: Well, he would read us at night. He'd say, "а діти..." He'd come in, and there'd be me, my two brothers, and my sister. He'd read us a story, and he'd say, "Чи ви хочете Юрчика Кучерявого, чи Павла Тичину?" Well, are we stupid? "Павла Тичину", оf course! And he'd read us poetry, which is what he liked. Because Юрчик Кучерявий was kind of the same thing over and over again. So that's what he read us. Sometimes he'd read us Antonych, but I mean, he was really into that stuff. And that's kind of why I love all that.

And actually, I see right here, you have a picture of Yuri, of Drach and Pavlychko in '66. I was at their reading in '66. My mom took me. It was in a church over here.

MA: We're referring to the photo on the cover of the Shevchenko Scientific Society Bulletin, issue 60 [showing Ivan Drach, Yuri Tarnavsky and Dmytro Pavlychko posing in a tree in 1966].

VT: Yeah, yeah. I remember that totally, because we... One of those pictures, which is me, like about 14 years old. [MA and VT view photographs on a laptop screen] Later, later. This, this group. Okay...

MA: So this is the "1960s-Tkacz-Oryshkevych-brooklyn winter2".

VT: Okay, well that's the group that met them in Brooklyn. I don't know if that was the event. I sort of don't think so, why we're all there. This, I think we're there for just Christmas, but Dr. Oryshkevych used to have dinners for some of the Ukrainian writers and people who'd come to the consulate, you know, to the embassy. That was like, they really did not communicate with other people, usually. So this was kind of an unusual thing. And I remember, I met him. He remembered me later on. I don't know what he said he did.

MA: Who was "he"?

VT: Drach, when I came to Ukraine. As a matter of fact, because I knew his... His daughter, Mariana, came to the Harvard workshops. And she was in one of the first ones. And I remember I told her that I had met her father. And she wrote to him. And he said, "Oh, yeah, Yeah, there was this family we met."

MA: So can you clarify the Oryshkevych? Who Oryshkevych was?

VT: They're sort of married to my uncle's... I don't know.

MA: So some sort of in-law relationship.

VT: Yeah. But it's like, yeah, like that. I can't say. Yeah. Yeah. So we'd go visit them once in a while. It's like when my uncle Roman came or something like that.

MA: Anything else you remember about Kysilivs'kyi?

VT: Kost' Kysilevs'kyi, of course. We lived in the same house with him most of my life until I went to college. Actually, he's the one who insisted that I go to Bennington because I wanted to go to Bennington and my mother, well, you know, they wanted me to go to Rutgers or Columbia at the worst, kind of deal, you know, so that I could live at home, you know. But I had gotten into all these colleges, and of all the places I got into, they couldn't believe I wanted to go to Bennington. Because it was kind of a wild school. But he said, he was funny, he said, it's the only honest money she'll ever make. You know, the scholarship. So that was, he had strange ideas about all this.

You know, it was all that really, like, Kurbas and all that crap. He knew Kurbas. He always went around the house saying, Not always, but like once in a while, I remember. "Я знав Курбаса". And I used to think, "А я знаю Марту Зайкевич." I mean, you know, when you're a kid, you think stupid things. Well, Marta Zajkevich has been a friend of mine forever. Yeah, so, yeah.

And he started Ukrainian schools here in '49 in New York, but then shortly after that, They used to live in Columbia here. We moved to Irvington and then eventually to Newark, to Smith Street. And then in the 60s, we moved to Brookdale Avenue in Newark. And that's where I remember the most. And by then, my grandparents moved back in with us because in Smith Street, My grandparents lived in a different apartment. And I think they, in the beginning in Brookdale, they lived in a different apartment, and then the other people moved out, and then, you know, that.

I remember when we first walked into [the] Brookdale Avenue house, it was... We went away, we used to go away for the summers, before I get into that story, to Belvedere, which is also New Jersey. And it was on the Delaware River. And we went there from when I was born, apparently. Of course, I don't remember that part, you know, kind of. But I mean, really. And you know, I found out recently, or I found out how probably my mother got there. Because when I was reading Myron Surmach's book about his store. There was a thing that his assistant was Bilians'kyi, and I knew him because he was Dziadzio Bilians'kyi, who owned the house that we went to visit in Belvedere for the summer. And he mentioned something that he rented, you know, his bungalows to people. So my mother probably went in there, saw the sign, and they decided to go the summer there. So she and the children would be there and my father who worked for Bethlehem Steel could commute, you know, or could commute for the weekends or something like that, you know. He'd come in for the weekends.

And the thing I remember most was the flood, the Delaware flood. It was a horrible flood, but what did I know? I mean, a lot of children died when this camp was swept away. That was like a famous thing that happened there. But what I remember is we were on the Delaware, but you had to really go down to the Delaware from where we were. And we were standing where you could see the river, but it was still ways down. And houses were floating down. I did not think it was that strange until I saw a house with a dog sitting on the roof barking. That, for some reason, really got to me.

That was like, what, '55, or something like the '55? I was born in '52, so I was real little, but I have a very clear memory of that. Maybe it was '56, but I don't know, but like that. [The flood was in fact in 1955.] I know my brother Boris was definitely born then because he bit a pear and there was a bee in it and he was screaming. My mother kept on saying to him, open your mouth and he wouldn't open his mouth. I don't know how he was screaming with his mouth closed, but this is what he was doing and the bee wouldn't come out, you know. I remember watching that. I mean, I really remember that part. And well, so.

MA: So these bungalows, were there other people renting other bungalows?

VT: Yeah, there were other Ukrainians. Marta Zaikevych, of course, and her parents, and her brother Yurko, who was even older than that. He was almost an adult, as far as I was concerned. He wasn't one of us kids, kind of deal. There was Viktor Yavorskyi from New Jersey, and there was Lesia. Lesia, not Turians'ka, but something like that, from New York. I'll think of her name. And her family was like the usual crowd. And my grandparents and us, we, oh, and my cousin, Khrystia Fronchak from Philadelphia area would come. They come and stay for a couple of weeks.

So it was a bunch of us going down to the river, washing the rocks. This is what we used to do. [laughs] We'd wash the rocks. I don't know why, but it seemed like a good idea. Get them nice and clean. And then we'd have exhibits of rocks and stuff like that on the river. And then my father, who worked for Bethlehem Steel, he got some steel like beams and wood and they made this like platform in the river and we could jump off of it into the river. That was lots of fun. I guess there was another guy who worked, Yavors'kyi worked with him at Bethlehem Steel. So I think they did it together. And yeah.

And so that's what we did until 1961, and we started going to spend summers in Hunter after that. And I know it was '61, because it was the first time I went to camp in Bobrivka. And my parents couldn't go pick me up because they had to go get the other kids at Vovcha Tropa, you know, at the upstate New York one. And this is in Connecticut. So somebody else, Martyniuk, got me. They brought me to Nova Oborokhta, this place that a whole bunch of families were renting together. It was this old, creepy house. I mean, it wasn't creepy. Yeah, it was pretty creepy. It was old.

It was very fixed up, but it had weird things like secret passages inside and a fridge you could walk into. We locked my brother in once and all this kind of stuff. There's a lot of excitement, and me and Lida, I forgot her name too, uh, Hryhorovych, and Arthur Hryhorovych, that was, his father was the one who arranged all of it, and, and I think they owned, kind of, the house, partly with somebody, you know. It was great.

We, we were like the oldest kids there. And so we would always come up with stuff to do. And there'd be like 40 kids you can do it with, you know, who have to listen to you. There was nothing else to do, you know, kind of deal. So we'd organize these huge historical recreations. That's what I was into then, because I was reading like Classical Comics, like, about the Civil War. "OK, let's do this. You guys are going to be in the South, and we're going to be in the North. And we're going to throw apples at each other." [laughter] You know, this kind of stuff. I don't know. It's like, we do this all the time.

And then we did puppet shows. I mean, we were always so busy. That's one thing that's still true today in my life. I'm always so busy. I don't have time because I gotta do this and this and this. Nobody tells me to do this stuff. I just make it up and do it. So that's kind of that.

And then I went to St. John's. I went to kindergarten at St. John's. I used to love going to school. My father went to work, and I went to school. We were like the important people. And all the little babies stayed home kind of deal. So I thought that was great.

And then everybody was crying in kindergarten. I couldn't believe this. What the hell is wrong with all you? And I would just like sit there and look at them. What is wrong? I couldn't understand, like, why didn't they want to be there? I really wanted to be there. Let's get on with whatever we're supposed to do, you know? And the teacher said, one day, she told my mother, that one day I was crying. I started crying. She came up to me, said, Virlana, what's wrong? You never cry, you love being in kindergarten. I said, "All those little babies are crying so much it's giving me a headache!" So that's the kind of stuff people tell me. Some of it I remember, some of it I don't.

But I remember the teacher, Pani Hurash, is really nice. But we spoke Ukrainian in kindergarten because most of the kids did not speak English because their parents really didn't. And then there were the kids who spoke English, they were from the earlier immigrations. So that was definitely very clear in our classroom. There was a part, about 30% of the kids, maybe, maybe a little more, who spoke English, really. And we all spoke Ukrainian to each other. I mean, because that was kind of what we knew, really.

MA: What were the interactions like between the two groups, so to speak, either at that age or later?

VT: Well, I'll tell you, they weren't like group groups, really. Maybe in some classes they were, but I don't think so. We hung out. There wasn't like a... Because The Ukrainian group was broken up into a couple of groups. There was the Plast group, and the kids who went to Ukrainian school, and then there were the kids who didn't. Because we would spend one more day together, and plus, after school we had a million activities.

On Monday you did this, on Tuesday we had dances, I remember. Except I didn't go to Ukrainian dances, I went to ballet school. But it was like, that was Tuesday. Wednesday, we had Plast. Thursday, we had this. It was like vyshyvannia. So we had all this stuff to do.

Well, I walked home with Marsha Vern, who lived next door to me. Or not next door. Eventually, they built a building between us. At the beginning, they lived in the next building. And since I'm Tkacz and she was Vern, she sat kind of next to me. And I had to kind of muster it together to speak English to her, because it wasn't like something I knew how to do naturally. I mean, I did OK in school, because I could read and write in Ukrainian totally. So English wasn't that hard, but speaking was a whole different story. I had nobody to speak English to, quite frankly, especially in the early grades. I mean, later we started speaking more English, but in the beginning, no. And I actually started speaking English to her, which was a good thing because she actually could speak it. Because some of the other stuff was just rumors of English, quite frankly.

So I remember she talked to me about baseball. And I never heard any of the words she said before, like first base or fly ball, whatever she said. She asked me if I liked Mickey Mantle. I didn't even know Mickey Mantle was a name. I mean, this was like, I just nodded yes to everything she said. And so she loved it because, just like my father, you know, I didn't, I said, mm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, without saying much back until I kind of, you know, after a few walks home, I could sort of say something back. Yeah, so she was kind of my introduction into that world. And we got along sort of pretty well.

Her parents spoke English at home. Her mother definitely was from a Ukrainian background. I'm not sure about her father, but I wasn't interested in them when I was a kid. Because they had some Ukrainian type of food. So it must've been the mother who did the cooking.

But they had stuff that I'd never seen anybody else have. Like we all had book bags. We had these giant things that my mother had gotten from some German catalog or something, or bought in some, I don't know, maybe they brought it from the old country. I don't know, but it was like this big thing that you carried all your stuff in. And Marcia had these like cute little elastic things on her books, and that was impressive, I remember. And she told me about Annette Funicello, or Annette, she didn't have a last name. I watched TV at her house, we didn't have a TV.

I remember the first time I saw my grandfather on TV. I thought they locked him up in the box, and I started crying. I was like, "Oh no! Get him out! Get him out!" He was on some New Jersey educational channel, ran, Pan Melnick had like, a half an hour show every weekend, you know, where he talked about what happened in the Ukrainian community in Ukrainian. This is like, yeah, on Channel 13 in New Jersey. I remember that.

And, you know, my grandfather was like somebody everybody knew because he'd started the schools. But not only for kids, he started the adult education classes and that was really important because all of the adults had had their education interrupted by the war. And so there were a lot of, like, people who then went on to med school and engineering school and lawyering and everything else. It was sort of like that actually started off in my grandfather's GED classes. So he had that idea, and that was a really... So people really kind of respected him. He was very respected in the community. So no matter what he said, nobody, like, said anything back. So, yeah.

Otherwise, the community is kind of divided on political issues, you know, Banderivtsi, Mel'nykivtsi, all that kind of stuff. But we seem to be outside of that. Yeah.

MA: What about like cultural stuff in the community?

VT: Oh, Taras Shevchenko Academii, you know! The famous! Now, when I heard later in my life that people were like almost dying and sort of fighting with the imperial government about the right to have these, we were like, please take him away from us. Because when I was a kid, that was like the worst thing they could tell you to go to the academiia. It was this event to celebrate Taras Shevchenko's whatever birthday and death day, because they came close together.

And they'd get some professor up there. And if it was my grandfather, at least it was vaguely interesting. But most of the others were just like "daah dee-dee-daah dee-dee-daah" about "Shevchenko's famous because he's famous because he's Shevchenko because he's Ukrainian, therefore he's great, and he's great because he's famous because he's Ukrainian." And this would go on for like 40 minutes. It'd be enough to make you totally insane.

And then your little sister would get up there and sing something, and she'd be up here and be like, "Oh my God." [laughter] You know, this is literally what they were like. And then the rest of the school would get up there and do even worse. And they'd start fighting in the choir during the event. So that was one. That was the pits, quite frankly.

But then there were other interesting things. What I remember is my parents and many other parents of those kids who were in that Christmas thing [the photograph referenced earlier], we would go to visual art exhibits of Ukrainian art. I'm not talking about, like, junky things. I mean, like, of Hnizdovsky or of Hutzaliuk. And my parents would always ask me which one we liked. And maybe we could think about another one sometimes if we picked a real big one or something, you know. And it's then we'd be, like, making a deal, like, maybe with my brothers or maybe with my father for his birthday, combine a couple of events and then we could get it. And that was kind of what we did when I was a kid.

And that's one of the reasons my mother has this great art collection because, I mean, it was all kind of all of us together getting it. But we got some pretty interesting stuff. I mean, my brother, Andriy, always had good taste, and I really liked, I had very strong opinions about what I liked and didn't like. And we, for instance, bought Mazuryk's first icon. You know, the guy who painted the church in Paris. And he was just a very young guy when he came and was selling, and we were the first to buy a painting. It was me and my two brothers. I mean, and we were maybe 10, 12 years old, like this. And he actually, when he found out about it from my mom, he wanted to buy it back from us later on, and we said no. And I still have it. It's beautiful, it really is.

So there was a lot of that kind of stuff, and there was a lot of literary evenings that writers would come, from, you know, New York writers, or we'd go here [Manhattan] to the cafes, or LIteraturno-Mystets'kyi Kliub, that we went to those all the time.

And the other huge gigantic event was in February usually, which was the Maskarada, which my Teta Tasia ran. This was incredible. This is every kid in Newark would be dressed up as a character in this story, whatever the story was. Like, for instance, Little Red Riding Hood. And this would go on for three, four hours. I tell you, this is huge.

Everybody, all the mushrooms come out and dance. And then two of them would play the piano. And then, next, were the trees. You know, da, da, da, same thing. And then, next, you know.

But I tell you, I saw one of the most real events that I remember in theater there, because we never did any of these rehearsals without costumes, with costumes. We always did it without. So it was just incredibly long and boring, the rehearsals, because all that. I don't know if you've ever been to the Tsentralia in downtown Newark, near the church. That was the first immigration to-do. That was like National Home here, but it was called Tsentralia there. And Pan Demko, Demko, Demko I think. I remember him because he was strict. But nice, but strict. [pounding on table] "Дітки, ідіть туди і от таке робити", you know? Because we'd always be running wild around there.

And I remember the scene when the wolf came out on stage, we were all sitting on stage, Or actually, I was done already. I was sitting in the audience. And whoom, the wolf walks out. The entire stage, all the mushrooms and the things, jump off the stage screaming "Mama!" Because he came out in this great costume. And that was something. I don't know. I don't know. So that's kind of why I remember that.

And we had many others. There was Snihova Tsarivna... It was like every year that she'd come up with something.

And I realized that's where I know Kvitka Tsisyk from, because her father taught violin. And when I started looking at... That first year I was there, I could walk and talk, but that's about it. I must have been three years old or something. She's sitting on one side, I'm sitting on the other side. Because I always knew I knew her from somewhere a long time ago, long time ago, like way before Plast.

MA: So what other kinds of things do you remember from life at the Tsentralia? Because I keep seeing that, but I really wasn't.

VT: Tsentralia, I remember Hirniak's show. That also is, I'm not sure I remember, or if I remember the stories of me talking about it. But I remember, what I remember is they did "Pryntsesa Na Horoshyni", and they had these girls come out with pillows. And there were like four, five, six pillows. Everybody was walking out with them. That was so magical, as far as I was concerned. It was so great. And it was "The Princess and the Pea", you know.

And yeah, and Pani Olіa Shuhan says, yes, that's true, because she was in that. See, that's my connection to Kurbas, is through Pani Olіa Shuhan, who was in my shows, who had worked with Hirniak, and Hirniak had worked with Kurbas. And then my grandfather and Kurbas. But I didn't know any of that when I started. Or I wasn't aware of it on any kind of level.

Anyway, and I saw that show, and it would start off, he started the children's show, he'd come out as the old man, and he'd say, "А діти! Чи ви чули як кує зозуля?", "Kids, have you heard the cuckoo bird?" And I would, "Yeah! Yeah! I heard it!" Because I was always volunteering for everything. And he'd say, "О, а де ти чула?" "Дядя Білянського на Делеварі!" Well, of course, I couldn't have possibly heard a cuckoo bird. There is, there are no cuckoo birds in America, but I thought I did because my grandfather would like read me stories and there'd be always zozulia and all this. And so that's how I remembered it.

And that, yeah, my grandfather would always read me stories. But anyway, so I got into this long discussion with him at the beginning of the show, you know, when I was really little. And then I met him later when I was writing my thesis, and he lived across the street from me. But he was in his 80s at that point. So I missed kind of in between most of the stuff, but yeah.

And my grandfather worked at the Shevchenko Society, so we came in a lot because of that. And his sister lived on St. Mark's [Place].

And Newark and New York community were kind of connected on that level. We did many things sometimes, in the beginning, together and then later on it became much more sort of established one way and the other way.

What else did we do? Well, коладувати... we'd go caroling with the Ukrainian Plast, and that was tons of fun. I just remembered all that because I'd just been writing about it.

And the best part was you got to see how other people lived, because you usually didn't get to see other people's homes. And Ukrainians kind of lived all over Newark, so you had to be driven to these places. So it wasn't like I could go see what Marsha Verne's house was like, or maybe Lilia Segida's, I knew because she lived there. But some of the others, I really did not. I didn't know even where my best friends kind of lived. I rarely saw their homes inside. We'd play in school and after Plast together, not at each other's homes, kind of deal, because it was too far away. And yeah.

So we'd go caroling, and we learned a couple of these Ukrainian songs that are carol songs. And then we'd sing them. And then people would give us chocolate. This was terrific. And then they'd give money to Plast, which was, "Oh, wow, that was nice..." [laughter] I mean, that's what we were supposed to do. So we definitely took care of that. But it was the cookies that were the better part, as far as everybody was concerned.

And then, but the big thing, but what we loved to do was Haivky. Haivky. Because in Newark, Haivky were really serious business. There were like hundreds of people in it. And that's the Easter dances, you know, after church, in the schoolyard. We'd do them sometimes in the schoolyard and sometimes in the parking lot behind the church, because they were building the church a long time. because first church was way downtown on High Street. That's where I had my first Holy Communion. And then it moved.

Oh, I could tell you the story of my Holy Communion also, That's another story I know, which was... But just remind me about Haivky later on, okay? Which is, well, in second grade, you know,

There was a lot of tension between the nuns and the community, because the nuns were all from the first and second immigration. And they wanted, they dreamt of being Roman Catholic, which was not what any of our parents dreamt of. You know, they, somehow, Ukrainian Catholic was not as good as being Roman Catholic. And they would constantly say things like that, and our parents would go nuts. Because here they're sending us to Ukrainian school, and they're teaching us Italian things instead of Ukrainian things. Or Polish. That would be even worse, you know.

So they get us dressed up for Holy Communion, they wanted us all dressed up like this, white, kind of like Spanish veils and dresses like that. The Ukrainians were kind of aghast at this, you know, the new immigrants. And then they'd make us kneel, which is totally not in our tradition, kind of, you know, you're supposed to stand, kind of, and not sit and kneel and all that. And then...

But that was all like, "OK, OK, yes, you can go get that dress." Because I was crying and everything else. And they finally took a picture with it. My mother didn't want me to have the veil. Well, I gave it back after they took the picture, kind of deal.

And then the worst thing happened, because then they gave us these prayer books that were English and Staroslovianskyi, but no Ukrainian. The community went nuts, you know, especially like in my mother and others, you know, of that group of people.

And they got these beautiful little white you know, prayer books that had like mother-of-pearl cover and the Blessed Virgin on the top and a gold little locket and gold edges. And it was like this big [gesturing the size of around 3-4 inches]. It was like the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, And my mother said, no. And I had to go say no. My mother says, no, I need a Ukrainian one.

Well, the nun gave me a Ukrainian [one]. It was like the size of the OED, and it was black. It had nothing on the front. And I tell you, my friend said it was from the devil probably.

And I was like really upset about this. Not only did I not have a veil, I had to stand during the time everybody was sitting, plus I had the devil's book. And then that's how I was supposed to get Holy Communion. I was like, "Oh my God." I was a mess over that one. But that's certainly where I learned how to say no, because my mom made me do it.

And then I wasn't in Sodality because that, you know, that wasn't a Ukrainian tradition. And Sodality is this Society of Virgin Mary, and they had these blue capes. They were really pretty, and they had these veils. My mother said, "No way." I said, "No way." And so they'd have an hour a week. They'd do Sodality stuff. I don't know what they did. The girls would do it. And the boys would have some other activity. And I had nothing to do except fool around.

So I'd always wind up in the nurse's office, where they always send you if you talk too much. And so there was nothing to do there except look at the eye chart. And so they could have asked me in five states over what the third letter on the third line was because that's all I looked at for hours on end. So I didn't have classes until I went to a different school.

MA: Speaking of church and this dynamic and Church Slavonic, what language were the services in?

VT: Old Church Slavonic. Yeah, yeah. And then, eventually, they did some kind of reform, kind of, right. But that was kind of late, because that was in the late 60s. By then, I was kind of gone from that. My grandfather actually was involved in that, rewriting some of the stuff into Ukrainian. But that was, this is like '61, '60, to '60, what I'm telling you about.

So, but the good thing was this Haivky, everybody loved that. And we all got like, like, for some reason SUM, they all had the same uniform, kind of Ukrainian outfits, you know, it was like exactly the same. And Plast was like, oh, whatever you like. That was always, no matter what happened, it was always like that between Plast and SUM. Plast always was kind of looser, loosey-goosey and all this.

It was really more cultural, so it's like, oh, from different areas, people come from different areas and you can wear your own area clothes, you know, or your own village outfits, whatever. And that's when I... Around that time, my mother had been writing to Ukraine and getting things, but that's when it became a little looser. In the '60s and that's when they started sending us Ukrainian clothes, you know, like Hutsul clothes.

And so it's no accident that I would eventually wind up working with the Hutsuls because one of her cousins had come back from the camps and he was technically blind but he could see kind of, you know, but yeah, whatever. And he started going to the mountains also, because that's where he grew up. And he was in one of those families that my grandfather had visited. I think his mother was his sister, one of his sisters, I think.

Anyway, and he started sending us really beautiful costumes or clothes from a Hutsul'shchyna. I have really amazing stuff because of that. Of course, I can't fit into any of it because it was for when I was 10 years old or something. But it is beautiful. I really should give it to a museum. But we've given a lot of the other stuff he sent us that was really rare. The Hutsul stuff isn't so rare as some of the other stuff he sent.

And because they wanted to kind of... My mother was sending them clothes and material and all that stuff, kind of really helping them survive. So they kind of thought that was making it even. It certainly was. It really had a huge effect on us. And so we'd wear these little things and dance and, you know, do the Haivky with them.

MA: So what would this be like? Would this be organized by somebody?

VT: The kids, actually. You know, Mind you, when it started in Newark, I have pictures from some of the first Haivky in Newark, ever. It was still, I tell you, in the old church, and there was a very little yard. It was like half the size of this room [room size approximately 25 by 60 feet], you know, and they were doing Haivky there. And I'm really little. I found myself finally in the pictures. And I might be in one of the films. The films, I think, are later. But you'll see in the films, there's like hundreds of kids doing this stuff.

And they have Plast, and then they have SUM, so first they do the little ones. Some of the kids can barely walk, and they're like in these big skirts and ribbons and flowers and everything. You know, they can kind of walk around in a circle. That's about all they could do.

And then there'd be, you know, older, you know, grade school ones, and then high school ones, and then, you know, all that kind of stuff. And that was totally organized by our Sestrychky. Kids were not much older than us.

But I imagine that in that first year, they had just recently come from Ukraine from various villages. And so they really knew what they were doing. I mean, they didn't make it up from a book. They had actually experienced it. And they had this idea: you did this, and you'd have to keep singing until you finished doing the dance that went with it.

So when I finally went to Ukraine in the '90s and went to see in Prykarpattia, probably a village very much like where people here came from there. They came from Ternopil and Prykarpattia, basically. And everybody's like, "They know the real thing. You've got to see this! You've probably never seen anything like this in your life!"

I went to see it. We did the same thing, and I knew six more verses! [laughter] You know what I mean? Because it was never forbidden here. You could do it.

So I don't know if I could tell you anything interesting about it, except that We did do it every year, and I think it's all on those films, I guess, because my father definitely shot the films. My father got one of the first cameras, and then he was interested in tech, quite frankly. He was an engineer. So movie cameras was very early on. It was before I went to school.

MA: What else related to Plast?

VT: Plast was one of my favorite things to do. I think even better than ballet, as far as I was concerned. And ballet was fun. I went to New Jersey State Ballet School or whatever. It was eventually connected with all of them. But, you know, you did the same thing every day, kind of. You know, or every week, you know. I mean, ballet is ballet, kind of deal.

But Plast, we'd always make up new things to do. And that was a lot of fun.

We went to even see shows. I mean, the first time I saw Sam Shepard was we went to Lincoln Center with my Plast group. Pan Lishchyns'kyi took us. It was a boys and girls group he'd put together. And you know, it's not that hard to go from Newark. You get on the PATH and you're in downtown, you know. And we went to see Operation Sidewinder. That's like one of the last things I did with Plast, probably, you know.

But we did many things with them, you know. So there was a lot of cultural stuff we did, and not just Ukrainian. We'd see, you know, Lincoln Center.

I also saw, you know, the premiere of Parajanov's the Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. I was there for the premiere. I was all dressed up like that. Must have been the same time, same year.

You know, we had like one dress. Yeah, we were not well-off. And so I had one dress. So every picture you see that dress in, that's definitely not that one, but the white, this one. This one, I had every, that year, that's all I wore. Because see, I liked black, and my mother just had a black velvet top. And yeah, because I would never wear anything that was plaid or printed. Yeah.

Yeah, so that must be like, I would guess, probably '66. That's why I'm saying it's probably right around this time. I don't know when the premiere, maybe it was 1961, I don't know. [The film was screened at the New York Film Festival in September 1966.]

MA: So this is the photo "1960s-Tkacz-Oryshkevych-Brooklyn winter-3".

VT: Yeah, because there are three pictures that are the same. This is just the kids, and then there's one with the adults and the kids. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we did a lot of that kind of stuff, and you know, we were not... My mother would have us eat noodles and then we'd go see an opera. That's kind of what we did. Although we didn't like opera, I'll tell you that much. That was not a favorite thing.

MA: So when did you, how long were you in Newark? When did you leave Newark?

VT: To go to college in 70. So I, you know, I lived in Newark till 1970, from '52 to '70. And then I went to Bennington College, and I came back for the summers.

Oh, I told you the story, I started telling you the story of how we were at Bilians'kyi's, and then we came to a different house. Because my parents bought a house. And of course, it was easier to move us without us, while we were on vacation. That was a more reasonable plan.

And I remember my father, we'd walk into Brookdale from the back, because that's how you got to our apartment mostly. We never used the front for some reason. Oh, I guess my grandparents who used the front more We definitely used the back stairs always. And we walked in, and we walked in.

My brothers were crying, said, "Oh, we don't want to go to somebody else's house!" And "Oh, no, no, no!" And we walked in, and I remember looking at the kitchen table. Looked kind of familiar, but you couldn't swear it was ours. I mean, kitchen table, how can you tell? Like kind of a table that's kind of yellow or something.

And then it was in my room, and it definitely looked like some of my stuffed animals on top of the bed, so I was kind of okay. My brothers were still hysterical, and I brought them to my room and said, "Look, it looks like some of the toys. Maybe they're right. Maybe this is our house." [laugh]

So I was like the oldest. My brother is two years younger, and then my other brother's three years younger, and my sister is four and a half years younger. So we're like very close in age. So I was always responsible for everybody. But that meant I also got to tell them what to do. Anything that happened in the house had something to do with me, usually. Although sometimes it was my brother Andrew. Then it was pretty crazy, usually.

MA: Anything from like the latter period of that that you sort of remember sticks out, or about the community, or about people, or about sort of like before you went off to college?

VT: Yeah, well, we would have graduation. Oh, like "matura". Yeah, "matura" was this like Austro-Hungarian idea of educational precepts that all the kids in Ukrainian school to this day dread. Because it's in your 11th or 12th year, depending what year, what school, that you have to pass oral and written exams. And we had never had oral exams in school. So this was really hard. And yeah, so we had that. That was a traumatic event, I remember.

I mean, I did really well in Ukrainian school because, and everybody said, oh, it's because your grandfather is the director. This is not true. He made us study. I mean, like, I really knew everything. I mean, for every half hour they spent, I'd spend five probably, you know, having to read every book and everything. But then, because of that, I know something.

And actually, given the fact that I only learned anything about Ukraine in Ukrainian school once a week on Saturday, and we did all kinds of crazy shit in our classroom, it's amazing I know as much as I know. And then I speak and translate and all that. But I actually read a lot of the books that they made us read, because how can I not? My grandfather made me, you know, kind of, or really oversaw the fact that I did. So, yeah.

So we had "matura", and then we'd have to, like, read a favorite poem. And I remember I read "Arfamy, arfamy" by Tychyna, and that's so beautiful. And then some of the Banderivtsi were upset because Tychyna's a Communist. Oh my God, it was like, you know, kind of stuff. Yeah, but nobody had the guts to say that to my grandfather, but they'd say it to me. [laugh] But anyway, so.

MA: What was social life like for like for like high school kids?

VT: I went to grade school in Ukrainian... I went to eighth grade in Ukrainian school. We didn't have high school in Ukrainian. So we went to different high schools. So I can tell you, we had dances in the school. See, most of the time when I was in, well, I went to, communion in the old church, you know, on High Street. Then we had chapel in the basement of the school, basically.

And that's where we went to church most of my life, because they opened the big one only at the end of my... when I was, maybe after I graduated already, in the late '60s, they opened the church across the street. And what do I remember? Oh, I remember going to confession there, and you could smell the hot dogs for lunch, you know, this kind of stuff. This is what I remember, you know.

Oh, and when we all saw the devil in church, you know, because some guy in dress in black walked across the church when we were all there, and everybody started screaming. There was a panic. I understand totally how medieval panic about the devil started, exactly like that, you know? Because he ran away because he realized he was scaring us, you know? But this only exasperated the situation, you know? Anyway, yeah. And so they had like panicky kids screaming and yelling, I remember that. I remember, that's like probably the thing I remember the most, because that was pretty intense. We were all convinced.

And then, yeah, and then the other, they take us sometimes on these Mary Days in Fox Chase [Pennsylvania] we went to. That was very weird because they had us have lunch in the biology lab, and there were all these animals and things in these jars. Oh, that was just gross. I remember that. I was like, because I threw up my lunch. I couldn't do it. Yeah, yeah.

But the good things were the Haivky, I remember really loving to organize all of that. And then we'd get the guys to do something, "piramidy" and all this. That was fun.

And it was all very self-motivated. I mean, it was all made by kids, really. Adults didn't get involved in this, you know? I mean, there were the 16-year-olds telling the 12-year-olds what to do, kind of deal, you know. And then the 12-year-olds would tell the 10-year-olds what to do, and the 10-year-olds would tell the 8-year-olds what to do, kind of deal. So your leader was just barely older than you always.

So it was kind of, that kind of self-organization was really eventually, I think, a very important part of the Ukrainian community. And I haven't seen it done anywhere else like that, where, you know, when you think about it, sometimes this is how we've survived.

There is this kind of horizontal organization that happens. And it's a really good thing. And whenever the adults get involved, they tend to screw it up. They don't get it, kind of, even though they themselves, as children, must have done this. Or maybe they come from some system that doesn't do it. But I think that was the strongest thing about the Ukrainian community that I remember.

It's like, how much my own group would be making itself do things, you know? And how we'd figure out different ways of organizing. We'd make "hazetky", we'd sell them so that we could go get money to go to New York to see a play, you know, this kind of stuff. I mean, like constantly we were doing things like that. Of course, you can only sell them to your aunt and, you know, and a few other people, you know.

But we published our own poetry. And then Boychuk invited us to read it. That was such a big thing. That was like the biggest thing I did, come to New York and read my poems. And I was probably about 15 or 16 years old. And they were very good at encouraging us, actually.

And also, you know, we had "Stezhky Kultury", that was really good. That was like "Paths to Culture", kind of, in Plast. And they'd invite artists, I mean, living artists, you know, sometimes very young, kind of not much older than us, sometimes a lot very old, you know, kind of depended. And they show you what they did and how they did it.

And I tell you, people started doing things because of that. I mean, I certainly started writing because Boychuk wrote back to me. He corrected some of my Ukrainian. "Heh, heh, heh, heh,heh", I was like, "That's not what I think!" [laughter] But anyway, you know what I mean? It encouraged the kids.

I remember Slavko Nowytski came, showed us films that he'd made about things that were Ukrainian. And Marco Carynnyk came, and that whole generation of young guys who were writing. That's why we all wanted to write afterwards.

Or painters, I remember. Yeah, Hutsuluk came, and that was a very, much hands-on part of the community, I think.

The sort of introduction to culture, and culture being important. And something you had to get involved with and support and do. That was something very forefront in both, I think, the community and my parents.

So we were also constantly making things for like, "Oh, we're gonna sell this at the Christmas Bazaar." It was always like, and so that we could go to New York and do this and this, you know. We were always raising money for stuff. I mean, ever since we were like very little. And it sort of made you appreciate the trip that was so special.

Like when we went to the Cloisters, I'll never forget. I haven't been there since, but I'll never forget as long as I live. That was so cool. It was like a castle. It was a castle within a castle within a monastery within a castle. That was just like, wow. So that was part of it, and whatever.

High school, we had dances, but because we went to different high schools, you know, that was... those were usually organized by high school. Ukrainian school, we only had graduation after "matura". And Plast didn't really do dances, I don't think. I don't remember. We did camps and trips and stuff like that.

There was singing things, but I was not much of a singer, so I guess they played some instruments, too, but... Because I didn't like making them play the piano, so it was like, ugh. So I did not get involved in any of that.

MA: Anything else that we haven't covered that you...

VT: Oh, I'm sure there's millions of things, but I haven't thought of anything else. Oh my God. Time flew. Oh boy, I've been talking and talking and talking.

MA: No, it's quite interesting. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm going to stop the recording here.