On The Road

By Volodymyr Kish

Last week, I took a long overdue vacation and spent a week in what I like to call the “Excited States of America”.  The ostensible reason for the trip was to visit my eldest daughter who is doing her PhD at New York University and bring her home for the summer, but nothing in my life is ever quite that simple.

My wife and I first detoured and spent a couple of days at Soyuzivka where I participated in a conference of the Association of Ukrainian Journalists of North America.  Soyuzivka is a Ukrainian resort situated in the picturesque highlands of the Catskill Mountains, a couple of hours drive up from New York City.  For many decades it was the summer playground of New York’s Ukrainian community and gained quite a reputation even up here in Canada as the place to go to for a fun weekend.  Sadly, as times changed and the forces of assimilation took their toll, Soyuzivka began a slow decline in both popularity and the quality of its facilities. 

Today, it is showing its age and in need of some major renovations.  The Ukrainian National Association (UNA), a fraternal Ukrainian insurance company, owns and operates Soyuzivka, as well as the two largest Ukrainian newspapers in the U.S., Svoboda in the Ukrainian language and The Ukrainian Weekly in the English language.  All of these are significantly subsidized by the UNA and in recent years it has been increasingly challenged in its financial ability to make the kind of investment in Soyuzivka that is required to restore it to its former glory.  Nonetheless, it still retains a certain comfortable charm which, combined with its scenic surroundings, made my brief sojourn there quite pleasant and enjoyable.

Of course, the primary reason for my being there was to network and exchange ideas, information and opinions with my fellow journalistic colleagues from Canada, the U.S. and Ukraine, and that aspect of it was thoroughly satisfying. Of particular interest was the update we received from Yuri Lukanov, head of the Independent Media Association of Ukraine, who briefed those assembled on the serious erosion of press and media freedoms in Ukraine.  Increasingly, most media outlets have come under the control of oligarchic forces that are working closely with the Yanukovych regime.  Last month, Freedom House, an international organization which tracks the levels of press freedom throughout the globe, ranked Ukraine as being in 131^st place out of 197 countries in terms of overall journalistic freedom.

The weekend sessions covered a broad spectrum of contemporary concerns such as the use of new internet technologies, the role of blogging and Twitter in disseminating information, web warfare, community activism, the role of the Fourth Wave, and ethics in journalism.  Needless to say, the informal sessions over meals and drinks proved as productive and interesting if not more so than the formal sessions.  Of note was the election of Roma Hadzewycz, the Editor of The Ukrainian Weekly as the new President of the Association, replacing the long-serving previous head, Jurij Klufas, producer of the Kontakt television programme.

We spent most of the subsequent week in The Big Apple, taking in as much of the city’s unique and eclectic attractions as we could.  Of course, this included a visit to “Little Ukraine” in the city’s Lower East Side.  The highlight of that experience was brunch at Veselka, a popular and iconic Ukrainian restaurant that recently opened a hip new location in The Bowery, complete with a revamped menu that, while still Ukrainian, has included some creative innovations to traditional Ukrainian fare.  For instance, we sampled some varenyky filled with lox and cream cheese, as well as a beet and chocolate crme brul dessert, both of which tasted as good as they were intriguing.

To cap things off, we had invited one of the New York Ukrainian community’s most colourful and interesting characters, Professor Alexander Motyl of Rutgers University to join us for that brunch and were treated to a delightful couple of hours of stimulating and witty conversation that ranged from Mazepa, to Andy Warhol, to President Yanukovych, to the history of the Borscht Belt vaudeville circuit.

All in all, it was an altogether too short of a break in my normal routine, and I can only look forward to that day, I hope in the not too distant future, when I no longer have to work at a normal job to bring in the “daily bacon”, and be able to indulge a little more in travel and adding more to my life’s collection of interesting places and experiences.