A Year of Return to “Normal”

You might also call this blog “A Quiet Place.”

It’s been almost a year of no posts, a year of hope and loss, isolation and longing, procrastination and frustration, a year of figuring out how life can return to a normal we can work with.

Certainly much has been happening on the “Carpatho-Rusyns of PA” front, but I haven’t found the time or, unfortunately, motivation to write about it. Fortunately I’ve managed to keep my Facebook page alive with items of interest and even post occasionally to my still-new(ish) Instagram page.

Here are some worthwhile things that happened or are coming up soon. I do hope to do longer posts about them when time and life allow.

• Early in the year I was contacted by a gentleman who is a media personality of some renown, who was looking for assistance exploring and documenting his Carpatho-Rusyn heritage. He hired me to produce a written narrative about his Lemko Rusyn immigrant great-grandparents and their “life and times” in northeastern Pennsylvania. As a follow-on to that, in mid-September I led him on a heritage tour of sorts through the towns and Rusyn communities in northern Schuylkill County in which the family lived, worked, and worshipped.
  
  
• On August 24, 2021, we lost a dear friend when Professor John Kelnock of Marion Heights, Northumberland County, departed this world. Without his inspiration and unflagging help that began years and years ago, I doubt I would have done any of the things written about in this blog. John will be the subject of a much-deserved tribute in an upcoming post. May his memory be eternal – vičnaja jemu pamjat’!
  
  
• After a year and a half of essentially no field work, no site or archive visits, I did make a research trip of a few very productive days over the Labor Day weekend. The highlights centered around places like Conemaugh, Lyndora, Curtisville, McKees Rocks, and Central City, plus I was very happy to attend the (this year abbreviated) Pilgrimage in Honor of Our Lady of Perpetual Help at Mount Saint Macrina in Uniontown after a year's hiatus due to...well, you know. A good bit of that trip is worth a post.
  

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  About a year ago I learned of the closure of two historic churches founded by Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants in eastern Pennsylvania: the Orthodox (OCA) parishes in Catasauqua, Lehigh County, founded in 1899, and McAdoo, Schuylkill County, founded 1901. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to locate some old photos from history of the McAdoo parish that had been kept in the church until the time of its closure. (Still looking!)
  
  With respect to the same for the Catasauqua church, I fared much better. I was contacted by a (now former) parishioner who was leading an effort to collect, catalogue, and translate items from the parish’s considerable archives. I was consulted for some help with translation and interpretation of several items. He and his team put together a most interesting booklet to mark the history of the parish from its founding to its closing that draws on these items, including numerous photographs. And I believe that I will soon be able to access the treasury of digital photographs from the early years of the community, most of which I had never seen before from any of the parish’s anniversary books published through the years.
  
  
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  Saints Peter and Paul Byzantine Catholic Church in Braddock, Allegheny County, celebrated its 125th anniversary on September 26 with a hierarchical Divine Liturgy and banquet. On that day, the parish distributed a commemorative booklet. My friend Mary Anne Mistick, a member of the parish, led the compilation of the book and researched and wrote most of the narrative. (I was pleased to be able to supply a bit of additional material on the history of the parish and its former school.) After receiving a copy of the booklet, I had to commend its author for a fantastic job. As I said to her, “this is probably the finest such book I've seen in at least 10 years.”
  
  
• Next Saturday, October 16, I will participate in the Czechoslovak Genealogical Society International’s (CGSI) 2021 Conference, “Celebrating Connections.” My presentation, “Using Traditional and Digital Sources to Write the History of Pennsylvania’s Carpatho-Rusyn Immigrants” (with a Q&A period at the end), will be available live to conference attendees and later on-demand for those who purchased on-demand access to all the presentations.

• And perhaps last but not definitely not least, next month the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) 53rd Annual Convention will be held in-person in New Orleans. There I’ll be part of a panel with the esteemed Paul R. Magocsi and Nicholas Kupensky, “Did the Carpatho-Rusyns Really Love the Russians?: The Meanings of the Russophile Movement in Carpathian Rus’.”

In With Their Backs to the Mountains: A History of Carpathian Rus’ and the Carpatho-Rusyns (2015), Paul Robert Magocsi represents the Carpatho-Rusyn fascination with Russia as a phenomenon largely limited to the educated elite, many of whom viewed Russian culture as a model for the Carpatho-Rusyns to emulate; however, he insists that the “glowing descriptions [of Russia] by Russophile apologists” were largely imaginary and did not reflect the sentiments of most Carpatho-Rusyn communities. This panel tests Magocsi’s thesis and reassesses the legacies of the Russophile movement among Carpatho-Rusyns in Europe and North America. These three presenters examine the meanings of “Russian” in Carpatho-Rusyn literature (Kupensky), the Carpatho-Rusyn diaspora in the United States (Custer), and Carpathian Rus’ today (Magocsi).

My paper is “Russkii, Ruskii, or Karpatorusskii?: Russophilia and Russian Identity in the American Carpatho-Rusyn Immigration, 1884-1947” with abstract as follows:

From their first American organizations established in 1884, Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants freely used variations of the adjective rus- in their organizations’ names. And in English, “Russian” was the earliest and most widely used ethnonym in the legal names or churches and mutual aid societies, as well as in journalists’ writing about the group. Within a decade, competing ideas of what rus- meant had already begun to distinguish “streams” of ethnonational orientation among the immigrants, complicated by the lack of other terms in English to distinguish these “Russians” from each other, much less from ethnic Russians or subjects of the Russian Empire. At what point did this popular, nearly universal “Russian” identity become classical Russophilia among the Carpatho-Rusyn immigrant intelligentsia, if it ever truly did? This paper will analyze the various streams of Russophilism among Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants to the United States as it manifested in their religious, fraternal, and social organizations and their serial publications. The best-known bastions of the Russophiles were organizations like the Russian Orthodox Catholic Mutual Aid Society, the Russian Brotherhood Organization, and the Russian Orthodox Church. But will also consider the influence of Russophiles within the Greek Catholic Church and the nascent Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese. It will also consider the intersection between organizational, “official” Russophile positions and popular “Russian” identity, and the acceptance, or lack thereof, of that identity by the rank-and-file immigrants and their American-born children.

I cannot be anything but thankful for being able to do these things. I'm hopeful that things really will get better for all of us. Check back for new posts within a few weeks.

Thanks for reading and take care out there!

Original material is © by the author, Richard D. Custer; all rights reserved.