As I described in my first post about favorite books of 2024, this past year has been rich in new works (and one translation) in English on Carpatho-Rusyn topics. From all these worthy candidates, it was tough to choose just one favorite, so I’ve chosen two!
My second selection is by Carpatho-Rusyn American specialist in Carpatho-Rusyn literature, Elaine Rusinko:
Andy Warhol's Mother: The Woman Behind the Artist (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024)
From the book notes:
While biographers of Andy Warhol have long recognized his mother as a significant influence on his life and art, Julia Warhola’s story has not yet been told. As an American immigrant who was born in a small Carpatho-Rusyn village in Austria-Hungary in 1891, Julia never had the opportunity to develop her own considerable artistic talents. Instead, she worked and sacrificed so her son could follow his dreams, helping to shape Andy’s art and persona. Julia famously followed him to New York City and lived with him there for almost twenty years, where she remained engaged in his personal and artistic life. She was well known as “Andy Warhol’s mother,” even developing a distinctive signature with the title that she used on her own drawings.
Exploring previously unpublished material, including Rusyn-language correspondence and videos, Andy Warhol’s Mother provides the first in-depth look at Julia’s hardscrabble life, her creative imagination, and her spirited personality. Elaine Rusinko follows Julia’s life from the folkways of the Old Country to the smog of industrial Pittsburgh and the tumult of avant-garde New York. Rusinko explores the impact of Julia’s Carpatho-Rusyn culture, Byzantine Catholic faith, and traditional worldview on her ultra-modern son, the quintessential American artist. This close examination of the Warhola family’s lifeworld allows a more acute perception of both Andy and Julia while also illuminating the broader social and cultural issues that confronted and conditioned them.
There are already a lot of very positive reviews out there, but some of the comments I found which stand out include:
“…In her important new biography of Warhol’s mother, Elaine Rusinko lays out an amazingly complete picture of Warhola — of her life, in more detail by far than anyone else has come up with, but also of her very special artistic persona and the vast effect it had on her famous son.” -- Blake Gopnik, author of Warhol
“For much of his adult life, Andy Warhol lived with his mother in New York City. Drawing upon a wealth of material, Elaine Rusinko takes us beyond the mythmaking surrounding this arrangement and brings to life Julia Warhola’s unique voice, chronicling her Carpatho-Rusyn background, her immigrant world in Pittsburgh, and her complex relationship with her famous son. This is an important book.” -- Reva Wolf, State University of New York at New Paltz
“[Julia Warhola] deserves a textured portrait worthy of her work and rich inner life, and this book finally grants it.” – Hyperallergic
While I have yet to finish reading the book cover to cover, when it first arrived I was immediately captivated by Rusinko’s Preface, “How Julia Warhola and I found one another”.
One cannot help but feel the author’s loving personal recollection and concern, especially if your own “baba” experienced similar things in her life:
Julia’s story also brought to mind recollections of the difficult life of Rusyn immigrants, especially women. When both my grandfathers died in mine accidents, one crushed in a rockfall, the other a victim of a lethal mixture of toxic mine gases called “black damp,” my grandmothers suffered the tribulations that characteristically afflicted Rusyn widows—poverty and depression. In the days before government safety nets, my grandfather’s dead body was carried home from the mine on a plank and left for my grandmother to deal with. My father’s most vivid memory of his mother, who was also, by the way, named Julia, is an image of her clinging to the family cow for warmth as she shed tears over her hard life. (Even in an anthracite coal patch, a cow was a necessity.) Left with five children under eight, with no English and few skills, Julia Rusinko found herself in a position common to Rusyn and other immigrant women. Dependent on men for support, they often endured domestic abuse in hurried, new relationships, or became reliant on their children. Similar patterns in the lives of Julia Warhola and her sisters are familiar, and their coping techniques are admirable. (p. xi)
This incredibly detailed and scrupulously researched book reveals not just the inner dynamics of Julia Warhola’s family life, but offers a valuable synthesis of information about Carpatho-Rusyn immigrant life in the Warhols’ Pittsburgh neighborhoods (Soho and Oakland) and in Lyndora, Butler County, where several of Julia’s relatives lived. I’m especially intrigued by the author’s vivid descriptions of the Soho neighborhood where Andrij and later Julia first made their American homes, amidst other Carpatho-Rusyns, some from their native village Miková, and other East Central Europeans:
[Abraham Oseroff] goes on to make an unequivocal assessment: “The worst housing conditions of the district, however, are to be found on Forbes Street,” and he pinpoints for special attention four blocks of Forbes Street from Cornet Street to the Brady Street Bridge, houses numbered 2300 to 2600. It was precisely here that Andrii Warhola lived from 1912 to 1921, along with relatives and friends from Miková and nearby villages.
Andrii's 1912 passenger manifest has him joining his brother-in-law at 2350 Forbes Street… For the immigrant Carpatho-Rusyn laborers, the boardinghouses, as crowded and uncomfortable as they were, replicated to a degree the extended kinship housing pattern of the Old Country. But while housing in Miková was primitive, the Forbes Street tenements presented a new kind of squalor.
Known today as Uptown or the Bluff, the Pittsburgh district where the Miková immigrants settled in the early twentieth century was called Soho, named by an early settler after the district in Birmingham, England, where he learned his trade. Pittsburgh’s Soho was located on the bluff overhanging the Monongahela River and the Brady Street Bridge, replaced in 1976 by the Birmingham Bridge. Along the riverbank below, the Jones and Laughlin steelworks stretched three and a half miles in length. The National Tube Company plant and Hussey and Company’s copper works filled the remaining flat area along the river. Above the industrial plants, hastily constructed ramshackle houses perched on the vertical hillside to provide residential housing for workers who could not afford carfare and needed to walk to work. Long staircases stretching up the steep grade provided pathways through the neighborhood and down to the mills. Ranged along a garbage-strewn hill, backing to the rails of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, blackened, wood-frame tenements lined the south side of Forbes Street…
Andrii’s first home at 2350 Forbes Street housed nineteen people… Men like Andrii, transient immigrants marking time until they could return to their homeland or pay for a wife’s passage to America, were willing to sacrifice all comfort in order to grow their savings. Crowded together with compatriots from the Old Country, single men depended on the lone housewife for cooking, cleaning, laundry, mending, and packing lunches. Keeping lodgers allowed the occupant’s family to make ends meet, but it was at the expense of the wife, whose housework was hardly less demanding than her husband’s millwork.
The 1910 US Federal Census shows ethnic clusters in the Soho district, with pockets of Irish, Jewish, Polish, Lithuanian, and Croatian immigrants on Forbes Street. Rusyn names begin at number 2300 and continue in the four blocks or decrepit tenements described by Oseroff. In house number 2354, Andrew Yanocsko (Janocsko) lived with his wife, four children, and two boarders. Janocsko was the brother-in-law whom Andrii named as his destination contact in 1912. In 2408, John Zapcara (alternate spellings: Subsara, Cepcera) from Miková shared an apartment with his wife, three children, and three boarders. In the same building lived one Croatian and four additional Rusyn families, with seventeen children and nine boarders among them. Andrii spent the nine years from his return to Pittsburgh in 1912 until Julia’s arrival in 1921 as a lodger here with the family of one or another of his Miková relatives. (pp. 120-123)
The above provides details about the Carpatho-Rusyn enclave in Soho that I knew little about beyond some of the individuals who lived there and when, as given in entries of families/individuals noted as Soho residents in the metrical records of the two Greek Catholic churches on Pittsburgh’s South Side.
I did assist the author on a number of questions about Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants in the Pittsburgh area, for which I was thanked in the Acknowledgements (p. 429) but was also cited in the text for this information about the Greek Catholic parishes in the Oakland and Greenfield neighborhoods that played a part directly or indirectly in the Warhola family’s life:
Most of the Rusyns living in Oakland, including many Miková natives and Andrii Warhola’s brother and his family, attended Holy Spirit Greek Catholic Church at the corner of Atwood and Bates Streets, just a few blocks from their homes. In distinction from their countrymen, Andrii and Julia and their children worshipped regularly at Saint John Chrysostom “down the run” in Ruska dolina, to which they walked more than a mile up and down hills and steps and across railroad tracks from their homes, first in Soho and later in Oakland. The historian Richard Custer’s examination of church records shows that members of Holy Spirit were primarily from Miková and surrounding small villages, whereas parishioners of Saint John Chrysostom came from the district center Medzilaborce, the monastery site Krásny Brod, and villages farther west in the prewar counties of Sharysh and Spysh. Some of the few Oakland neighbors who attended Saint John Chrysostom with the Warholas were the Slovak Greek Catholic Girmans from Dawson Street—Margie Girman was Andy Warhol’s childhood friend—and the Stephen Kalinyak family from Miková—Stephen was Andy’s godfather, and his wife had been Julia’s travel companion from Miková in 1921. Aside from its less insular character, the only discernible difference between the Oakland and the Ruska dolina churches was the autonomous character of Saint John Chrysostom, which allowed the parishioners to assert their Subcarpathian Rusyn culture and traditions with less interference from the hierarchy, western or eastern. (p. 150)
If you haven’t had the opportunity previously to have been acquainted with Rusinko’s masterful work on aspects of the Warholas and Zavackys’ Carpatho-Rusyn heritage and Julia Warhola in particular, you can get a taste with these freebies:
- “We Are All Warhol’s Children”: Andy and the Rusyns (The Carl Beck Papers, University of Pittsburgh, No. 2204)
- The Woman Behind the Artist: Andy Warhol's Mother (Slovo (National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library), 2016)
- Andy Warhol's Ancestry: Facts, Myths, and Mysteries (2019)
- Was Andy Warhol Ukrainian? Carpatho-Rusyns and "Ukrainianism" in Pittsburgh
- Andy and Julia in Rusyn: Warhol’s translation of his mother in film and video (from a special issue of Journal of Art Historiography, “Translating Warhol,” Guest edited by Reva Wolf, June 2022)
Andy Warhol's Mother: The Woman Behind the Artist is available from the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center, the Carpatho-Rusyn Society, and many other online booksellers. You can also preview the book here or the Kindle version here.
Rusinko’s monograph on the life and times of Julia Zavacky Warhola is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the dynamics of the Carpatho-Rusyns’ old-world social, cultural, and religious background and how they served to form a heritage which sharply influenced the life of one American family: a family headed by a remarkable woman whose son subtly, perhaps unwittingly, brought this heritage to worldwide notoriety.
Original material is © by the author, Richard D. Custer; all rights reserved.
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