CHAPTER 1 YESTERYEAR: “THE WORLD WAS UKRAINIAN”

A STUBBORN AND SURPRISING IMMIGRANT ENCLAVE, HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE.

- Christopher Bonanos

In 1931, a writer named George Tichenor made his way from his home on West 21st Street down to the Lower East Side to see a play. Galicia Aflame, by the Ukrainian American playwright William Chopinsky, was perhaps not deathless theater, but it was sturdy activist work. (Sample dialogue: “By a workers’ and peasants’ government, I mean a government formed from all of our people.”) It was staged in front of 2,000 viewers at the Manhattan Lyceum, a big barn of a room on East 4th Street.

Tichenor wanted to interview the playwright, and after the show he went out into the neighborhood to look for him. Around the corner at the Ukrainian National Home, they were celebrating Ukrainian Independence Day. Tichenor watched a performance by a traditional folk chorus, a dance demonstration, and a child’s presentation about the meaning of the blue-and-gold flag. He walked a few more blocks and dropped into the offices of a Ukrainian newspaper, asking if anyone there knew the playwright. Eventually, he managed to find and interview Chopinsky in a storefront over toward Avenue D. His neighborhood travelogue, which ran in a small theater magazine, carried the headline “Ukrainia on the Bowery,” as if he had discovered an unfamiliar planet.