aaus-list @ ukrainianstudies.org -- [Fwd: Re: [aaus-list] Fwd: To My Beloved AmeriKan UnKle]

["Rubchak, Bohdan" <kalush@uic.edu>]

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Re: [aaus-list] Fwd: To My Beloved AmeriKan UnKle
From:    "Rubchak, Bohdan" <kalush@uic.edu>
Date:    Sun, July 22, 2007 4:05 pm
To:      auss-list@ukrainianstudies.org
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Mykolo,

This letter (my last on the subject) will be straight talk, without any
tongue-in-cheek "discourse" stylizations.

First, I am happy to inform you that I am neither your uncle, nor your
beloved. More to the point, I am not your AmeriKan unKle, although God
knows that you have assembled a whole bunch of those, including one called
Sam.

Because your letter to me speaks for itself and needs no elucidation, let
me turn to another of your Texts (which I recently circulated through the
list), in which you emote about Grandma embroidering Ukrainian towels,
waiting for you to come home from glorious battles against American
turkeys (and pork chops and steaks). There you muse on what would have
happened to you if you had permanently settled in the United States: you
would have probably wound up teaching in a "provincial" college or editing
a diasporan periodical. This is by no means your first snide dig against
your AmeriKan unKles (and aunts), without whose generous help, hospitality
and initial funding you would have found it much more difficult to climb
the lofty heights of the Numero Uno European Public Intellectual. Only
this time, in order to put us down once and for all and in your desperate
reach at wit, you summon the aid of Nabokov's nefariously xenophobic
attack on the early (Ukrainian) Hogol, with which even my Russophilic
American professors felt rather uncomfortable. And this is really bad.

Let me inform you that over the years we have done somewhat better than
that. In my estimation, there are only two major universities (Princeton
and Stanford) where Ukrainian diasporans or their immediate descendants
have been absent from faculty or library staffs. As for diasporan
periodicals, you still have a long way to go before you see in Ukraine the
caliber of intellectual journal that Suchasnist' was in its heyday. That
one, I am afraid, you would not have been invited to edit, because a Yurij
Shevelov you ain't! I wonder what purpose such opinions, which%2