It is no secret that DNA tests and ancestry services have rocketed in popularity among Americans within the last decade. This, as a result, has led to many new people discovering their Rusyn heritage and the urge to connect with something they had never known before. While from a general point of view this cannot be argued as anything but a good thing for the future of our people, what is going on with the culture in our diaspora is deeply concerning.
Though I would not call myself a community leader within North America, my writings, videos, and other work have allowed me the privilege to interact with a vast amount of people that live throughout the US and Europe. It has led to both fantastic and awful interactions, but a lingering sense of uncomfortable confusion has persisted throughout my time when talking to a select group of fellow Americans.
For those of us within the diaspora, we all know at least a few individuals who, instead of embracing their ancestral identity seriously, take the most eccentric and trivial perceptions and apply it to themselves while knowing nothing of their actual history or language. These experiences usually come when someone proclaims to be extremely knowledgeable but then argues something like an obviously Russian Christmas tradition is Rusyn or that we are descended from Cossacks because their grandma told them so, even with all the evidence to the contrary. As it might be obvious to some, Rusyns in America are not the only ones with such experiences. This phenomenon is best showcased in mainstream American culture with the overly patriotic Italian-American from New York City who does not speak a word of Italian nor wishes to, but claims all of his mannerisms, cooking skills, and red hot temper are due to his gladiator ancestors. Shows such as The Sopranos come to my mind as specific examples.
Aside from the obvious comedic effect where such a person’s worst attributes are played up to the camera, what is this portrayal attempting to capture? It is in many ways hard to describe succinctly, but the closest that I have come to is the desire for novelty and uniqueness over true understanding. The embracement of caricature over the foundation of the real. To put it simply, the appearance of something matters more than doing the actual work it takes to incorporate heritage into ones’ identity in any meaningful way.
One could also try to explain this as the result of people just clearly being lazy, but I don’t think that is actually the case. The problem, in fact, goes much deeper than any singular person. And while the realities of living in a multi-ethnic nation may help answer the question of why one would attempt to find identity elsewhere, it does not answer why it is done in this specific way.
It has to do with the Americanization of identity itself. The dumbing down of identity before finally packaging it into a nice square box where all meaning and complexity is lost. Where drinking all day and coloring a river green means you’re Irish, or your love of vodka and squatting makes you Russian. Disregard actually learning the alphabet of your people or realizing spaghetti and meatballs isn’t even an Italian food. Doing that would actually make you think.
Today there is so much information freely available about Rusyns that one has to try hard not to find it. Unless the entire point is not to fully understand what it actually means to be one, but instead use it as a token card to act as if someone is unique or more special than everyone else. Because once the realm of novelty disappears, all that is left is the am. To a Russian it is not a novelty that they are one; they just are. To many, it seems as though this stage of “just found out who I was” stays around for all of eternity. But perhaps that really is what they desire, to look cool to people and to think they are special.
It may be important to ask now, why is this worthy enough of a topic to write about? Why can’t I live my life without worrying about what others are doing? They don’t affect me personally, right? I type these things because people’s actions do matter. To act as though we all live on separate islands and have no influence on each other is idiotic at best and dangerous at worst. For a people’s culture, especially one outside of its homeland, to survive, responsibility and care of it must be taken seriously since there is nothing else holding it together. These words may sound judgemental, because they are. Because without judgment, nothing is held above anything else.
The fundamental reason we associate with our past is as important as how we go about doing so because it affects what is saved and passed on to those after us. Should we choose poorly and continue to treat Rusyness as a costume to be worn at parties, only the blandest and most superficial elements of our culture will live on into the future. This, in turn, will change a once unique culture into a withered husk of its former self.
Allowing such caricatures to run rampant within our community not only serves to make us look like embarrassments to others but also inhibits the ability for people to actually learn about themselves in a constructive way. To be Rusyn should mean more than awful mass-produced t-shirts with “My Baba was Rusyn” printed on the front to make a quick buck or the countless recited garbage about how one acts a certain way because that is how Rusyn’s behave. These are not real, but Americanized fictions of something much more rich and complex.
Perhaps we are becoming more aware of these pitfalls which constantly plague us. However, I doubt that very much, given what I have continued to see time and again. And even if that were true, the question of why we consider ourselves a part of something we had never known before still remains. Look into your own abyss and make sure the answer is a good one.