World War I - A Personal Story
Loading...
Date
2017
Authors
Bohachevsky-Chomiak, Martha
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
For me, the First World War brings visions of the home I had never known. A strange statement?
Let me explain, since of course I did not live during that war. Growing up I heard much about it.
My childhood coincided with the entire Second World War, experiences that overwhelmingly
make accounts of the First World War bearable. We, children during World War II, did not know
any other childhood. Not expecting anything, we were satisfied with little. Our worldview was
still that of the World War I generation with our belief in the normality of a life of decent people
who share basic ideas about what constitutes good and who know where true values reside. My
generation of Ukrainian immigrants who came of age in America in the 1950s and 1960s still
publicly marked November 1918 and 1919 — liberation and unification of the Ukrainian People’s
Republic — as a heroic attempt. In our stories, we mused how Ukraine would eventually gain
its independence, as other Eastern European states had done after WWI. Our pseudo-European
Displaced Persons camp experiences gave us a precarious affinity to things European. My decadeolder
brother dismissed my choice of a history major with a breezy: “Martha has to figure out
how we got here.” He went on to study mathematics to explore the cosmos, while I scurried into
the ever more labyrinthine presentations of the past.
Description
Keywords
First World War, history, Ukrainian Halychyna Army, reflections
Citation
Bohachevsky-Chomiak Martha. World War I - A Personal Story / Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak // Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal. - 2017. - No. 4. - P. 139-143.