Slavic Civilizations and Ethnic Consciousness

Abstract

The United States is in the midst of what is often described as a rise in ethnic consciousness. The country that for so long prided itself on being a giant melting pot is discovering that its components have not entirely melted and that, to mix metaphors, some of them are beginning to precipitate out. I am not competent to offer a sociological analysis of this phenomenon (something that the sociologists are beginning to do, judging by what filters down to the New York Times), but some things seem clear even to a layman. Clearly, the student movement has had a powerful effect on the consciousness of other groups in the country. One aspect of the new ethnic consciousness-a superficial and negative one, I think-is the mere substitution of Irish or in Black power slogans and the concomitant attitude, We didn't get any special privileges, so why should they? A more positive aspect might be the interest in Afro-American studies. If students-and not only studentsare no longer content to define themselves in terms of their present condition and are seeking their historical and cultural roots, is not such reference to traditions relevant to Polish Americans and Slovak Americans and Jewish Americans? While this search for cultural or national identity seems most advanced among students, I believe that we are seeing signs of it among students of other ethnic backgrounds, in particular among Slavic Americans. One example is the remarkable effort by a group of Ukrainian-American students at Harvard University, under the leadership of Professor Omeljan Pritsak, to raise funds for the establishment of chairs in Ukrainian history, language, and literature. The campaign, which raised an initial six hundred thousand dollars by soliciting contributions from Americans of Ukrainian descent, has led to the establishment of a Harvard Ukrainian Studies Center.' Another example, on a smaller scale, is the experience of the Slavic Department at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, which introduced an elementary Polish-language course in the fall of 1970 and found thirty students enrolled in it. A parallel phenomenon seems to be the rising interest in the Yiddish language, which strikes me as a nascent conscious-