It’s been five days since Ukraine celebrated Christmas on January 7, but I thought this story in The Local East Village, an NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute project in collaboration with the New York Times, was interesting enough to post here.
The story about a small Ukrainian shop in the New York City area once known as Little Ukraine does a good job of sharing what Christmas is to Ukrainians while providing a glimpse into the life of an immigrant who migrated to the U.S.
Here’s a snippet:
Andrew Ilnicki, the store’s 50-year-old manager, spoke as customers shopped for smoked meats, breads, borscht mixes, pierogi, and jellied pigs’ feet. “On Christmas Eve,” he said, meaning Jan. 6, “people serve non-meat food, which can be dairy; a lot of fish; and kutya, which is a pearled wheat with poppy seeds.”
“You can make kutya richer with honey and walnuts and raisins,” he said, describing one of 12 dishes that make up a traditional Ukrainian Christmas Eve supper. “On Christmas, there will be hams. They’re very popular with people. We cure them, smoke them, bake them and sell them.”
As Mr. Ilnicki spoke, the store’s owner, Julian Baczynsky, looked on with a paternalistic smile. Mr. Baczynsky was a displaced person in a German labor camp before he migrated to New York in 1949, one of tens of thousands of Slavic immigrants to do so after World War II.
“I worked for a farmer in Germany,” he recalled, adding that he has a degree from a German college and has learned to speak seven languages. He described himself with a grin as “just a young fellow – 88 and a half years old.”
Mr. Baczynsky opened his now iconic market in 1970, after closing a store he ran on Avenue B in 1955. It has since drawn visits from a multitude of locals and dignitaries ranging from the first President of Ukraine to Ray Kelly, the city’s police commissioner.
You can read the full story over at The Local East Village.