Last year my family and I lived in the Summit Hill neighbourhood of Saint Paul. Specifically, we lived in an apartment complex that, for all intents and purposes, might have been in Mac-Groveland except that it sat on the eastern bank of Ayd Mill Road. East of us yet was the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Saint Paul. I have a habit of flipping the Cathedral an ironic, if heartfelt, salute every time we go past (which, the cathedral being located on the eastern end of University Avenue, we did often when we lived in Saint Paul). It was, after all, the seat and the great project of Archbishop John Ireland, who may be considered the originator of my church – the Orthodox Church in America.
The story of how the great reversion of Rusin immigrants into the Metropolia came about from the Archbishop’s rather impolitic behaviour to a certain immigrant priest is an infamous one these days, and it can be read in full elsewhere; suffice it to say that the troubles Rusins have historically had with ill-tempered Irish bosses does go back a rather long way. But our Bat’ko, Father Saint Alexis (Tovt), having been rebuffed by the local bishop here in the Twin Cities and threatened with being recalled to Austria-Hungary, went instead to the Russian bishop in San Francisco to be received into the Orthodox Church. Holy Father Alexis then went on to evangelise, bringing fifteen parishes with over twenty thousand Rusin-American immigrants back into the Orthodox Church. One of the churches Father Alexis founded was St. Mary’s Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Cathedral, pictured in my blog header. At Saint Herman’s on the Sunday of Orthodoxy I’ve made it a habit these past two years to bring my icon of Father Saint Alexis, which seems particularly fitting, given that he and his parish were baptised on that Sunday in 1891.
It’s a little weird living and going to church, as it were, at what is essentially ground zero for a mass conversion that transformed a large number of Greek-Catholic parishes into Orthodox ones over a relatively short period of time. Also, if on occasion I am hard on the Uniates (those of whom I’ve met locally being incredibly nice people), please understand that it is partly because ‘Minnesota nice’ can actually mask a lot of historical violence beneath the surface. The mass-reversion of the (mostly mine-working families) Rusin immigrants to Orthodoxy all along the Rust Belt is no exception to this rule. The conversion of Father Saint Alexis to Orthodoxy was not greeted meekly, tamely or peaceably – not by the Catholic hierarchy and certainly not by churchmen who remained in communion with Rome. It is instructive to read Father Alexis’s sermons and letters. In the immediate wake of the return of the Minnesotan (and Pennsylvanian) Rusin-Americans to Orthodoxy, there were a number of violent incidents. Threats were issued. Churches which reverted to Orthodoxy were vandalised – bricks thrown through windows, collection boxes robbed, a guard dog poisoned. Saint Alexis even survived an assassination attempt by a Uniate fanatic. At some point the Uniates realised that if Father Alexis Tovt was killed, it would make him a martyr for the cause of Orthodoxy in America, but they continued to attack the reverting Orthodox churches through the press, and through their coffers – a tactic which seems to have been at least partially effective. The letters of Father Alexis are filled with the prosaic and rather sad details of how his churches had to scrounge up paltry amounts of cash by selling off church goods and relying on support from San Francisco in order to meet court costs and legal fees.
In any event, the experiences of the working-class Rusin immigrants in these churches are not entirely gone. The old folk memory is there, particularly among the older laypeople in the parishes of the OCA and ACROD. It has been interesting to me to observe that the Rusin-Americans are insistent that they are not Ukrainian; they actually don’t mind being called ‘Slovaks’, but their sense of belonging – very much like that of the Jews who were their neighbours – is one that doesn’t fit neatly within nation-state boundaries. During the time of the migration across the Atlantic, the Rusin people were caught on the boundaries of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Before then, they had been robbed, enslaved, beaten and oppressed by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This folk history has been remembered in a fragmented way: stories handed down from the babushki about life in the old country; or habits kept out of fear of the police or of famine. One older Rusin-American friend of mine said she’d heard ‘Lemko’ (referring to a linguistic subdivision of the Rusin people) was used as a term of disparagement (this is something I couldn’t, in my limited knowledge, confirm or refute).
Just as some more radical Jews began in 19th century Russia and Poland to think of themselves as doyiker, the Ruthenian Orthodox peoples of the Commonwealth and the Monarchy were simply ‘tutešni’, which means the same thing: ‘people from here’. Their ‘here-hood’ was in part an imposition, but also in part stemmed from an unwillingness to form a political-linguistic identity which fit into the ideological boxes provided to them by their colonial masters. To be ‘tutešni’ is to be neither ‘Ukrainian’ nor ‘Russian’ nor ‘Hungarian’ nor ‘Slovak’ nor ‘Polish’.
The ecclesiastical-political orientation of the mission of Father Saint Alexis Tovt among the Rusins was accused of having a ‘Russophile’ or ‘Moscophile’ flavour by his enemies in the streets, in the courtroom and in the press. The Rusins who ‘went over’ – or ‘perekhodyty’, in the polemical language of the Uniate press – to Orthodoxy were accused of being a potentially-traitorous fifth column for Russia, a charge which was opportunistically credited on account of their involvement in labour disputes. (Sound familiar?) Indeed, he speaks of these accusations specifically in his sermons, and attempts to hold out for a surprisingly nuanced position. On the one hand, he commemorates the Russian Tsar as a patron of his church. Further, he speaks of the need for his people – whether they call themselves Slovaks or Russians – to demonstrate material kindness and brotherly solidarity to other immigrants in America, particularly those from other Slavic countries. On the other hand, he encouraged his parish to learn English, not to drink or party to excess, to attend public schools and to support the labour movement. There were two sides to his civic thinking; even if he didn’t embrace assimilation with both arms, neither did he give in to an implicit anarchism or allow himself to be cowed by his detractors into a reactive stance. Being the ‘people from here’ who are also self-consciously migrants (physically, civilly, religiously) is a tenuous position indeed.
There are several other noteworthy parallels I could – and will eventually – mention between the Moravian Jewish family connexions I seem to keep coming back to, and the Rusin(-American) experience. However, the (self-?) designation as ‘tutešni’ and its parallel with the ‘doyiker’ idea in contemporary Jewry is simply too good to ignore in connexion with the careful position that Holy Father Alexis had to stake out in his public priestly mission, which was all the more tenuous for his and his parishes’ chronic poverty.
In the meantime, being a fragmented and recently-Minneapolitan Orthodox Christian convert of Czech extraction and walking a path that intersects this folkway at a number of different points, I will simply ask: Holy Father Alexis, pray to God for me, a sinner.
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