To talk about that world, about Ukraine and Ukrainians in New York, you first have to make a few decisions about what Ukraine is. Vladimir Putin’s stance, echoed on the American far right — that Ukraine is a “fake country” — is nonsense, but reading the history, you can grasp the broken logic behind the label. In the past few centuries, Ukraine has been chopped up a half-dozen different ways. The city of Lviv has been called Lwów (when it was Polish) and Lemberg (when it was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire). Other parts of the country have been run by Germany, the Soviet Union, Romania, the Ottoman Empire, and (twice) an independent Ukrainian government.
That jumble is reflected in the assemblage that is Ukrainian America. Something like a half-million Ukrainians came to the United States through New York from the 1870s to the 1920s. Immigration records list only a tiny fraction of that number. Until 1899, Ukrainians were logged as Russians, as Poles, as Austrians, and often as “Ruthenians,” an old catchall ethnic term. Look at the households of East 7th Street in the Census of 1910 or 1920 and you see, under “place of birth,” Poland, Russia, Poland again, Russia again, Hungary, Austria, Romania. “Ukraine” is conspicuous by its absence. Politically at least, until the First World War, Ukraine did not exist.
Ukrainianness in New York is culturally a little murky for another reason: There are not one but several Ukrainian populations here, divided (as the old joke goes) by a common language. One smallish community is Ukrainian Orthodox, whose adherents are faithful to the patriarch of Constantinople. But the majority in America are Byzantine Catholics, who blend Eastern Orthodox rites with fealty to the pope. In Ukraine, the Christian population is about 85 percent Orthodox, 15 percent Catholic; here, it’s about the opposite.
A small group of Orthodox Christians lived and worshipped at the top of the Ukrainian neighborhood, around a church they bought from a German congregation on East 14th Street. The much larger Catholic population coalesced around East 7th Street, where in 1911 they bought a different old German church that they renamed St. George. That building became the core of the area we now think of as Little Ukraine, or Ukrainian Village.
Among the Christians there, and especially a few blocks to the south, were an enormous number of Jewish immigrants who came from what is now Ukraine. Here again, the numbers are tricky. Much of western Ukraine was then known as Galicia, a province that lay within the Austro-Hungarian empire. Eddy Portnoy, a scholar at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, explained to me that Jewish peasants and villagers from there called themselves Galitzianers, Poles, Austrians, residents of their particular towns, arrivals from the Pale of Settlement, or even Russians — but almost never Ukrainians. As Hasia Diner, an NYU professor who studies immigration, put it to me, both Gentile and Jewish New Yorkers agreed that the latter group was its own ethnicity: “Jews were Jews.”