Group Maintenance and Ethnic Commitment

With the decline of the cultural and social organizations that were active in the 1940s and 1950s, and with the ongoing uncertainty among many Canadian-born about the national heritage of their ancestors, most Carpatho-Rusyns had by the 1970s lost interest in their ethnic identity and simply identified themselves as Canadians of Slavic background. Those who felt the need for a more concrete cultural identity joined the better organized Slovak, Russian, or Ukrainian communities and identified with one of those groups. Only since the late 1980s has there been a revival of interest in a distinct Rusyn heritage, sparked in particular by the recent immigration from the Vojvodina (Yugoslavia).

There have been, however, examples of individual Carpatho-Rusyn Canadians committed to ethnic maintenance. An outstanding example was the talented painter and amateur ethnographer, linguist, and historian Julijan Kolesar, who established in Montreal the Julijan Kolesarov Institute of America and for nearly two decades, until his death in 1990, he published single-handed thousands of pages of historical, ethnographic, and linguistic works about Carpatho-Rusyns, especially those from the Ba™ ka/Vojvodina region of Yugoslavia. But Kolesar had virtually no impact on other Carpatho-Rusyns in Canada, who never knew of the existence of him or his “institute.”

More recently, the Toronto business executive Steven Chepa has funded publications about Carpatho-Rusyns and, in response to the recent national revival in the homeland, has established an annual monetary prize for the best original literary work in the Rusyn language. Also, because of the activity of scholars at the University of Toronto, Canada has since the 1980s acquired a reputation in the European homeland as one of the world’s major sources for publications and information about the Rusyn national revival during the post-Communist era. Although such developments have not been able to restore the kind of community life that existed in the years immediately after World War II, it does allow for certain individuals and groups to maintain the existence of a Carpatho-Rusyn identity in Canada.