Folklore into Mindset: A Case Study of A Carpatho-Rusyn American Family and their Unspoken Cultural Practices

Rituals are often carried out without intent: a reason for why one is practicing them and mostly full consciousness of what the ritual means. These overt and outspoken practices might include the practice of wearing folk costumes or celebrating holidays. However, folk custom and culture can also dictate internal behavior: the way they think things should be done, what they think is moral or immoral, and how they react to situations are all culturally dictated.

These are ancient ways of thinking about the world, that can be passed down from generation to generation. These beliefs might have once had an overt intent to them, be it spiritual, magical, or practical, but, as time goes by and people groups shift and immigrate, these behavioral rituals can lose their magical intent, or the presence of intent in the first place, morphing into reflexes rather than rituals.

This paper consists of looking at old customs and beliefs among the Carpatho-Rusyn people and analyzing how these customs translate into beliefs and actions of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrant families residing in the United States. This case study will be looking specifically at a family who immigrated in 1922 From the village of Folvark (Now Stranany) in Slovakia to Johnstown Pennsylvania. It will take a generational approach to analyze changes in behavior the longer the family has resided in the United States. 1st generation, for this paper’s purposes, is defined as those who were born in Slovakia, 2nd generation refers to their children born in America, 3rd refers to the 2nd generation’s children, and so on.

Rusyn immigrants, especially those who retained a large amount of their culture, show a snapshot of a past Rusyn culture that still largely exists in the present. Their immigration in itself set the culture on a different evolutionary route than their counterparts in Europe. These cultural divergences emerge from both the separate historical events experienced, as well as pressures to assimilate into American culture. The family I worked with had a reluctance to assimilate or intermarry with non-Rusyns, or at least Slovaks from around the village area, and spoke a common dialect until the third generation.

The melds with American culture in this family mostly came in the form of their overt holiday traditions. While the second generation was growing up, the family celebrated Sviaty Vecer or Christmas dinner the Rusyn way on December 24th. The family also had a separate dinner on January 7th, along with attending orthodox church services. These traditions radically changed during the 3rd generation’s upbringing, they celebrated Christmas on the 25th secularly, but still with some Rusyn cuisine. They also still celebrated Orthodox Christmas on January 7th, but only with a minor dinner. The changes in these traditions might have been economically charged, such as schedules not allowing for members of the family to call off work for Christmas Eve or skip school on January 7th.

When the third generation grew up, however, they began to have Christmas Eve dinner again, albeit without most of the “society vecer” traditions and food. And their children, the 4th generation, experienced a secular Orthodox Christmas that borrowed East Slavic figures such as Ded Moroz or as they called him, “Russian Santa”. The 4th generation also experienced the melding of the American Easter egg hunt with the traditional dish of Rusyn Cirecz, a tradition in which finding the “cirecz egg” meant good luck, and the child who found it would be rewarded if they ate it.

The changes and adaptations of these overt and open traditions represent the collective hiding, rather than erasure of Rusyn culture after immigration. Even if a family refused to become fully assimilated into the Anglo-American culture, the jobs they worked and the school system they were educated in placed changes in the family’s behavior and culture out of necessity. The church they were involved in, which in his family’s case was the Russian Orthodox church, facilitated the intermingling of Russian culture and the adoption of Russian folkloric figures.

One fully Carpatho-Rusyn tradition of the more deliberate variety that survived is that on new years eve, all the male children visit the matriarch of the family, who in this case is their grandmother, and say a phrase to initiate good luck in the new year. The first boy to visit receives a prize. This somewhat relates to Mykola Musinka’s work in the Presov region, where he observed the new year tradition of well-wishing. In the original version of this tradition, groups of boys from the whole village visited both neighbors and relatives. This had to be scaled down in a post-immigration context where Rusyns lived farther apart, hence being narrowed down to boys only practicing this well-wishing within a family context. While this tradition is quite deliberate, many in this family were unaware of its village origins, simply learning to do it by watching generations that came before them instead of researching to revive these traditions after the fact.

Other, more hidden aspects of Rusyn culture, including more ancient Slavic beliefs, survived in this family by other means. These beliefs survive as they are not publicly on display, while one’s boss or school might say “you can’t take off for that”, they cannot dictate one’s behavior at home, the values they teach their children, or their beliefs about gender and death.

The grandparents of the second-generation family matriarch were both wed due to arranged marriages, as was common in Carpatho-Rusyn culture (Musinka 1985). Her mother and father were a love match who met in America, but they were approved of by the bride’s parents to get married. While the official practice of arranged marriage might have ended, the belief that parents ultimately held the decision of who their daughter was allowed to marry remained. as when the second generation matriarch met a person her parents didn’t approve of, her parents supervised her movements outside of the home, threw away letters that the boy had sent, and forbade her from speaking to him. In the end, she ran away with the boy and then bargained with her parents over the phone to either let her get married or she would not return home, this finally persuaded her parents to allow her to marry the boy. This act of eloping, even though the couple was completely unaware of it, is almost identical to the folk custom of bride kidnapping, which according to Musinka’s 1985 ethnographic work, was practiced in Rusyn villages when the bride’s family was not approving of a marriage.

Many girls in this family also unwittingly practiced the behavior of moving into the bride’s parents’ house even after they were married. A tradition practiced in Rusyn villages, where it was called Prystasstvo, according to Musinka’s 1985 work. In this tradition, the couple moved in with the bride’s parents until they could build a house of their own, the couple would of course help the bride’s parent’s with whatever they asked, this was mostly practiced when the bride had no male siblings. The reasoning of why the Carpatho-Rusyn American family practiced this was a little different. In the cases of the 2nd generation and some of the 3rd generation it was partly due to the husbands family being unwilling to support the new couple as they got settled into married life, another reason this was practiced in the 2nd and 3rd generations was the possible distance the married couple might move away if not supported by the bride’s family. In the post-colonial subtext the girls' marriages might move them to faraway and unfamiliar places, and in doing this many of the girls felt disconnected from the support system that was so integral to them for much of their lives, so rather than moving back into their parents' actual house, they symbolically did this by moving into houses on the same street as the one they grew up on, purchased by their mother and father. This system earned the nickname of “the compound” by the former husband of a 3rd Generation daughter. In turn for the parents’ support of their children, they were expected to be cared for later in life by their children and their spouses. The 2nd generation matriarch also mentioned this tradition in earlier times, with her paying for her parents' retirement, as they helped her pay for trade school. As is written in Rusyn folkloric songs such as “teche voda teche” in which a daughter sings about how her mother took care of her and now she must take care of her mother. This tradition remained at least until the 3rd generation, in which all but one female child participated in this practice. The sons of the family also remained close by, albeit not on the same street, to help take care of their parents.

Younger mothers in this family are sandwiched between taking care of the matriarch in the family: taking her on errands, as she does not drive, or bringing her groceries. These women also have full-time jobs and children whom the matriarch will take care of after school while the mothers work at said jobs. Still, women are expected to “take care of their own” and it is frowned upon and seen as shameful and irresponsible to look towards resources outside of the family such as daycare or institutions such as nursing homes, leading to some of these women getting less than 5 hours of sleep.

This shows a mirror into Cristina Cantin’s work with modern Rusyns in Ukraine and Slovakia. The women in the villages she worked with were often exhausted, due to their expected role of “family cultivator” this exhaustion often led to stress-related health conditions and breakdowns which could require hospitalization or spa treatments (Cantin 2012). These hospitalizations too, are not without a mirror within the Rusyn-American family. One of the young 3rd generation mothers was actually hospitalized with pneumonia, likely aggravated by stress, leaving the matriarch to care for her children while she was away.

Despite the expectations excised over daughters in this family, some of the gender roles are more progressive than the surrounding Anglo- American urban culture they immigrated into, as a 2017 American Women’s psychology book by Hillary M. Lips states of these western roles; Women cook the food, men produce it, yet among this Rusyn family, women learned how to do both. The 1st and 2nd child generations of children consisted of only girls, yet the family experienced no shortage of work during these periods, the 1st generation daughters worked on a full-scale farm rented and worked by theirs and another family. The second-generation daughters were encouraged to learn how to raise livestock, get a job to earn money for their families among any other practical skill. This encouragement of practical knowledge continued through the 3rd and the youngest 4th generation where the girls learned along with the boys how to raise livestock, do garden work, as well as trap and fish if they wished to. The belief in this family about these gender non-divisions is that the ability to do these things makes the girl a more useful young person to the family and in general, This belief that women can do practical work classified by urban western societies as masculine is present in many photos taken of female farmworkers from Rusyn-inhabited regions.

The phenomenon of boys learning traditionally female roles, such as cooking, is prevalent among the 4th generation, but not among the older generations as the unmarried 3rd generation male children still stop at their mothers' house for a meal quite often.

Cristina Cantin mentions in her 2012 work, a Rusyn woman named Pani Halina describing Rusyn Masculinity. the line that stood out the most in regards to the work with the Rusyn-American family reads “they work very hard, and smoke, and drink. They need wives so they don’t die early because they don’t know anything”. The last part of this description almost precisely matched the description of men offered by the Rusyn-American Matriarch, she would often say things like “Having a husband is like having an extra child, that is why you need to cook”. One 4th generation member of the family remarked that growing up she didn’t understand the term “man of the house”, she understood that there were men in the house, but did not see how they could be in charge any more than the women, as all they did was sit, eat, and do the work the woman said needed doing outside. This also references back to Cantins' work and the description of the woman’s role as the “Cultivator of the family”.

Women in this family also learned of the prevalence of curses. when one of the first-generation family members was left pregnant with a deadbeat husband, her mother cursed the man’s entire family to never give birth to a girl again. While there are no remarks of curses after that instance. The matriarch retelling this story seemed to see no quarrels between her grandmother’s spell work and Christian faith. Nadia Varcholova writes that the practice of placing curses on individuals in the Rusyn villages of eastern Slovakia went hand-in-hand with herbal magic and medicine. Which is the medicinal aspect is another practical skill girls in every generation of this family are encouraged to learn.

Another belief that has possibly ancient connections is the superstitious belief in this family that if a bird hits its head on the window or door of a house or flies into said house, someone in that house will die or become ill. They also believed that the souls of their loved ones could be reincarnated into birds, As the matriarch of the family would always state that birds she saw in the garden where deceased members of her family returning for a visit. Although this family was Christian and had no awareness of this, these beliefs have to do with the ancient Slavic belief in “Vyraj”, a land where the birds go in the winter and souls go when they die. This belief was documented in Andrzej Szyjewski’s work “Religion of the Slavs”. The Eastern Slavic belief in the ability of the soul to reincarnate into a bird is noted in Elena Levkievska’s work “Myths and Legends of the Ancient Slavs”.

Further beliefs about death included the remaining of family member's spirits after death to watch over the younger generation. This references Cantin's work in which the Rusyns she worked with had a similar belief. These beliefs also predate Christianity, and these spirits were worshipped as minor gods. These minor gods did the same thing as the Family spirits that were believed in by the Rusyn-American family, acting as protectors to their descendants’ well being (Fedotov as Cited in Cantin 2012)

These traditions have unintentionally been passed down generation after generation. Some of which, such as the last ones mentioned, for thousands of years. These traditions have survived not by research, but by simply observing what previous generations did, and forming judgments around those observations. These judgments may inflict cultural pain and hardship onto future generations, as a belief in “doing what has always been done” can restrict a person’s individual freedoms, But they can also pass on hidden beauty and a different way of understanding the world. It can be easy to imagine humanity as sprouting up as it is, with no background, no story. However, everyone is the continuation of something, every generation grows out of the embers of the previous one. While assimilation might try to kill a culture, elements of it are bound to remain as an unspoken truth.