Happy springtime from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte! In my childhood home, for the Easter holiday, my mom would break out a basket of lacquered wooden Pysanky eggs from their hiding place. The shiny varnish that coated them smelled like pinecones. I recognized the scent last summer in Manhattan when I was eating pierogies in a small restaurant whose wood panel walls were coated in the same resin. The smell took me back to the basket of wooden eggs on our kitchen table that my Grandma Yankos (née Dancha) carried home with her from a trip to the Ukraine in the 1980s.
The daughter of immigrants hailing from Drahovo in current day western Ukraine, Ana Dancha was born in a small Western Pennsylvania borough where she completed the eighth grade. I had her diploma framed:
This certifies that Anna Dancha has completed the Eighth Grade of the Course of Study as prescribed for the Public Schools of Cambria County, State of Pennsylvania, consisting of viz: Reading, Orthography, Penmanship, Arithmetic, Geography, English Grammar, United States History, History of Pennsylvania, Physiology and Hygiene, and has passed a satisfactory examination therein. In recognition of the same, she is entitled to receive this certificate of entrance into any recognized High School in Cambria County. Given this thirteenth day of June 1924.
My grandma’s formal education ended that year, and she was married shortly thereafter. But one of the things the diploma doesn’t mention was her biliteracy. She learned to read and write in English as her Cambria County diploma attested. However, in her Sunday school classes at the little wooden church with a gilded onion dome her own parents helped to build in Vintondale, Pennsylvania, she also learned to read and write in Rusyn — an East Slavic language of Central and Eastern Europe written in Cyrillic script.
A vivid memory I have of my grandmother is how when a neighbor received a letter from “theold country,” she would be invited to read it out loud, translate, and pen a response. She was one of the few in town who could. She tried to teach us Rusyn words and expressions here and there. I still remember a few.
My grandma’s biliteracy was also the means through which she was able to know her oldest sister, the daughter her own parents had left behind in Drahovo with the thought of bringing her to the United States once they had settled in. A World War and then the Cold War prevented that from ever happening. But the two sisters wrote to each other their whole lives.
In the 1980s, my grandma was able to make the trip to Ukraine for the first time, and we drove her to the airport in Washington, D.C. Our green Oldsmobile station wagon was piled with heavy vinyl suitcases stuffed with Levis and secondhand wedding dresses for her sister’s family to sell on the black market. The two old women met for the first time. But they already knew each other intimately: They had written to each other across a lifetime.
Not long after their reunion, my grandmother died. Someone wrote to her sister to let her know. Family legend has it that she too died a couple of days after receiving the news — of a broken heart.
Thinking about my grandma’s bilingualism and K-12 world language education, I realize, surprisingly, that North Carolina has become something of a leader in dual language/immersion (DL/I).
The latest count numbered over 280 DL/I programs across K-12 in eight different languages (Cherokee, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Japanese, Spanish, and Urdu). At the same time, the proliferation of DL/I in North Carolina roughly coincided with the dismantlement of bilingual education in California, Massachusetts, and Arizona as well as strong resistance to, and in some cases legislation against, K-12 ethnic studies, and more recently, all things Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion-oriented. Here’s the thing, the state never explicitly branded its bilingual education efforts in a Civil Rights tradition or one of ethnic pride. Instead, it adopted a neoliberal marketing strategy whereby DL/I was one of several pathways to employability.
In North Carolina, bilingualism has been reframed as a commodity. But back in 1924, in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, “old country” languages were stigmatized. They still are today, especially when the home language lacks a perceived economic currency or prestige. It is true that Rusyn with a “y” is a language shared by a relatively small percentage of the world’s population — mostly in the mountains of the Western Ukraine of today. But I’m glad my grandmother learned to read and write in Rusyn because it was her biliteracy that gave her a deep connection to her sister. And, I remember them both every Easter when I take out the wooden eggs from their hiding place and inhale their pungent nostalgia.
Image: Making Easter Eggs by cooleewinds, licensed under CC 2.0.
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