Vat ees thees box for moveez?

"Mr. Mike, I cannot find man with key," says Ivan, shrugging nonchalantly as I push the attendance sheet in front of his face.

I've been sitting here for 20 minutes, trying to keep the seminarians distracted while Ivan looks for the key to the video room. I don't even teach this course, but does it really take 20 minutes to find a key to a room everyone in the seminary has used at least once? Marian answers the call and bursts through the door, solution in hand.

Handing my copy of the The Scarlet and the Black to Ivan, I follow the black-cassocked future-priests as we vault through the white-washed walls of Khutirivka Seminary in L'viv. "The Video Room" is a pie-shaped glass-walled room at the end of a hallway with a few chairs, a TV and VCR, and a pimple-faced Ukrainian techie who leaves in disgust as soon as we enter.

Ivan whips the tape out of the box and shoves it into one of the VCRs sitting below the television. It burps and eats the tape like it was guzzling vodka.

"Ooo, nie dobry(not good)," says Ivan.

"Moze(maybe). . ." another seminary begins pushing buttons violently while another two run to get more chairs.

At this point, the high-pitched chatter of Ukrainian exceeded my comprehension and I filled in the dialog for myself.

"What's this cardboard thing?" says Marian, flipping open the cassette case and examining it. "Can we eat it?"

"No, no good," says another, "you would have terrible heartburn, worse than borscht."

"Da? Maybe salt . . ."

"Oh! I know, if I push all the buttons at once and you punch the VCR, then maybe we get the tape out, nie?"

"No, you have bad connection," says Stephen, chewing on a piece of exposed copper wiring. "I will fuse them with my teeth."

I point out that there's no UHC cable for video to the seven young men in black gathered around the VCR, so this is all pointless. We switch to english briefly as they give me puzzled looks, and then they dive back into Ukrainian.

"What the hell is he talking about?"

"I don't know, he doesn't have a full unibrow. He can't be man."

"Maybe he is Jew . . ."

"Just keep fiddling with this thing, and saying 'Toshiba' a lot. He will think we are fixing the problem."

Ivan comes crashing through the door and everyone stops what they are doing. There is no UHC cable. Period.

I finally succeed in ejecting the tape from one VCR by overriding the eject button, but it doesn't matter at this point. I abandon the attempt at my first movie and sound the retreat back to the classroom.

Continuing a previous class debate, the students split up into two groups: one for 'religious America' and one for 'secular America.' They like this activity, but I figure if you've spent the last few years studying latin, Thomas Aquinas, and philosophical dissertations, then debates on secularism are about as close to a field trip as you can get. The debate goes well until I ask them what kinds of religious groups we can find in America.

"Protestants!" yells Marian.

"Who are protestants?" I prod.

Our rough list includes baptists, presbyterians, evangelicals, 7th day adventists, scientologists(which was debatable) and mormons. I suggested the Amish, but they gave me blank stares when I tried to mime what it meant.

"Catholics! Muslims! Orthodox!" they yell. Da, da, da.

I explain the percentages of Americans that believe in each to the best of my knowledge(approx. 45% Protestant, 25% Catholic) and that Americans, on average, change churches every seven years. They whistle.

"And Jews? You have Jews?"

"Yes."

"What are they like? Do they behave?"

"Well, they're pretty much like everybody else," I say.

Knowing Ukrainian history(particularly volatile with respect to Judaism, more on that later) I patiently explain that I have family in Skokie, Illinois, which has a Hasidic Jewish population.

"They don't bother you?"

"Nope."

I change the topic and soon they are asking me if I would marry a Ukrainian girl. You'll have to wait for that post. I end class and explain I have to catch the bus in 10 minutes.

"You will be teaching us on Wednesday?" says Yaroslav after class.

"I don't know," I say, shrugging. "Maybe."

"What do you do in your free time?" he asks.

I explain my activities, and he nods approvingly.

"Maybe we can have english language discussion sometime? Like a group or something?" Yaroslav says.

"Yeah, maybe," I tell him. "It was great meeting you."

We shake hands and he turns out the light for me. I run to catch the bus.

Anti-Semitism in Ukraine . . . from Seminarians?

"President Bush is disliked by many," said Brett, giving an example of the past tense to his English class of Ukrainian seminarians.
This prompted a student to assume "and Bush, he is Jew?"
Brett, my lifelong friend and roommate, explained that no, Bush isn't disliked because he might be a Jew. And no, he wasn't surprised by the response. Having been a seminarian in America himself, Brett's very attune to the religious scene and general attitudes toward faith. To illustrate the Ukrainian attitude towards Judaism, Brett just explained to me the Vertep(which neither of us have actually seen, fyi), a Ukrainian Chistmas play tying the birth of Christ to Ukraine's attitudes and culture. The only Jew in the story is the best friend of Satan.
I should preface all of this by saying the American understanding of anti-Semitism and where it comes from is entirely different from the Ukrainian experience, much of which is steeped in pre-WWII history(we Americans are, I admit, in the dark here). How much do you know about the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1920, the Holodomyr Famine in Ukraine, or Old Europe(pre-1940)?
To give some background, Ukrainians don't have a lot of exposure to faraway cultures, ethnicities or varying points of view. Mostly everyone here is of Ukrainian, Russian or Polish descent. Few people travel out of the country, those that do go somewhere in Europe or to the USA. I have seen one African in L'viv and, I kid you not, some people stopped in their tracks and stared, mouths agape, in shock. There have been a few chinese tourists here, and they stick out like Boy George at a Catholic funeral. It's a matter of exposure.
My friend nearly wet his pants last year during a discussion of religion when one student, innocently unaware, asked, "the (n-word)s in your country, they are religious?" This spawned a 10 minute explanation of what that meant, why it's the most innapropriate word in the American vocabulary, and what the proper reference was. If English is your 4th language, you've never been outside Ukraine, and you've never seen someone who wasn't pale in your life, you'd probably make the same mistake.
Back to Judaism. According to the American Holocaust Museum, there were some 200,000 Jews in L'viv(then L'wow or L'vov, the Polish or American names, respectively) in September, 1939. After Operation Barbarossa, the Nazis took control of L'vov and sent many Jews to Belzec concentration camp. Post-Holocaust, there were only 200-300 Jews left. I'm having trouble finding reliable sources in English about the current Jewish population/culture in L'viv, but as I understand it, nearly every synagogue in L'viv was destroyed, some 40 buildings. L'viv had the third largest Jewish population in Poland before the Holocaust.
Today, there are no markers, monuments or signs to speak of that recognize Jewish cemetaries, synagogues or the ghetto. In contrast, Krakow also had a large Jewish population and ghetto, not to mention Plaszow, the concentration camp featured in the movie "Schindler's List." Just about everything is marked well, and tours are regularly given. Judaism is part of the city's identity, and Krakow to L'viv is about the distance from Madison to Chicago. So how come Krakow is so friendly to Judaism and L'viv isn't?
Judaism in L'viv or Ukraine, as I understand, is still a very touchy subject. I just edited a story about a Jewish Rabbi in an eastern Ukrainian city that was publicly assaulted in broad daylight by a gang a few weeks ago. Obviously, this isn't everybody, but I find it really interesting it is such a hot-button issue. Circa WWII, there was a lot of ill-will in Europe towards Jews, it wasn't just in Germany(this is too complex to elaborate on here).
Before, I thought anti-Semitism to be so neanderthalic and trivial that is was laughable. My aunt studied in Tel Aviv and often indulged us with Jewish food. I still love eating at Ella's Deli, a Kosher restaurant, in Madison, WI. So I was a bit taken aback when Brett caught me up with Ukrainian affairs, but I've come to realize it's part lack of exposure, part historical context, part something I don't understand.
I leave you with Brett's story from his class yesterday, a policy I will adopt as my own:
"I was explaining the conflict between 'Secular America' and Religious America' by dividing my class in two teams for a mock debate. Not wanting to generalize, I started naming people 'you represent Catholicism, you're fundamentalist, you're Lutheran, you're Muslim, and you will be a J- . . . But I let it go."