Між Америкою та Галичиною: Спогади Марії та Олекси Мотилів

Description

No. 5 in the series Memoirs, Diaries, Interviews published by the Peter Jacyk Program for the Study of Modern Ukrainian History and Society at the CIUS, this book contains two separate memoirs written by members of the Ukrainian émigré community in New York, Oleksa Motyl and Maria Motyl (née Boichuk). Born in the Lviv region in 1913, Oleksa Motyl completed his law studies in Lviv during the 1940s and he emigrated to the United States in 1949. Maria Boichuk was born in 1914 in the United States, but spent her formative years (after 1923) in Galicia. She returned to the US after World War II, in 1947. The most prominent place in both memoirs is occupied by the dramatic events of World War II in Galicia. The book provides personal insights into the daily life under the Soviet and Nazi occupations and it offers unique recollections about remarkable personalities, such as Rev Omelian Kovch, a Ukrainian priest murdered by the Nazis, who was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations for his efforts to save Jews, or Maria Boichuk’s friend Faina Lacher, a Jewess who became a Ukrainian Catholic nun and a prominent member of the underground Ukrainian Catholic church in Soviet Ukraine.