Alisa Vlasenko, a student of the 31st group at the Bila Tserkva State Lyceum, recently sent an e-mail to our newspaper. In her letter she informed us that a scholarly conference devoted to James Mace’s research work will be held soon at the lyceum, and the students have therefore decided to ask for assistance from The Day to plug the gap in their knowledge about the American scholar.
Naturally, we agreed. The next day Alisa visited our office on the invitation of our editor Larysa Ivshyna and told us that the scholarly conference is the brainchild of Olha Burlaka, who teaches history at her school. Burlaka hopes that these kinds of activities will be held not just in her high school but in other educational institutions of Bila Tserkva as well. “The scale of the conference on James Mace is large, and all the history teachers in Bila Tserkva have been invited. This will give us and other educational institutions good experience in holding such events,” Alisa said with conviction. “The conference will be about Mace as an American, who is worth many Ukrainians put together.”
Alisa learned about Mace and his work from her history teacher. “We were told that he was an American who knew Ukrainian very well and had studied the Holodomor. Actually, he was the one who acquainted Ukraine with its own history.”
During their preparations for the scholarly discussion of Mace’s work, the students at Alisa’s high school received nearly all the necessary information from The Day’s Web site. The editor also donated books from The Day’s Library Series, including the electronic edition of The Day and Eternity of James Mace.
Alisa said that her peers have an inert attitude to the topic of the Holodomor. Perhaps one has to reach a certain level of maturity to understand this tragedy. “I think that all the discussions lie ahead of us. After all, we are holding the conference specifically with this aim,” said Alisa, who learned about the tragedy of the Holodomor from her parents. “My parents come from the Cherkasy region. It is known for its beautiful Lake Syniukha whose banks are lined with wonderful cherry orchards. They are wild; no one planted them. But my parents were told that a village once stood here instead of the lake. After the village completely died out during the Holodomor, it was simply flooded, but the cherry orchards are standing there to this day.”
The conference will be held during the last week of November, simultaneously with the nationwide action “A Candle in the Window,” which was initiated by Mace in an article published in The Day in 2003. Clearly, these are the kinds of actions, not SMS-voting, that help us understand who is worthy of the title of “Great Ukrainian,” and should be the subject of history lessons in schools. Ukrainians have a long way to go in learning about their own history.
