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Living through a momentous time in history made teaching it a joy for Basil Dmytryshyn.
The small black and white photo is faded and blurry. In the battered little cardboard suitcase filled with a jumble of photos, it stands out as my favorite.
THE ENGAGING SMILE of a young man beams through the faded emulsion after several decades. He's dressed in shorts, knee socks, and a lightweight shirt. A mop of wavy hair tops his head; he's very thin, but he's smiling. He has just survived the devastation of World War II in Europe.
The person in the photo is Basil Dmytryshyn, my father, who retired from Portland State in 1989 as a professor of history.
FROM MY EARLIEST years, Dad's personal history was a vivid presence in my life. He was born in Poland to Ukrainian parents, and lived in Eastern Europe until World War II. In December 1943, he was imprisoned by the Germans; after escaping, he became a member of the Slovak anti-German resistance movement. At the end of the war, Dad spent a few months in Soviet prisons. Once again, he managed to escape and then made his way to a displaced persons camp in Mittenwald (now in West Germany). In January 1947, he disembarked from the U.S.S. Ernie Pyle at New York's Pier 42 to begin life anew.
Dad learned English through a variety of means, including sitting through endless showings of Abbott and Costello and Hepburn and Tracy movies, and taking "English For Foreigners" classes in New York City public schools and at Queens College. After he applied to universities across the country, he enrolled at University of Arkansas, where he met my Arkansas-born mother. She worked in the university's business office and processed Dad's first tuition payment. They married in 1949 and, in rapid succession Dad earned his bachelor's (1950) and his master's degrees (1951), and became a naturalized U.S. citizen (1951). He earned his doctorate from University of California at Berkeley in 1955. In 1956, after a year of postdoctoral work, he accepted an assistant professorship at a small and relatively new school called Portland State College, then housed in the old Lincoln High School.
My mom always joked that George Hoffmann, then Portland State social studies dean, called and interviewed her for the job because he wasn't sure if Dad spoke enough English. Dad and Mom moved north to Oregon in the summer of 1956, and Dad settled into an office in Lincoln Hall with two other assistant professors. My sister was born a year after they arrived, and I came along in 1960. Several years later, Dad moved into an office in newly built Cramer Hall, which afforded him gorgeous views of the South Park Blocks. I left many child-size nose prints on his office windows as I took in the scenery.
I WAS PROBABLY the smallest and youngest "student" ever in Dad's classroom. I have fond memories of days when I'd tag along to work with him, long before the national Take Our Daughters to Work movement started. I'd sit in his office, my legs swinging freely since my feet didn't reach the floor, as he reviewed notes for class. I loved the echoey sound of the hallways as my little-kid shoes clip-clopped along the waxed floors of Cramer Hall when I walked with him to class. I got curious stares on the first day from students already seated scattershot in the room.
"This is our youngest student," my dad smiled, and he turned to write "Western Civilization 101" on the blackboard. Dad then faced the roomful of students and started talking about the content of the course. Students took a few notes.
"Your grades will be based on midterm and final written essays. I will accept exam papers written in English . . ." He paused. ". . . and in French, German, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Church Slavonic, and Polish." I smiled at the in-joke. My dad and I knew he was serious; the students weren't sure. But if, by chance, anyone wrote in any of the languages he listed, he'd read, correct, and write comments in the language of their essay. Dad has an amazing command of languages—most learned out of necessity during World War II.
MY DAD AND I have a special father-daughter relationship influenced by his life experiences. As we skied together at Mount Hood Meadows, he told me how he used a pair of skis to flee after being detained by the Germans in 1943. When we played one-on-one soccer, he won more times than not. We would walk and talk and I grew to share his love of history and heritage.
My dad researched, read, wrote, published, and lectured during his academic career—he still does. Over a 50-year career, he's published 20 books with mainstream publishing houses, and more than 150 articles and reviews in professional journals around the world on diverse aspects of Russian history. Proofreading was always a family affair, with the long galley sheets spread out on the dining room table. While Dad was away teaching at Harvard in the summer of 1971, my mom, my sister, and I mapped out the index for the second edition of his book U.S.S.R.: A Concise History on 3-by-5 cards laid all over the living and dining room floors.
The library in our home was filled floor to ceiling with more than 4,000 volumes; Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, English, German, and French titles called out to me. English as well. Dad had fashioned a desk from a door and two two-drawer file cabinets, with a wooden office chair on casters parked behind it. A small table held first a precious old Underwood typewriter, and later an IBM Selectric. This was our style of office technology.
At the desk, Dad would read, research, and write papers, book manuscripts, lecture notes, and other scholarly pieces in longhand, and then Mom would type everything from his notes. He still favors legal-sized yellow notepads and pencils. As a child, I would quietly pad into the room while he worked and curl up in an overstuffed green chair with my favorite reading materials. While my elementary school friends read Nancy Drew and Hardy Boy mysteries, I pored over Harold Lamb's Tamerlane and Hannibal. Or Jim Bishop's The Day Lincoln Died. Or my all-time favorite, Robert Payne's The Gold of Troy. History, the subject matter that interested him, interested me.
AT TIMES, OUR house seemed to me like a miniature United Nations. Visiting foreign scholars, faculty members, and dignitaries would come to our home for dinner. I'd hide in the stairwell to listen to lively conversations about differing perceptions of world affairs. During the Cold War era, Soviet scholars sometimes came to Portland State for limited-duration visits. My parents extended dinner invitations to these scholars and sometimes to sailors from the Soviet ships that occasionally came to Portland. The sailors invariably showed up in threes; it was a game in our family to try to figure out which of the three was the KGB officer whose duty it was to keep an eye on the others. "Which one is it?" I'd whisper to my dad. "You tell me," he'd whisper back.
Academic careers can have a vagabond feel to them. My dad's work as a scholar of Russian and Soviet history took him to interesting and prestigious places, including research and teaching stints at Harvard University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Hokkaido University in Japan, and University of Hawaii at Manoa. And he was a fellow at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, D.C.
During 1967-68 our family joined him in Germany. Under the auspices of a Fulbright Fellowship, Dad reviewed and assessed Slavic research and studies centers at European universities. During that academic year, he traveled from our home base in Bad Krozingen, near Freiburg, to conduct his research. My sister and I were enrolled in the local German elementary school; I was in second grade and had never studied German. This is what it must have been like for my dad, I thought, to be suddenly uprooted and replanted in a new country. On weekends, and at the end of the Fulbright year, we piled into our Volvo 144 sedan and drove to visit different places: Bonn, Cologne, Mainz, Heidelberg, Oberammergau, Gottingen, Frankfurt, and Munich (although it wasn't until I was an adult that I visited Dachau, site of one of Germany's concentration camps, where numerous friends of Dad had perished during the war). We also visited other European countries. As we drove, Dad provided a narrative of his experiences as a young man on the war-torn continent.
AS A SMALL child, I never understood why people asked me where my dad was from. "From our house," I'd reply. I'd grown up with his rich vocal tones and well-chosen words, and never heard the hint of a foreign accent. "Where are you from?" I finally asked him. He shared with me stories of life on the family farm in Barwinok, a small rural village. While growing up, he enjoyed woodworking (he later built a doll house, a playhouse, a deck, and some furniture for the house he and Mom built in the late 1950s). As a boy, he had a dog (he dotes now on my two dachshunds), and he enjoyed music, playing a half-size violin.
In elementary school I joined the school orchestra as a violinist and later as a double-bass player. First by ear and later with a score, I was able to play for Dad melodies from Antonin Dvorak's New World Symphony and Bedrich Smetana's Ma Vlast. These two pieces remain dear to me, since I see them straddling the old and the new worlds, much as my dad has done. Smetana composed powerful melodies that drew on his proud and deep Czech heritage. Dvorak wrote his ninth symphony while he was in the United States in the 1890s, embracing the culture of the new world and sharing it with people in his home country.
Later, when I hosted a classical music program on public radio, I would invariably weave works by Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, and other Eastern European composers into my playlist, since I knew that Dad and Mom had the radio playing continuously at home. I would roll the "r's" and spit out "huh" sounds with authority and authenticity, having had help from my dad. If I ran across a foreign name or word I couldn't pronounce, I'd call him and he'd coach me through it.
I AM NOT the only one who appreciates my dad. His engaging and impassioned teaching and research earned him praise and honor through the years at Portland State. Student nominations earned him two consecutive John Mosser Awards for teaching excellence, and he earned both the Branford P. Millar Award for faculty excellence and the Outstanding Retired Faculty Award.
The cardboard suitcase Dad brought with him from Europe could always be found in a closet under the stairs at the house I grew up in. I'd rearrange the way the suitcases and footlockers were stored, but I always kept that little case on top of the stack. The compelling black and white images stored within spoke to me across decades about a young man's life interrupted and a life's direction changed. Dad may not have become the lawyer, medical doctor, or engineer he once dreamed of, but as a doctor of philosophy and a scholar of Russian and Soviet history, he opened up a worldview for me and countless students and helped shape our view of life and history through what he experienced.
Tania Thompson worked in public radio for nearly two decades and now works in public relations and communications. Her father, Basil Dmytryshyn, will share his life story with the Retired Association of Portland State (RAPS) on October 19. For more information call 503-725-3447 or e-mail raps@pdx.edu.