{"id":38404,"date":"2026-08-13T13:29:42","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T17:29:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/?p=38404"},"modified":"2026-08-13T13:29:42","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T17:29:42","slug":"searching-for-a-cup-of-tea-emigre-experiences-in-ivan-lysiak-rudnytskys-diaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/searching-for-a-cup-of-tea-emigre-experiences-in-ivan-lysiak-rudnytskys-diaries\/","title":{"rendered":"Searching for a cup of tea: Emigr\u00e9 experiences in Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky's diaries"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Vladyslava Moskalets<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Having just arrived in New York, historian Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky wrote in his diary for 17 July 1951, between descriptions of meetings and his search for work: \"On the one hand, almost tropical, humid heat prevails, while on the other, cold sea breezes blow in the evening. In many places, the air is artificially cooled, and all drinks are necessarily served with ice. As a result, a person catches a cold again and again. In my eyes, in those days, New York often appeared as some kind of nightmare, as a hellish city cursed by God, an image of humanity completely gone mad, having forgotten the natural order of things.\" On 24 July, he added another sentence on the subject: \"I went to have dinner at a Chinese restaurant (Chinese restaurants are the only places in America that serve good hot tea!).\"<\/p>\n

These small details allow us to almost physically feel the discomfort of an emigrant in a new place, where the climate and consumer culture were so different that the newcomers' experience manifested itself primarily as a bodily feeling of rejection. The cold air conditioning and the lack of a comfortable place to live made it clear to the newcomers that they did not belong there. Lysiak-Rudnytsky was not alone in this. Jewish writers who emigrated to New York in the early 20th century made similar observations. Literary critic Shachar Pinsker has studied how Jewish immigrant intellectuals of the early 20th century set up their own caf\u00e9s on the East Side of New York City to drink hot tea and socialize in the familiar European manner, sitting at tables for long periods. New generations of Jewish immigrants gathered at the Caf\u00e9 Royal on Second Avenue, near the Yiddish Theater. Thanks to the meticulousness of Lysiak-Rudnytsky, who recorded his thoughts and meetings, recounted conversations, and outlined plans in his diary, we can get a sense of the climate of the (mostly) emigr\u00e9 environment in the 1950s.<\/p>\n

Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky (1919\u20131984) came from Lviv, from the well-known Rudnytsky family of writers, public figures, and intellectuals. He lived through World War II and studied in Berlin and Prague. After the war, Lysiak-Rudnytsky received another education in Switzerland, where he married Mary Joanne Benton, an American. In 1951, he emigrated to the States, where his mother, Milena Rudnytska, and his uncle with his family already lived. He kept diaries from his teenage years until the early 1950s, although some portions were lost. The diaries were published in 2019 by the Dukh i Litera Publishers and became an object of scholarly research. For example, Yaroslav Hrytsak studied the origins of Lysiak-Rudnytsky's ideas<\/a> by analyzing his teenage notes, which contain many references to books and figures that influenced the future historian. Yuri Radchenko analyzed<\/a> Lysiak-Rudnytsky's views on his Jewish background, discovering an entire spectrum between alienation and interest in Jewish culture. In his review<\/a>, Ilya Chedoluma showed the rich potential of the diaries as a source for researchers of the interwar and postwar intellectual environments.<\/p>\n

We will see more such texts, thanks to the large volume and factual richness of Lysiak-Rudnytsky's diaries and to the author's sincerity, who did not seek to appear better than he really was. His diaries sometimes highlight how distant his world was from ours, while at other times, they surprise us with the many commonalities in academia then and now. As an example of frank autoethnography, they show aspects of life and character traits that are not included in textbooks and encyclopedic articles and will not be discussed at conferences on the occasion of the author's anniversary. Lysiak-Rudnytsky is having a hard time coping with the presence of his Jewish grandmother in his family tree. His youthful friendship with the Jewish writer Piotr Rawicz is overshadowed by his affair with Piotr's wife. Lysiak-Rudnytsky writes frankly about his contacts with women, which, for a long time, were also far from the chaste, monogamous ideal. There is a lot of corporeality in the diary, such as a detailed account of gonorrhea treatment in postwar Germany, and a lot of irritation and complaints even about the closest people. I do not know whether Lysiak-Rudnytsky planned to make these entries public. After all, even the genre of his notes changes from theoretical reflections or descriptions of what he read to the recording of everyday life.<\/p>\n

Apart from physical discomfort, Lysiak-Rudnytsky's \"American\" diaries offer rich insights into the adaptation strategies used by entire groups of intellectuals in the U.S. after the war. It was extremely difficult for intellectuals, even renowned and experienced ones, to find work in their fields, as evidenced by the historian Roman Rozdolsky and Milena Rudnytska, who had to take odd jobs and were supported financially by their relatives. Some intellectuals chose physical labor; for example, Lysiak-Rudnytsky's uncle, the musician Antin Rudnytsky, set up a chicken farm because it was difficult to enter musical circles. Other acquaintances from Galicia mentioned by Lysiak-Rudnytsky worked as orderlies in hospitals or nursing homes and as factory workers. His father-in-law offered the same solution to Lysiak-Rudnytsky himself \u2014 getting a job on a cherry farm and doing physical labor for 10 hours a day for little pay. \"There was a certain moral pressure on me from the Bentons, who are generally extremely hospitable and kind but have American views on these things.\"<\/p>\n

The threat of working on the farm forced Lysiak-Rudnytsky to search for other options, and the pages of his diaries are filled with descriptions of endless meetings, mostly in New York, during which he managed to find at least temporary intellectual side jobs, for example, as a collector of interviews. A teaching job in the U.S. required an American doctorate, which Lysiak-Rudnytsky began pursuing at Columbia University.<\/p>\n

These memories of an experienced scholar who had to start writing another dissertation can be compared with the memories of another Lviv scientist, the Jewish mathematician Stanis\u0142aw Ulam. Ten years older than Lysiak-Rudnytsky, Ulam fled from World War II to the United States and faced a different problem. His qualifications were sufficient to begin teaching math at a university immediately, but he faced fierce competition, as an unusually large number of refugee mathematicians arrived in the United States from Europe. One of Ulam's strategies was not to look for work at prestigious universities on the East Coast but to opt for the lesser-known University of Wisconsin, where he could go through the initial stages of adaptation while maintaining a stable income.<\/p>\n

Both Lysiak-Rudnytskyi's diaries and Ulam's memories point to the key role of networking. Meetings in restaurants and caf\u00e9s, even with cold air conditioning, invitations to visit, and personal correspondence, became the main source of information and later of job openings. Jobs in prestigious research projects or universities could not be found on the pages of newspapers. They required not only education, language proficiency, and practical qualifications, but also the ability to learn about vacancies in time and establish oneself.<\/p>\n

As Lysiak-Rudnytsky admitted, he lacked a \"political flair\" for organization. I began the essay by quoting what he wrote about the discomforts of life in exile \u2014 one of the topics most likely to attract Ukrainian readers' attention in 2025. There have been multiple generations of Ukrainian scholars who experienced geopolitical upheavals that determined their futures and led them to leave, whether because of the war or the poor economic conditions in Ukraine. However, support for Ukrainian scholars in wartime quite often consists of short-term programs, whereas full integration into American academia forces them to develop their own effective strategies.<\/p>\n

Vladyslava Moskalets
\n<\/strong>Researcher at the Center for Urban History in Lviv, lecturer in the Department of History at the Ukrainian Catholic University, and coordinator of the Jewish Studies program. She studies the social history of Jews in Galicia and the history of urban spaces and is a visiting lecturer at the University of Illinois at Chicago.<\/p>\n

Originally appeared in Ukrainian @Ukraina Moderna<\/a><\/p>\n

This article was published as part of a project supported by the Canadian non-profit charitable organization Ukrainian Jewish Encounter.<\/em><\/p>\n

Translated from the Ukrainian by Vasyl Starko.<\/em><\/p>\n

NOTE: UJE does not necessarily endorse opinions expressed in articles and other materials published on its website and social media pages. Such materials are posted to promote discussion related to Ukrainian-Jewish interactions and relations. The website and social media pages will be places of information that reflect varied viewpoints.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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