A Ukrainian Named James
James had always wanted to be an outstanding personality: in childhood he even dreamed of becoming president of the United States. A fourteenth generation American of English, German, Irish, Welsh, Dutch, and Cherokee Indian ancestry, he was born on February 18, 1952, in the small city of Muskogee, Oklahoma. Being raised in the family of an ordinary railroad switchman, he was distinguished for nothing but excellent grades and a passion for school debates. The mastery of public debate open him the door to free higher education at Oklahoma State University.
At that time the United States waged a war in Vietnam. Mace would learn the truth about the war from his fellow students who had come back from it. His protest assumed a shape quite traditional for the times: Mace became a borderline hippie. He took to marijuana and the antiwar movement. This did not keep him, though, from doing well at the university, enthusing about the Beatles’ music, adoring Elvis Presley, and falling for pretty girls.
A passion for serious reading and a desire to find the root causes of historical conflicts determined his further scholastic pursuits. Awarded the degree of bachelor of history with a certificate in Russian studies, James went on to Michigan University for graduate studies and defended a doctoral dissertation “Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine in 1918-1933.” Harvard University invited the young researcher to take part in a project to study the 1932-1933 manmade famine in Ukraine and published the study in 1983. James learned more and more horrifying details of the cruel and cynical Stalinist policy toward Ukraine. The desire to open the forbidden and carefully camouflaged page in the history of Ukrainian people, which proved to be even more terrible than the Vietnam pages in the history of his fatherland, increasingly drew him into more detailed research. In 1986 he was appointed executive director of the US commission inquiring into the Ukrainian famine. His name hit the pages of the Soviet press as early as 1983 with such epithets as “bourgeois falsifier,” “patent Ukrainophile,” and “bearer of a human-hating ideology...” Meanwhile, his works have been published in English, German, Spanish, Dutch, Russian, Ukrainian, and Hebrew.
Today, when we come across James in the editorial office almost every day and speak with him in Ukrainian, we are astonished at his excellent command of the latter. Ten years ago, when he was first invited to Ukraine, he did not even think of staying behind in this country, although he was in low spirits for the mistrust of his fellow scholars and private life problems. The meeting with prominent Ukrainian poetess and prose writer Natalia Dziubenko filled his life with new sense. James considers this meeting the most important event and the greatest success in his life. He has recently sold his US house to fund the publication of his wife’s book St. Andrew The First Called Apostle, present a gift to one winner of a Ukrainian language competition organized by the League of Ukrainian Philanthropists, and buy a modest Troyeshchyna apartment, where his wife and he made a library of all the rooms. James loves Dickens, Shakespeare, Scott, and Darwin. When a graduate student, he moonlighted as a cashier in an antique book store, which also let him read a great deal. Once, already in Ukraine, seeing a collection of Stalin’s opuses at a book market, he rushed home for a streetcar and thus enriched his library with it. He continues to dig into our past to help us live better, with almost no free time left. To relax during his hours of home studies, he dances or hums a favorite rock-n-roll tune of his youth. What he also likes is to walk across Kyiv with his wife, taking a stroll of Khreshchatyk or Andriyivsky uzviz.
