I just posted about a Carpatho-Rusyn film festival, and it occurs to me that many people still don't know what a Rusyn is (po-našomu = "our people," which is how we refer to ourselves). The following might give you some sense:
In the early 1900s, as recounted in his book "The Furthest Man Down," Booker T. Washington traveled Europe in search of a group that would be most comparable to Southern blacks at the time. In other words, a group that was disproportionately poor and discriminated against.
In the Carpathian Mountains across what is now southern Poland, Washington found a little-known ethnic group called the Lemkos.
"They were a minority within a minority," Kurilko said. "They were the poorest of peasants."
Poland, at the time, was part of the Russian Empire, but the Lemkos weren't Russian enough to be accepted in Russia. And they weren't Polish enough to be accepted by the Poles, either, Kurilko said.
Stigmatized and marginalized, thousands fled to the United States during the late 1800s and early 1900s, many ending up in the coal mines . . . (click here to read the whole article).
Lemkos are a subset of Rusyns -- and yeah, I'm part Lemko and half-Rusyn. This all resonates with me -- that we were the poorest of the poor, the ones everyone else looked down on (when I first met my relatives in Slovakia in the 1990s, they were too embarrassed to admit that they were Rusyn, but now they're proud of it!), and we worked in coal mines. I have lots of death certificates with lung and stomach cancer as the cause of death.
If you're interested in learning more, please check out
Rusyns - Lost Homes -- a remarkable quasi-documentary (including traditional songs) of a handful of Rusyn villages that were destroyed in 1980 for a dam -- will give you a visual and audio sense of what it is to be a Rusyn.
and