Interview with Russell Sveda

Library of Congress Interview with Russell Sveda Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project RUSSELL SVEDA Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: June 28, 2000 Copyright 2007 ADST Q: Today is June 28, 2000. This is an interview with Russell Sveda. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and I'm Charles Stuart Kennedy. Russ and I are old friends. Could you tell me when and where you were born and something about your family? SVEDA: I was born on December 27, 1945 in Passaic, New Jersey. My mother and father were both born in the United States but were of immigrant parents. My father's family was from a small area called Papapelrusse. They actually have an Internet web site, the nation of Papapelrusse. It is a small nation that is really very obscure. It's between Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary in the Carpathian Mountains. It is a place that has been exchanged between one or the other for a while. My father's family is originally Swedish and they somehow got dropped off here. One of my cousins who invented artificial sweeteners did some research on this. He said that it was in the 17th century. So, my mother's family is absolutely Polish, no question. My father died when I was just shy of my fourth birthday, so my mother's family and that influence was really strong on me. My mother's family is Polish and therefore very Catholic. My father's family is Russian Orthodox. I had one foot in each tradition. Interview with Russell Sveda http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001462 Library of Congress I went to Catholic schools from third grade on. My mother was a public school teacher. My father was a high school teacher. My mother thought it would be better for me to go to Catholic school, but specifically to a Catholic boarding school, a Catholic military boarding school, in Upstate New York run by Italian nuns on the West Point reservation. It was a completely Felliniesque experience. Fellini had films with many bizarre characters and, believe, me, that was my growing up. Q: Did you have brothers or sisters? SVEDA: No, I was an only child. Q: In Passaic, was there a fairly large Polish community? SVEDA: There was a very large Polish community in the northern New Jersey arePassaic, Patterson, Garfield, what have you. In fact, Lodi is where my mother lived until her death. She lived across the street from a very large Polish convent run by sisters. The reason I mention this is because when I met the Pope in 1978 at a large audience with everybody yelling, “Papa! Papa! Papa!” as he came into the audience hall, I yelled the three words that I knew would rivet the Pope to the floor. The three words were, “Lodi, New Jersey.” The Pope stopped and said, “Who's from Lodi” and I said, “I'm from Lodi.” It seems that he had spent two summers there as Archbishop of Krakow across the street from my mother's home, playing tennis in the tennis courts cattycornered from my mother's house, and living in the rectory that was for priests who were attached to this convent of several hundred nuns. So, he knew the place very well. He knew all the Polish parishes of the region, but he didn't ask me about my mother's parish. He asked me about all their rival parishes. Q: At home and with your relatives, were you getting a good dose of Polish nationalism? SVEDA: Oh, yes, absolutely. My mother's family was largely absent in that regard. They were very Americanized and they didn't really want to discuss anything about the old world. In fact, I once asked one of my aunts what village her mother was from. She said Interview with Russell Sveda http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001462 Library of Congress that she had asked her mother once and her mother had refused to answer because she said she never wanted to hear the name of that place again. She knew if she told her daughter, she would hear it again. So, they were absolutely adamantly turning their back on Central and Eastern Europe and wanted to be American. My mother's family, on the other hand, was very different. My grandfather was a very successful businessman. In 1927 on his 25th wedding anniversary, he made a triumphal visit back to his home village. He had worked on the estate of a great noble, as he kept telling my grandmother, and the family had been trusted administrators of this great noble up until that visit. After that visit, my grandmother told with great delight how the estate was really a rundown place. This great noble, who was wearing a fur jacket, was smelling from not having bathed and he asked for a handout from my grandfather. He had contributed as a very patriotic Pole a lot to the resuscitation of the Polish state after 1919 and before 1939. One of the things I've inherited is a gold medal from the Polish state which says in Polish, “For the rebirth of the nation” and honors him for his contributions. My grandmother's family was a bit unusual. Her father had been a soldier fighting with France in the Franco-Prussian War. He was a Polish soldier who, like many Poles, was a mercenary. He lived in France for a while. To our horror in recent years, we have found that he fathered a family in France. Then he went back to Poland and started my grandmother's family. There were several girls. My grandmother decided to come to America after she became a schoolteacher at about age 16 or 17. She said this was because she hated lentils. She had lentils in the morning, lentils in the afternoon, lentils in the evening. She hated lentils and she wanted to go to a place where nobody knew what lentils were. She had read about Odysseus, who settled ultimately in a place where nobody knew what a war was. So, she carried in her pocket a little purse filled with lentils. If people knew what they were, she moved on. She first landed in Boston. They knew what lentils were. She got to Passaic, New Jersey, eventually. They did not know what lentils were. She stayed. Interview with Russell Sveda http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001462 Library of Congress Q: One always thinks of the Orthodox Church as sticking to lentils all the time. SVEDA: Well, she wasn't Orthodox. She was Catholic. Her brother was supposed to have come over to New York for the New York World's Fair in 1939. Because of the brewing possibility of Poland getting involved in the war that year, he decided to forego this trip and come the following year. It was a bad decision in personal terms, although in national terms maybe not. He was a major general in the Polish army and a cavalry commandeand I don't mean mechanized cavalrI mean horse cavalry. He has the distinction of having led one of the last cavalry charges in history. People mock this not knowing that in 1939 German tankany tanks for that mattewere not very good. They got stuck in the mud. Horses did not. He survived the charge. Unfortunately, he was executed later at Katyn Forest by Stalin's people. My mother's other uncle on her father's side was killed by Stalin's troops when he refused to give up a cow which was the mainstay of his family's survival. He was bludgeoned to death by the Soviet troops. So, there is a feeling in the family, a rather personal feeling, of anti-communism. Q: I would imagine that at least at the home at this time, before 1945, you were getting very strong anti-communist and anti-Russian strains and also a very strong Catholic upbringing. SVEDA: Actually, Russian. As far as my grandfather was concerned, my mother had married a Russian. He was Russian Orthodox and not Catholic. Yet he grew to like my father very much. My father was a naval officer in World War II. In fact, I was conceived at the naval station in San Diego. When I learned that my family could have lived in San Diego instead of New Jersey as a young child, I was very upset. Q: Did you go to Catholic parochial schools before you went to the school near West Point? Interview with Russell Sveda http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001462 Library of Congress SVEDA: I went to public schools in Garfield, New Jersey, but the problem was that my mother after my father's death had to start working again as a schoolteacher. She really didn't want me untended. My grandparents were there, but she didn't want to have them as a day care facility and I don't think they were very interested in it. So, she came up with this solution of a boarding school. Q: At what age did you go to boarding school? SVEDA: It was at the beginning of third grade, so it was the age of seven. It was really too young. Q: Tell me about the school. SVEDA: The school had 120 students, all male, except for the day students. There were about 20 females that came in from the surrounding areas. We had a few day students. But the boarding students were all male.

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