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New Jersey's Cossacks
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11754 |
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CULTURE
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4 / 1987 |
2,616 Words |
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Merlinda Fournier
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The rolling fields and wooded stretches leading into New Jersey's pine barrens are distinctly rural, not at all the great industrial wastelands stereotypical of the state. The southern counties are a land of horse farms, small rodeos, and large billboard signs begging the passerby to smoke Marlboros. A sign hyping a Western clothing store proclaims, "This is cowboy country." New Jersey is home to some remarkable horsemen: the Russian Cossacks of New Kuban.
These are cowboys of the East who were forced to abandon their steppe horses - "light as an arrow, strong as the wind," as one Cossack proudly described them - to flee the advancing Bolshevik forces of the Russian Revolution. Today, these horsemen are an aged remnant of a once proud military life-style.
The community of New Kuban, off Route 54 in Buena Vista Township, is hardly noticeable at all. There are no stores or gas stations, not even a post office, to mark the settlement. The houses, bordering Weymouth Road for several miles, are obscured by rows of oak and pine. Only the churchyard and minister's residence testify to a corner of czarist Russia transplanted to America. The diminutive white church with green roof and gold domes seems like a set in a Disney fantasy film.
Yet it is this Orthodox church, where a small box of Russian soil rests on the altar, that is the last remaining life in a community many of whose members are literally dying out. Father Nikolai Nekludoff, the present batushka (priest), sighs and point past the church down a narrow tree-lined road. Rows of distinctive headstones are inscribed in Russian; each stone displays a prominent picture of the deceased and is usually topped with an Orthodox cross. "Maybe two hundred...our church congregation, but now no more," Father Nikolai comments in broken but touchingly clear English.
This Cossack community traces its origin to the efforts of an earlier Russian refugee, Alexis Corson, who arrived penniless in the United States in 1935. He spoke no English at first; as he struggled to learn, he vowed never to forget "how hard it was to get started." In the early 1950s, the World Cossack Association in Lakewood, New Jersey, began assisting displaced persons entering the United States from refugee camps in Austria and Germany. Corson finally fulfilled his promise when he purchased Buena Vista Township properties piecemeal at twenty dollars an acre, in order to resettle refugees. Some fifty Cossack families from the area of the Kuban River were able to transplant their culture intact to a community setting. They named it New Kuban, after their earlier homestead.
Russian language use
Anthropologists and sociologists have made few studies of Russian ethnic enclaves in the United States. According to Stanford Gerber, an ethnographer who published several studies on Russians in the late 1960s, "This [lack of research] is unfortunate, for viable Russian communities hardly exist any more and the opportunity to observe and record the life, customs, and practices of a unique cultural minority group will soon end." The community he studied, Russkoya Celo in the American Midwest, has much in common with the Cossack community of New Kuban.
Gerber concluded that a number of values that appeared vital to the life of
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