Pat Krafcik Oral History Interview

Item

Identifier

KrafcikPat

Title

Pat Krafcik Oral History Interview

Date

7 September 2021

9 September 2021

Creator

Pat Krafcik

Contributor

Susan Fiksdal

extracted text

Patricia Krafcik
Interviewed by Susan Fiksdal
The Evergreen State College oral history project
September 7, 2021
FINAL
Fiksdal: I am interviewing Pat Krafcik for her oral interview with me, Susan Fiksdal, on September 7,
2021. Pat, I just want to start at the very beginning. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the
culture and your family life as you grew up.
Krafcik: I was born in Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland, as you know, just like Chicago, New York, and other
Eastern cities was very much a kind of what we would call ethnic city, ethnic in the sense of those
immigrants who arrived in North America at the very end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the
20th. My grandparents arrived just on the threshold of World War I. They came from a place that, in a
way, no longer exists, and that was the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Specifically, they came from what is
today’s eastern Slovakia. They were peasants. My maternal grandmother did not know how to read or
write. My maternal grandfather did. On my dad’s side, they also came from eastern Slovakia. I think
there’s a possibility that those grandparents were both literate to some extent. But these were people
largely of peasant background and from villages.
For me, as I was growing up, that identity was really crucial in shaping my own identity; when
my people came to America, they were, as new immigrants, the lowest of the low. It’s interesting,
Susan, that I was able to explore this a little bit in a program in 2019 with Brad Proctor and Sean
Williams. That was in the program called “Not a Melting Pot: American Identities, Migrations, and
Places.” I was looking for a program to participate in because the Russia program had been deleted from
our curriculum at that point, something we can talk about later.
Fiksdal: Yes, I want to talk about that. I didn’t know that. And 2019 is quite a long time to wait to
explore your identity.
Krafcik: I had explored plenty on my own and in other ways, but this was a moment and a time and a
context in which I could really contribute something to that program. Initially Brad and Sean had not
incorporated anything on immigration from Eastern Europe. They had a beautiful program in place
already, but they welcomed me and my contribution to the program. It was in that context that I was
able to bring in front of students something of my own ethnic background.

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To go back to that, that Slavic peasant origin, the village origin, impoverished in so many ways,
which drove my grandparents and thousands and thousands of other East Europeans to seek a better
life--that particular phenomenon really did shape my early youth. Even in my childhood, I was aware of
this history, though not in its entirety, and it was a factor that inspired me to want to study Slavic
languages. I wanted also very much to make contact with family, whom I knew that my mom was
writing to, but she herself had never met. That “grandparent origin” as immigrants, that mentality and
the culture that they brought had shaped my parents and, in turn, me. My parents, dad born in 1920
and mom in 1923, grew up bilingually. Dad spoke an eastern Slovak dialect and Mom spoke a Rusyn
dialect. They understood each other because, as you know, Slavic languages are close to each other, and
certainly these two were very close. They used their languages as a cryptic tongue that they could speak
in front of us kids (my two brothers and me) without us understanding because they did not expect that
this would be important in our “American” life. As I gradually over time learned Russian, I was able to
understand what they were saying, so that this became a moot issue.
Fiksdal: That’s great. And you were studying Russian in high school?
Krafcik: I grew up in the Orthodox church in a parish in Cleveland, Ohio, that called itself a Russian
Orthodox church, and that’s where I, still in elementary school, had my first Russian-language lessons.
There is, of course, a very complex cultural story here. The bottom line is that the parishioners of this
church were not actually Russians, but Carpatho-Rusyns. However, many of them believed that they
were part of a larger Rus’ culture and thought that they spoke a kind of “low Russian.” This
misunderstanding was also significant for me as I continued later to study Russian and Slavic culture and
languages.
When I was about maybe seven or eight, my mom started taking us to what was called Russian
School— “Russkaya shkola”—at the church. The priest and the main cantor taught this class. I remember
sitting in the church basement of the old St. Michael’s Russian Orthodox Church on Union Avenue in
Cleveland. We studied from an actual Russian textbook for kids, a primer for kids. I just ate it up. I was so
excited. My brother John was a little bit less excited than I, but I was over the moon about this. We were
learning Russian, how to write, how to speak! That lasted for a while.
Fiksdal: You learned to write in Russian when you were ages seven to eight?
Krafcik: Yes, not perfectly, but it was fun to draw the Cyrillic letters.
Fiksdal: But still, you were just learning to write in English. Amazing.
Krafcik: For me, that was really exciting.
Fiksdal: And you were attracted to that alphabet. That is so interesting.
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Krafcik: The funny thing about this, too, is that later, when I was in junior high school, eighth grade, I
was given the opportunity to study Russian. We were the “Sputnik generation” and so it was considered
crucial that we learn languages such as Russian. I began comparing what I had learned in school to what
I had learned in “Russian school” at the church, and I realized that there was a difference. The difference
was not very big, but it was a difference. That made me wonder, are we Russian? I started asking my
mom that question, because I knew that my dad was Slovak. My mom said, “Yes, we’re Russian, but
we’re not “high Russians.” We’re “low Russians.” “What do you mean, Mom?”
Fiksdal: I have never heard that term.
Krafcik: “What language are you speaking, Mom?” Again, “It’s Russian, but it’s not “hard Russian. It’s
soft Russian.” Meanwhile, there was another church in Cleveland, St. Theodosius, a Russian Orthodox
church where there actually were Russians. The priest there was Russian and part Georgian, and had
gone to a seminary with Stalin. They spoke what I was learning in school.
Fiksdal: With Stalin? What a claim to fame!
Krafcik: Yes. There I was, putting this all together, as you can imagine, and trying to figure it out. What
was my mom’s actual background? That set me on a trajectory of learning about who we were. It clearly
was not Russian. I majored in Russian in college at Indiana University in Bloomington, but was not really
able to pursue research on mom’s background very much until I got to graduate school. But I guess what
I want to stress here is that what set me off on that trajectory that became a crucial part of my life’s
path and work was the search for what kind of Slavic identity was ours, and wanting to know language,
wanting to know something more about that culture. Our family’s cuisine was very much Slavic. The
church holidays, for instance, were the same church holidays that were celebrated in the old country.
My maternal grandmother who lived with us until she passed away when I was eight, and all the elderly
people with whom we were close, spoke Rusyn and “broken English,” that is, English with a strong Slavic
accent—and this felt right to me. I recall meeting a fellow classmate’s grandmother while in elementary
school, and their grandmother spoke regular unaccented English, and there I was thinking “is that a real
grandmother? Grandmothers always have an accent!”
Fiksdal: That’s really quite a good story.
Krafcik: You can see how all of that experience was shaping my identity and my outlook, and again,
inspired me to study, so that finally, when eighth grade came around and Russian was available to me, I
knew I would pursue it. My teacher was an American who had had really great training in Russian
language. Many years later, when I was studying in the Soviet Union, I visited him at our US consulate in
Leningrad.
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Fiksdal: Wow!
Krafcik: I studied Russian through the end of high school, really loving it, wanting it so much, and that
would shape the further trajectory of my studies and my interests beyond just language.
Fiksdal: Can I ask you, did your parents go to college?
Krafcik: No.
Fiksdal: How do you think you got the idea of going to college?
Krafcik: My parents were always very supportive. There was no question about me pursuing higher
education. I was a very serious student. It became pretty clear to me early on that I wanted to be a
scholar. I wanted to study. I wanted to learn. But the twist in all of this is that from very early on in my
life, it was clear to me that I was inherently a musician. I recall that when I was in first grade, second
grade, we would do some music, playing plastic flutophones. It was so easy for me, so easy. Some of the
kids struggled with it, and I just thought, why are they having so much difficulty? This is so easy. I think
it’s because I was a musician already. My dad went ahead and bought an old upright piano, one that had
been a player piano—and he put it into our basement. He had it tuned up and he completely redid the
outside of it, and then he sat down and he played. I was just drawn to it. He started teaching me some
chords and so on. I loved it! This became for me yet another parallel trajectory to the scholarly
Russian/Slavic studies. I studied piano, later flute, and then very seriously violin. While I was in junior
high school and into high school, there were then these, in a sense, two competing tracks which I was
able to maintain during high school--serious music and serious Russian.
What won out at first was music. When I first went off to Indiana University, I studied at the
Conservatory with the great master, Josef Gingold, who had himself an extraordinary history of being in
a concentration camp and surviving the war as a child. He was a wonderful teacher. But, as I studied
there at the Conservatory during my first year, I was also deeply involved in Russian and had tested into
the third level of language because I’d had so much of it in high school along with some private tutoring.
That’s when the competition between those two disciplines, two tracks, became intense. That was a
moment of crisis in my life because I somehow recognized that I did not want to pursue music
professionally. But there I was, studying with a master at one of the best conservatories in the country,
so I had to make a difficult decision. I remember going to Gingold and telling him this. He was such a
wise man. He said, “Do this: if you had another life to live right now, what would you do?” I said, “I
would study Russian. I would study Russian language, culture, literature.” He said, “Do that now.”
Fiksdal: His field was piano or flute?

4

Krafcik: No, violin. He was a great violinist, one of the great violin players and also master teachers. And
his advice to me was, “You must do for your life what is wisest.” It was golden advice. So, that’s what I
did. I shifted my path over to Russian, and then I just threw myself into that. And that’s what I ended up
majoring in and going on with it to graduate school at Columbia University for a master’s degree and a
PhD. I had fortunately also been able to get what was called a Danforth Fellowship which supported me
through all my graduate school years. I was so grateful to that program and the great education at
Columbia. And grateful for my parents’ support.
Going back to my parents just briefly, my dad had done a few different jobs in his life, and I think
we were, at best, on the lower end of middle class. My dad worked for the Cleveland Police, for
instance. As a former Marine from World War II serving in the South Pacific, that was a natural thing to
look into, but not his favorite work. He also did some construction work and working for the US Postal
Service. But he pursued, all those years, what I believe was his greatest calling, and that was as an
upholsterer. He was an absolute master upholsterer. He had studied under some upholsterers in
Cleveland, the son (like my dad) of immigrants—in this case Jewish immigrants--and they generously
taught him everything he needed to know about upholstery. He was close friends with them, as well,
and they gave him the tools, the skills, to pursue this creative craft.
I remember in my childhood that my dad had set up in the garage—a little garage next to our
house—a workshop, or he’d work in the basement of our house. He had joined the military before
finishing high school, but when he came back from the Marines—he had been in the South Pacific, a
very tough place to be—he finished his high school education with a GED. Mom also finished high
school. They never had the chance to pursue higher education officially, but, again, they were very
supportive of whatever I wanted to do.
Now I have been doing music very seriously, especially in the past 10-15 years, playing in the
South Puget Sound Community Orchestra and with a stint in the Olympia Chamber Orchestra.
Fiksdal: Oh, I didn’t know that. That’s fabulous. Your skills must have been incredibly well grounded for
you to be able to take them up again.
Krafcik: Growing up I had fine teachers both in piano and in violin. I think that I was able to go back,
revisit and hear the “recordings” of my music teachers in my head as I worked by myself to get my
playing up to speed. I’ve had to work very, very hard, but the solid musical training from the past has
helped. I will never bring back exactly what I had at age 17 or 18, but I’ve been able to bring back
enough to play competently in a good orchestra, and to absolutely love it. That has been so fulfilling in
my life now, so in retirement, I will be doing a lot of that.
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Fiksdal: I think that’s wonderful that you can carry something through, and it’s a great love of your life.
I’m just so struck. I also studied piano, only until I was 16, unfortunately. I had a tough teacher and I
decided I wanted an easy one, and when I got my easy teacher, I slipped in my discipline towards piano,
so I did drop it. But one result, I think, of studying music that I think did us both well has been that
discipline of study every day. No matter what, you must do it. Then recitals, where you’ve got to
perform, and where you’re never quite good enough according to yourself, but other people might give
you praise. Little do they know all the errors you made or the touches you didn’t quite put in. I think also
for me—and I’m wondering if this might be for you, too—the music that fills your ears, I think we’re just
naturally attuned to other languages, and to language itself. What do you think?
Krafcik: I would agree with you completely. I think that everybody has potential in all different kinds of
areas, but if you are doing music, if you’re pretty good at music, you must have a good ear. You are
listening to elements like pitch and intonation. This also helps with language learning. I remember that
while I was at Indiana University, I was recruited by a graduate student who was doing a project with
Czech language. Czech is a very intonational language. Slovak is, too, but Czech really is. He wanted me
to find the tones of Czech and to try to outline certain words in sentences.
Fiksdal: Oh, my gosh! This was early on, trying to figure out intonation. Fabulous!
Krafcik: It’s really kind of amusing to me because we would now use computers to do this, but there
were no computers available to us in 1971-72. But that really drove home the fact that I could hear
these tones. I could find them on the piano. I could write this out for him as musical notes. Yes, we are
somehow attuned to language. Like math, music is a language. So, indeed, that may have come together
and mutually helped us both, Susan.
Fiksdal: Let’s pause for just a moment here.
Okay, I’m back with Pat Krafcik. We’re now on the topic of graduate school. I was just
wondering, Pat, if there were some moments that you particularly remember in graduate school, either
good or bad. It’s always a tough time. You think you know what you’re doing, but writing a dissertation
is not always easy, and you have to find the right mentors and all of that sort of thing.
Krafcik: I spent the entire last spring semester of my undergraduate education in the Soviet Union.
That was pretty interesting because that launched me into graduate study. I entered Columbia
University in the fall of 1971, and I graduated with a PhD in 1980. I was hired at the University of
Pittsburgh for my first job starting in September 1979.
Fiksdal: You were hired as an assistant professor. That’s a lot of responsibility.

6

Krafcik: It was a lot, and when I look back at that time, I think that I was naïve about a lot of things. I
had so much to learn about teaching. In graduate school, we don’t really learn much about teaching. At
Columbia, in my last few years, I had been teaching Russian language, so I was getting good with that,
and I loved it. And I ran the summer school language study there one particular summer and taught. But
teaching in other disciplines, such literature—that was something that I really had to learn over time. I
had to learn how to put a course together. When we complete graduate studies and are “released” into
the world, there still is so much learning to be done if we want to become really good teachers and
mentors.
During graduate school, I found Columbia University to be great. There were wonderful faculty
there in Russian, in Russian literature in particular, and that was what I was going for. I did a couple of
years there, and then I spent a year in the Soviet Union in 1973-74 as an assistant director to a language
program sponsored by the Council on International Educational Exchange, or CIEE. It had a great
program at Leningrad State University. I was an assistant on that program in which I had myself been a
student in in the spring semester of 1971, that last semester in undergraduate studies at Indiana
University. After that year abroad, I returned to Columbia to complete my Ph.D.
Fiksdal: Did you go to the Soviet Union because you needed to refine your skills, or you just were
tempted to spend more time there?
Krafcik: I recall that I was asked by CIEE if I might be interested in doing that job during the academic
year ’73-‘74, and I was of course interested. It was a good time to take a natural break. Of course, I knew
that it would be great for language and culture and history and all of the rest that you imbibe when
you’re in the culture.
Fiksdal: What about your students there? Did they expect you to be a Russian native-born speaker?
They were okay with having someone who maybe understood their culture better, but who wasn’t
native-born?
Krafcik: When I participated in that program, Susan, it was for American students studying there. As an
assistant director, I worked with the director on all the organizing and complications surrounding the
program, so I didn’t actually do any kind of teaching.
Fiksdal: Oh, I see.
Krafcik: I helped run the program. We had a big group of students living in a dorm with Russian
roommates. There was always something to deal with, visiting their classes, going on excursions with
them, solving problems, and so on. In the Soviet Union, there was always an additional layer of difficulty
to everything. I learned so much from that experience. I was really able then, when I returned and
7

finished graduate studies and then went into my teaching, to bring that experience into my work with
students. And, of course, to transfer it all to Evergreen when I came here.
Fiksdal: No students crossed the line? You didn’t have anyone doing things they shouldn’t do and have
the state come down on them? This was a very tricky time, really.
Krafcik: A very tricky time. But in some ways, I must say, I never really felt afraid personally there. There
were always a lot of police around! At least I think that if one didn’t do anything wrong and pretty much
was careful, then it was not bad. There were always cases where people had problems, but somehow, I
think, we didn’t have any completely insurmountable problems. There were always things like, for
instance, the water in Leningrad. It was terrible. There was a lot of what was called Giardia lamblia
lurking it the water. It was a parasite. We begged our students, “Don’t ever drink the water. You’re going
to get sick.” Some of them simply ignored us, and they got sick. They in fact had to be hospitalized. The
Soviet doctors claimed that we brought sick students to the Soviet Union so they could be cured, but, in
fact, it was the Leningrad Giardia lamblia in the water that was at fault. The kids would start losing
weight. They became very thin. They had to be nursed back to health in the hospitals. They were
quarantined in the hospitals, although they didn’t have to be, but that’s how things were handled in the
Soviet hospital.
Fiksdal: Just a different system, and I think that would be so hard, especially with medical issues. You’re
always, as a student especially, much more comfortable being with people who can speak your language
and, I don’t know, probably not with people wearing white coats and things.
Krafcik: Yes, the upshot was that the students and we ourselves learned a great deal from these
experiences. We also along the way had a student who had, I think, a kind of a mental breakdown, so
she was taken off to an asylum for a while.
Fiksdal: In Russia? The USSR at that time.
Krafcik: Yes, and there were some special issues around that situation, but in the end, everyone
survived, and we never left anybody behind.
Fiksdal: But getting her out. This sounds very tricky. Something like this happened to me in Mexico and
getting them in safe custody is one thing; getting them out, you just never know.
Krafcik: Somehow we managed to extract her, and I think that she was sent home.
Fiksdal: Wow! That’s an adventure, Pat.
Krafcik: That all was an extraordinary adventure. Meanwhile, I had also made some study tours from
Indiana University—two tours, in fact—to the former Yugoslavia. This was another strong interest of
mine, really always looking at the broader Slavic world, not just at Russia. Even though South Slavic
8

culture was not the ethnic Slavic culture with which I identified, it was so fascinating, because the
territory had been occupied by the Ottoman Turks for hundreds of years, so Turkish culture was deeply
embedded in South Slavic culture, and it produced this extraordinary folk culture—which, of course, I
was able to draw on many times teaching at Evergreen especially. That acquaintance with South Slavic
culture in these study tours was as crucial to me as going to the Soviet Union, so I’m so grateful for the
opportunities I had to live and study abroad in those years, and that definitely influenced my teaching.
Subsequently, over the past several decades, I have been able to turn my attention to my own
roots, my own ethnic roots, and so have spent the equivalent of some few full years in Slovakia—first, in
Czechoslovakia, and then, when Slovakia and the Czech Republic broke into two sovereign nations in
1993, I was able to throw myself into Carpatho-Rusyn and Slovak studies. I had had an IREX-Fulbright to
Czechoslovakia to do research into the folklore brigand tradition during the academic year 1983-84, and
subsequently had Fulbright Specialist grants to Slovakia at Comenius University in Bratislava which
enormously strengthened my Slovak language.
Fiksdal: To go back a bit: What was your dissertation about?
Krafcik: I had, from early on, a fascination with Robin Hood. I am sure that part of that was a couple of
different series that were on TV of Robin Hood, including The Adventures of Robin Hood. Robin in the
Greenwood. And in my junior high, I played flute in the band, and we were called the Yeomen. We had
green capes, and we wore Robin Hood hats, and we would march in parades.
Fiksdal: Interesting. This did not affect my life in the same way it affected yours. I don’t remember even
watching TV.
Krafcik: Somehow, the Robin Hood phenomenon really stood out to me. I always was always really
fascinated with the idea of a brigand enacting true justice.
Fiksdal: And redistribution of wealth.
Krafcik: Redistribution of wealth and justice. These ideas came through in the Robin Hood ballads and
in the replaying of these ballads in story form in these series, and all this just absolutely fascinated me.
As in my study of Russian folklore and Russian history, I came across these Cossack heroes who led
uprisings, and one of them just caught my attention. His name was Stepan Razin. He and his band of
Cossacks operated on the Volga River on the 17th century as pirates. They would rob rich merchants.
There was this wealth of legend and song that came out of that historical phenomenon from a few years
of Razin’s activities. I was utterly fascinated. As I read what were called historical songs, I started seeing
the Robin Hood archetype everywhere in the Razin legend. That’s what I wrote my dissertation about!
Fiksdal: I was thinking the same thing. There must be an archetype.
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Krafcik: There is, and again that is what I then focused on for my dissertation.
Fiksdal: Interesting.
Krafcik: That work would then send me in the direction of looking at some other figures in Slavic culture
who had similar archetypal features, the most magnificent one being a Slovak hero called Juraj Jánošík.
He absolutely was Robin Hood. There were differences in elements of the story, but the archetype
shone through. When I finally finished the dissertation, defended it, and was into teaching at the
University of Pittsburgh, my first job, I had the time and energy to start looking at my own ethnic
background. I had already begun doing that in graduate school, but now I had a chance to actually study
in what was Czechoslovakia at that time. We had a Fulbright teacher at the University of Pittsburgh who
came to teach Slovak. Perfect place to teach Slovak because Pittsburgh was a totally Slavic ethnic city,
with lots of Slavic groups represented by immigrants and their descendants—Ukrainians, Poles, Slovaks,
Carpatho-Rusyns.
Fiksdal: I wonder why they were attracted to this one place? I didn’t know that.
Krafcik: The steel industry and mining. Just like before them, the Welsh had come and others. They
flocked to Pennsylvania. I think when my grandparents arrived, they came through New Jersey, through
Pennsylvania, and finally to Cleveland, Ohio. Pittsburgh was a great place for all this Slavic ethnic activity
and still is, and through that particular Fulbright teacher from Slovakia, a few of us were able to
participate in a program in Bratislava called Studia Academica Slovaca, which was a summer school, one
month of Slovak study, there in Bratislava, plus excursions. The first year I did that was 1981. That’s
where I met Dan, my husband, so much more came out of that study for my life than just the study of
language. Part of what was wonderful was that this was still socialist times, and so we had great
opportunities to observe and “live” that world firsthand.
Fiksdal: You were behind the Iron Curtain.
Krafcik: Czechoslovakia was, indeed behind the Iron Curtain. You could go out of Bratislava a little bit,
up along the Danube River, which flows right by Bratislava. There was this magnificent site which still is
there, of course, called Devin. Devin was an ancient site where there had been Celts, then the Romans,
and finally the Slavs. It was an extraordinary archeological site. But the point is that Devin was the place
where Austria was accessible just across the Danube. At that location, you could look down from the
high hill to the river below, and there was barbed wire. There were soldiers with machine guns and
German shepherd dogs supposedly preventing invasion from outside. But the reality was that we, inside
the country, were inside of a prison, in a sense, and that was really driven home to us in 1981 and all the
way up to the Revolutions of 1989 in eastern Europe when the Berlin Wall fell and everything changed.
10

Prior to the revolutions, though, it was very interesting, fascinating, for me, who had done so much
study in the Soviet Union to be in one of the so-called satellite countries, and to see everything from the
perspective of those people who were not within the boundaries of the Soviet Union, but were held
hostage under the power of Big Brother.
Fiksdal: Held hostage. They could see their situation.
Krafcik: It was fascinating. All of that also, of course, ultimately, and not unexpectedly, has played an
enormous role in my teaching, especially at Evergreen. I’m so grateful for those experiences because
without them, I would not be who I am. I could not have given to my students what I gave to them. I was
able to give them the real feel of what it was like to be there, to live there for months. When I had the
Fulbright IREX grant in 1983-84, Dan and I went back, and we spent a year in Czechoslovakia. We lived in
a small apartment, and I researched the topic of that Slovak brigand from the 18th century, Jánošík.
Fiksdal: Were you in Bratislava as well?
Krafcik: We were in Bratislava.
Fiksdal: Not Prague.
Krafcik: That’s right.
Fiksdal: Because most people have only heard of Prague.
Krafcik: Prague is in the Czech lands, now called Czechia, and Czechia and Slovakia are related but
different cultures. Historically, there are reasons why Slovakia is very different from Czechia although
the two were put together after World War I as a single country. In the end, there was in 1993 what
they called the “velvet divorce.” As I mentioned before, they separated into two sovereign nations.
Fiksdal: First, there was the Velvet Revolution and then there was the velvet divorce? That’s very
interesting.
Krafcik: No bloodshed, fortunately, unlike in the former Yugoslavia.
Fiksdal: I wonder why they chose that word velvet, or if it’s even the right word?
Krafcik: It’s not, but what the original word means is “soft” or “tender.” Not like the bloody breakup of
the former Yugoslavia.
Fiksdal: Thank goodness.
Fiksdal: I did travel—just because I wanted to—with my husband through Eastern Europe when it was
the Iron Curtain, behind the Iron Curtain, in 1974. We went camping, because it was cheap and easy.
Somehow, I had written to all these countries because you needed visas at the time, and you had to wait
and mail and things like that. No one understands that anymore either. We had maps, and we

11

somehow had lists of campgrounds, I guess. We must have gotten those because otherwise, how would
we know? We went and camped all over.
Krafcik: Where?
Fiksdal: We started in Yugoslavia, and we went through Bulgaria and Romania. This was in 1974. I have
incredible pictures. We rented a car. There are just so many things to say, but in a car, you have to be so
careful as you’re driving through these countries in that time because there were hardly any other cars,
and there were oxen. If you come upon oxen in the road, you have to just screech to a halt, because
they are very slow, as you can imagine. We went from the eastern part of Yugoslavia to Bulgaria.
Bulgaria seemed like it had been devastated. In my meager understanding of history, it had just been
wiped out by just about every civilization that had come along. They had passed through Bulgaria. It was
flat and ruined and with horrible Soviet architecture. We got to Romania, and it was lively and colorful,
and there were horses. The borders really mattered. Now, when you’re talking about the barbed wire—
we didn’t encounter that, or I just don’t remember it—of course, there was a lot of control. I do
remember such differences between those countries, so I can understand a little bit what you’re talking
about.
Krafcik: I’m sure that there wasn’t barbed wire absolutely everywhere, but at certain strategic places
there was.
Fiksdal: Near a river, the Danube, where you could get out.
Krafcik: Yes. In the Slovak part—Slovakia, eastern Slovakia—my maternal grandparents’ villages are
right on the border with Poland, in northeast Slovakia, and there was no barbed wire there, but it was
still an international boundary—border—and there was a small creek separating Slovakia and Poland. In
1984, when Dan and I were still there with the Fulbright IREX exchange, we made trips out east. It was
during that year that I was really able to get to know my mother’s family.
Fiksdal: That’s when you finally went and visited.
Krafcik: Yes. I had already made contact with them during my first study of Slovakia in August, ’81, but it
was really during that full year—’83-‘84—where were able to make multiple trips up to the villages. That
was amazing, of course.
Fiksdal: I just can’t imagine. I’ve always wanted to be able to go to a village and find my ancestors.
Krafcik: It was really, really wonderful, so moving.
Fiksdal: But you could speak with them.
Krafcik: I could, but my language has improved since I first met them. My ability with Slovak, a little bit
with Rusyn, but certainly with Slovak has improved quite a bit over the years. But I was able to do
12

enough between that and Russian to speak with them. I remember during the spring of ’84, when we
were still there, my mother and my two brothers came to visit. For my mother, this was unbelievable
because she had been so close to her immigrant mother. Her mother had grown up in this little village
Ruska Volya, and for my mother to go back to her mother’s village with my help was like the absolutely
100 percent pure good thing in my life that I ever helped to organize--one hundred percent pure! She
was so moved to go to her mother’s village. And my mom could speak Rusyn—that cryptic language she
used when we were kids—which she spoke very well, and, of course, she spoke to everyone there in
Rusyn.
Fiksdal: It must have changed.
Krafcik: As a linguist, you know, she was speaking Rusyn from the turn of the century, the 19th century
into the 20th. She was dressed like an American, short hair, casual slacks. I have a photograph of her
standing in the road, the one road in Ruska Volya--and she is standing there surrounded by village
women who had their scarves on, work boots, skirt and aprons, some in black.
Fiksdal: Still! And black.
Krafcik: Oh, yes, black, because some of them were widows.
Fiksdal: They were widows, yes.
Krafcik: Or in dark clothes. Very modest.
Fiksdal: Oh, my goodness. And those horrible tights.
Krafcik: Yes, yeah! Exactly!
Fiksdal: Terrible shoes.
Krafcik: Precisely. That was all they could get their hands on. So, there she is, standing talking with
them, and they’re saying to her, “How come we don’t know you? When did you leave the village?” She
just absolutely loved it. During that visit, my brother Jim who was adventurous, went to that creek,
which was the official border between Czechoslovakia and Poland in that region, and he put one foot on
one side and one foot on the other. He stood in both countries at once, and sure enough, somehow a
border officer encountered us on that little road and he said, “You’re not supposed to do that. You’re
not supposed to do that.” That was all. An apology from us was sufficient.
Fiksdal: And your brother got called out for that.
Krafcik: Yes.
Fiksdal: It was a creek.
Krafcik: It was a creek, and the creek—the little potok is still there, and I have made many visits since
that time. The border is completely open now since 1989, and the Poles come into Slovakia to buy
13

alcohol, and the Slovaks go into Poland—right across the border—to all the little shops to buy meat. It’s
a nice symbiotic relationship.
Fiksdal: I love it! Let’s pause here.
Krafcik: Okay.

14


Patricia Krafcik
Interviewed by Susan Fiksdal
The Evergreen State College oral history project
September 9, 2021
FINAL
Fiksdal: Hi, Pat. This is our second interview on Thursday, September 9, 2021. When we last left off,
you were at the University of Pittsburgh, and I was wondering about any jobs in between, and then what
attracted you to Evergreen?
Krafcik: The University of Pittsburgh was my first job after graduating from Columbia with my PhD. It
was a good place for me to be initially because it was, if we can go back to this term, a Slavic ethnic city.
I already had some friends there who were deeply involved in Carpatho-Rusyn culture and the
preservation of the culture. For me, a lot of the value of being in Pittsburgh was simply that I could make
connections with them. I became good friends with many of them, and those friendships have lasted my
whole life. The university was big. I was an assistant professor in the Slavic Language and Literature
Department. From the start, I had so much to learn about teaching, creating courses, and so on.
Then I went to Slovakia after the second year of teaching there; we already talked a little bit
about that. The opportunity arose because we had a Fulbright language teacher connected with our
Slavic department at Pitt, and she and I became friends. She said, “There’s this great language program
in Bratislava called Studia Academica Slovaca, and you should really think about going because you’d like
to explore some of your background.” So, I did, and it was during that first trip in the summer of 1981
that I first met Dan.
Fiksdal: And Dan is your husband.
Krafcik: Yes.
Fiksdal: But he didn’t become your husband right away.
Krafcik: Not right away, not until summer 1982. We returned to Czechoslovakia to participate in the
language program again a second time, and then even a third time after which we stayed during my
IREX grant for the academic year 1983-84 and that’s where we made our daughter, Sasha. She wasn’t
born there; I was about seven months pregnant when we returned. The University of Pittsburgh at that
time, 1984, was bewildered as to what to do with me. “What? You’re pregnant? How are we going to
handle this? We’re going to have to consider this medical or disability leave because you won’t be able
to teach right away.” So, not maternity leave, but simply medical or disability leave. Our daughter was
1

born September 12. Particularly in hindsight, but even at the time, it was like, why are we calling this
medical or disability leave? It’s not. With all the demands at the same time--learning to teach, having a
new baby, there was no way that I could satisfy the standards for tenure, so I didn’t even go into a
tenure review because I knew that it wouldn’t fly. I couldn’t possibly measure up to what standards they
wanted. There were a couple of single women in our department, one that was very much entrenched,
married with older children, and then single ones who really were very free and didn’t have the same
obligations. To make this story short, for all the wonderful things that were connected with living in
Pittsburgh for me, we decided to look to another job.
I started my search, and I found a position at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, so it
was going to be in the same state, not too terribly far, a few hours’ drive from Pittsburgh. We would be
able to move there easily. Here I went from a very large university to a small liberal arts college that had
a good reputation. That work started out okay, but within a very short time, it became clear that the
chair of the Russian-German Department was not playing with a full deck. She was psychologically
unstable, so she perceived a lot of things and people as threats. It became clear to me that there was a
trail of destruction behind her that I hadn’t known about when I took that job. I found out she was
called by others “Dragon Lady.”
In any case, I had some good students there, but it was very much a place that attracted upper
middle-class, white kids. Again, Susan, being in that situation at the time, I saw it for what it was, but
once I came to Evergreen and the whole world opened up to me in a positive way. I look back and I just
am horrified at how insular it was to be teaching in an institution with discrete departments, with little
to no interaction among faculty, and without the absence of anything like a wider social conscience.
Fiksdal: In the middle of nowhere.
Krafcik: Almost, but not entirely. Carlisle just a couple hours from D.C. and about an hour from the
capital Harrisburg. It’s an old American city, and you can see traces of that. It also has a reputation of
being the place where there was an Indian school, a school where Indian kids were brought in and then
beaten up because they were speaking their language. Eventually everything started going bad at
Dickinson College, and one particular individual, who is now deceased—the chair of the department—
began to display more and more animus toward me. She would play these games; for instance, there
was going to be some kind of department party, but I didn’t get an invitation. This was a small
department. A few German faculty and two Slavic faculty besides myself. Being treated like that was
very hard for me.
Fiksdal: You were expecting a community.
2

Krafcik: Yes. Which, I must say, places Evergreen on an absolute pedestal for me. Because having come
from a place like that, I really came to appreciate deeply what Evergreen has been.
The other part of the problem was that Dickinson College was absolutely male-centered.
Absolutely. The vast majority of faculty were men. There would be a faculty meeting, and then all the
men would go over to a really lovely little Victorian house owned by the college where they would
smoke, drink, and play cards. My colleague in the department, Tanya, and I decided to go and see what
the after-faculty-meeting gathering was. We went there and all these men were there, again, smoking,
drinking, playing cards. We just stood there and knew we were not welcomed. That was another really
negative thing for me.
Fiksdal: Yeah, it was an actual club, not just an imagined one that I always imagined when I first got to
Evergreen, because everybody was pretty much male back then. I have one comment, and then I’m
going to ask a question. My comment is that I had the opposite reaction to my pregnancy when I found
out I was pregnant in 1976. I went to my dean, and I remember that the provost at the time made a
decision that I would have the entire quarter—three months—off to give birth and then to care for my
child. She happened to arrive right smack on the first day of evaluation week. Back then, students
would just call you up all the time, and so they heard that I had given birth, and then wanted to know if
they were going to get an evaluation. I would just gently say, “I’m not going to answer the phone
anymore” to my husband. And, of course, I got those evals done. Anyway, I had the winter quarter off, if
you can imagine, and then they realized that they couldn’t be doing that all the time—not that we had
that many female faculty—but they did institute another policy and it was much less time off. That was
naivete. They were all men running the college. But still, I liked being thought of as fragile and having
that time. It really helped. I did have a couple of contracts during that time. I didn’t completely stop
teaching.
My question, considering the times and the majority of faculty being male at Dickinson, and
then even at the University of Pittsburgh, were you paid less because you were a woman, or did you
know?
Krafcik: I don’t know to this day.
Fiksdal: Because that was common practice at the time.
Krafcik: It could well have been. I was very grateful that I did land this Dickinson job at the time so I
didn’t really ask any questions. The salary at that time must have seemed reasonably okay. I don’t think
that there was any great increase in my salary. It was probably about the same as at Pitt.

3

Fiksdal: Because at Evergreen at the time—even now, it is a state college, so it had to go by State laws,
which meant that women were paid equally. But at the time, I had a friend at PLU, and she was paid
less. PLU—Pacific Lutheran University—at that time and now is private, so they could do what they
wanted, and that’s why I was wondering.
Krafcik: Interesting.
Fiksdal: Let’s go on and talk about how you found Evergreen then.
Krafcik: Needless to say, I was very unhappy at Dickinson College and started looking for another job,
and seriously pursued the possibility of FBI or CIA. Both of those institutions were interested in me. The
CIA even had me come for an interview to D.C., around which there are a lot of stories to tell, but maybe
not really relevant for this situation.
Fiksdal: Oh, at least a little. Tell us a little.
Krafcik: The situation was that I was suffering from something called mitral valve prolapse. This was
exacerbated by the terrible stress I was under at Dickinson College, with the chair of the department
showing blatant animosity toward me. I found that very difficult to deal with. Dan was a great support
through all of that, but I was having, for instance, issues with hyperventilation and panic attacks. These
are just crazy, so I really have understood when students have come to me and said, “I have panic
attacks.” I say, “Honey, I understand what you mean.” The problem with panic attacks is that you can’t
really control them with your mind very easily. It’s like a chemical process that occurs, and it proceeds
even though you try to control it. It can get out of hand.
Anyway, the CIA was interested in me. Brought me to D.C. for an interview. Dan and I drove
down because Carlisle is close to D.C. Sasha was a very little girl—two, three years old maybe. Now I
chuckle because all of going to and being involved in this CIA interview was already shrouded in some
kind of veil of secrecy. There were other people at the meeting spot. We got on a bus and were taken to
someplace in Rosslyn. We were not supposed to eat any breakfast that day. Maybe they drew some
blood and did some kind of blood tests.
Fiksdal: Oh, my goodness!
Krafcik: Yes, and there was a vision test. Then the stupid thing is that all they had for us to eat were
sweet doughnuts and coffee. That was not good for me. I developed a migraine. But at that time, there
was no Sumatriptan or Imitrex or any good meds for migraines. There was something called Ergotamine
with a disgusting taste to be dissolved under the tongue, but it didn’t help all that much.
Fiksdal: I know all about those medications.

4

Krafcik: I know, I am sure you do. So, I had this migraine, and the process continued that day, and then
they took us for a polygraph test.
Fiksdal: Were you both interviewing?
Krafcik: No.
Fiksdal: So, you were in this group?
Krafcik: Yeah, I was in this large group, and Dan went off with Sasha visiting the D.C. Zoo. They brought
us to this waiting room. We were sitting there, and people were going to be going in for polygraphs, and
they started that process, and at the same time, I started getting palpitations, and I couldn’t make them
stop. Maybe this was partly from the morning coffee (caffeine), lack of a good breakfast, and the stress
that I and everyone there was feeling. There was a woman sitting at a front desk and I went to her, and I
said, “I’m getting palpitations. I don’t think I can continue with this part of the interview. I’ve got to
contact my husband.” She said, “Just wait.”
Then, Susan, they took me back into one of the rooms and they hooked me up to a fricking
polygraph machine to find out, I think, whether I was telling the truth! They discovered that I was
absolutely telling the truth, and said, “Oh, yeah, your heartbeat is really, really weird.” The hilarious
thing now when I think about it, is that they called medics, and so can you imagine? All these folks are
sitting out in this waiting room—lots of them—waiting for polygraph tests, and the medics come into
the back room, and they put me on some kind of a gurney, and they rolled me out. Can you imagine?
What were those folks waiting for their tests thinking at that point?!
Fiksdal: I would have left the room immediately.
Krafcik: At the moment, I suppose, I didn’t have pain, but the problem is that the palpitations just
continued and continued. It was like irregular heartbeat, and it was a bad feeling. As they were rolling
me out, I glanced around, and people looked at me in horror, like, what are they doing to them back
there? Now I see that as extremely amusing.
They took me to a hospital. I was there for a while. A doctor checked me and decided that there
wasn’t really anything wrong. I think eventually I was given Valium, and that really, really helped. Then a
nurse came in and said, “Oh, your sister is here to visit you.” I said, “I don’t have a sister.” Maybe that
was a test, a CIA test. The “sister” was actually somebody from the CIA who came in--a woman along
with a man. I guess I was supposed to know to say, “Yeah, yeah, sure. Let my sister in.”
Fiksdal: They were not going to stop. They were continuing the interview.
Krafcik: I guess something was continuing. Anyway, the bottom line for all of this is that finally I told
them, “I don’t want to continue with this.” Dan came to pick me up. We went back to the hotel. I lay
5

down and was glad that I had taken the Valium which helped me relax; the palpitations stopped. Dan
got me something to eat, some real food. The next day, we went to the Library of Congress. It was very
moving because from that visit I had a moment of epiphany. Have you been to the Library of Congress?
Fiksdal: I never have.
Krafcik: There’s this very large and beautiful reading room. You can go up to a balcony and look down at
the reading room. We went there, and as I stood there, I thought, this is what I love! This is what I love!
The books, the scholarship, the research, the learning… The heck with the CIA. I don’t want that life. I
don’t. That moment was so moving to me, and at that point, I really began to focus on academic jobs. I
had interviews at, among other places, a college called Juniata College which was pretty close to Carlisle
and was, for sure, in the middle of nowhere. The Appalachian chain comes down in rows of mountains,
from the northeast all the way to Georgia, and Juniata College was in one of the deep valleys. Nice
people, lovely people, but it was not a place where we wanted to live.
Lehigh University was interviewing me as well, and they were really, really interested. This is
where it becomes kind of mysterious. I don’t actually know how I found out about Evergreen. It was
something mysterious. When I look back, I imagine in my mind only this: that a flier advertising the job
came wafting down from the sky and landed on my desk. Honestly, Susan, I don’t know how I learned
about Evergreen in faraway Washington state. I had been only to California, and never anywhere else
out beyond the Mississippi except to a little summer music camp at the University of Kansas once in high
school. But the state of Washington? Honestly, I didn’t know anything about this, and it seemed very far
away. But there was something about the description of Evergreen that really sounded intriguing.
I applied. For the application, I really threw my heart into what I had to write. Even the
questions resonated with something deep inside me. To my surprise, Evergreen was interested, so Dan
and I went out for the interview which must have been in January perhaps. We were initially really
struck by the fact that there were crocuses already coming out!
Fiksdal: Our mild winters.
Krafcik: Mild winters. We couldn’t believe that. The interview process was like nothing else I had ever
experienced. What stands out to me from that? First of all, the campus. Surrounded by gorgeous forests.
When I was first taken to campus, somebody picked me up at the hotel. We got out in the parking lot
and I looked around. Which way is the college? I couldn’t tell! Just trees all around.
Fiksdal: Yeah, you can’t see it.

6

Krafcik: That was my first moment. But the people I met felt right to me. I felt that there was a kinship
here. Among other things, I was sent to experience an Evergreen seminar. It was Gail Tremblay’s
seminar.
Fiksdal: Wow.
Krafcik: I had never experienced a seminar like that! I was always very quiet in seminar in college and
even to an extent in graduate school, somehow. I spoke, but I was very quiet. But I came into Gail’s
seminar, and it was some hot, relevant topic. I was so intrigued. I was excited to see students speaking
out, giving their opinions, really engaging the issues. I couldn’t hold back, and so I joined the discussion
with vigor. I remember seeing Gail look at me with surprise—maybe delighted surprise—but I felt, this is
real conversation. This is discussion that is going somewhere. That was one amazing thing. Then,
meeting Tom Rainey, with whom I would teach the Russia Program, from the very start just felt
wonderful. We hit it off so well. We were both interested in the same kinds of things. Then I asked Tom
to take me on one of the trails because I was thrilled that there were actually trails from campus. He
showed me a trail and we walked on it a bit. It was such an extraordinary experience.
Fiksdal: It was two days. Do you remember that? It can be exhausting.
Krafcik: It was a full couple of days. I think Evergreen was really hopping with hires at that time.
Fiksdal: This was 1980 . . .
Krafcik: This was 1989. Early in the spring of 1989. I met others--Chuck Pailthorp, and then the whole
group that interviewed me, which included Russ Fox and Carolyn Dobbs. These were people with whom
I interacted during the group’s interview. I just felt like these people were so different than the faculty
people I had known both at Pitt and at Dickinson College. All this felt so right and so good.
Fiksdal: Did it surprise you that you were being interviewed by people in other disciplines?
Krafcik: Yes, but I knew enough about Evergreen to understand that there was interdisciplinary study
and programs and team teaching and so on. I had had a little bit of experience with team teaching at the
University of Pittsburgh and really liked it.
They asked me good questions, the kind of questions that really were significant to me.
“Outside of Slavic studies, what else are you interested in?” I’m interested in many things, and so had a
hearty response to that question. The interview was so exhilarating. The whole experience was, in fact.
Then I recall that Dan and I drove around Olympia. At one point, we were up on some hill, and
suddenly we saw Mount Rainier, and I screamed. I had never seen anything like that before! There were
just extraordinary moments like that. After those couple of days while Dan and I were driving back to
SeaTac in a rental car, we thought that this experience had been great, but really, our families are in
7

Cleveland and Binghamton, New York. We’ve spent most of our life out East. Can we really make a move
like this? As we were driving away, we both were as if in mourning. This is such a good place. This felt so
wonderful, but we didn’t know that we could make such a big move.
We got back to Carlisle and within a very short time, Lehigh University really pressured me. “We
really like you. We really want you.” What were we going to do? Evergreen or Lehigh? And then a very
peculiar thing happened; this is really weird. This is when you think that the universe must be really a bit
more than what we think. We had to go back to Lehigh to do some kind of additional interview or other.
We got in our car with little daughter Sasha in the back in a car seat, and we were heading out of Carlisle
to make the trip to Allentown and the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania area where Lehigh is located. While we
were still in Carlisle, a car pulled out in front of us and across the back window was the sticker, “The
Evergreen State College.” We just froze! What? Nobody had ever talked about Evergreen in Carlisle,
Pennsylvania. It was like, oh, my goodness, what is this? We looked at each other. Is this the universe
speaking to us—right in our face!
Only later did I find out that one of my faculty colleagues at Dickinson College had a son who
was a student at Evergreen. But I hadn’t known that. And that that car pulled out in front of us with the
big sticker along the back window, it was just too amazing.
Fiksdal: Yeah, faculty know about Evergreen. They send their kids to Evergreen.
Krafcik: I think it was then Barbara Leigh Smith who called me with the offer, and I accepted the
invitation! It was very exciting. When I found out which faculty it was that had a son at Evergreen, they
made it clear to me that their son was artistic and was interested in a lot of things, and they had looked
for a place that was going to be right for him, and it was Evergreen. I was very happy about that. We
then prepared for that move. There was so much extraordinary emotion involved.
Maybe the last thing I can say about this is that we moved from Carlisle to Olympia in June 1989,
and the first thing that summer was that Rudy Martin, of blessed memory, recruited me to participate in
the National Faculty, which was going to have a session on the campus of Evergreen. There were going
to be faculty from different places—teachers—coming to learn and experience Evergreen teaching.
Fiksdal: I did that, too, but I don’t think we were in the same year.
Krafcik: Probably not. This was the summer of 1989. Rudy Martin. What can one say about this
extraordinary person? He was so warm, so welcoming, so loving. I was just blown away. I gave lectures
to the folks and participated joyfully in that session. It was a wonderful way to begin to get involved in
teaching here. The atmosphere was the same kind of atmosphere I recalled from my interview visit-charged with extraordinary energy. And the kinship I felt with the people I was meeting was so strong.
8

Maybe part of it was that I was a child of the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, when things were really changing. I
was really taken with these issues of social justice and equity, equality, all of the various things we talk
about a lot still today. The Vietnam War and all of that was in our life experience—and I think that that
kind of feeling of a shared history was the feeling I got when I came to Evergreen. When we started in
the fall, our common read was Black Athena.
Fiksdal: Oh, I remember that. I think it was right before fall started.
Krafcik: There was a faculty retreat that I went to. I met Martin Bernal who wrote the book. Just the
fact that there was all this focus on this issue, and people were reading this book, and people were
talking about it! I had never seen anything like that at the University of Pittsburgh or Dickinson College.
Nobody talked about these issues. For me it was like the world had opened up.
My first team was a big team: Niels Skov, Richard Alexander, and Argentina Dailey. I was to
contribute with Russian literature, but I had to do some real footwork to fill in some other lectures
beyond Russian lit.
Fiksdal: And they had planned the program.
Krafcik: They had, but they worked me into it well. Argentina, bless her soul, welcomed me so warmly,
saying “Now I have a sister.” Nobody talked like that at Dickinson College or at the University of
Pittsburgh.
Fiksdal: She was in Latin American Studies and Spanish.
Krafcik: She was mainly actually in American Studies and literature and English. But her background was
interesting, her dad was totally Irish. He was, I think, in the Merchant Marine. I really didn’t know
anything more about him except that, and her mother was Honduran, so Argentina was this really
interesting mix of cultures. I was with her, really, through the next few years, taught with her in a Slavic
and Celtic folklore program and witnessed the difficulties that she was having which were heartbreaking
and eventually led to her leaving Evergreen. But that first year was really extraordinary.
Fiksdal: I think now would be a really good time to talk about interdisciplinary teaching, one lesson
maybe that you learned in that program, or more. Then how that helped you in the future. A little bit
about how you found your place, like when did you establish the Russian program? Those two things at
least.

9

Fiksdal: Pat, we just had a little break, and I’m going to ask you a little bit about interdisciplinary
teaching. I wonder what you learned in that first program that might have served you in the future in
planning and teaching at Evergreen.
Krafcik: The first program was Great Books: The Pursuit of Virtue. It was, as I mentioned, along with
Richard Alexander, Niels Skov, and Argentina Daily. This was a formidable team, I must say, that I was
coming into. But also, a team that, I think, was interested in mentoring me, too. I really appreciate that
as I look back.
It was led by Richard. We had a genuine faculty seminar every week, as well as a separate
business meeting. That was a good way for me to start because it kept everything in order for me. I think
that what was so extraordinary to me was the difference between teaching alone, being, in a sense, very
insular—thinking with yourself, speaking with yourself, figuring things out with yourself—and then
hoping everything would go well and that you would be able to give students what they need. Working
with a team all the time was a new experience now at Evergreen, well beyond my small previous onetime experience team teaching at Pitt. This was great! You taught with other people, they gave you
input, you shared with them what you were thinking, you created something with them. In years
subsequent to this, I began to think of this process as designing a feast with faculty partners, where you
think, what are the hors d’oeuvres, the zakuski as we call them in Russian? What is the main course?
What is the dessert? What do we want people to take away from this meal, this feast that we’re going
to have? Already then, I began to understand that that’s what the process was, and that I could
contribute something to that, so I began to see myself in a slightly different way. Rather than this insular
person who was just working on one little course and trying to broaden out, now, I had other faculty
who were interacting with me.
Fiksdal: Did they talk during your lectures? When you lectured, did you all interact?
Krafcik: Yes, I think that they certainly welcomed that, and I welcomed that. Sometimes Richard had a
little bit of an edge to him, which we all came to understand was simply Richard’s personality. But I think
Richard was always kind to me. And Niels was just extraordinary. Such an interesting person with such
an extraordinary history! And then Argentina brought in such passion and warmth and love of learning,
love of students.
Fiksdal: You all brought these different cultures, except for Richard, who was just a very strongly white,
tall, American, arrogant man. He had been on the planning faculty. He was a friend of mine. I would chat
with him in the hall a bit, and I was able to interview him for the Oral History Project just before he died.
But he was a formidable intellect, so I think teaching with him would be challenging.
10

Krafcik: Challenging, but I suppose it also gave me a standard that I needed to keep in mind, so I
listened with interest to his lectures, to Niels’ and Argentina’s lectures. Those gave me models of what
to do; my colleagues gave me time to get adjusted. I had my own seminar and that was a new
experience for me. But it was the beginning of a really wonderful experience that continued throughout
all these decades. There were many interesting situations with students. There were, for instance, some
personality issues. One student, in particular, told me that she simply could not be in Richard’s seminar,
and she begged me to be in mine. I talked with Richard, and he seemed to be fine about her coming to
me. Subsequently, that particular student got her Ph.D., and she just offered some lectures in my
program in spring quarter this past spring.
Fiksdal: That is so great.
Krafcik: Yes, really lovely. Wonderful. I always believed this kind of dictum that the teacher should
always rejoice when the student achieves, and maybe achieves more than the teacher. Then you know
you’ve done well.
Fiksdal: And you listened to her, and you welcomed her into your space, and I think that matters so
much to students. She felt she couldn’t learn in the other seminar, and you clearly helped her on her
way.
Krafcik: That was the beginning for me. That program was fall/winter/spring. It was an entire-year
program, so I had the chance to follow through all three quarters with that. During that year I was
already planning with Tom Rainey the Russia program, which he had initiated with Andrew Hanfman, of
blessed memory, whom I was able to meet not long after he retired. Shortly after he retired, he passed
away.
Fiksdal: Oh, I’m so pleased to know that you knew him!
Krafcik: I had a whole evening with Andrew over dinner, and it was really wonderful to make that
acquaintance.
Tom and I got busy planning the Russia program. We started in ’90-’91, my second year at
Evergreen. This was an extraordinary year because the Soviet Union was falling apart. There was so
much excitement. We had lots of students, including lots of students for language study. Really
interested students! That interest and excitement about Russia lasted my whole time at Evergreen. We
did the Russia program every other year. I think we tried to coordinate that with other language
programs, if you remember, so we would have good language/history/culture programs in alternating
years.
Fiksdal: Yes, you worked hard on that.
11

Krafcik: The Russia program was ’90-’91, then ’92-’93, ’94-’95, and every other year from there. It was
an extraordinary program. Tom is an excellent historian, so bright, so well read. He himself, over the
decade of the ‘90s, developed even further as a scholar and teacher as we worked together. For him,
Russian history was a saga. Teaching wasn’t just giving history lectures. Tom was telling a story, and the
students were just riveted. I also then found it very inviting and wonderful to contribute what I could to
that program in the same spirit. We were always fully enrolled.
Fiksdal: You must have already known Russian history. You had taken plenty of courses.
Krafcik: Oh, yes. My graduate study was in Russian literature. But it was impossible to study the
literature without having a deep understanding of the history. That’s certainly how it works in Russia.
I’m sure it works that way elsewhere.
Fiksdal: Everywhere.
Krafcik: You must also have that historical background. But it was the process—the experience of
listening to Tom, hearing the arguments, paying attention to how a historian was thinking, I learned
even more. I had certainly taken classes in history, even at Indiana University when I was an undergrad.
But now, the history was offered as a saga! I have to say, I never got tired of it, Susan, all of these years,
because things were happening in Russia. The Soviet Union as we knew it fell apart. Russia was
struggling to maintain itself. We were following it, monitoring it. That’s what made that program so
exciting for me, for Tom, and for our students.
Fiksdal: In the years that we’ve been colleagues, you would often say that you felt that those programs
that you taught with Tom and others—with Rob Smurr later—were transformative for the students.
You’ve spoken a little bit about how they were transformative for you. I wonder if you could speak a
little to that.
Krafcik: What we did in those programs, and what I think is a basic Evergreen approach, is that you’re
not telling students what they should know, but you’re inviting them into the discussion. You are taking
them on a journey with you. Every program—I can speak to the Russia program, but this happened
elsewhere, too, in other programs—was a journey. We’d begin somewhere, and we’d ask big questions.
We’re not here just because “I have to know something about Russian history.” But rather, what drives
it, what drove it in the past, what was the fire that made the machine work? Where did it come from?
How did this literature get created? What were the historical arguments?
I think that that’s the kind of thing that we focused on, and that’s what could be transformative.
It was not just information imparted to students, but it was the kind of critical thinking that we must
apply in order to understand ourselves, too, and to understand our own situation. I felt all this strongly
12

through those early years, but I certainly felt it strongly here, trying to help students nurture the
capacity for critical thinking, for reading under the surface. We saw with Trump that there are too many
people who stop at the surface and go no further. Critical thinking is probably one of the most important
things we can develop with students that can transform their lives.
Fiksdal: You’ve touched on a point that I did want to raise. We can go back into your teaching history,
but since we’re here, students have changed quite a lot. In other words, we have been receiving
students from under-resourced high schools, students who were never in college prep classes, not
tracked that way, and they come with sometimes not having even read an entire book in their lives. That
was one of the reasons that I found it so difficult to teach in those last couple of years that I was
teaching, where students said my lectures were too involved, too long, too complicated, not on one
topic but many. That didn’t bother me. I kept teaching the same way, trying to pull them along like I had
always done, but I did, with my colleagues, work very hard on building blocks. I’m wondering about your
perspective on that.
Krafcik: Those are difficult issues, and I think we did notice some things that were different. For one
thing, when we first started in the Russia program, the students who came to us knew what the Soviet
Union was, basically. But 20 years later, no; they really had no clue and no strong history preparation
from high school, so Rob Smurr and I had to readjust our approach a little bit. The issue of students not
being prepared, yes, I think that’s difficult. I suppose there are different ways to look at it. One thing
that struck me is that even though there were students coming to us who were not really prepared
superbly well with skills, nevertheless, I could never talk down to them. What I found was really that
given the right approach—and this might have had to do with the subjects I was teaching, too—they
were really drawn in in ways that inspired them. They perhaps discovered that they could actually think
about things. They inspired themselves!
One of our adjustments might have been that early on we would try to tackle some of the big
Russian novels, but later we started backing off from that. I don’t think that that was necessarily a
lessening of our standards or our desire to go on that journey with our students, but it was more a
recognition. What can we do to readjust somewhat so that we can keep them with us on this journey?
Reading the big novels was increasingly challenging to the students.
Fiksdal: That was the tradition of book-a-week, and we couldn’t continue that.
Krafcik: Yes, that became difficult. And with the Russian novels, as much as we would love to have read
Brothers Karamazov in every iteration of the program, it didn’t work well. Tom and I then tried to read

13

it over two weeks’ time. That was difficult, because it’s so hard to break up a novel. It’s like listening to
part of the symphony one day and then the rest of it later.
Fiksdal: The patterns aren’t there.
Krafcik: Yes, you’ve got to do the whole thing. Given the nature of that, of the big literature, we
switched to smaller forms, but forms that were no less impactful. In some of my lectures, I would refer
to these bigger novels and I would suggest to the students that in the summer they might want to tackle
them, but I never was very thrilled about reading only small sections of books. I just really feel that a
book is like a person. It has a personality, and you can’t break it up without losing something important.
Among other programs, I also taught six times in a program called Madness and Creativity: The
Psychological Link, which Carrie Margolin and I taught together, mainly with an Evergreen faculty as a
third partner, and sometimes with visitors. It was a first-year interdisciplinary program, psychology,
literature, film/or art. In that program, in the different iterations of it, we tried different things. In all my
programs, including Madness and Creativity, I worked very hard on writing with students, and in
Madness I had a writing seminar in which we covered certain points of grammar and structure, etc. I
found that there were different ways to teach writing, and if I just taught it flat out, it was pretty dull.
But I started having some fun with it, and having some fun with the students as a result, and that made
the difference. They were willing to go over sentences with me, some silly sentences, but they were still
learning. In the past, it might not have been necessary to do that.
Fiksdal: Can I ask a little more detail? I tried putting sentences on the board or projecting them from a
projector and going over them. Did you do things like that? What did you do exactly by going over
sentences?
Krafcik: Well, for instance, we would do some analysis using the Academic Statement, taking an entire
short essay and talking about it. We took the few models that Evergreen had available online and we
projected them, and then we took them apart. We tore them apart. That was good because it helped
students understand what they themselves might want to write, and what they might not want to write,
like staying away from cliches, thinking about how an audience would perceive the writing. What picture
or photograph of yourself are you putting forward in the Academic Statement so that others can really
understand who you are? There was some of that work, then. There were some instances where I had
students correcting mistakes on the board, taking turns doing that. Again, I tried to design sentences
that were maybe humorous but still got across certain elements. We would have fun with this. Just hope
that they carried away helpful knowledge and skills.

14

It wasn’t easy for me or, I’m sure, for most Evergreen faculty, to deal with writing skills. I still
think Evergreen really ought to have some kind of introductory writing for students. It doesn’t have to
be quite like English 101 or Writing 101, but just to really be able to focus a little bit without taking away
from the study of subjects in a program. It’s so difficult in programs when you want to work with
students on subjects and topics and substantial material, and at the same time, try to keep a focus on
their writing skills. It can be daunting for faculty.
Fiksdal: Especially it was the humanities faculty that shouldered that burden for so long.
Krafcik: Many of us were never really taught how to teach writing.
Fiksdal: No, no, we weren’t.
Krafcik: That always was an issue.
Fiksdal: That might have freed us, actually.
Krafcik: Yes, indeed, Susan. In the end, when I think back to the evaluations with students and their
impressions of our programs, I think many of them felt that I did a good job with feedback on papers. I
discovered that many students really, really appreciated the feedback. But I just spent hours of time.
Hours of time. And always harbored a concern for being diplomatic. Never mocking students, never
denigrating them. I thought it more productive to say things like, “If you avoid passive voice, your own
strong voice will come through better.” Things like that, really trying to help students the way I felt I was
helped by faculty when they did something more than just putting a letter grade on a paper. I tried very
hard, and I think, in the end, students really got a lot from the work that I put into the task of reading
their papers.
Fiksdal: In those first years when you were teaching Russian language, did you have students who
already knew some Russian language so you could have more than one level of language?
Krafcik: Almost never. There were maybe a couple of students who were native speakers, but what was
interesting about that—which is very typical—is that those students never were very interested in
learning anything about grammar. Of course not, because they were okay about speaking. Why do we
need to study grammar when we can speak already? Indeed, I could understand that.
But, no, Russian was already by that time not taught extensively in junior high or high school,
unlike what I experienced living in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. Students would come in and I would try
my best with language to say, “Yeah, guys, this is a very tough language. Six cases, and all the endings
keep changing. But let’s just do this step by step, and you’re going to be okay. You’re going to come
away with something. “

15

Fiksdal: What about continuing? They did a first year. Did they want to continue? How were you able to
help them?
Krafcik: This was a constant struggle.
Fiksdal: For all of us.
Krafcik: For all of us. There were a few times when we were able to get somebody on board to take a
second-year level. Hirsh Diamant gave it a shot. He gave it a fair shot, and he was entertaining with the
students. Hirsh is a unique, lovely person.
Fiksdal: He is Russian.
Krafcik: Yes. We also had a woman teach with us in the early 1990s, Lisa Hewitt. She was wonderfully
helpful as well, especially because we had lots of language students at that time. Then we brought on
Larry Cothren, who taught a little bit with us and even set up a summer language program largely for
our students in the city of Pskov in Russia which lasted perhaps three years.
Fiksdal: These are adjuncts who taught in the evening.
Krafcik: Yes, these were adjuncts.
Fiksdal: But then, you’re asking students to give up something in their fulltime programs to be able to
do this second year of language.
Krafcik: Actually, the Russia program in its basic form was really 12 credits, and language was another
four.
Fiksdal: I see, so not everyone did language.
Krafcik: That’s right. Some people just took the 12 credits and that was it. But Tom, and then Rob
Smurr, began to offer a segment of four credits that would be open to others not in the program, so
program people who didn’t do language could take that extra seminar and earn 16 credits. Rob Smurr
was especially great with that. He focused on Russia and war, and then Central Asia. Rob also had the
knowledge and the wherewithal to take a group of students in the summer to exotic places such as
Georgia in the Caucasus and the Altai Region in southern Russia.
Fiksdal: That’s something that’s quite different than many of our other language and culture
programs—and now, speaking just to the audience— where we had language as an integral part of our
program in the French program, and I know in the Spanish language program, we actually lectured in the
language.
Krafcik: Yes.
Fiksdal: Then in the spring, we would go to a country so students could really develop their language
skills. But also, we, crucially, could continue to develop our skills and our understanding of the culture.
16

You didn’t have that opportunity. I was wondering what kinds of steps you took to have that
opportunity to go back, or to go to one of these Slavic cultures.
Krafcik: The first issue was the language itself and the difficulty. It took really the full year to cover the
basic grammar, and that was really learning only the very basics. With six cases, you just work slowly.
You see, for every change in a sentence, every time you go to a different case, it’s not just the noun that
changes but the adjective. There’s such complication in those changes that it’s just daunting to students
to put sentences together. The idea always thrilled me that students could start French or Spanish in fall
term and already, maybe by spring, could listen to simple lectures in French or Spanish and could follow
them, and in the second year, you could do that even more. With Russian, that was not possible.
Fiksdal: Andrew actually took a group of students to France in ‘80s because I was gone.
Krafcik: I think that was good. Yes, he could not go to the Soviet Union.
Fiksdal: He could not, but he spoke five languages beautifully.
Krafcik: You know, I started working with Michael Clifthorne and decided that the difficulty of
organizing a program out of Evergreen was just not worth it when there were already well-established,
reliable programs in place. The University of Arizona has great programs for studying in Russia. Then
there is the Council on International Educational Exchange. There’s also the American Council of
Teachers of Russian. These groups had well-established programs, and Michael and I worked together to
get Evergreen hooked up with them in a few consortia. Then we were able to have some of our students
go if they wanted to, and they could get Evergreen credit. That was really a much better kind of thing
than trying to organize our own program.
Fiksdal: So much easier with a difficult language. I’m wondering if you had any students that you know
of that went on and studied Russian in graduate school and/or beyond.
Krafcik: I don’t know of any who finally did that, although I have to say that one of our students who
was really interesting, an interesting young woman—Gretchen Bakke, who was all tattoos, earrings, and
a nose ring—actually went to Russia with us. I think it was during Larry Cothren’s program in Pskov. She
always wore really funky clothes, and I said, “Gretchen, I don’t know how that’s going to fly in Russia.
I’m not really sure.” But she stayed true to herself, even in Russia. And she later went on to Indiana
University for anthropology. Just the other day, she was interviewed on NPR. It was the most wonderful
thing to hear “Professor Bakke” speaking! She’s teaching at the University of Chicago, and was doing a
visiting professorship Humboldt University in Berlin at that moment.
Fiksdal: Amazing! You just happened upon her?

17

Krafcik: Yes, we were listening to NPR, and they said, “We’re going to be interviewing Gretchen Bakke,”
and I thought, Gretchen Bakke. I know that name. Anthropology? Oh, my goodness! I looked her up and
indeed that’s her. I’m going to write to her and just tell her I was so thrilled to hear that. She spoke so
well, so intelligently. She was talking about climate change and how we have to adjust, and how Covid
has made us rethink how we work. We have also had students who have gone on to library and
information studies, and I know that it was important for them that they had studied Russia and some of
them, the language. There may be some that I think Tom knows of who went on in history studies as
well. A few went to teach English in Mongolia, Turkey, Georgia.
But I understand. Trying to find a job in teaching Russian literature is very hard. The additional
thing is that once the Soviet Union fell, there was free travel, and a lot of Russians emigrated. They came
to the States and went on with their educations. They have now become the teachers, especially of
language. That was not true when I was studying.
Fiksdal: I hadn’t even thought of that. You didn’t have native speakers teaching you.
Krafcik: Not very many. I did, though, by the time I went to college. Indiana University had this older
generation of people even from pre-Revolution times who had left after the Bolshevik coup. Some had
come through China—Harbin—and then through Seattle. That generation was already very elderly, but
those were my faculty at Indiana University. After that, there was a lapse, and it was just up to us to get
as good in language as we could, as authentic and genuine a command as we could, and to carry that
load. But it’s changed now. A lot of families came from Russia, and their children, who grew up with
language but were American educated could really go into those fields and do a good job.
Fiksdal: You’ve twice now mentioned to me the demise of the Russian program. Could you talk about
that a little bit?
Krafcik: Rob Smurr passed away just on the eve of the new year 2016. We taught together in the Russia
Program from 2000-2001 and then every other year after that. For about 10 years before his death Rob
struggled with a brain tumor, and finally succumbed to it.
Evergreen was willing to have me teach with visiting faculty for one round of the Russia
Program, which ended up being the final round, and that’s what happened in 2016-17. I would visit Rob
often as he was losing ground, and he was glad to know that the program still went on. We had two
really, really wonderful visiting faculty, one in fall, Jennifer Webster from UW who had just gotten her
PhD. Then in winter and spring, Jipar Duishembieva, who was from Kyrgystan originally, but also had just
received her PhD from UW, taught with me. That year was wonderful. Jipar brought with her an
especially interesting cultural background. She spoke Russian natively, as well as Kyrgyz, which is a
18

Turkic language, and she spoke other Turkic languages, too. She was a great colleague and mentor to
students. Just wonderful all the way around.
During the following academic year, 2017-18, when we would have been planning the next
Russia program, is when everything hit the fan. Trevor Speller brought me together with Kathleen
Eamon and Alice Nelson for a discussion about our language/history/culture programs.
Fiksdal: Not Marianne Bailey?
Krafcik: She may have been invited but she wasn’t there, so it was just the three of us faculty. In
hindsight, I would say that it was almost like he set up some kind of competition. I didn’t like it. I love my
colleagues, and I didn’t ever think of our programs as being in competition with each other.
Fiksdal: They were not in competition ever.
Krafcik: Well, Trevor may not have seen it that way. We all gave good reasons why our programs were
really crucial.
Fiksdal: And longstanding.
Krafcik: Longstanding, but also different because Kathleen, doing German stuff, and Alice doing Spanish
stuff, had the spring quarter in Germany or in various Spanish-speaking places, and the Russia program
did not. But I made it very clear that we were in consortia with other schools, and that that was a way
for students to get language study abroad, and that our program—unlike those others--was very
strongly history oriented. Alice is not a historian, Kathleen is not a historian, but I had trained historians
teaching with me in this interdisciplinary package of the Russia Program.
Some time passed, and Trevor called me back in and he said, “I’m sorry, but I think the Russia
program probably is not going to be allowed to continue.” He showed me a chart: “These are the
programs that we’re going to be able to continue for sure. Then, in this column are three programs we
may continue, but the Russia Program is the third and lowest of these three.” The two programs above
the Russia Program were business programs.
I just couldn’t believe it. I said, “Trevor, the Russia program is one of the most rigorous and
demanding and popular programs at Evergreen. We teach the highest level of history, literature, culture,
language. We’ve sent students to Russia to study language in these consortia programs. This is a great
program. We have excellent enrollment, full enrollment for years.” I remember Scott Coleman telling
me, “Don’t worry. Your program has been full for years. It won’t be cancelled.”
Fiksdal: Yeah, that’s usually the reason to continue it. Besides the fact that it helps balance. You’ve got
history. We need humanities. The language and culture programs have always been an attraction for
students to come to Evergreen.
19

Krafcik: Precisely. That was also the year, 2017-18, of course, when theater was being cut. We were
doing Madness and Creativity that fall and winter, and I remember the students being horrified as we
learned, bit by bit, what was being cancelled. The costume shop was being cleaned out. The theater
program was being shut down. Students started to look for other schools.
Fiksdal: Absolutely.
Krafcik: Then the loss of the Russia program. Trevor summoned me again and informed me, “No, it just
didn’t make it. Those other two programs that were above you, we’re running those, but not the Russia
program.” I was horrified. I wrote e-mails and letters to the deans, and even spoke personally with
George Bridges, clearly explaining what a mistake this was, talking about the value and high quality of
the program, the draw that it had for students. The kinds of students that it drew were some of the best
students at Evergreen in the humanities. And ours was already a nationally known program. I say that
because Rob Smurr and I were asked to write up a description of what we did in this interdisciplinary
program for a newsletter that went out to the thousands of members of the American Association for
the Advancement of Slavic Studies.
Fiksdal: That’s really a coup.
Krafcik: Yes. Colleagues that I met at conferences would say, “It’s just fantastic what you have there.
We can’t do that. We give a program in Soviet history, and we give a program in 18th-century literature,
and we’re all over the map, and students have to somehow put it together. We do literature here and
history here. You bring it all together. What you do at Evergreen is extraordinary.” I tried to really make
that clear.
Fiksdal: Did you try just teaching it yourself? Or that wasn’t even possible?
Krafcik: I think the idea was, oh, if we cancel the program, Pat will do something on her own. And yes, I
did do the best I could. But we were told, “You will never have it again like you did with a historian. We
cannot afford to hire a visiting historian. We can’t afford to bring on a visitor.” Even though Jipar was
willing to travel again from Seattle to do the program with me, we could not hire her. She was a Muslim
on top of all else that she had brought to her teaching with me, and she had a wonderful way of
teaching history and culture from her personal perspective. She would have contributed such value once
again. But the answer was always no.
With regard to subsequent programs on Russian topics, in fall 2018, I taught Flight of the
Firebird: What Ignites Russia’s Imagination in Literature and Culture. I taught it solo, and it was a
wonderful program, although not the full Russia Program by any means. Just one quarter, but with full
enrollment and even a small waitlist.
20

Fiksdal: What a great title.
Krafcik: Then for winter of that year 2018-19, I was welcomed by Brad Proctor and Sean Williams into
their program, and then Drew Buchman and Sean in spring to participate in programs they were
teaching, programs that I was able to contribute to easily.
Then, In fall-winter 2019-20, we did Madness and Creativity again, so I had a good home in that
repeated program. That spring, 2020, I undertook a kind of reiteration of Flight of the Firebird, solo, with
some changes, of course. We always make readjustments in repeated programs. Already for that term
we were teaching remotely via Zoom.
For my last year, from fall 2020 through spring 2021, I taught three programs, and all three were
also focused on Russia. In fall, I offered Stalin: Soviet Russia’s Legacy in Stones, Steel and Blood. Winter
quarter, Russia’s Magnificent Siberia: Shaman, Cossack and Commissar. Then in spring, Search for the
Russian Soul: Slavic Mythology, Folktales, and Magic.
Fiksdal: I wish I had known about these. I would have been there!
Krafcik: We had a few other people join us because these were all remote via Zoom because of Covid.
For instance, Magda Costantino would visit once in a while. I allowed her to come into the Zoom room.
She sat there quietly. But the most beautiful thing about these last programs, besides the fact that they
were all completely enrolled, was that Tom Rainey came in to offer guest lectures in relevant topics in
Russian history. I was able, thanks to David McAvity’s understanding, to get a budget in order to offer
Tom a little honorarium. Tom insisted that he would have joined in even without an honorarium.
Fiksdal: Of course, he would.
Krafcik: He was great. The students absolutely loved him, and it was like doing the Russia program again
with him, in a way.
Fiksdal: I bet. It’s so much easier to have someone like him come in because you had a sense of what he
could do, and you didn’t have to worry, and you could use that material. One year Tom came up to me
and he said, “My program is under-enrolled.” It wasn’t in a time when we were going to be kicked out of
the college. The Legislature wasn’t trying to get rid of Evergreen or anything. He said, “I would like to
come to your program and give lectures on French history.” I just looked at him and I said, “Well, you
are very welcome to come in and give lectures.” He came in. I don’t believe he had notes—perhaps he
did—and he gave lectures. I think I must have been teaching alone. I can’t remember. What year that
was right now, I can’t remember. But it was fabulous. It was fabulous. He was the kind of person, such a
giving person, that Evergreen helped create.
Krafcik: Yes.
21

Fiksdal: We all wanted to help each other out. We gave guest lectures in other programs, so I’m really
glad you talked about that.
Krafcik: It was a most beautiful gesture on his part.
Fiksdal: How old was he at that time?
Krafcik: Eighty-five.
Fiksdal: And still very sharp.
Krafcik: Very sharp. We would talk via Zoom after class. He would say, “You just can’t imagine! This is
giving me new life. I love this. You know, Pat, we both love this, don’t we?” I would answer, “Yes, Tom,
we do. We love it. We love it!” That kind of energy inspired the students, as well. We had—I say “we”
even though these were my solo programs—a full class each of those quarters, which, for me, was a
kind of indication of the importance and value of teaching about Russia. Yet it made me sad to think that
after me there would be nothing remotely like this.
Fiksdal: Yeah, I think it showed the deans the level of interest.
Krafcik: Yeah, there was nothing else like the Russia Program.
Fiksdal: Look at how much literature you were doing, and they loved it.
Krafcik: I feel very bad about the decision to delete the program. I know that there were hard decisions
to make then and are now, but not every hard decision leads to a good decision.
Fiksdal: No, that’s right.
Krafcik: And some are fatal, and I felt, along with my students, that the deletion of the Russia Program
was a fatal mistake. I think somehow, though, that along the way I decided that I can’t hold a grudge.
Trevor was under a lot of pressure to make these decisions.
Fiksdal: He didn’t make them alone. He went to the deans. I was a dean many times, and you talk about
these things, or usually you do. I have no idea, but I’m hoping that he talked with the deans.
Krafcik: I don’t know how much discussion was held. I don’t know with whom. Again, I think there was a
lot of pressure in those years being put on the college to really cut down costs and so on, and this
continues. I understand all of that. However, I think that it was almost like shooting oneself in the foot
to cancel completely a program like the Russia Program.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Krafcik: It was as if we cut this out, then that program, then another program, and students won’t
come.
Fiksdal: That’s right.

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Krafcik: I always felt that that was a mistake. At least in the end, in my last full year—2020-21—I was
thrilled to be able to do three programs focusing on Russian material, and students loved the programs.
We had great discussions, lots of valuable learning.
Fiksdal: It was a good way to end your career.
Krafcik: It was a good way to end. So, I’m scheduled to teach in spring of 2022, coming up now, with
Sean Williams in a program that we’ve done before. That program is called Slavic and Celtic Folklore:
Heroic, Spiritual, Practical. Sean and I really do a great job together. We even had a Fulbright faculty
with us from Slovakia the previous time we did that program. It was really, really wonderful. Really fun.
Fiksdal: I’m surprised and pleased that they were able to give you a post-retirement contract because I
thought those were gone.
Krafcik: They aren’t gone, at least for now, so I think I’ll be happy to do that. I’m trying to look at it as
two quarters of sabbatical and then a quarter of teaching again. If I were to continue that, which I could
for the following four years, one program each year, I will just do something Russian, Slavic. Folklore
seems to be something that students really like, as well.
Fiksdal: And it brings you back to your Robin Hood years.
Krafcik: It certainly does, and there’s a lot of richness in that.
Fiksdal: Yes.
Krafcik: You can bring in literature, you can bring in psychology, as I did in spring quarter of this year
with Search for the Russian Soul. We looked at mythology, we read folk tales, we looked at magic, but
also, we had a strong study of archetypes and Jungian archetypes, so the students got a good idea of
who Jung was, and what archetypes are.
Fiksdal: And I wonder if anybody’s teaching Jungian archetypes anymore, actually, now that you
mention that.
Krafcik: I don’t know.
Fiksdal: It’s been years since I’ve heard of someone doing that. Good for you.
Krafcik: Yes, it was good. And I was able to have Heather, that student from my first year in Richard
Alexander’s program. Heather is the one who could not be in his seminar and came to my seminar. It
was she who offered three class sessions for my students in my last program, talking about archetypes
and searching for our own archetypes. It was wonderful to have her join us for these sessions.
Fiksdal: I just think that’s such a fitting conclusion, too, to your last program to have a student from
your very first program come back. That must have seemed like a very flourishing flourish.
Krafcik: It was.
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Fiksdal: I like that so much. Let’s pause.
Fiksdal: After a pause, we’re still on September 9, 2021. I wanted to ask you now a little bit about other
faculty members that you worked with, or you came in contact with that particularly struck as amazing
in one way or another.
Krafcik: This is a difficult question because really, from all the names that I’m looking at now, all the
faculty with whom I’ve taught, all of them gave me something. All of them were interesting people in
their own ways. Some eccentric in some ways, beautifully eccentric. Others just on their own journeys
but sharing with us. Many of them aren’t at Evergreen anymore. I’m thinking, for instance, of people like
Michael Pfeifer and Babacar M’Baye.
Fiksdal: I remember them.
Krafcik: In 2003-04, I taught a full-year program—three quarters—with those two guys called The Folk:
Power of an Image. It was so fascinating. Michael was this kind of very nice, lovely, proper white guy.
Fiksdal: He was an American historian.
Krafcik: Yes. And Babacar was from Senegal and brought a whole different world with him. He was so
lovely, and the two of them got along so well. I loved working with them. They were both so kind and
respectful. From people like Babacar, I really was able to understand something from a very different
point of view about life.
Then there were people like Lance Laird, who, also like Michael Pfeifer, didn’t stay at Evergreen
very long. But Lance was strongly interested in Islam, and he had us go on a fieldtrip to Seattle to the
Islamic Center. This was in 1999-2000, a long time ago. That was an amazing experience. We spent the
day at this Islamic Center. They had a school there. All of us women had to be scarved for the whole day,
so we had that experience. We shared food with them. People like Lance really wanted to give us an
experience from another point of view, and that stood out to me.
Then I think about other faculty, such as Richard, or Niels, or even Tom Rainey—all of those guys
who considered themselves the dinosaurs. I realized only later that, oh, I’ve also, I guess, become a kind
of dinosaur. But they were special dinosaurs. They had a table down somewhere in the CAB where they
would meet for lunch, and it was the dinosaur table. David Marr was part of that group as well. I taught
with him and Tom in a program in ’95-’96 called Literature, Values and Social Change. David was such an
interesting lecturer because he would just linger on different ideas. He would have students wrap
themselves around an idea for quite a while. It was a different kind approach than even than Tom’s,
where there were historical arguments in this saga of history.
24

Then there was Art Mulka. Such a kind person, and a person who really had a very rich life
outside of Evergreen. He was very wedded to his Polish identity, and we taught two programs on
Eastern Europe together. I was a witness to Art’s passing, a long passing from cancer. He was in hospice
toward the end of his life, and I visited him and his wife more than once.
What a spectrum of types of people and experiences. From all of them, though, I learned
something. I cannot think of one with whom I had a negative relationship ever. These were people who
loved what they were doing.
I taught a program with LLyn De Danaan, as well, who was already an emerita faculty. We did a
program in fall and winter of 2007-08, which we entitled Gypsy Road: A Study of the Roma. LLyn, as an
anthropologist, with a deep, deep interest in Romany culture, was so amazing to teach with, just the
way she thought, the way she could find sources that gave the students such insight.
Really, all of these people I remember with great fondness. Or the people who came to help us
when we needed help. For instance, when Rob Smurr was not able to teach well anymore, I remember
his attempt to give a lecture, and it failed miserably, and he and his wife, Becky, realized, in tears
afterwards, that he had to let go. And then, Rob Cole, who I think was already retired at that point, came
in to help. This was in spring of 2016. While Rob Smurr was in the process of letting go of his life, Rob
Cole came in and taught with me. It was a program on Stalin again. I did a lot of it, and Tom Rainey also
joined us with some lectures. But Rob Cole actually took a seminar, reading the material, seminaring
with students, helping to write evals. He and Tom helped rescue the program.
Fiksdal: And it was brand-new material for him, I’m sure.
Krafcik: A lot of it was, although Rob Cole was very much involved in things Russian, so quite
knowledgeable. Did you know that?
Fiksdal: No, I don’t.
Krafcik: Oh, yes. He and Jean MacGregor have been going to—
Fiksdal: Oh, to Lake Baikal, of course.
Krafcik: Yes, to Baikal, so he was interested in the Stalin program and was able to contribute something
from his own experience.
And teaching with Sean Williams is just a dream. Absolutely. How kind of Sean and Brad Proctor
to welcome me into their program in 2018-2019 winter, which would have been a Russia program year.
They welcomed me into their program Not a Melting Pot: American Identities, Migrations and Places.
Or Drew Buchman and Sean, who welcomed me into their spring program, Projects in World Musical

25

Theater. I’m repeating here what I said before, but it’s just to underline how strongly I feel about these
folks.
Fiksdal: Did you ask to be invited, or did the deans direct you? How did you find all these programs and
these people?
Krafcik: I think I had taught with Sean for the second time, Slavic and Celtic Folklore, in spring of 2018,
at which time we already knew that the Russia program would not run for the full next year and that I
would need to find something else. I was okay with fall, because I said, “I’ll do Flight of the Firebird, but
I’m not sure about winter and spring.” And Sean said, “Why don’t you join us?” Brad, who’s absolutely a
wonderful, great person, also welcomed me, and we found a way to work my input into that program,
which I think was very good.
Likewise, in spring, with Drew Buchman and Sean, in the program Projects in World Musical
Theater. They had plenty of Broadway, but nothing on Russian musical theater, Soviet musical theater,
and I added that. It was a good and valuable contribution to the topic.
Fiksdal: I’m glad it exists. I didn’t know anything about Russian musicals either.
Krafcik: During the ‘30s, when Stalin was beginning his purges, and the camps were filling up—the
Gulag was well established by then—with inmates, things were terrible, horrible. These musicals were
full of joy. Imagine!
Fiksdal: Terrible conditions. And they would create musicals.
Krafcik: The musicals were Jolly Fellows and Volga! Volga! They were joyous expressions of the
wonderful life in Russia, in the Soviet Union, standing in stark contrast to the actual reality. I was able to
talk to that issue.
Fiksdal: Such irony.
Krafcik: I think, in the end, that mine was a really good contribution to the musicals program. But it’s
the kindness of those faculty, the willingness to be flexible, that was so wonderful, and I really
appreciated that.
Fiksdal: That’s great, Pat. Now let’s turn away from teaching for a moment to governance. I know that
you contributed quite a bit, and I remember with great fondness in my heart how you helped me
establish a Language Lab at Evergreen. We worked hard on that. It was over years. We just had all these
ideas and ways of doing things that were difficult and hard, and we didn’t have any money. Then we
finally had some ideas, and you and I sat down, and we actually got a place, and we established it, and
we fought for that place. It was a great experience. We did it. I don’t know whether it’s still there in a
little corner of the library, but hopefully.
26

Krafcik: It is, I think. Yes, I was always a pretty good attendee and participant in Culture Text and
Language (CTL) work which has evolved further now. But I think it took me a few years to warm up to
that. It was daunting at first. CTL was rather large and had all these guys, like Chuck and Kirk and others,
who just would spend a lot of time talking to each other about how to define culture. This was an
important issue, but after a while I felt somewhat impatient with dragging the conversation on and on
when other issues were also important.
Fiksdal: That’s probably when we were trying to determine the new name of our cohort.
Krafcik: Yes, yes!
Fiksdal: I couldn’t believe that those men came up with “culture first” text and language. We were
thrilled at the time, but, yeah, we didn’t get to talk too much.
Krafcik: It was a little daunting. But then, in time, I felt more confident, and I think the nature of the
membership changed a little bit. CTL was always pretty important, and it was a good place for support
and for exchanging ideas, and just helping each other, and also talking about the curriculum. I really felt
very much all those years that I really loved teaching. I loved working with students. I was not drawn
very much at all to administrative work. I know that some faculty are, and that’s great. Thank goodness.
But I was always willing to be on, say, Hiring DTFs, and then I found that Admissions really needed
faculty support. They always struggled to get faculty to do these Fridays at Evergreen, not to speak of
spending almost a whole Saturday at Preview Day. But those events were extremely important.
Those events gave students their first impression of Evergreen faculty, and I felt that that was something
I could do, so I worked for years with them doing those Fridays, and then the Preview Days, talking
about my programs, trying to help people understand what an interdisciplinary program was—what it
looked like, what kinds of things we were doing. I tried to infect them with enthusiasm and curiosity
about Evergreen. That’s really where I put a lot of my time with regard to governance.
Fiksdal: What about any research that you might have done along the way?
Krafcik: During all those years, I continued to do some work on brigand heroes in the Carpathians. Also,
every single year I participated in a professional Slavic conference that was held in different cities. It was
the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, then changed its name to the
Association of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies. This is an enormous professional organization
of historians, political scientists, sociologists, even linguists and literature people. There’s a folklore
section as well. Huge convention every year.
From my graduate days on, I was very much involved in Carpatho-Rusyn studies. This is my
mom’s background, in the Carpathian range of Eastern Europe—southeastern Poland, northeastern
27

Slovakia, western Ukraine, flowing a bit into Romania and Hungary. I did tremendous work in that
subject area. I was the editor of a newsletter from 1978 through 1998, for 20 years. I worked on that
with a professor at the University of Toronto who is a historian, holder of the Ukrainian Chair at the
university, and also of Carpatho-Rusyn background and very much involved in Carpatho-Rusyn studies-the world expert, really. From 1978, when I was just finishing graduate school, over all those years to
now, that has been an enormous side preoccupation for me. In conjunction with that, over the past 15
years, that professor and I initiated a program at Prešov University in eastern Slovakia, a summer
program, a three-week intensive study of Carpatho-Rusyn language and culture, for which I prepared
and gave lectures. I researched, wrote up lectures, produced PowerPoints. With Covid, in the past two
years we have not been able to do it, but maybe it will resume now in 2022. I have also given
professional presentations, many of them connected with the brigand hero, but also with folktales, and
with Carpatho-Rusyn culture. For instance, I did a presentation on memoirs of Carpatho-Rusyn
immigrants. Some of my presentations were published.
What I also did, with regard to Slovakia, was to get a Fulbright Senior Specialist grant that I
mentioned previously, which permitted me to go three times to Slovakia for about six weeks each time,
in which I worked with faculty at Comenius University in Bratislava in the Department of Cultural
Anthropology and Museology. I did lectures for students.
Fiksdal: In Slovakian?
Krafcik: No, in English. It really helped enormously that I could handle Slovak, though. But what they
wanted, were lectures in English. And I accompanied them on some fieldwork in a Carpatho-Rusyn
village. It was just wonderful, a wonderful experience over the course of three years. That’s where a lot
of my focus has been, not necessarily directly connected with Evergreen, but, as always, the experiences
garnered abroad fed into my teaching. I was able to share with students so much that I had experienced
that helped to enhance the material I was presenting. You know that as well.
Fiksdal: Yes, absolutely.
Krafcik: Without that kind of experience, it’s just not quite as rich.
Fiksdal: You have to tell your own stories about your experiences. Now that you’ve retired, it sounds
like this research will continue on and your love and practice and performance of the violin will go on. It
sounds like you’re going to be quite busy.
Krafcik: Yes.
Fiksdal: Perhaps you’re looking forward a little bit to this time.

28

Krafcik: The additional factor with Covid is that my daughter and son-in-law and two little grandsons
fled to us from Alexandria, Virginia, and lived in our house for some months. They’re going through their
own life struggles. That has been a great preoccupation for me, a very challenging one, I must say.
Also, in the past five years, I started playing in an orchestra that developed only about five years
ago out of SPSCC, an orchestra that is made up of musicians in the Olympia area. Many of them are
professional musicians. Many, like me, are really good, but we didn’t do music professionally. Also, there
are a few Evergreen and SPSCC students in the orchestra, too, which is lovely. This orchestra was just a
godsend absolutely, because there are so many of us here who wanted to do music, but there was no
way to do it. We’ve had a Covid break now, but we are resuming in the fall. Also, a year ago, I started
playing with the Olympia Chamber Orchestra, which is a smaller group playing very difficult music. Right
now, I’m learning some new music, which is very challenging. I have to work very hard. But it’s good for
our brains to have to work hard, so I’m thankful for that.
Also, I do want to work seriously on the Carpathian brigand tradition. There’s nothing in English
on this subject at all, and it’s extremely interesting, and Sean Williams is breathing down my neck to
write this book.
Fiksdal: She is so good at that. I’ve been to her seminar, and it helped me write my book. I do think
she’s a good person to be in contact with, and to have at your back.
Krafcik: She’s wonderful for that, and for many other reasons. Great friend. I think that’s what I will be
doing, Susan, now in retirement, and teaching with Sean in spring 2022 Slavic and Celtic Folklore, and
then perhaps, if I still have the energy and interest to do it, I will do some more teaching. I’m in contact
with Stacey Davis, asking her, what does she think, within the context of CTL offerings, would something
on Russia be a good idea? I’ll just be flexible with that.
Fiksdal: Sounds great, Pat. Thank you so much for your interview. I really appreciate your time, and I’ve
learned a lot about you that I didn’t know, surprisingly. I thought I knew you well. Thanks so much.

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Item sets

The Evergreen State College Faculty and Staff Oral History Project

Media

KrafcikPat_20210907_Transcript_pt1.pdf

KrafcikPat_20210909_Transcript_pt2.pdf