A Grandson Returns To Retrieve His Legacy

It was the sign above the store that made me stop short, one perfect spring day, during a stroll down East Seventh Street: Surma Books & Music. The goods for sale were ceramic eggs, embroidered blouses, religious icons. A few shelves of books and cassette tapes, mostly in Ukrainian.
The sight of it all woke the memory of another sign, another road, another May, 26 years ago.“Apiarist,” said the sign on that street, in Saddle River, N.J.The beekeeper was 91 years old, lord and servant to 700,000 bees. They darted into a tangle of raspberry vines. Their wooden hives were set in the yard. The old man worked barehanded; he said the stings prevented rheumatism. He was spry as a fawn.And his voice, on that spring afternoon in 1983, was fragrant with Ukraine that he left in 1910. After digging coal near Scranton, Pa., he moved to a pocket of the Lower East Side of Manhattan known as Little Ukraine. He opened a shop and stocked it with books and newspapers and things from the old country. Then he kept bees in northern New Jersey.Schoolchildren — not a wandering reporter — were his steady visitors. A class of fifth graders sat on tree stumps, in the shade of a pine grove, and absorbed lore of the bee: the needless terror of the stings, and the flowers the bees pollinate, their combs thick with honey.But, the kids wanted to know, wasn’t he scared? “A beekeeper likes to be with the bees,” he said. “When he hears them buzzing around, he thinks it’s a symphony.”Nearly three decades later, in the shop on Seventh Street, I mention the old beekeeper, Myron Surmach. The man behind the counter nods.“My grandfather,” he says. “He started this store in 1918.”The grandson is Markian Surmach, 47, and he is almost as surprised to be standing in the shop, a few doors east of Third Avenue, as I am to encounter another Surmach in 2009.“I was away for a long time,” he said. “Most of my generation of Ukrainians moved away and assimilated.”When Myron Surmach moved from shopkeeping to beekeeping in the 1950s, he turned the store over to his son, Myron Jr., who had a fine run as impresario of Ukrainian dances and parties and outfitting the flower children of the 1960s. Peasant blouses were in demand. Janis Joplin and Joan Baez and members of the Mamas and the Papas shopped in Surma Books & Music.The grandson, Markian Surmach, whose first language was Ukrainian, lived above the store until he was 6. He left Little Ukraine and New York behind in 1991. “You want to define yourself, apart from the mold,” he said. “I chose to run away.” He started a Web-development business in Denver.Surmach the beekeeper and store founder died in 1991, not quite 99 years old. His son died in 2003, at age 71. Markian has a sister, who was busy raising her children.“If I didn’t come back, the store was going to close,” he said.No place stays the same for 15 years, certainly not in Manhattan. With a few exceptions, Ukrainians have long since drained from the Lower East Side. So have the artists living cheaply. “The homogenization of city life is not unique to New York, or this country,” Mr. Surmach said. “It’s all over the world.”People return to the store around Christmas and Easter, and also after attending services at St. George Ukrainian Church, he says. The older people will glance through the Ukrainian newspapers; younger ones will pick over the crafts, the painted eggs and greetings illustrated with folk scenes by a Surmach aunt.He wrestles with the future. “I started a business of my own with a clean white slate,” he said. “Here, the book is fully written. I’m just trying to write in the margins. I haven’t given up yet. I’m trying to find meaning.”Perhaps, he says, he will bring fresh life to the shop with music. He is offered another memory of his grandfather from 1983: for the visiting schoolchildren, the beekeeper played the bandura, a 55-string lute.“For an old man, this is like family,” Myron Surmach had told the kids. “Everyone, when they get old and lonely, should have a bandura. It is like family because it has all the voices.” He plucked a high note. “These are the children.” Then a richer one: “These are the ladies.”Hearing of this nearly three decades later, the grandson smiled and pointed to a bandura, hanging on the wall. He stood below an old sign, “Honey Sold Here.” The old bee farm is gone, but Surma Books & Music still stocks honey, fields of clover, tangles of raspberry, remembered in a jar.