"Where's your family from?" In the case of Natan Prinz and many Jews from the area where he was born, the response can get a little convoluted.
The geographic diversity of Galicia was reflected in its population. According to Paul Magocsi's A History of Ukraine, around the time Grandpa was born, the national composition of Galicia broke down as follows: 45% Poles, 43% Ukrainians, 11% Jews and 1% Germans.
Galicia, however, is not a "country". According to the passenger manifest of the Celtic, the ship on which Grandpa sailed to New York in 1921 (more on that below), he was born in the village of Nowe Selo ("New Village") in ... Poland. Poland?
In 1906, the year Grandpa was born, Galicia was part of an Austria-Hungary well into its twilight years. At that time, Poland was still stripped of its sovereignty, wiped from the map in the Third Partition of 1795, its territory divided among Russia, Prussia and Austria. The village of Nowe Selo, as well as the village of Zhuravno, where Grandpa lived at the time he emigrated, were located in the Stryj region of eastern Galicia. Click here for pictures of some historic structures in present-day Zhuravno; below are some period postcards (on the left, the ratusz, or town hall; on the right, the landing -- presumably on the bank of the Dniester -- of the Liga Morska i Kolonjalna (Maritime and Colonial League), the post-1930 name of the main organization of the interwar Polish colonial movement):
And here is the long-gone synagogue that once stood in Zhuravno:
The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed and was broken up in the wake of the first World War (1914-18). Below is a satirical "obituary", published in Kraków in late 1918:
By 1921, the year of Grandpa's transatlantic voyage, Galicia had been awarded to a reconstituted independent Poland, as the Celtic's passenger manifest indicates. As a result, it listed his country of birth as "Poland"; the family would have been carrying Polish passports.
Galicia did not, however, remain "Polish" for very long. As a result of secret protocols in the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop "Non-Aggression" Pact, Poland disappeared again. Eastern Galicia -- including the Stryj region -- was absorbed into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, i.e. the Soviet Union. In 1991, Ukraine became an independent country for the first time in its history.
Today, Nowe Selo (pop. 420) and Zhuravno (pop. 3,655) are both located in the Zydavic raion (region) of the L'viv oblast (district) of the Republic of Ukraine. (Note that zyd (жид) is the word for "Jew" in Ukrainian -- thus the nomenclature still reflects an element of the historic ethnic composition of the area. The Polish word for "Jew" is also zyd, but in Russian, zhid (жид) is the pejorative term, akin to "yid": the neutral word is evrei (еврей) in Russian (єврей in Ukrainian).)
Returning to the original question: from a modern, geographical standpoint, Grandpa is from Ukraine. This does not mean he was "Ukrainian" (or "Polish" for that matter), since even today Jews in those countries are still viewed as having a separate, somehow inorganic "nationality" apart from the Christian majorities. I was reminded of this recently at a Russian concert I attended at Lincoln Center with an American friend from my Moscow days, and an (Orthodox) Ukrainian couple my friend knows from work. At the intermission, my friend observed that she and I seemed to be the only non-Russians there. Her Ukrainian colleague immediately countered, "These people are not Russians -- they're Jews!" (Many of the attendees were in fact Jewish, since many former Soviet citizens who immigrated to the New York area in the 1970s-80s were Jews.) I was nevertheless stunned by the vehemence of the remark, but alas, not surprised at its substance. I decided to play dumb: "What would you call them, then?" I asked. "Russian-speakers", came the indignant reply, along with the following 'analogy': "Just because someone from Haiti speaks French, does not make them French." I'd heard enough and excused myself to make a phone call -- arguing would have been useless, even if I was tempted to point out that by this logic, Russians would not view this Ukrainian couple as "Russian", either: there's a strain of contempt in that relationship, as well.
But back to Grandpa. To say that he was "Austrian", as he often did, is also not really accurate. Austria-Hungary was an intricate hodgepodge of nationalities, ethnicities and religions. The Germanic overlay imposed to help keep the fractious pieces of empire together would have seemed alien to many Galician Jews, who in any case mainly spoke Yiddish and, in the villages, lived, learned, ate and worshipped apart from the Christian peasantry.
Moreover, "Austrian" today connotes a specific culture centered around Vienna and Salzburg, which has (and had) nothing in common with the lives of poor Jews in rural Galicia. In America, it's easy to see why it appealed to Jewish immigrants from the former Hapsburg lands to cast their origins as Austrian, as it implied a provenance more refined and cultured than the crowded, muddy shtetls of Poland, Ukraine or Russia.
My answer? Grandpa was born in what is now Ukraine, a Jewish Galitzianer and a citizen of Poland, who came to this country and built a life for himself, and soon his family, in New York.
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