The Kalmyk Odyssey.

After an odyssey of more than three centuries a group of Mongolian Buddhists has come to Philadelphia and nearby New Jersey to settle. Their name for themselves is mana khalyamik emtn, “our Kalmyk people,” but they have accepted the westernized versions, Kalmyk, Kalmuk, or Kalmuck. The forebears of the Kalmyks came from the pasturelands of Jungaria, between the Altai and the Tien Shan ranges in western Inner Asia. Their early history was interwoven with that of other Mongol horse-riding peoples who lived in round felt Yurts, herded sheep, cattle, goats, horses, and Bactrian camels, reckoned their genealogies through males, owed fealty to members of a militant caste of nobles, and practiced Buddhism of Tibet. The ancestors of the Kalmyks were known as Oirat of Dorben Oirat, “The Four Oirat.” They were Western Mongols, who arose as a confederacy after the fall of the Mongol Empire in the fourteenth century, to contest dominion over Inland Asia with the principal powers in the area–the Eastern Mongols, who were led by Genghis Khan’s descendants, and the Chinese of the Ming and succeeding Manchu Empires. The Western Mongols sought for themselves the imperial glory that had once belonged to the house of Genghis. The Oirat, together with the East Mongols, accepted Tibetan Buddhism in the sixteenth century. Their descendants ever since have devoutly adhered to this faith. The Kalmyks of eastern Europe and the Soviet Kalmyk emigres came together in the Western Zone of Germany at the war’s end. For several bleak years they languished in Displaced Persons’ camps near Munich, while their spokesmen, working through the Tolstoy Foundation, Church World Service, and the Society of Friends, sought a place for them to settle. Their Mongolian background was against them, for it conjured up prejudicial stereotypes about Mongols in particular and Orientals in general. In 1951, however, the United States Attorney General’s office was prevailed upon to admit them. The stated reason for the action was the linguistic view that the Mongolian is a Ural-Altaic language, related to such western languages as Finnish and Magyar, and the historical fact that the Kalmyks had inhabited European Russia for three hundred years. Most of the present American group arrived between December, 1951 and April, 1952. Today the immigrants and their American-born children number around seven hundred. (The Kalmyks remaining in Europe number about five hundred eighty in France, one hundred fifty in Germany, and twenty-five to thirty in Belgium.)

Kalmyk settlement in Pennsylvania and New Jersey conforms approximately to the historical division between the Don and Astrakhan Kalymyks. Members of the Don group tend to live in north-central Philadelphia. They are to be found in scattered single families or small clusters of households. About fifty-five miles away in semi-rural Freewood Acres, on U.S. Route 9, New Jersey, live most of the Astrakhan Kalmyks. There are also a small Don Kalmyk colony in Freewood Acres and several lesser groups in nearby New Jersey communities.
Having participated in a variety of non-Kalmyk cultures–in Tsarist, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Soviet varieties of the Slavic tradition, in German or French and now American culture–how have the Kalmyks managed to remain Kalmyk? They seem to have succeeded in not becoming assimilated by settling themselves apart in certain ways some of the time, while at other times they have flexibly, enterprisingly, and receptively kept open their channels of communication with the non-Kalmyk world.

Видео The Kalmyk Odyssey. канала Ulan Zalata Production's