In July 1910, a teenager named Myron Surmach left his village in Ukraine, boarded the ship Atlanta with a third-class ticket and headed across the ocean to an improbably big city called New York. For 21 days, Mr. Surmach sucked on a lemon to stave off seasickness until he reached Ellis Island. There, he told an interviewer decades later, he was shocked to find an American guard welcoming him to the United States in perfect Ukrainian.

Mr. Surmach began his new life in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., but within a few years, he made it back to New York. Eager to preserve his native culture, he opened a small shop on Avenue A in Manhattan where he sold records, books, clothes and other trinkets from the old country to other Ukrainian immigrants. He named the store Surma — after an old woodwindlike instrument — and for 98 years it has operated at various addresses in the East Village, settling in 1943 at 11 East Seventh Street.

The family business has outlived Myron, and his son, Myron Jr. It has outlived Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, who bought embroidered blouses there during the folk revival of the 1960s, when the peasant look was all the rage. But recently, patrons learned that Surma has only a few days left, when Mr. Surmach’s grandson Markian announced that he would close the shop this month.