Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal
Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal Mapping the Field Author: Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern Source: Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal 1 (2014): 135–157 Published by: National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy http://kmhj.ukma.edu.ua Mapping the Field Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern Northwestern University, Department of History Abstract Drawing from the new trends in the inter-ethnic and cross-cultural studies, this paper points to several major lacunae in the research of Jewish Ukrainian relations and in the contextual religious, economic, and multilingual literary history of Jews on the Ukrainian lands, the study of which the author considers the major scholarly desiderata. Unlike most of the historiographical studies of Ukrainian Jewish relations published so far, this essay suggests heretofore underexplored or neglected themes, sub-fields, documentary collections, and methodologies, thus, “mapping the field” for the next generation of young scholars and researchers interested in exploring Ukrainian multi- cultural legacy. Key Words: Ukraine, Jews, historiography, inter-ethnic and cross-cultural studies, research program. In his memoirs, written in Ukraine and published in Canada, Danylo Shumuk relates an episode of his stormy career. In the 1930s, Shumuk spent several years in a Polish prison for his communist sympathies and, in 1942, he escaped from a Nazi POW camp somewhere near Kharkiv. He decided to walk from Kharkiv district to his native village in Volhynia and join the Ukrainian underground resistance there. On his journey across Ukraine, Shumuk met a Jewish girl, Fania, from Warsaw, who was also walking to Volhynia seeking to find her relatives there. Shumuk was not a great admirer of the Jews.
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