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the anti-imperial choice This page intentionally left blank The Anti-Imperial Choice The Making of the Ukrainian Jew Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern Yale University Press new haven & london Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. Copyright © 2009 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and ex- cept by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Ehrhardt type by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Petrovskii-Shtern, Iokhanan. The anti-imperial choice : the making of the Ukrainian Jew / Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-13731-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Jewish literature—Ukraine— History and criticism. 2. Jews in literature. 3. Ukraine—In literature. 4. Jewish authors—Ukraine. 5. Jews— Ukraine—History— 19th century. 6. Ukraine—Ethnic relations. I. Title. PG2988.J4P48 2009 947.7Ј004924—dc22 2008035520 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). It contains 30 percent postconsumer waste (PCW) and is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). 10987654321 To my wife, Oxana Hanna Petrovsky This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments ix Politics of Names and Places: A Note on Transliteration xiii List of Abbreviations xv Introduction 1 chapter 1. A Prayer for Ukraine: The Improbable Identity of Hryts’ko Kernerenko 24 chapter 2. Between Two Fires: The National-Communist Utopia of Ivan Kulyk 62 chapter 3. Writing the Body: The Passion and Freedom of Raisa Troianker 111 chapter 4. Being for the Victims: Leonid Pervomais’kyi’s Ethical Responses to Violence 165 chapter 5. A Messiah from Czernowitz: The Language and Faith of Moisei Fishbein 228 Epilogue 275 Notes 281 Selected Bibliography 323 Index 337 Illustrations follow p. 164 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments n 2003, my colleague Mikhail Krutikov, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, commissioned me to write an essay for East European Jewish Affairs on some aspect of Jewish-Slavic cultural interaction. Polish- and IRussian-Jewish aspects had already been covered, and I was left with Ukraine. I decided to write on Moisei Fishbein, a Ukrainian poet of Jewish de- scent whose verse I had long admired. Writing about Fishbein puzzled me. Not only did he pen his verse in exuberant Ukrainian, but he also construed his im- ages and metaphors by combining elements of Jewish religious and Ukrainian literary tradition. His quest for a Ukrainian-Jewish synthesis made me suggest that Fishbein was re-creating a certain preexisting, although latent, paradigm. Perhaps, I thought, it had long shaped Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement yet pundits of East European culture had overlooked it. If Fishbein embodies the momentum of an encounter between the two cultures, who then preceded him? And if he was preceded by others, why do we know next to nothing about them? The research took several years of intensive archival work, interviews, and conversations, and also involved a search for private archives, which I was told had vanished or had been destroyed. During that time Stepan Zakharkin, Yaryna Tsymbal, and Mykola Klymchuk from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv, provided an infallible, timely, and invaluable help. Multiple con- versations with Ihor Kachurovs’kyi from Munich and Oksana Chykalenko from New York, witnesses of the Ukrainian renaissance of the late 1920s and early 1930s, helped me delve into the Ukrainian cultural atmosphere of that period. My parents, Myron and Svitlana Petrovs’kyi, helped obtain copies of rare photo and documentary material from the most inaccessible archives. John Bushnell, ix x Acknowledgments George Grabowicz, Mikhail Krutikov, Oleh Ilnytzkyj, Glenn Dynner, Meghann Pytka, Myroslav Shkandrij, and the late John Klier read either parts or all of the manuscript and made comments that allowed me to hone my argument. Four re- viewers—two selected by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and two by Yale University Press—have read the entire manuscript; I am indebted to them for their suggestions, corrections, and “big” questions they wanted me to think about while reworking the manuscript for the press. My most sincere gratitude to Jonathan Brent, whose enthusiasm about the manuscript made possible its publication as a book. I am indebted to the editors of Yale University Press, first and foremost Annelise Finegan and Jack Borrebach, for their patience and dili- gence in dealing with the manuscript, and to Eliza Childs, Yale University Press copy editor, for her amazing sense of logic, style, and consistency. My special thanks to Victoria Zahrobsky of the Northwestern University In- terlibrary Loan Department, to Kalyna Drahomyrets’ka of the Chicago Ukrai- nian Museum Library, to the staff of the University of Illinois at Urbana— Champaign Library Slavic Division, and to the staff of the Widener Library Phillips Reading Room and Houghton Rare Book Library at Harvard Univer- sity, who helped me to locate books, periodicals, and texts that I thought were not available or even nonexistent. Special thanks to the staff of the Huliai-pole His- torical Museum, the Chernihiv Historical Museum, the Archive-Museum of Literature and Art of Ukraine, and the Department of Manuscripts of the Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine: I appreciate the selfless work of all those enthusiasts who managed to preserve and develop their collections, enduring the financial and economic downfall in postcommunist Ukraine. The unusual thesis of my book made my search for additional funding a vain enterprise. Only my home university—Northwestern University—supported my research, allowing me to travel to archival depositories and rare book libraries to obtain copies of documents, manuscripts, and rare books. I thank Paula Blaskovits and the members of the Northwestern University Research Grant Committee for their enthusiastic support and financial assistance. The value of the advice, help, and support of my colleagues in the History Department at Northwestern is indescribable and cannot be conveyed in words. Particularly I would like to thank John Bushnell, Robert Lerner, Sarah Maza, Jacob Lassner, Joel Mokyr, and Benjamin Frommer, with whom I had a chance to talk about this project and whose insights helped me to make my argument more convincing. The quest for sources led me to the family collections of Raisa Troianker, Leonid Pervomais’kyi, and Haim Beider: my most profound gratitude to Alexandra Turgan in Berlin, Sergei Parkhomovsky in Austria, and Eva Lodz- Acknowledgments xi ernik in New York who shared the materials in their possession and allowed me to use them in my research. If not for their help, entire parts of the chapters on Raisa Troianker and Leonid Pervomais’kyi would not have seen the light of the day. Indeed, Moisei Fishbein, one of the subjects of this book, has been for years my sober critic and demanding interlocutor. I thank him for allowing me to see his verse and prose long before it found its way to press. The artistic collages he sent me over years have also been an inspiration. Although I had long been thinking about a book on this subject, Patton Write of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute enthusiastically supported my book project in its present format and encouraged me in my work. I deeply re- gret that Pat did not live to see the publication of this book. I would have never turned to things Ukrainian if not for my friends in Kyiv, who introduced me to Ukrainian language and culture, so different from the im- posed Russified Ukrainian designed for, and consumed by, a homo Sovieticus. My Ukrainian upbringing started in the house of Iurii Shcherbak, continued under the long-lasting impact of Vadym Skuratovs’kyi, crystallized in the house of Eva Narubina and Bohdan Zholdak, and was reinforced in friendly conversations with Iurii Lysenko, better known as the Ukrainian avant-garde poet Iurko Po- zaiak. It was shaped by the consistent philosemitism of Orest Tkachenko and the Ukrainophilia of Martin Feller. Because of them I discovered the depth and breadth of Ukrainian culture and eventually came to admire Hryhir Tiutiun- nyk’s prose narrative, study Ukrainian language from Borys Hrynchenko’s fin de siècle Ukrainian dictionary, paint icons imitating Mariia Prymachenko’s Ukrainian folk art, publish literary criticism in Ukrainian periodicals, research Ukrainian borrowings from Yiddish, explore Ukrainian vernacular in Galicia and Bukovina, and write this book. The chapter on Kernerenko appeared in an earlier form as “The Construction of an Improbable Identity: The Case of Hryts’ko Kernerenko,” Ab Imperio 1 (2005): 191–241. Part of the chapter on Troianker first appeared as “From the Shtetl with Love: An Episode in Ukrainian-Jewish Literary History,” in Jewish Literature and History: An Interdisciplinary Conversation, ed. Eliyana R. Adler and Sheila E. Jelen (Bethesda: CDL Press/University Press of Maryland, 2008), 63–98. Portions of the chapter on Fishbein appeared in “The Coming of a New Moses: Ukrainian-Polish Poet in the Making,” East European Jewish Affairs 1 (2004): 12–28; available at http://www.informaworld.com. The translations of Moisei Fishbein’s poems “Apocrypha” and “A Mouth xii Acknowledgments Contorted in Pain” by Bohdan Boychuk and J. Kates are taken from A Hundred Years of Youth: A Bilingual Anthology of Twentieth-Century Ukrainian Poetry (L’viv: Lytopys, 2000), 506–509. The translation of Leonid Pervomais’kyi’s poem “For Drinking and Eating I’ve Lost the Knack” by Peter Tempest is from Poetry of Soviet Ukraine’s New World: An Anthology (Woodchurch, Ashford, Kent: Paul Norbury Publications for UNESCO, 1986), 113.

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