Islands of Memory
The publication Islands of Memory is the result of the Agnon Literary Residency, which took place in Buchach, Ukraine, in 2021 as COVID shutdowns were coming to an end, and before Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country in 2022.
It features the works of three prominent Ukrainian writers — Boris Khersonskiy, Diana Klotchko, and Markian Prohasko — who reflected on changing times, and the town of Buchach, the birthplace of Shmuel Yosef Agnon. This Nobel Prize-winning writer lived the better part of the first two decades of his life in Buchach, before embarking on a literary journey that brought him international acclaim.
We are delighted that we can now present these writers’ essays in a trilingual book — Ukrainian, English, and Hebrew — as part of the residency’s work.
The Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, in cooperation with the Agnon Literary Center, supported three literary residencies in Buchach — in 2016, in 2019, and in 2021 — to symbolically return Shmuel Yosef Agnon to his birthplace and offer a new generation of Ukrainian writers to consider his work, Buchach’s multicultural heritage, and a space for their own exploration and writing.
Writers participating in the 2016 residency were Andriy Lyubka, Sophia Andrukhovych, and Yevheniya Senik, whose essays appeared, also in a trilingual format, in the book A Key in the Pocket.
In 2020, the essays of writers Vasyl Makhno, Oleksii Chupa, and Yevheniya Kononenko appeared in the trilingual book Light on the Hills.
Through their works about Buchach and beyond, all these writers have added to a greater understanding of Agnon’s legacy, Ukraine, and its place as a tolerant multiethnic state, even as it fights for its survival against an authoritarian neighbor.
