Maksym Gon: "To understand life truly, I had to be in a dugout and experience fear in its undisguised form"
In the following interview, the Ukrainian historian and political scientist Maksym Gon discusses the impact of his service in the Armed Forces of Ukraine (ZSU) on comprehending the past, particularly the history of the Second World War and Nazi crimes. These are the intellectual and emotional reflections of an insider who seeks to grasp his personal experience of being on the front line from a researcher's standpoint. He positions his subjective perspective as a significant focus for analyzing events past and present. The topics raised in this interview include the decolonization of memory and contemporary life, the language question, the study of controversial history pages, and Russia's genocidal policy. He also raises the painful question of draft dodging and the efforts of a segment of Ukrainian society to distance itself from the war, attempting to identify the root causes of this state of affairs.
Maksym Gon
"The aggressor's army has hundreds of thousands of fighters — Putin's little killers"
You have been at the front since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. How has this experience influenced your understanding of history? How has it changed your views and approaches to understanding the past?
Fighting in a war is, without a doubt, a fundamentally new experience for anyone. A few years ago, this was true even for the military people who had never taken part in the first stage of the war, called the "anti-terrorist operation" (ATO), let alone other professionals, like me, who taught and engaged in academic studies.
It is my third year in the ZSU, so I have some war experience, even if I’m not the best soldier. This experience has been defined by a fundamentally new reality I encountered in early March 2022, which ranges from soldiers' everyday activities to the sounds of real explosions I hear, not their reproductions on some device. Despite my integration into this world, my subconscious still marks what I see during the war as extreme. There is virtually no way for me to get used to this.
I will state the obvious: For direct participants in the war (not just soldiers, sailors, and officers but all those people who in any way demonstrate active civic engagement), the world became divided long ago into "before" and "after" 24 February 2022. The Russian Federation's new act of aggression forced a re-evaluation of life itself. Once, everything seemed routine. In my case, it was research in archives or libraries and teaching. I will admit I didn’t realize this routine was the happiness of everyday life. It turned out that, to understand life truly, I had to be in a dugout and experience fear in its undisguised form.
Understanding history when you are at war is a second-tier reflection, I would say. This has mostly nothing to do with research. But from time to time, you delve into these thoughts. Since I frequently think about better things, my primary focus is on war vs. no war and peace. In these extreme circumstances, I think with nostalgia and pleasure about the past and future, the latter of which will be peaceful, God willing. As for the other things, I subconsciously compare reality to similar sociopolitical processes, above all, the Second World War. This may be because my parents lived through it when they were children and also because I revere those who fought Nazism.
My comparisons are linked to the problem of subjectivity in war, which pertains to both our soldiers and enemies. It is easy to understand the motivation of those in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. But there is still the enemy, whose desire to kill and destroy we must comprehend. It is much more complicated to understand the enemies' willingness to risk their lives and become disabled or die in our land. But we must give some thought to this because it is an open question whether it was Putin who befuddled Russian society or whether Russian society needed a dictator and an adventurer to satisfy its predatory imperialistic nature through bloodshed on a grand scale.
Answering this question can bring us closer to understanding the nature of evil as it is currently framed. I do not remember who said that thousands of willing, "little" Hitlers were required for the Holocaust to happen. If we follow this train of thought, what is happening to us now is the result not so much of Putin's insanity and criminality as the actions of his Lilliputians, the soldiers who took part in the annexation of the Crimea, who "protected the Russian-speaking population" of the Donbas, who volunteered to go to war against us and participated in the first wave of the attacks in February and March 2022, who did not hide from mobilization, who did not refuse and are still not refusing to carry out the orders of their commanders, and who are not turning their weapons against their commanders. (I am not talking about the march of Prigozhin and his men deep into the RF.) In the aggressor's army, there are hundreds of thousands of fighters — Putin's little killers!
Against the backdrop of such reflections, the topic of ZSU mobilization is a special one for me. Everyone remembers the lines in front of military enlistment offices in the first weeks of the full-scale war. In contrast, what has been happening with ZSU mobilization over the past six months is unthinkable. It has long been common knowledge that many of our units have not been rotated, and not just for months but years. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of men are hiding in the literal sense of this word. Even the pay that the government is offering, which most people never even dreamed of before, does not sway these draft dodgers. Is this not a reason for reflection?
I must add that when our unit was issued its first pay, I think, in April 2022 (when the government was not offering higher payments for combat deployment yet), I felt conflicted because we had not joined the army in order to receive payment. No one even thought this. But over time, it turns out that financial stimulus is either not working or not effective — and this, considering the realities of our country, where our standard of living was nothing to shout about.
These kinds of reflections prompted a question for which I have no answer. Did the soldiers who fought against Nazism in the ranks of the Red Army receive some kind of payment? We never asked such questions when we were students or later.
My biggest discovery during my reflections on the Second World War is our bitter experience with how those events were schematized/trivialized. This is a product primarily of opportunists from among historians, of whom there are considerable numbers, let's be frank. Thanks to some of them, we now have the perception that almost everyone — at least a significant majority — voluntarily joined the ranks of the Red Army. Other historians have forged an image of tens of thousands of nationally aware Ukrainians who became UPA fighters.
Meanwhile, what I am seeing right now speaks to something quite different: Everything is much more complicated. There are colossal problems with mobilization to the ZSU, yet there is no war a hundred kilometers from the front line (not to mention western Ukraine). The prevalence of happy posts on Facebook and other social media suggests that everything is so much more difficult that we could not even have imagined such a situation at the beginning of the full-scale war. Today, we can confidently say that "back then" (during the Second World War), not everyone ended up in the ranks of the laboring front. Needless to say, for many citizens of Ukraine, a donation is simply a word but not a word that reflects action. And the absence of action, as we all know, is also a kind of action. Is this not a stimulus for (re)interpreting the past and the present? The trouble is that these reflections lead one to draw some bitter conclusions. As an educator, I will summarize the situation this way: It seems that in our country, something went wrong with how many members of our collective "I" were brought up…
"History that makes one burn with shame is also necessary"
Did your historical knowledge help you decide to take up arms and fight the aggressor? How do you see the function of historians in wartime?
If I wanted to, I could formulate an idea about my profession having played a decisive or iconic role in my decision, but it would not be true. In fact, what was in play was my civic awareness and my unwillingness to see Ukraine end up again in the realities of totalitarianism. I suppose that at the present stage, graduates of history faculties are not the only ones who understand what totalitarianism and its stepson, Putinism, are.
Of course, I am far from idealizing the public. That would be ridiculous. Lately, however, some of my fellow citizens seem to be indifferent to the kind of society in which they want to live. We may still be on our forty-year-long wandering in search of true values. Those fighting and those helping the Armed Forces of Ukraine in one way or another have recognized them. However, those who remain on the sidelines do not share these values.
As for the functions of historians in wartime, everything is cut and dried: they must record what they see and think about this. There is another question that is much more relevant to me, and that is the historian's role after the war. I fear that many historians will quickly dock on the shore of the new situation and write a completely heroic history. It, too, is necessary because a substantial number of soldiers in Ukraine's armed forces are definitively writing the history of winners with their feats. As for me, a history that makes one burn with shame is also necessary. Therefore, I hope it will be an educational history, if not a healing one. The central topics of this shaming are well known. I will mention only the so-called waiters, collaboration, indifference, and self-alienation from the war realities. Add to this draft dodging, which, unfortunately, has already become a social phenomenon. Given the prewar trends in national history writing, I am sure that only a handful of individuals will be writing about these topics.
"Our experience of saying goodbye to the past was fully exploited by the RF, where the memory of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ occupies a central place in the state ideology"
In the media sphere, we often hear comparisons drawn between Russia's aggression against Ukraine and the crimes of Nazi Germany, particularly the Holocaust. The tone of these comparisons was set by Russian propaganda, which accuses Ukraine of "Nazism." What explanatory potential do such comparisons have? Do you think they can deepen our understanding of the Russo-Ukrainian War, on the one hand, and help us gain a better understanding of Nazi crimes, on the other?
With your permission, I will separate and answer these questions in stages. Let me formulate my premise. What I find important is that the Law "On Condemning the Communist and National Socialist (Nazi) Totalitarian Regimes and Prohibiting the Propagation of their Symbols" has often been implemented in such a way that forsaking the memory of those who took part in the Soviet-German War in the ranks of the Red Army and the partisans became a kind of compulsion. This happened against the backdrop of the UPA's glorification, a process that began much earlier. Regrettably, we failed to balance these two memory components. In fact, we bore witness to the launch of the mechanism of amnesia about the majority of those who fought against the most terrible ideology in the history of humankind. This definitely happened at least in western Ukraine, which consistently basked in its self-portrait as the Galician Piedmont.
For one reason or another, the public did not notice the lesson about the Ukrainization of the monumental Motherland sculpture. During the war, I have seen examples of simple changes in the Donbas region, such as state flags hung above monuments or painted on a tank mounted on a pedestal.
To multitudes of our fellow citizens, such practices proved unpromising. Alienation and, in many instances, renunciation of part of our memory are still taking place. To this day, it is enough for us to fight with monuments, to pull them down. This happened several months ago in the city where I live. Money and energy are being spent on retouching memory at a time when thousands of people are donating money, helping the state to plug the many holes in maintaining the ZSU. Dismantling something costs both human resources and money.
What have we achieved? Whether consciously or unconsciously, we have become alienated from a specific component of our heroic past. I am confident that we will review this practice in the near future because renouncing a heroic past is absurd and amoral.
Our experience of parting with the past has been fully exploited by the RF, where the memory of the "Great Patriotic War" occupies a prominent place in the state's ideology. Putin's propaganda has labeled us as "Nazis." We are unable to change this. But for me, the fundamental question is: What has Ukraine done to counter this label that has blemished our collective "I"? What have we done in the international arena? What messages has the government addressed to the descendants of Nazi fighters who were members of the two currents of the resistance movement? I may have omitted something, or there may be something I don't know. But even if we have done something, I am sure it is too little to achieve the desired result.
As for the comparisons drawn between the Russo-Ukrainian War and the actions of Nazi Germany, several factors came into play. First, the public sentiment in Ukraine is defined by the long-established parallel between the crimes of the two totalitarian regimes. We perceive the Russian Federation, the self-proclaimed successor of the USSR, which over the past few decades has plotted a course toward authoritarian rule and pursued an aggressive policy in the international arena, as a state that has returned to the imperial harbor, from which it had briefly departed. Second, embedded in the memories of many Ukrainians are recollections of the fate that befell their relatives during the Second World War. Third, drawing parallels between Nazi Germany and today's RF is entirely natural in our realities because the issue here is a comparison with a similar sociopolitical process from the past. The last war in which our relatives took part was the German-Soviet War. We are participants and contemporaries of another war. Thus, there is an entirely natural and correct criterion for comparison: today's war and the war that took place in our lands in 1939–1944.
My last point is that many citizens of Ukraine saw the similarity between the acts of the Bolsheviks and the Nazis in the years leading up to the full-scale war. The latter, given the horrors of their acts in the occupied territories, have long been the personification of absolute evil. Therefore, when we draw a parallel between the current enemy and those who violated any and all moral principles and integrity, we are (un)consciously referring to the classic example of the twentieth-century abuser and killer. Such constructions correspond to our psychological and emotional state and desire to see ourselves in the image of a fighter against an offshoot of a totalitarian regime that existed less than a century ago.
As for the explanatory potential, as you put it: Any comparison, if we use correlated criteria, is not only permissible but beneficial, I think. Some eloquent examples include control over the media and public opinion in the modern Russian Federation and the 1933–1945 Germany, the use of Newspeak and euphemisms by these two states, and the mechanisms they employed to mobilize their citizens to participate in wars.
Can such comparisons deepen our understanding of the Russo-Ukrainian War? Once we rid ourselves of the excessive emotions triggered by the Russian aggression and the crimes committed by its army, we will see that things are not so simple. The Third Reich placed its racial theory on a pedestal, and it played a key role in its social engineering. This, of course, we do not hear in the ravings of Putin and his henchmen. However, this is just one example indicating that mechanical inferences are not a good cognitive aid. Furthermore, I think understanding the nature of the current war will deepen after it ends and some time passes. Distance often allows you to better comprehend something you did not notice or realize earlier.
This also pertains to your idea of the current war as an impetus for understanding Nazi crimes. Humankind has covered quite a distance along this path. Given what we have said, Ukraine, unfortunately, has an additional impetus for such reflections now.
"The target group of crimes is not a specific ethnic community but the Ukrainian political nation"
Given your historical knowledge in the field of Genocide Studies, can one say that Russia is committing or seeking to commit genocide in Ukraine?
I must confess this is not an easy question for me. It is complicated because, in reflecting on the unprecedented crimes of this war, I am guided by the well-known UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. However, I do not use the term genocide automatically, so to speak. Importantly, specialists in humanitarian law propose, for several reasons, to correct the substance of the crime of genocide as it appears in the 1946 UN convention. At one time, there were proposals to add political groups to the list of possible genocide victims. Finally, a certain context to your question is provided by the resolution adopted in late June 2024 by the Parliamentary Assembly [of the Council of Europe], which classified Russia’s actions as genocide against the Ukrainian people.
To a certain extent, it is tempting to use this document as an a priori reference point when replying to your question. However, some remarks are in order. The first thing to be done in proving the fact of genocide is establishing intent and a clearly defined target group, the victims of violence.
As regards the former, there is no particular need to talk about the intentions of the Russian Federation, which it has been implementing through violence for decades. Its imperial intent determined the means of its implementation — using a military force to seize significant parts of Ukraine at the very least and attach them to the skeleton of the empire. The overarching program pursued by the possessed Putinists is to destroy the Ukrainian State as such. Meanwhile, the nature of the war and the "philosophy" behind the pacification of the territories taken over by the aggressor have defined the target group at which the Russians have directed violence: Crimean Tatars and other citizens of Ukraine, regardless of their ethnicity and religion. In fact, everyone who is nationally aware, as we like to say, and has ended up in the territories annexed by the aggressor state has been part of a target group against which the Russian army and security forces have directed hatred and aggression. Thus, the group targeted by crimes is not a specific ethnic community but the Ukrainian political nation.
The UN Convention defines the acts that constitute the crime of genocide; there are only five. What has already taken place during the full-scale war allows us to confirm that three of them have been unequivocally identified in the actions of Russia, the aggressor-state: killing the members of the target group, causing them serious bodily harm or mental distress, and forcibly transferring children out of that group. However, it is possible to interpret the murders of both civilians and Ukrainian military personnel of childbearing age during military operations as preventing the process of a social group's self-reproduction. In my view, this venturesome statement brings Russia’s crimes to the fourth act of genocide: preventing births. I will only say that this act of genocide, as spelled out in the UN Convention, is based on the Nazi campaigns to sterilize targeted groups of people, primarily the Roma.
I think that I have answered your question. The resolution approved by the Parliamentary Assembly is a balanced assessment of the Russian Federation's actions against the Ukrainian people in recent decades.
"If we resort to a ‘pact of forgetting,’ we will lose"
After 24 February 2022, we have occasionally heard some historians in Ukraine suggesting we should pay less attention to studying the history of the Holocaust, particularly its social dynamics. This type of research seeks to understand the role that the local population and organizations played in Nazi crimes and can, in part, echo Russian propaganda. How can this situation be remedied? Is it necessary to study the history of the Holocaust in all its manifestations, or should the focus be shifted so as to devote more attention to such questions as the actions of Ukrainians recognized as Righteous Among the Nations?
We must realize that a long time will pass before a new phase of democratization begins in the Russian Federation, one that will be led by someone who, like Khrushchev, will talk more or less openly about Putinism. That said, propaganda will continue its criminal role in this state for a long time to come. It will continue to blacken our past, exploiting one Holocaust topic or another. Does this mean that Ukrainian historical science should suspend studies in this field, establish a kind of proto-image of Spain's Pact of Forgetting, and succumb to intentional amnesia, even temporarily? It is not all that complicated to do this, considering the limited number of people researching this set of problems. But is this an ideal path?
I am inclined to think differently. We should talk more consistently about the fact that we do not profess the idea of collective responsibility. We should state that crimes against Jews during the Holocaust, which, unfortunately, were neither isolated nor the exception, were committed by specific people. And, of course, we should balance these statements with studies about rescuing victims. If we resort to a "pact of forgetting," we will lose as we will reject, under pressure of external circumstances, the first successes historians have achieved in this complex and dramatic topic.
"A balanced and well-conceived policy for Ukrainizing children must become a priority"
One acute issue that has emerged in the context of the decolonizing processes in Ukraine is the language question. On the one hand, Kremlin propaganda justifies its policy of aggression with the phrase "protecting the Russian-speaking population." On the other hand, most people in Ukraine, if not all, are bilingual, and for some of the population, Russian is the language of daily communication. In this situation, how should the language policy be formulated?
Language-based conflicts, as well as religious-based ones, are dead ends. Without having noticed in a timely fashion the growing dynamic of contradictions and having failed to regulate them, society falls into a trap from which it is extremely difficult to escape. The search for effective ways to resolve such conflicts may take decades. Everyone who has ever expressed an opinion on the language question (or is planning to do so) must realize this.
There is no question that all Ukrainian citizens should be proficient in the state language. This is not up for discussion. However, I have doubts about the correctness of the strategy for vanquishing bilingualism (provided that such a course is logical on the whole). Ukrainization in the form that the government was implementing in the years before Russia's full-scale invasion was too unequivocal and immoderate — just like the attempts to bid farewell automatically to Russian, which some people aspired to do in Ukraine not so long ago, promoting the view that Russian was the language of the aggressor. The situation is much more complex: Russian is not just the language of the criminals who attacked us; it is also the first language of a considerable number of our fellow citizens.
In the new sociopolitical realities, proficiency in the state language is a citizen's political expression. This political act has another manifestation: participation in the war, the latter being more important than the former, in my view.
I will illustrate this idea by telling you what I have seen during the years of my service in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. My battalion was initially composed of residents of two oblasts, Lviv and Rivne. We joined contract soldiers who had already served in this battalion for several years. When we ended up in the Donbas in early March 2022, our battalion was almost a hundred percent Ukrainian-speaking. A lot of time has passed since then. Much has changed. Over time, young men and women from Kharkiv, Mariupol, and many other cities and towns have joined the battalion. Among them were many bilingual and Russian-speaking people. Naturally, I was not able to conduct a poll, let alone any sociological research. But I can confidently say that quite a few of the soldiers are bilingual, and for many of them, Russian is their native language, which they use actively.
Why am I telling you this? The answer is obvious. These people did not hide; they did not become draft dodgers. They are performing their civic duty honestly, and in doing so, they will continue to dream in Russian. There are typical situations where such officers and soldiers start a conversation in Ukrainian and then switch to the other language — from the heart, as they say. There are many such bilingual individuals. Few people do not know Ukrainian. Without trying to determine the proportion of Ukrainian-speaking people, bilingual individuals, and those who do not communicate in the state language, I will say that our army is bilingual. We must recognize this because it is the reality. We, especially those who have not ended up in an army setting yet, must grasp this. Trying to Ukrainize the army to one hundred percent is pointless right now. Furthermore, power-pedaling the farewell to Russia does not strike me as very constructive. Rather, the primary task of both Ukrainian and bilingual speakers is to get rid of Russian profanities (mat). Most of us do not realize that this must be the first step toward linguistic decolonization, because Russian obscenities gained a powerful foothold in the Ukrainian language a long time ago. Rejecting them — making a complete break with them — is imperative on the path toward improving our speaking culture. This is no less important than removing one Russian writer or another from the world literature curriculum and replacing them with representatives of world-class literature.
Right now, when we are compelled, one way or another, to return to discussions of language questions, a judicious and well-considered policy for Ukrainizing children should be the top priority. I dare say this is an easy task to implement, but it requires considerable financing. The cheapest possible children's books (primarily fairy tales), Ukrainian-language cartoons, films, children's songs, computer games, as well as a children's television or YouTube channel that is Ukrainian in spirit and language — this, in my view, is Ukraine's optimal path with regard to the language question. This, together with instruction in schools and extracurricular educational institutions (that is, systematic immersion in a Ukrainian-language environment), will more than suffice to Ukrainize children whose parents are still communicating in Russian. By purchasing one product or another, such as fairy tales, or turning on a children's television or YouTube channel, parents will co-implement the government's policy. This kind of Ukrainization will be organic, painless, and effective.
Summing up, proficiency in Ukrainian is a political and civic act on the part of adults. Their premier act in today's realities is participating in the war and rendering thoughtful and consistent aid to the army. We must create optimal conditions for the gentle Ukrainization of children of Russian-speaking parents.
"In studying international experience, it is worthwhile considering whether so-called counter-monuments should be erected alongside monuments"
One question that is generating a considerable number of challenges is the honoring of the victims of Russian aggression and fallen soldiers. What approaches would you, as an expert in the field of memorialization, recommend for honoring the memory of victims and fallen heroes of the Russo-Ukrainian War?
This is truly an extremely urgent task. The way I see it, it has two components. First, the state and other entities, which in one way or another affect the formation of collective memory, should be consistent in their actions. Implementing a commemorative policy as such is crucial, even if it involves using products that are not particularly refined. It alone guarantees the desired result. Second, we must develop effective tools for building a bridge of memory that should be oriented not only toward us, contemporaries of the war, but also toward those who will eventually learn about it from documentary films or history lessons.
The first steps toward memorialization have already been taken with the creation of the National Military Cemetery, the Wall of Remembrance of the Fallen for Ukraine on a wall of St. Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery, and the unveiling of monuments and commemorative plaques to the fallen in this war. Commemorative activities include some less successful initiatives, such as renaming streets with victims’ names in places where they once lived. In approving such decisions, city council officials have good intentions, but they fail to realize that there will be such large-scale losses that they will eventually run out of streets to rename. This is only one example of the need for well-thought-out and balanced memorialization.
In my view, we should not be in too much hurry. We should be reasonable and carefully examine the tools used in various Western countries for remembering. This pertains especially to the spaces of cities, towns, and villages. I suspect we will prioritize erecting "classical" monuments, which, according to sociological research, most of our contemporaries have stopped noticing. Towering above squares, they do not provide a dialogue with those who find themselves next to them.
In studying international experience, we would be well advised to consider whether we should erect so-called counter-monuments alongside existing monuments. They democratically provide dialogue between the object of veneration and those in their vicinity. City dwellers should play a prominent role in building such a bridge of memory.
The question is not only and not so much about monuments, public art, or streets that bear the names of heroes. The Western experience comprises a substantial number of original forms of honoring victims and heroes, which appear unusual to us. Again, we must think about this and develop our own projects and initiatives. Ideally, once we formulate a clear-cut strategic plan of remembrance, we will be able to choose the best possible instruments for its implementation.
Maksym Gon, Doctor of Political Science, is Professor of History at the Department of World History, Rivne State University of Humanities, and director of the Mnemonics Center for Studies of Memory Policy and Public History. He has been in the Armed Forces of Ukraine since March 2022. Dr. Gon is a specialist in Ukrainian-Jewish relations during the interwar period and the Second World War, the history of the Holocaust, collective memory, and the politics of memory in Ukraine. He is the author of the books Ievreї v Zakhidnoukraїns′kii Narodnii Respublitsi (do problem ukraїns′ko-ievreis′kykh vzaiemyn [Jews in the Western Ukrainian People's Republic (co-authored with Iryna Pohrebynska); Iz kryvdoiu na samoti: Ukraїns′ko-ievreis′ki vzaiemyny na zakhidnoukraїns′kykh zemliakh u skladi Pol′shchi (1935–1939) [Alone with a Grudge: Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in the Western Ukrainian Lands under Poland (1935–1939)]; Osoblyvosti mizhetnichnoї vzaiemodiї v konteksti politychnykh protsesiv na zakhidnoukraїns′kykh zemliakh u mizhvoiennyi period [Characteristics of Interethnic Interaction in the Context of Political Processes in the Western Ukrainian Lands during the Interwar Period]; Misto pam'iati — misto zabuttia: palimpsesty memorial′noho landshaftu Rivnoho [City of Memory, City of Oblivion: Palimpsests of the Memorial Landscape of Rivne (co-authored with Petro Dolhanov and Nataliia Ivchyk); Henotsydy pershoї polovyny ХХ st.: porivnial′nyi analiz [Genocides of the First Half of the 20th Century: A Comparative Analysis]; Równe: obrysy znykloho mista [Równe: Outlines of a Missing City].
Interviewed by Petro Dolhanov
Edited by Olha Diachuk
Photographs from open sources are used in this publication.
Originally appeared in Ukrainian @Ukraina Moderna
This article was published as part of a project supported by the Canadian non-profit charitable organization Ukrainian Jewish Encounter.
Translated from the Ukrainian by Marta D. Olynyk
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