The streets reflect the color of longing: Debora Vogel and the limits of commemoration
The last wave of street renaming in Lviv, on which many hopes had been pinned, has also brought a number of disappointments, revealing that social trends change very slowly. On the one hand, the rejection of Mendeleev and Tolstoy in the urban space was another step distancing us from Soviet international universality. On the other, it is not very clear what we are getting closer to and whether an opportunity has been missed to include figures important to our city. The most painful aspect was the commission's refusal to name a square after the writer and poet Debora Vogel (1900–1942), who wrote in Yiddish and Polish, lived in Lviv, and was killed, along with her family, in the ghetto during the Nazi occupation.
If you look at the list of Lviv's current streets, you will see that it features only a handful of Jewish figures, even though Jews constituted one-third of the city's prewar population. Out of the roughly 1,300 streets in Lviv, only seven reflect this: Staroievreiska St. (Old Jewish Street); the street named after the historian Majer Balaban; Sholem Aleichem Street; Jakob Rappoport Street; streets named in honor of the politician Herman Diamand and the officer of the Ukrainian Galician Army (UHA) Solomon Leinberg; and, only recently, squares named after the Polish writer Stanisław Lem and the lawyer Raphael Lemkin. There is not a single woman among these names. Most of these seven street names appeared back in the 1990s, when it was important for the Lviv political milieu to dissociate symbolically from Soviet antisemitism and restore some old names. That was a nice start, but only two new names — Lem and Lemkin — were added over the next 30 years.
Yet, it is wicked to complain that Vogel is unknown to the Ukrainian intellectual milieu or that there is a lack of lobbying for her commemoration. Three of her books — the poetry collection Fihury dniv (Day Figures), a collection of essays entitled Akatsiї kvitnut′: Montazhi (Acacias Bloom: Prose Montage), and a collection of critical works and correspondence entitled Bili slova: Eseï, lystuvannia, retsenziï ta polemika (White Words: Essays, Correspondence, Reviews, and Polemics) — have been translated into Ukrainian and published by Dukh i Litera. Olesya Zdorovetska and Asya Gefter have created a multimedia exhibit called Fragments of Memory, and Iryna Starovoit, Danylo Ilnytskyi, Ostap Slyvynsky, and other researchers have written articles that are easy to find by running a Ukrainian-language search request on Google. Debora Vogel is not a politically controversial figure, and her connection with Lviv is evident. She is already present in the urban space of Lviv, and a quotation on the Space of Synagogues memorial comes from one of her poems:
The streets are like the sea:
they reflect the colour of longing
and the difficulty of waiting.
The lack of a street name does not necessarily signify oblivion. The books, the quotation on the Space of Synagogues memorial, the teaching of Vogel's works (I bring her texts to my history classes), and Vogel's portrait painted by contemporary Lviv artist Vlodko Kostyrko are more reliably restoring the poet to us. However, the categorical non-admittance of Jewish or Polish names to the official urban space reveals several alarming phenomena about our community and our understanding of our history and connection to the city. One might overlook this fact, saying that this is not such an important question and refraining from engagement in the battle. However, street naming is, first and foremost, a process that reveals who can use power to define part of the urban space. It also reflects views on city streets and history in general. That is why the easier way — putting up plaques or organizing a performance — does not compensate for a serious conversation or a series of conversations about removing undesirable groups from history.
Thus, the main reason is not the lack of lobbying but the fact that neither Debora Vogel nor the poet Zbigniew Herbert are perceived as figures important to Ukrainian history and culture. Like a considerable number of artists, poets, and writers in prewar Lviv, Vogel did not write in the Ukrainian language and was preoccupied with totally different issues than the development of the Ukrainian nation. Paradoxically and ironically, she began using the Ukrainian language in 1939, during the first Soviet occupation, when she had to teach in Ukrainian. Perhaps that is why it is difficult for the public to recognize her as "our own" despite the entirely universal language of her texts. After all, if you apply the criterion of the Ukrainian language or literature as the indispensable principle of "belonging," then few prewar Polish or Jewish residents of Galicia will really fit in.
However, we will not be rewriting history and changing it, especially not in Lviv, where the space itself countervails a monoethnic view of our past. The buildings where we live, the streets and parks where we stroll, numerous institutions with continuity that persists to this day, and the many works about Lviv were not created by Ukrainian-speaking Greek Catholics or Orthodox believers. You may shut your eyes and pretend that these people did not exist (or timidly call them "Lvivites"), but this practice just reveals uncertainty about whether we are at home.
Concerning the streets "liberated" from Mechnikov, Mendeleev, and Tolstoy, the desire to apply positive discrimination in favor of Ukrainian names is certainly understandable. They resonate with and are close and familiar to the majority of Lviv's current residents. However, for some, including me, both Iryna Vilde and Debora Vogel are relevant, as are Mykhailo Hrushevsky and Majer Balaban. I do not see any contradiction or even competition between them. It is difficult for me to understand when people remonstrate that streets named after notional "Poles" are necessary for the Polish state and "Jews" — for Israel and that we should use them as a bartering chip in the global political arena ("Why are there no Ukrainian streets in Warsaw?"; "Why has Sheptytsky not been awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations?") It is exhausting to explain that the State of Israel is not the sole representative of past and current Jewish communities. Such an argument excludes from the conversation Jewish communities that live in close proximity in our cities and also have ideas and wishes concerning memory. It also excludes the part of the population that sees the legacy of the past not as a burden preventing us from building a state but as a rich source of inspiration to which we have rights and obligations.
Debora Vogel is important for Lviv not only because she was one of many female writers or activists. She represents the Yiddishist movement, whose history, often neglected by Jewish writers themselves, resonates with the history of the Ukrainian language. Vogel was one of many figures who put Lviv and its Yiddish-language literature on the global map, especially thanks to her contacts with the New York-based periodical In Sich. Despite her brilliant intellect, Vogel had a challenging time in prewar Lviv, where few people were able to appreciate her ultramodern poetry. Lviv later killed Vogel, or at least our city and its residents at the time were unable to protect her and nearly 100,000 other Jews. Later, Lviv forgot about her. The new owners of her apartment threw out the poet's archive; her language was forgotten; there is no grave, and the cemetery where her ancestors were buried was demolished. A few stands are located on the site of the mass shootings of Lviv Jews, which have not been put to rights to this day.
The preservation of memory and knowledge about Jewish culture in Lviv, like in Ukraine on the whole, is mostly left to the efforts of Jewish communities or interested organizations and individuals. Officially, they are mentioned when "peaceful Jewish-Ukrainian coexistence" or the "joint struggle against the empire" are brought up. In all other variants, like Alice in Wonderland, you must run twice as fast in order to prove that Jewish names have a right to exist, whether on a plaque, a street name, in a regional history museum, or in school textbooks.
Vladyslava Moskalets is a researcher at the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv, Coordinator of the Jewish Studies Program, and Assistant Professor at the Department of Modern and Contemporary History of Ukraine at Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. She researches the social history of Galician Jews and the history of urban spaces. She is a guest lecturer at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Originally appeared in Ukrainian @Ukraina Moderna
Translated from the Ukrainian by Marta D. Olynyk
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