What We Were Told about War: Linor Goralik
Linor Goralik is a writer, an artist, and columnist. In the Encounters program on Hromadske Radio we talk about her memories on moving from Soviet Ukraine to Israel, the rhymes between the war experience in Ukraine and in Israel, and also about family memory and stories about World War II. The Encounters program was created with the support of the Canadian philanthropic fund Ukrainian Jewish Encounter.
Iryna Slavіnska: Let’s start perhaps with the following question. You are a native of Dnipropetrovsk. Now you live in Israel, and, if I understand correctly, you came to Israel from Ukraine at a rather mature age. How old were you?
Linor Goralik: In 1989 I was fourteen years old.
Iryna Slavіnska: How did it feel?
Linor Goralik: Very odd. Well, first we must remember that we were leaving not from Ukraine, but from Soviet Ukraine. I mean my parents' passports were also taken from them and all of us were denaturalized. Only now, having become an adult, I've started thinking a lot about my parents, who experienced a few hours when they were stateless people relying on another country's promise that they all were going to be okay. I was less involved in those feelings. I was fourteen. I was suffering because of leaving my friends. We were leaving—it’s crucial—we were leaving for good. In a way, we were “dying” into another country.
Iryna Slavіnska: Which means one wasn't able to leave the Soviet Union only for a period of time.
Linor Goralik: Absolutely. We were leaving forever and parted forever. It was very hard, on one hand. On the other hand, Israel is a pretty amazing place, so it was quite fascinating, and my first major impressions were certainly visual. This country is very vivid. I'm even thinking that if we came to Israel when the weather was worse—actually, we arrived in November, however, the first few days were very sunny—it would have been harder for us. Yet, it was somehow...
Well, I still have that feeling, a great sense of gratitude felt by the person who has received citizenship and social insurance, not to mention many other things, from some country that owes nothing to him. I still don't understand how this happened, and I have a feeling of pure gratitude, pure miracle.
Iryna Slavіnska: In addition to those feelings there are perhaps those having to do with quite a lot of absolutely routine situations. You have to learn a new language. You have to go to a new school, interact with other people who may be immigrants like you, or may be more settled, maybe even native Israelis. Then again, how did these routine situations unfold for your family and for you personally?
Linor Goralik: Well, as for my parents, as I understand now, it was very hard, but only they can talk about that. As for me, it was much easier. In fact, we arrived at the beginning of a major wave of emigration. And in a few days it became clear that there were quite a lot of people like me, including those with a common social background, which was important at that time.
Israel at first provides you with the so-called ulpan—a place where you learn the [Hebrew] language, and not only that, there they also explain... how the country is structured, how routine things work. And there I instantly made friends. I still was really-really yearning for my friends left behind. Even now I realize that I was suffering. Yet there were [new] friends, support, and later our friends from Dnipropetrovsk started arriving one by one, as well as our relatives. It was difficult for me, but these difficulties faded away for me as a teenager captured by the excitement of a new life. I felt good about that.
The main burden for me was a psychotic fear of war that suddenly developed when I was fifteen. It was an enormously painful story for me. It was a horrific clinical story, which I still recall with fear. It is clear that such stories do not occur because of an oncoming war, but on the contrary. This story emerges in you for different reasons, biological for the most part, and finds material to be translated into some kind of fear. And of course when the Iraq crisis started—it was soon after we arrived... Yes, it was dreadful. But everything ended well.
Iryna Slavіnska: Continuing the theme of the war, Dnipropetrovsk, your hometown, today is a front-line city. You must have never experienced the fear of war there, because Dnipropetrovsk used to be pretty quiet, an ordinary Ukrainian regional center. However today the city is the first outpost, where the wounded are taken in and treated. Helicopters with the wounded land in the stadium there. There are also all the routines common for this situation. How does all this look to you, a native of Dnipropetrovsk, who no longer lives in Ukraine, but cares about what is happening in Ukraine?
Linor Goralik: I'm not able to see it—that’s the whole point. I have an eye on Ukraine, I stay up to date with the news, I am really worried about what is happening, but as a private person I can't help but remember Dnipropetrovsk as my childhood hometown. I can't insert it there, I can't align these two pictures. A picture of a city that takes the wounded in is absolutely intelligible for me, because I read a lot about the war, because during my first year in Israel I lived in Beer-Sheva, with its "Soroka" hospital, where helicopters endlessly bring in the wounded. But no, I can't put these two pictures together. However, there's something very important to say about Dnipropetrovsk, a city that has never anticipated the war. I have no idea about Dnipropetrovsk's anticipations, but all of my childhood memories are evidence to the fact that Dnipropetrovsk remembered the war so well, and this fear was so strong and so alive, and was so passed on from generation to generation, that, as we see, even I got enough of it, though it shouldn't seem so.
This is also an issue I'm thinking a lot about. This is a city heavily traumatized by World War II. How's that for people there when it suddenly becomes real again? I'm terribly sorry for that and I can't imagine that.
Iryna Slavіnska: In this conversation, about a person who lived in one country, left for another, speaks several languages, including Hebrew, writes in Russian and began to write in Hebrew also, if I understand correctly, [the question arises], how does it work?
Linor Goralik: It's hard. For me, the most stressful revelation in this sense was to discover that the person who writes in English, the person who writes in Hebrew, and the person who writes in Russian, appear to be unfortunately three different writers.
Iryna Slavіnska: You feel it, don't you?
Linor Goralik: Acutely. It's terribly weird, because I've grown up inside the myth of the Russian language and the Russian attitude toward literature.
Iryna Slavіnska: The great Russian literature, the great novel?
Linor Goralik: No, it's about something quite different. It's about the belief that the act of writing is associated with some inherent essence within you, that you are writing in a certain manner and not otherwise, not because of a certain relationship between you and the language or the context, but because that's your nature. This is a major part of the Russian myth about literature. But then all of a sudden you find out that while writing in English or in Hebrew something positively works like that, and something obviously does not.
This is so weird that it really frightens and blocks me. I understand that I should stop being afraid of that, that I should just say to myself that everything, indeed, works differently than I thought. But it's terribly hard so far. Now I'm making my first attempts to write fiction in Hebrew, short prose, and I'm terribly afraid.
Iryna Slavіnska: Do you feel any kind of bottom level, something you could base yourself upon when you write in Hebrew?[1]
Linor Goralik: I wanted to say "yes, usually they knock at it, when you live in Moscow."
Iryna Slavіnska: But it is unlikely that in Israeli literature there are those who knock at the bottom.
Linor Goralik: It's not likely. I'm not sure. I'm not that expert in Israeli literature. This is hard, yet essential: a person who is trying to write in Hebrew and trying to read something in Hebrew, but hasn't read that much in Hebrew, at least this experience obviously can't be compared to reading in Russian or English. All that was quite an extraordinary experiment. We'll see. It should be mentioned that I'm doing this not because I've decided: “Oh, I live in Israel, I ought to write in Hebrew” but because some things that are spoken in Hebrew start to crystallize in my head. And this alone is very strange.
However, in fact, you draw on the fact that, regardless of the cultural background, people experience some things, basic things, in the same manner: pain, affection, empathy, rejection, aggression. And then you say to yourself: okay, I'm talking about something clear-cut... about the things that I think I understand—but just in another way. Still, it drives me mad, makes me feel a bit schizophrenic. Who is this person? Who is that talking inside me? I have no idea.
Iryna Slavіnska: Talking about the writers that use many languages, I really like Igor Pomerantsev's metaphor: the metaphor of a breeze or breezes that may blow through prose or poetry, and... yes, it's a very beautiful metaphor. It quite aptly describes this phenomenon where, on one side, there's seemingly no ultimate influence, yet, on the other hand, there's something that makes itself felt.
And in this context I recall a conversation with Katya Petrovskaya, a German writer who comes from Kyiv and has written her first novel in German. Her native language is Russian, and nevertheless it's been proved by the translator Yurko Prokhasko that Ukrainian language notes are still heard in her novel written in German. Maybe even she could scarcely ever realize that, but some Kyiv accents, tones of Kyiv Ukrainian language, may vibrate there.
In your writing, in your prose or poetry, do you feel any elements of Ukrainian influence, Jewish influence, or Russian influence?
Linor Goralik: Yes, definitely. Hebrew... and oddly enough, American. Because there were long periods when I lived there for my job—for several months—and it is clear that there were days when I didn't speak Russian, or Hebrew. I listened to, watched, and I spoke only English.
And yesterday, my husband asked me, "How do you feel about those moments when you use calques in your speech." I said, "Which ones?" And it turned out that, of course, I use them... This is common, we are talking about everyday speech, I am using calques in my speech without feeling them. That's bad, of course. We were talking about the phrase “I don't have enough balls,” which I wrote about something." So he asked me: "Do you realize it's a calque?" I asked, "What kind of calque?" I had to google it to make sure that, indeed, I'm using “I don’t have enough balls” translated literally into Russian.
Yeah. And besides that, it is obvious that those cultures you live in, live in you, beyond your own will. For example, it is normal that your voice in Hebrew is different, because the Hebrew world speaks in a different voice. Even the routine—and I am mostly interested in routine—speaks to you in a different voice. It has another rhythm, another tempo. There's nothing you can do about it.
Also... Well, formally speaking, I'm not your Jewish writer in the sense that refers to many Russian-speaking writers interested in Jewishness, who work with it historically or culturally. However, the scope of my reading and the fact that I am the Booknik website editor, and other things, too... of course, I clearly hear inside of me, as one of my friends would say, "Ashkenazi intonations."
Iryna Slavіnska: As we are talking about Booknik, my last question in this conversation will be about that. Booknik has created a very interesting project around May 9. A project recording family stories about the war, told by the family members, the ancestors, so to say.
Linor Goralik: Yes, for many it's their great-grandparents...
Iryna Slavіnska: Grandparents, mothers and fathers talking about the war. Which means it's a story that obviously went through a number of filters. So here's the first part of the question about the project. What is this desire to record the memory and what kind of memory was there molded as a result? And here's the second part of the question. Are there stories about the war in your family, and, if it's possible, could you share a fragment of this memory?
Linor Goralik: So, in short. Booknik is a site dealing with contemporary Israeli-Jewish culture, it's booknik.ru. I am its chief editor, and Booknik makes a lot of selections of related articles about history. This is a genre in which we endeavour to work, as we observe that it evokes a wide response, because it's quite meaningful material.
The subject of any piece is not the bare facts, but exactly how people perceive, remember, and describe them. So when May 9 was on the agenda, and we resolved to create this kind of content, I decided to ask people, "What did they say about the war in your home?" It was very important. I also wanted to ask them to talk about this memory object. At first, we got more than a hundred... almost a hundred stories, and when I finished reviewing them... Sometimes there were very short, sometimes quite vast, thirty-six page stories, so I was really crying, my hands were shaking.
This is really terrible. Just because if people were recalling what they were doing during the war, what their family was doing during the war, there would be finished narratives. But here they are recalling how people were really stressed by the war, lived through the war. And when we published this collection, we started getting a second portion. So in a few days we are going to make a free e-book, because this has to be told.
Iryna Slavіnska: It has two volumes?
Linor Goralik: It comes out rather small, but it's a real book, a comprehensive volume. We are going to release the second volume shortly. And yes, in my family there's a very typical story. My grandfather was in the war, and he didn't say anything about the war. He said very little. Unfortunately, he died when I was ten. I loved them very much, my grandmother and my grandfather. My mother was told some snippets. What we know is definitely not enough and, exactly as it has to be in such stories, some facts do not fit together. Some timings are conflicting. And this is a reflection of the fact that, just like in many Soviet families, in my family, too, they were silent about the war. There are plenty of stories like this, about keeping quiet about the war or crying when someone asks questions, or saying: "I don't want to talk about it." When my friend's father who was in the war was asked: "What is war?" he usually said "It's crap." There are plenty of these stories.
This program is created with the support of the Canadian philanthropic fund Ukrainian Jewish Encounter.
Originally appeared in Ukrainian (podcast) here.
Translated from Russian by Miriam Feyga Bunimovich, MF Language Services Platform
Additional translation and editing by Peter Bejger
[1] The discussion refers to a buzzword cliché popular in the Russian segment of the Internet in recent years. Originating from Stanisław Jerzy Lec's aphorism, it means the absurd revelation that the bounds of decline can be even deeper than the bottom. [Translator's note. - MFB]
