{"id":12357,"date":"2018-11-29T23:17:23","date_gmt":"2018-11-29T23:17:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/?p=12357"},"modified":"2018-11-29T23:37:10","modified_gmt":"2018-11-29T23:37:10","slug":"yohanan-petrovsky-shtern-discussed-two-new-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/yohanan-petrovsky-shtern-discussed-two-new-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern discussed two new books"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nYohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, who is a member of Ukrainian Jewish Encounter\u2019s Academic Council, recently discussed two books he authored. Below are a transcript of his interview with Hromadske Radio about his book<\/em> \u201cJews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-Existence\u201d<\/em> co-written with UJE Board Member <\/em>Paul <\/em>Robert Magocsi. That is followed by a video presentation <\/em>of \u201cThe Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew<\/a>,\u201d which originally appeared in English in 2009 and was published in Ukrainian in 2018.\u00a0 Petrovsky-Shtern spoke in Lviv at the 25 Book Forum as part of UJE\u2019s program at the 25 Book Forum.<\/em><\/h5>\n


\nHromadske Radio:\u00a0 Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-Existence<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/strong>Iryna Slavinska:\u00a0 We will be talking about the book <\/strong>Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-Existence<\/em><\/strong>, by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern<\/a>, which was co-written with Paul Robert Magocsi<\/a><\/strong>. A millennium of co-existence is quite an ambitious task for such a book. Let\u2019s start getting to know it. What should a person who picks up this book expect from it? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern:<\/strong>\u00a0 Look, most people who pick up this book do not know anything about this history. They will be discovering much that is new, and it is difficult for me to imagine what people will see there first and foremost, apart from the 350 illustrations, 30 maps, and the captions to the illustrations.<\/p>\n

I would ask this person to pay attention to one very important thing. The historian will begin reading from the second chapter, \u201cThe Historical Past\u201d; the political scientist will be looking very carefully at Chapter 11 entitled \u201cContemporary Ukraine\u201d and Chapter 12 \u201cThe Past as Present and Future.\u201d And if a person is a specialist in the history of art, s\/he will read Chapter 8 on architecture and art; a linguist, on publications and the languages of Jews and Ukrainians in Ukraine. And so forth\u2026<\/p>\n

I think that there has never been such a book in this discipline or another. This is precisely why Paul Robert Magocsi and I tried to write a book that would examine various dimensions of Ukrainian\u2013Jewish relations in various disciplines, so that there would be both publications and languages, manuscripts, libraries, printing, so that this would be history, art, folk culture, religious culture, educational organizations, the diaspora, etc.<\/p>\n

I think that this is an innovation with which we are entering the Humanities. The history of the relations of two peoples\u2026 In general, Ukrainian\u2013Jewish history is not history alone\u2014and this is a very important point in the book.<\/p>\n

Iryna Slavinska:\u00a0 I am convinced that for readers who are less acquainted with this history the very title A Millennium of Co-Existence<\/em> will be a discovery in and of itself.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern:<\/strong>\u00a0 Of course. To talk about Ukrainians and Kyivan Rus\u2032<\/a> is the same thing as saying that the starting point of the Ukrainians is the Trypilian Culture<\/a>, which, as we know, is nonsense, as very good specialists note.<\/p>\n

If we look at any of these chapters, they can be read as a narrative, as a specific account, about the evolution of relations or about the absence of these relations. But it is very important that, if Professor Magocsi and I were permitted to add a bibliography to every chapter of this book, we would have a volume containing the hundreds of articles and monographs on which our work is based. And this is a new thing. When such books are written, they are digests. We know about a certain thing, let\u2019s talk about them. This book is written differently.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take, say, the beginning of the chapter on historical relations, where we examine a very well-known mythological point connected with the Khazars\u2019<\/a> conversion to Judaism, with the influence of the Khazars on the founding of Kyivan Rus\u2032, about which Omeljan Pritsak<\/a> wrote quite a lot. Naturally, there are very many different, controversial aspects and, since I wrote this piece, it is based on dozens of monographs and articles that were published literally in the last five to seven years. In other words, I summarized everything that was available on the Khazar question and wrote about this as though I had been given the opportunity to identify, in fact, the current stage of studies devoted to this question. My two or three paragraphs on this topic are what may be called an academic review essay, that is, an essay in which I explain, without citing books, where the scholarship stands at this particular moment. And this kind of narrative may cause indignation in someone, but where does it come from? I am sorry. If I were allowed to say where I am taking this [information], I would have to append a twenty-page bibliography to these three paragraphs.<\/p>\n

Iryna Slavinska:\u00a0 It is necessary to publish a second volume, the bibliography.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern<\/strong>:\u00a0 Of course, but we can\u2019t do this because the book is intended for the general public. But I assure you that in any of these disciplines, everything that we are writing about\u2014about the painful topic of the Holocaust in Ukrainian-Jewish relations, art, or Ukrainian-Jewish cooperation during the establishment of printing presses and newspapers\u2014nearly all the most recent works have been included in this book. I only have to apologize for not including Ivan Monolatii\u2019s<\/a> book about the noted Jewish publisher [Yakiv] Orensthain<\/a> in Kolomyia who published Ukrainian literature when others didn\u2019t want to publish them and only issued German or Polish works. I confess I did not include this book.<\/p>\n

Iryna Slavinska: Since we\u2019re on the subject of bibliographies, I have this question. Were there chapters or, perhaps, historical periods for which there is a dearth of publications on the study of the history of Ukrainians and Jews? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern:<\/strong>\u00a0 That\u2019s a very good question, and I would say this. There is a lot missing on the nineteenth century and the twentieth century. For example, Roman Serbyn<\/a> wanted to publish the polemic<\/a> between the two newspapers Sion<\/em> and Osnova<\/em>, which is linked to the use of the words zhyd<\/em> and ievrei<\/em>, and which provoked, I would even say, a many months-long polemic between the Ukrainian and Jewish press in the 1860s. This is a topic fit for a monograph, and the late John Klier<\/a> has a small chapter on the Russian\u2013Jewish press, but this topic requires monograph-type research.<\/p>\n

We needed to find out something about Ukrainian\u2013Jewish relations, say, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the early seventeenth century, the period before the Khmelnytsky era. We know very little about Jewish\u2013Ukrainian relations in Galicia. In Lviv. Myron Kapral<\/a>, a wonderful specialist on this topic, published a book of documents in Lviv about these relations, but this topic needs separate monographic study. We do not have a decent monograph on the Khazar question.<\/p>\n

My colleague from Jerusalem, Alexander Kulik<\/a>, is an excellent specialist of medieval culture, medieval texts; in bits and pieces, he collects all mentions of Jews in texts written in the Old Slavonic language, and in Hebrew-language texts, in which Jews who arrive in Western Europe from Chernihiv or Volyn are mentioned. Such texts exist, and they are very interesting texts; this is the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These texts must be collected, published in the Ukrainian language, and interpreted in a monograph.<\/p>\n

There are quite a few blank spots. If I had my own institute, say, of young historians, philologists, and culture specialists who were ready to write good monographs and doctoral dissertations on these topics, I, sitting here on this chair, could give you thirty topics for doctoral dissertations and offer you ideas on how this can be done, so that they will be decent works, able to compete in the Western market.<\/p>\n

Iryna Slavinska:\u00a0 Maybe now we can concentrate a bit on individual semantic nodes. Straightaway, it is worth asking a rather sensitive question about the work being done on the topic, say, of stereotypes of Jews from the Ukrainian side and of Ukrainians from the Jewish side. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern:<\/strong>\u00a0 I think this is not just a sensitive issue; it is the main topic. And the book begins with this topic. We decided to begin it with a conversation about stereotypes. We had quite a few arguments about the people who read our book and wanted to foist all sorts of comments on us. Naturally, I thought that stereotypes, above all, are precisely what one people knows about another\u2014Ukrainians about Jews, Jews about Ukrainians.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe haidamakas<\/a><\/em> were gangs of criminals, who freely robbed everything that they clapped eyes on, who killed Jews brutally, even small children and pregnant women, on the earth that lit up with their sacrifice, the Uman land.\u201d That\u2019s how Jews view<\/a> the haidamakas.<\/p>\n

Ukrainians: \u201cThe haidamakas<\/a>, under the leadership of Zalizniak and Gonta, were brave peasants, who sought to cast off the yoke of the Polish-Catholic landowners and their Jewish lackeys.\u201d Here you have two absolutely different approaches to the haidamakas.<\/p>\n

Iryna Slavinska: Are these cited monologues constructed or someone\u2019s direct speech? Did you, as the authors, independently imagine how this narrative might be constructed? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern:<\/strong>\u00a0 You know, we thought about whether to take open quotations from third-rate but quite influential in the diaspora and Ukraine works by historians of Jewish culture, the history of Ukrainian culture, Israelis, Canadians, and Americans, and, with the aid of these quotations, demonstrate what a stereotype is. But it turned out that we had quite a good idea of these stereotypes precisely because they are stereotypes\u2014it is not necessary to quote them because they are common knowledge. It\u2019s what everyone knows.<\/p>\n

Iryna Slavinska:\u00a0 It\u2019s in the air? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern:<\/strong>\u00a0 Yes, we decided to start from this. And you know I never showed this book to my colleagues although this book was celebrated when it was seen by the rector of my university. But I did not show the book to my colleagues, the eighteen or nineteen professors from various disciplines in the Center<\/a> of Jewish Studies where I am a historian. And suddenly an economist who heads our Jewish Center came up to me and asked, \u201cYohanan, why I didn\u2019t you tell me anything about the book you wrote with Magocsi?\u201d I told him, \u201cWell, you know it\u2019s kind of a popular book\u2026\u201d He replied, \u201cI opened the book and started reading about anti-Jewish stereotypes among Ukrainians and anti-Ukrainian stereotypes among Jews and that\u2019s what my granny told me! And he told me he got interested in the book just because he immediately recognized what he absorbed with his mother\u2019s milk and what he heard in his family.<\/p>\n

This kind of stereotype is like a trampoline for any other discussion of this topic, and it is these very stereotypes that we are trying, if not to overcome, then at least to contextualize them in the book, in order to explain the sources behind them, how these stereotypes emerged. Fighting against stereotypes is the same as tilting against windmills. But I don\u2019t know which one of us was Sancho Panza and who was Don Quixote, but Magocsi and I dealt with this in our book. And, believe me, there is a lot for which we can be beaten and hounded.<\/p>\n

But we did a very important thing, I think. We created what is called a road map: Here is a book, look what\u2019s written there. It is based on the latest sources. If something is not to your liking, write your own articles, write your own monographs, write that you are doing this in a polemic with this book that does not deal with stereotypes as you see fit. Please, be my guest, as they say.<\/p>\n

Iryna Slavinska: \u00a0Besides stereotypes, the topic of history as shared history, to which this book is devoted, also comes up. And, besides the blank spots that you have already mentioned, controversial subjects exist in this shared history. For example, I don\u2019t gift \u201cKyiv Evening\u201d candies to my friends in Israel as they have images of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. I know they wouldn\u2019t be happy to see this image due to the history of the Khmelnytsky era and the attacks on Jews. Also, the participation of Ukrainians in the Holocaust. This subject is very painful for both the Jewish side and the Ukrainian side. I could name many other topics. How did you work with this material? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern:<\/strong> \u00a0We always presented this material from various points of view. For example, the Khmelnytsky era is not only a Ukrainian\u2013Jewish subject. It is a Ukrainian\u2013Austrian subject, it is a Ukrainian\u2013Muscovite subject, it is a Ukrainian\u2013Polish subject. There is a considerable number of other points of view, not just the Jewish and the Ukrainian ones. We provide various points of view on this period in the middle of the seventeenth century.<\/p>\n

Another point is to place this topic within historical development. For you and me today, Khmelnytsky is the creator of the first Ukrainian state, even though he did not have anything like this in mind; he generally did not know how to call that which he was fighting for. But, at least in both the eighteenth and the nineteenth century there was not such an enthusiastic attitude to him as we now have. Shevchenko did not like Khmelnytsky. [Mikhail] Pokrovsky\u2019s<\/a> very popular book in Ukraine from the 1920s\u2014Stalin banned it in 1933 or 1934\u2014describes the Khmelnytsky era absolutely not from the standpoint of a person who is a sympathizer of Khmelnytsky\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Iryna Slavinska: \u00a0But Khmelnytsky is not the only one. In Shevchenko\u2019s works there is an equal number of passages that are quite unpleasant for the Jewish reader. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern:<\/strong> \u00a0Of course. You know, we\u2019ll get to Shevchenko. At least when the scoundrel [Vladimir] Zotov<\/a> decided to write an antisemitic article in 1859 in the newspaper Iliustratsiia<\/em>\u2014the liberal press had just started coming out and as you know whenever the regime is liberalized, scoundrels immediately crawl out\u2014[Panteleimon] Kulish<\/a> and Shevchenko signed one of the first letters protesting Zotov\u2019s antisemitic attack. So, not everything is so simple with Taras Hryhorovych.<\/p>\n

And not everything is so simple with Paul Robert Magocsi, either. You know there are clashes between stereotypes. There is also a certain tension between two scholars, who may propose differing approaches to a topic. And this was truly the most interesting thing in the book.<\/p>\n

Iryna Slavinska: \u00a0You wrote mirror chapters in places where tension arose. But did you reach a compromise nonetheless? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern:<\/strong> \u00a0There was hardly any thematic or conceptual battle between Magocsi and me. I don\u2019t remember a single instance of this, precisely because we have a specialist, professional approach. We understand that any topic requires context, any topic requires understanding, deep knowledge of sources, analysis of sources; and in addition to everything else, any topic requires the Jewish context (in the case of Magocsi) and the Ukrainian context (in my case). And on this intellectual basis it was not very difficult to write this book.<\/p>\n

I dreamed about writing this book with Magocsi because\u2014I\u2019ll tell you a story\u2014when I first arrived in Canada on a scholarship in 1993 to the Centre<\/a> for Russian and East European Studies, I gave some lecture and Magocsi came and invited me for coffee or lunch. We were sitting and talking\u2014and this was a year and a half after Ukrainian independence and you have to understand there were so many discussions about this new and important and fantastic thing and everyone was asking what was going on. And Magocsi asked me what was going on and I considered myself so important and a VIP and responded, \u201cthe Ukrainian government\u2026\u201d \u00a0Magocsi looked at me and asked, \u201cIs there any?\u201d You know when I heard this remark, I immediately realized this person very well understood what was going on in Ukraine in 1993. I was immediately taken by this very simple question! He asked me a question.<\/p>\n

Twenty years later I understand that the government was not a government, it was a successor that occupied the institutions, it sat in those seats, but it was not a national-democratic government of a new country. It was all in this question. I knew I wanted to work with this person. And later, like in a Soviet film, \u201ctwenty years have passed\u201d and in 2009 I received a call from Magocsi\u2019s secretary who said, \u201cThe Professor would like to write a book with you\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Iryna Slavinska: A wonderful story. I have one more question. Is it possible to create a shared memory of historical events between Jews and Ukrainians?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern:<\/strong> It already exists, it is developing. I think that this book is not something that begins this memory. It is part of it; this is not the first or second year that this memory exists. It has existed for dozens of years; this is the memory of the hounding of the Ukrainian and Yiddish press in the 1860s and 1870s; this is the memory of the national renaissance of the Ukrainians, Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians and Yiddish-speaking Jews in the 1920s; this is the memory of the shared experience in the dissident milieu in the 1970s\u20131980s. And, of course, this is the memory of Jews and Ukrainians, who are building independent Ukraine together. This memory does not need to be built; you have to apply efforts to it.<\/p>\n

This program was made possible by the Canadian non-profit organization Ukrainian Jewish Encounter.<\/em><\/p>\n

Originally appeared in Ukrainian (Hromadske Radio podcast) here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Translated from the Ukrainian by Marta D. Olynyk.
\nEdited by Peter Bejger.<\/em><\/h5>\n


\nPresentation of the book <\/strong>The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew<\/em><\/strong> by Prof. Yohanan Petrovsky Shtern at the 25 Book Forum in Lviv on 20 September 2018. Moderated by Andriy Pavlyshyn. <\/strong>(in Ukrainian)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n