{"id":37147,"date":"2026-04-22T17:50:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T21:50:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/?p=37147"},"modified":"2026-04-22T17:57:16","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T21:57:16","slug":"perceptions-of-the-jew-in-ukrainian-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/perceptions-of-the-jew-in-ukrainian-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"\"The Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter: Cultural Dimensions\": Part 4.1"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Ukrainian Jewish Encounter was founded in 2008 with the goal of building stronger relations between Ukrainians and Jews, two peoples who, for centuries, lived side by side on the territory of what is modern-day Ukraine. Since then, in keeping with its motto, \"Our stories are incomplete without each other,\" UJE has sponsored conferences, round-table discussions and research, as well as translations and publication of works the organization anticipates will promote a deeper understanding between the two peoples and an appreciation of their respective cultures.<\/p>\n

We offer for the first time the book\u00a0The Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter: Cultural Dimensions\u00a0<\/em>in an eBook format.<\/p>\n

The book is a collection of essays that examine the interaction between the Ukrainian and Jewish cultures from the seventeenth century onwards. Written by leading experts from Ukraine, Israel, and other countries, the book presents a broad perspective on parallels and cross-cultural influences in various domains \u2014 including the visual arts, folklore, music, literature, and language. Several essays also focus on mutual representation \u2014 for example, perceptions of the \"Other\" as expressed in literary works or art history.<\/p>\n

The richly illustrated volume contains a wealth of new information on these little-explored topics. The book appears as volume 25 in the series\u00a0Jews and Slavs,<\/em>\u00a0published by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem since 1993. In several previous volumes, considerable attention is given to the defining role of the Old Testament in Ukrainian literature and art and to the depiction of Jewish life in Ukraine in the works of Nikolai Gogol, Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, Lesia Ukrainka, Vladimir Korolenko, and other writers.<\/p>\n

This collection of essays was co-edited by Wolf Moskovich, Professor Emeritus, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Alti Rodal, Co-Director of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, who also wrote the introduction to the volume. It was published in 2016 by Hebrew University of Jerusalem.<\/p>\n

4.1<\/span><\/h1>\n

Click\u00a0here for a pdf\u00a0<\/a>of the entire book.<\/p>\n

Perceptions of the Jew in Ukrainian literature<\/h2>\n

Myroslav Shkandrij (University of Manitoba, Winnipeg)<\/span>
\n<\/em><\/strong>The Ukrainian-Jewish relationship is often conceptualized through one of two master narratives: the history of antisemitism or the history of the Ukrainian struggle for national liberation. The first links the imaginative representation of Jews in Christian Europe to an unchanging vocabulary with roots in an anti-Judaism that for two millennia has been closely linked to Christian self-affirmation. Within this master narrative Ukrainian-Jewish relations are often seen through a discursive framework of religious hatred and communal violence. The Jewish historian S. Dubnow even spoke of the \"pogrom mission\" of Ukrainians throughout all history and claimed that this was a feature of the \"Ukrainian soul\" (Dubnov 1923, 9, 12). Those who follow this line of reasoning might describe the Khmelnytsky Uprising of 1648, the Koliivshchyna revolt in 1768, the revolutionary violence of 1919, and the genocidal killings during the Second World War as irrational social convulsions that constitute episodes in this narrative.<\/p>\n

The second master narrative links Jews to Polish, Russian, or Soviet efforts to hold back the rising Ukrainian national movement. With a focus on the struggle for self-determination of Europe's largest stateless nation, this narrative laments the \"denationalization\" of cities (which in the seventeenth century had been overwhelmingly Ukrainian), the suppression of the Ukrainian language and culture, and the denial of identity \u2014 all of which are seen as resulting from Polish or Russian attempts to dominate urban life, education, and high culture, and to assimilate Ukrainians. The alignment of Jews with the dominant nations and their refusal to support the cause of the oppressed majority are seen as linked to a colonial attitude, an expression of contempt for the Ukrainian culture as peasant, rural, and unsophisticated, and therefore a rejection of the possibility of statehood.<\/p>\n

Ukrainian literature portrays Jewish-Ukrainian relations in ways that often challenge both these master narratives. It contains a submerged and little-analyzed discourse of interaction that has spanned centuries but was particularly intense in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are many literary texts that testify to an intimate interaction between figures in the two communities, and to alliances as well as antagonisms between the two peoples.<\/p>\n

A negative representation of Jews dominated Ukrainian literature from the 1830s to the 1880s, expressed in portrayals of Agasuerus or the Wandering Jew; Marko Prokliaty (Marko the Cursed), who combats Agasuerus and is the latter's mirror image; the orendar (leaseholder); and the tavern-keeper. In the twentieth century the dominant negative images were the communist commissar and the Chekist (secret police). However, these images evolved, often receiving positive features and reaching a level of individualization and complexity that prevented them from being simplified and used as stereotypes. This evolution occasionally was countered by attempts to displace the complex images with earlier archetypal ones.<\/p>\n

The most negative image has probably been that of the Jewish orendar, who in the nineteenth century was portrayed as the scourge of Ukraine. In works depicting Khmelnytsky's time he is portrayed as a tax collector, ruthless exploiter, ally of the foreign oppressor (the Polish magnates), and enemy of Orthodox Christians. The image of the Jew who holds the keys to the church and demands payment for church services became a topos in both Ukrainian and Russian literatures after Mykola (Nikolai) Kostomarov and Panteleimon Kulish introduced the figure in the 1830s and 1840s. Kostomarov's Pereiaslavska nich: Trahediia <\/em>(Pereiaslav Night. A Tragedy, 1841) gives a powerful literary embodiment to this image. The play is set in 1649, and the refusal to unlock the church during Easter week starts the action. Father Anastasii spends an entire day collecting money to pay the orendar Ovram so that the church can be opened. There are additional outrages against Orthodoxy. A Uniate (Byzantine-rite Catholic) bishop is described as being carried by twelve Rus men, with a Jew as driver. It is forbidden to bake Easter bread (paska) and a woman who tries to do so is dragged off by her hair and thrown into prison. In this way economic exploitation is linked to national and religious outrage.<\/p>\n

The truth or falsehood of the church-renting issue has been discussed elsewhere (Kalik; Shkandrij 17\u201319). The significance of the image, however, lies in the enormous influence it exerted on popular attitudes and the way it was used as an ideological tool. These negative images reached into the past for support, drawing from sources such as the early nineteenth-century Istoriia Rusov <\/em>(History of the Rus); the eighteenth-century Vertep puppet theatre, in which like a commedia del arte <\/em>figure the Jew appears in a stock role (he is in conflict with the Zaporozhian Cossack who outwits or punishes him); and some portrayals in religious dramas and songs. These elements crystallized in the literature of the 1830s and 1840s into the character of the exploitative, merciless orendar \u2014 a stereotype made to represent all Jews and used by some political forces to mobilize outrages against contemporary Jewish populations.<\/p>\n

During the more liberal 1860s, when Jews were allowed to publish newspapers (in the Russian language) and Ukrainians were given permission to issue the journal Osnova <\/em>(Foundation), Kostomarov wrote several articles on the Jews. He drew a picture of what in his view was the essential Jew, the Jew in all places and in all times. In this regard he summoned up another stereotype, the miser, by invoking Shakespeare's portrayal of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice<\/em>, and nineteenth-century portrayals of the Eternal Jew as connected with the image of the European banker (Kostomarov 1862, 46). The orendar of Khmelnytsky's time was in this way \"modernized\" and became the contemporary capitalist banker. Twenty years later, in one of his Russian-language stories, Kostomarov also suggested Jews might have engaged in the ritual murder of Christians. \"Zhidotrepannia v nachale XVIII veka\" (Jew-Beating in the Early Eighteenth Century, 1883) describes the murder of a Ukrainian student called Mykola Sokhno by a Jewish tavern-keeper during Hetman Mazepa's rule. The murder is said to be sanctioned by the Hasidic community's tsaddik<\/em>, who is incensed by the student's criticism of Judaism. Sokhno maintains that the evidence presented at various legal trials demonstrates that the accusation of ritual murder must have some basis in reality. He has read everything written by Christians on the subject and is convinced that such murders occurred. In addition, the narrator suggests that there may be truth to the accusations, stating, \"nothing infuriates a Jew more than to be reminded of this secret, terrible question, which in spite of many historical facts, remains to this day unresolved\" (Kostomarov 2005, 160). Kostomarov's story was published just after the 1881\u201382 pogroms, at a time when many writers who were shocked by the events expressed sympathy for the victims. Kostomarov's story appears to be an attempt to challenge this outpouring of sympathy and to reinforce the imaginary border between Jews and Ukrainians at a time when it was being eroded.<\/p>\n

Olena Pchilka, who edited the popular weekly Ridnyi krai <\/em>(Native Land) from 1907\u201314, published a series of articles that reinforced the view that Jews had in the past acted against Ukraine's national interests and persecuted Ukrainians during Polish rule. As proof, she indicated the presence in archives of contractual arrangements with Jewish orendars that prove the existence of church leasings, and insisted that the ancient dumas and folksongs, which she took to be historically accurate depictions of events, proved the widespread nature of this practice. She objected to what was in her view an excessively positive image of Jews in contemporary Ukrainian writing, singling out for ridicule Ivan Tohobochny's Zhydivka-Vykhrestka <\/em>(The Jewess-Convert, 1909), as well as works by Modest Levytsky, Dmytro Markovych, and Stepan Vasylchenko. Challenging their portrayal of kindly altruistic Jews, she insisted in response to a story by Levytsky that in her own experience Jews were more likely to rob than to help a train passenger. She was particularly offended by Vasylchenko's Zilia Korolevych <\/em>(1913) because the play shows a Ukrainian school teacher's attraction to the son of a Jewish merchant. Her comment: \"Why could not a capable, intelligent, young villager or Cossack be favored with the young lady's attention?\" (Ibid., 225). Her discomfort was clearly not caused by the unconvincing nature of the portrayal but by the fact that a positive image of Jews went against her understanding of the \"Jewish national type\" as a priori \"hostile to the Ukrainian nature\" (Ibid., 232). In the spirit of nineteenth-century Romanticism, she held an essentialist view of national character and reacted to the blurring of demarcation lines between national \"types\" or \"natures\" \u2014 and, by extension, to the dissolution of old stereotypes.<\/p>\n

Kostomarov and Pchilka summarize standard Ukrainian prejudices against Jews. Significantly, their works were chosen for republication by MAUP (Mizhrehionalna Asotsiiatsiia Upravlinnia Personalom) [Interregional Academy of Personnel Management] in 2005 and 2006. This private degree-giving institution actively promoted antisemitism (reportedly with financial support from outside Ukraine, including from Iran and Libya) and issued a number of antisemitic publications that resuscitated stereotypes from the past. One such publication, Zhydotriepanie <\/em>(Jew-Beating, 2005), is an anthology of selected texts, mainly by Kulish and Kostomarov, which focus on the image of the orendar. In his introduction to this anthology, Vasyl Yeremenko also accuses Jews of ritual murders and attributes revolutionary terrorism to them, including the 1881 assassination of the tsar. The anthology includes antisemitic cartoons from the Russian press of the 1880s, reproduced with comments that provide a contemporary spin. The message is that Jewish perverseness has remained unchanged throughout the ages. Another MAUP publication, Vykynuti ukraintsi <\/em>(Rejected Ukrainians, 2006), consists of a collection of Pchilka's journalistic writing from 1908\u201314. It is introduced by Valerii Arkhypov, who, like Pchilka, refers to folklore as evidence of the widespread despotism of the orendars. He also suggests that the murder for which Mendel Beilis was tried and acquitted was indeed a ritual killing, and deplores the vigorous protests against this libel by the liberal Ukrainian intelligentsia, including Mykhailo Hrushevsky. Like Yeremenko, Arkhypov draws support from reactionary Russian authors who published antisemitic brochures in 1912 and 1917.<\/p>\n

In addition to the alleged foreign funding for MAUP's antisemitic publications, another motivation for returning to these stereotypes might be related to an anxiety created by loss of control over the discourse. As new knowledge, theories, and attitudes challenge stereotypical images, the republication of century-old texts and cartoons may reflect a desire to counter the contemporary deconstruction of stereotypes and to reassert them in an updated context, while linking them with older familiar notions (Said 1978, 58\u201359). Apparently, this was the strategy of the MAUP publications: to emphasize an image that the editors claim is settled and to appeal to an unchanging view of culture and human nature, while introducing a contemporary twist. The resulting outcry against MAUP's blatant promotion of antisemitism, however, put an end to further publications in this vein by this institution.<\/p>\n

However, there are also many examples in Ukrainian literature of Jewish characters being portrayed sympathetically. Characters such as the poor Jew, the vykhrest <\/em>(convert), and the victimized girl were prevalent in the years 1880\u20131917. At this time Ukrainian literature was overwhelmingly philosemitic and portrayed the suffering of the ordinary, poor Jews with understanding. Even the figure of the orendar or tavern-keeper was at times treated in a positive light. This was partly in response to the first great wave of pogroms in the early 1880s, but also partly due to the fact that in these decades a number of figures in the Ukrainian and Jewish intelligentsias worked together in the civil rights struggle against the tsarist regime. There was also a practical consideration. Leaders of the Ukrainian national movement knew that Ukrainians constituted only about a third of the urban population, while Russians, Poles, or Jews made up two-thirds. Aware that they would have great difficulty in finding support among the Russians and Poles, the Ukrainian leadership hoped to form an alliance with the Jews. This became an important part of their strategy in the 1917 Revolution and explains in part the granting of national-cultural autonomy to the Jews and other minorities by the government of the Ukrainian National Republic. The collapse of statehood and the ensuing pogrom wave of 1919 effectively ended this cooperation.<\/p>\n

Some of the most popular plays of the 1890s \u2014 such as Mykhailo Starytsky's Yurko Dovbysh <\/em>(Yurko Dovbush, 1888, 1910) and Ivan Tohobochny's Zhydivka-vykhrestka <\/em>(The Jewess-Convert, 1896, published 1909) \u2014 integrate the Ukrainian and Jewish worlds. Often they played to mixed Ukrainian and Jewish audiences. Generally banned in the cities, some Ukrainian theatre troupes toured educational institutions in small towns, including Jewish yeshivas (higher religious schools), and needed plays to reach out to this public. In the wake of the 1905 Revolution, many censorship laws and restrictions were lifted and the first stationary Ukrainian theatre in Kyiv was opened in 1907. It immediately included in its repertoire works by Jewish playwrights and works on Ukrainian-Jewish relations. Ivan Tohobochny's Zhydivka-vykhrestka <\/em>was performed numerous times. Incidentally, this play was also shown at least twenty-four times in Canada between 1913 and 1923. The play deals with the issue of converting and assimilating Jews. Sara falls in love with Stepan, becomes a Christian and marries him, by this act breaking her father's heart. Both she and her father Leibe are liked by the villagers. He disowns her and loses his mind. However, Sara discovers that she has married a philanderer, who quickly returns to one of his previous lovers. She changes back into her Jewish clothing, takes her baby, and returns to her father. Eventually, she hangs herself after observing Stepan's unfaithfulness. The viewer is asked to consider Stepan's destructive passion, which, at one point, even turns his mind to the idea of murdering his wife and baby. The story ridicules antisemitic gossip among village women, some of whom swear that during Sara's christening they saw with their own eyes steam rising from her \"as though from a chimney\" and accuse her of using charms to win over Stepan. Sara, now christened Maria, complains: \"Do I not have a soul, a heart like theirs? Even small children are taught to ridicule me! A sorceress they call me\u2026What kind of sorceress am I?\" (Tohobochny 1922, 37) Even after she becomes a Christian, she is still ostracized as a Jewess. Her fear is that her son will also fail to find acceptance. Although her mother-in-law and the villagers love her, they are unable to save her. The message is directed both at those who hold prejudices, and those who manipulate these prejudices to further their own immoral acts. At the play's end the audience is made to feel that Sara's conversion and death have been a tragic loss to both the Ukrainian and Jewish communities.<\/p>\n

Unlike a number of Russian authors, Ukrainian writers in this period do not express suspicion concerning the motivation of Jews to become Christians \u2014 converts are presented as driven by personal love, without expecting any material reward. On the contrary, the emphasis is on the convert's courage and self-sacrificing behaviour, which only makes the prejudiced antagonists appear more ridiculous. Nor is there any suggestion in these plays that Jews should be converted or that Judaism has outlived its time \u2014 a theme that has been described as \"a commonplace of both Christian apologetics and Romantic historiography since Hegel\" (Safran 183). Jewish households are depicted in a number of these plays, implying an acceptance of cultural diversity. Jewish characters are fluent in Ukrainian. They live side-by-side with Ukrainians as full members of the community, even while their cultural specificity is recognized: Jews have their own religion and rituals, their own food, interiors, clothing, and view of the world. It is precisely because Ukrainians know their Jewish neighbours well that the tragedy of Jewish suffering is strongly felt.<\/p>\n

Almost the entire modernist generation of the years preceding the 1917 revolution embraced a philosemitic stance \u2014 including writers such as: Oleksandr, Oles, Ahatanhel, Krymsky, Hnat Khotkevych, and Volodymyr Vynnychenko. This positive stance was carried over into the revolutionary and immediate post-revolutionary years in the works of Stepan Vasylchenko, Modest Levytsky, and Klym Polishchuk \u2014 writers who were widely published or republished in the 1920s. Vasylchenko had made a name for himself in the pre-revolutionary years with his depiction of the downtrodden who yearn for a better future. During the revolution, he wrote stories that portrayed Jewish characters with sympathy and understanding, reportedly in response to a request from Symon Petliura for short popular prose that would help counteract the wave of pogroms. One such story, \"Pro zhydka Marchyka bidnoho kravchyka\" (About the Poor Jew Marchyk the Tailor), was published in the newspaper Ukraina <\/em>(Ukraine, 1919) and as a separate publication in the same year. It depicts a poor Jew, who, along with his fellow townspeople, welcomes the February 1917 revolution, but perishes a year later. In this world that promises so much freedom, Avrum and his wife Liia conceive a child. However, when the baby is born, the country has already experienced the invasion of the Red Army and the spread of anarchy. To avoid the approaching violence, Avrum and his family take refuge in a cellar, but the quarter is surrounded and burned down. Those who try to escape are bayoneted. Avrum and his family perish and his story, the one he began telling in a state of euphoria at a meeting in the revolution's early days, remains unfinished. Vasylchenko's narrative reflects the tragic fate of the Jewish population, but also suggests that the moment of coming together was within reach before being lost. The dream of a happy birth and a future in freedom perishes in violence and destruction. Whereas the author's earlier work documented the growth in mutual understanding between two communities, here the violent end to that process is recorded. Klym Polishchuk's stories deal with the revolution in central Ukraine, but were published in Lviv, where he spent the years 1921\u201325 before returning to Soviet Ukraine and being imprisoned in the Gulag. His protagonists are unavoidably caught up in the events, find themselves first in one army then another, fight not out of conviction but in order to survive, and show little enthusiasm for ideology. The story \"Manivtsiamy (Iz zapysnoi knyzhky nevidomoho)\" (Sideroads: From the Notebook of an Unknown, 1921) presents the diary of a Red Army soldier, a former nationalist supporter, who was killed in battle. It records his horror at witnessing the violence on both sides, particularly when he discovers that Ida Golberg, a celebrated actress, was murdered during a pogrom. Ironically, the commanders of both the nationalist and communist armies know one another intimately. Both claim to be fighting for an independent Ukraine. But the two sides do not encompass all of Ukraine: as the diary's author records burying his beloved actress, he comments poignantly that two Ukraines are fighting one another while a third lies buried in the grave before him.<\/p>\n

The alliance of the two intelligentsias continued to a large extent in the Soviet 1920s during the period when parallel Ukrainian and Jewish institution-building brought the two intelligentsias together. In this decade many supporters of Ukrainianization viewed the development of a secular Jewish culture in Yiddish as a potential barrier against Russification, as had the government of the Ukrainian National Republic a few years earlier. The twenties saw the flowering of Yiddish literature in Ukraine and many prominent Ukrainian figures \u2014 such as Pavlo Tychyna, Les Kurbas, Maik Yohansen, Yurii Smolych, Myroslav Irchan, and Mykola Bazhan \u2014 working closely with Jewish colleagues.<\/p>\n

The Jewish voice within Ukrainian literature has been discussed in Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern's book, The Anti-Imperial Choice: the Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Jew<\/em>. For the pre-revolutionary years it is worth mentioning Hryts Kernerenko (Kerner), who contributed to the leading Ukrainian journals and anthologies, and produced four books of poetry dealing with love and loneliness. He also published the patriotic \"I znov na Vkraini\" (Once more in Ukraine), in which Ukraine is described as a promised land that overflows with milk and honey, a \"holy\" and \"sacred\" land that is dear to. [1]<\/a> From 1900 Kernerenko began writing on explicitly Jewish themes and expressing Zionist sentiments. At the same time he was the first writer to clearly raise the issue of a Jewish-Ukrainian identity. In \"Ne ridnyi syn\" (Not a Native Son, 1908), he portrays himself as an orphan, who has been adopted by his stepmother, Ukraine. His life has been one of suffering because of the mockery he has endured. Although he loves his stepmother, he feels that he has not been accepted. Published in 1908, the poem presents the situation of Jews who wish see their Ukrainianness recognized, but who feel that the obstacles to creating a Jewish-Ukrainian identity are perhaps insurmountable.<\/p>\n

Another poem by Kernerenko, \"Monopoliia\" (Monopoly, 1902) deals with the law prohibiting Jews to sell alcohol. They had originally received this right from Polish kings in previous centuries. In the wake of the pogroms of 1881\u201383 the tsar's Minister of the Interior Nikolai Ignatiev, who blamed the Jews for the violence, banished them from villages and introduced a state monopoly on alcohol production. The poet makes the point that the stereotype of the Jewish innkeeper is no longer valid, and therefore no one has the right to insult a Jew with the word shynkar<\/em>, or innkeeper. The prohibition, in other words, has removed an obstacle dividing Ukrainians and Jews.<\/p>\n

Petrovsky-Shtern has emphasized the fact that the conscious choice of Ukrainian as a literary medium was in itself a strong anti-colonial statement. In the face of received imperial opinion, the poet saw Ukrainian as a medium of great sophistication, and one that was congenial to other nations such as the Jews because it was saturated in the discourse of national self-determination. This sentiment aligned him with the views of Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky and other Jewish intellectuals who were supporters of the Ukrainian national movement. Petrovsky-Shtern considers Kernerenko among the first to discover that the Ukrainian language was well suited to expressing the political, social, and cultural concerns of Jews and, more broadly, the national concerns of non-Ukrainians.<\/p>\n

Raisa Troianker combined nostalgia for a Jewish childhood with an assertive eroticism. At the age of thirteen she ran away from her Jewish family in Uman to live with an Italian tiger-tamer from the visiting circus. Later she fell in love with Volodymyr Sosiura after hearing him read his poetry and followed him to Kharkiv, where she became part of the leading literary circles and published two poetry collections. Yurii Smolych's memoirs Intymni spohady <\/em>(Intimate Confessions, 1945) focus on her erotic adventures, but her poetry deserves attention not only for the image of a passionate and vulnerable lover, but also because it is the voice of a woman struggling to reconcile two identities.<\/p>\n

After the collapse of tsarism, the Ukrainianization policy brought many Jews to Ukrainian culture. Leonid Pervomaisky is the greatest talent in the large cohort of Jewish writers who entered Ukrainian literature in the 1920s. His writing spans most of the Soviet experience. In his early work he attempted to articulate a Jewish Ukrainian identity. In Zemlia obitovana <\/em>(Promised Land, 1927) he portrays a boy, Yerukhym, who escapes from the stifling atmosphere of the shtetl <\/em>and his alcoholic, abusive Jewish father, and takes up with young thieves in the city. Eventually, he returns, but only to leave again, striking out on his own. He begins to understand \"that his escape was a kind of protest,\" against the synagogue, \"the traditional, conservative spirit,\" and \"the implacable Jehovah \u2014 a vengeful, degenerate old man\" (Zemlia <\/em>98). And yet, in the final pages, when all other Jews have turned their backs on him, an old man who has read the prayer for the dead over his father's grave (something Yerukhym refused to do), turns to the boy in a gentle way, and placing his hand on his shoulder says: \"You are stubborn\u2026 That is very good. It is very good to be stubborn. You will reach your goal.\" Yerukhym rises and shakes the old man's hand warmly. The old man accompanies him to the cemetery gates and wishes him luck. The narrative shows that for the new generation of urbanized Jews the break with their former identity is painful. The message is that the promised land of Israel is being supplanted in the mind of young people like Yerukhym by the \"promised land\" of building socialism in contemporary Ukraine, even though the substitution of one goal by another will not be easy. Yerukhym is torn between worlds. As a result, this early work is tinged with ambiguity and a subtle tragic irony.<\/p>\n

In the thirties, as a ruthless and uncompromising spirit took hold of literature, Pervomaisky moved away from emphasis on the possibility of human understanding. His poetry of 1929\u201333 asserted a \"Stalinist\" hard line that characterized the countryside as entirely anti-Bolshevik. However, during the war he wrote stories full of Ukrainian patriotism. Persecuted during the so-called anti-cosmopolitan campaign in Stalin's last years, he attempted suicide in 1953. The writer found himself attacked both as a Jew (for \"cosmopolitanism\" and lack of patriotism) and as a Ukrainian writer (for excessive nationalism).<\/p>\n

However, Pervomaisky outlived Stalin. In the sixties and early seventies, he produced his great novel of the war, Dykyi med <\/em>(Wild Honey, 1963) and his best lyric poetry: the verse collections Uroky poezii <\/em>(Lessons of Poetry, 1968) and Drevo piznannia <\/em>(Tree of Knowledge, 1971). These contain lucid imagery, measured rhythms, and an economy of expression. It is the poetry of wisdom and experience, but also passionate feeling. He looks back upon life philosophically and speaks simply about the essential human experiences (youth, love, old age, approaching death), and the great twentieth-century tragedies (war, Babyn Yar, Maidanek, atrocities, idol worship, and lack of self-awareness). He also writes poignantly about the mistakes his generation committed. This was taken by most readers as a reference to the grim years of Stalinism, when many young people had been fanatical supporters of a repressive regime and when writers had often played a deplorable role, however indirectly, in justifying the regime's murderous policies.<\/p>\n

Pervomaisky's oeuvre captures the complexities of the entanglement with Soviet reality over six decades and is a good source for understanding how Jewish identity was negotiated in Ukrainian literature. He began as a communist neophyte but gradually eliminated almost everything \"Soviet\" in himself. By the end of his life he appeared to most readers as simply a Ukrainian writer, whose literary persona encompassed his Jewishness without emphasizing it. His poetry was addressed to humanity, and was often concerned primarily with his own conscience.<\/p>\n

Among contemporary Ukrainian writers one of the most prominent is Moisei Fishbein. He is now an Israeli citizen but made his literary debut in Ukraine in the 1970s. He was born in 1946 in Chernivtsi (Czernowitz), a city with an unusual mixture of cultures (German, Ukrainian, Jewish, Romanian, Polish and Russian) that has for centuries nurtured a strong and self-confident Jewish population. After 1979 Fishbein worked for a number of years in Germany for Radio Svoboda's Ukrainian section before moving to Israel. Fishbein lives in both the Jewish and Ukrainian worlds, combining identities and patriotisms. He speaks of the tragic experience of the Second World War and the Holocaust: one of his most moving poems \"Yar\" deals with Babyn Yar. At the same time he shows a profound respect for the Ukrainian language and culture, and laments their forcible marginalization. The language itself is described in terms of raped child in his \"Netorkani y gvaltovani\" (Untouched and Raped). Fishbein is best known for the way in which he continually examines his Jewish and Ukrainian identities and meditates on their development. In \"Ya vbytyi buv shistnadtsiatoho roku\" (I was killed in 1916) he looks to the failed rapprochement of the pre-Revolutionary years. He portrays himself as having been killed during a pogrom in 1916, but also envisages a time when he will be resurrected. Because of his integration of Jewish and Ukrainian perspectives, he has become a symbol of pluralism and tolerance in the post-independence period.<\/p>\n

These four writers \u2014 Kernerenko, Troianker, Pervomaisky, and Fishbein \u2014 can be seen as representing the Jewish voice and identity in modern Ukrainian literature. Each reveals the difficulties faced in articulating this identity. Together they perhaps describe an evolutionary dynamic: from orphanhood, through the struggle for self-definition, to an almost seamless fusion of Jewish and Ukrainian components. Or, in another way of thinking, they model three possible ways of self-perception: as an outsider, as a partially visible but uncomfortably positioned insider, or as a fully acknowledged citizen and patriot.<\/p>\n

Apart from these four writers, negative stereotypes of Jews \u2014 in particular the exploitative orendar and the dishonest tavern-keeper as a source of social ills \u2014 reemerged in the late 1930s in popular dramas performed in western Ukraine, then under Polish rule. These stereotypes came to the fore in conjunction with the promotion of the cooperative movement, the anti-alcohol campaign, and the spread of Prosvita (Enlightenment) reading clubs in interwar Galicia. Jews figured prominently in a negative light in a number of the didactic plays that addressed the problems of poverty and alcoholism among the Ukrainian masses.<\/p>\n

Toward the end of the decade a more virulent antisemitism emerged in some of these plays. In Vasyl Hulyk's Het z lykhvoiu, pianstvom i temnotoiu <\/em>(Away with Usury, Alcoholism and Ignorance, 1937), the heroine delivers the following denunciation of Moshko the tavern-keeper and his fellow-Jews: \"You are worse than despo us to develop our commerce and industry. With trickery you draw from our people their last, bloody coin; our people are dying from hunger and cold, and are continuously in want. You, on the other hand, drag blood-soaked earnings from us by trickery and grow wealthy, sending the rest [of the money] to Palestine. With our bloody money you build various factories and universities there... Go to Palestine, to the promised land, to work and live there!\" (Hulyk 1937, 11). This diatribe is a compendium of the traits that reinforce the stereotype: the Jew is socially exploitative, deceitful, merciless to the local population, and a foreign presence that needs to be removed. Moshko's business does indeed suffer and he decides to leave for Palestine. However, the Ukrainian who buys the tavern from him, hoping to get rich, does not thrive.<\/p>\n

The orendar from Khmelnytsky's time and the \"keys to the church theme\" resurfaced in Spyrydon Cherkasenko's Vyhadlyvyi bursak: Komediika dlia molodi v 2-kh diiakh z chasiv Khmelnychchyny <\/em>(The Enterprising Student: A Comedy for Youth in Two Acts from Khmelnytsky's Time, 1937), and in Panas Fedenko's Homonila Ukraina <\/em>(Ukraine Roared, 1942) which was published in Prague. The character of the orendar in this last book recapitulates every accusation made against Jews in connection with the 1648 Cossack uprising.<\/p>\n

Also in the 1930s, Dmytro Dontsov, an influential ideologist of authoritarian nationalism, tried to establish a firm line between the European spirit (to which Ukraine belonged) and the Asian, Semitic, and American, which he depicted in a negative light. He mapped a series of oppositions and contrasts, juxtaposing, for example, Christianity and Judaism, and insisting on their absolute separation, even going so far as to assert that Christ was Galilean and not Jewish. The \"works of the Jewish national genius,\" he wrote, \"are foreign to us in the same way as the works of the Ukrainian national genius are foreign to Jews\" (Dontsov 1967, 281). There are, however, contradictions in Dontsov's depiction of Ukrainian essentialism as intrinsically different from Jewish essentialism. The Jewish and Christian faiths share not only the Bible as sacred text, but also respect for the sanctity and dignity of each human life, and for compassion and tolerance \u2014 this is manifest in Ukrainian literature, which has been deeply influenced by Judeo-Christian values. Dontsov showed a clear aversion to these values, which he, like Nietzsche, associated with submissive weakness. In fact, he rejected almost all leading Ukrainian writers as \"infected\" by them. He admired in Christianity the figure of the crusader: religion was merely a tool for mobilizing the nation in a great war against a corrupt civilization. And the enemy was not only communism, but also Western materialism and hedonism, as his brochure Khrest proty Diavola <\/em>(The Cross Against the Devil, 1948), a transcript of a speech he gave in Toronto's Massey Hall in 1948, makes clear.<\/p>\n

Some wartime writers, like Arkadii Liubchenko, gave voice to a racially based antisemitism. In his diary he expresses a horror of the m\u00e9tis<\/em>, or mixed natures, and sees the pollution of the pure and noble Ukrainian essence by other races as a source of evil. His view of the nation is very clearly biologically constructed, and the Jew is a foreign body within this organism, preventing its proper functioning and leading to pathological deformations.<\/p>\n

Postwar \u00e9migr\u00e9 writers associated with MUR (Artistic Ukrainian Movement), such as Yurii Kosach and Dokiia Humenna, produced entirely different perspectives on the war and criticized Dontsov's views. Yurii Sherekh (Shevelov), the leading \u00e9migr\u00e9 critic, argued that the humane and compassionate literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century represented the mainstream Ukrainian tradition. Humenna's novel Khreshchatyi yar (Kyiv 1941\u201343): Roman-khronika <\/em>[The Cruciform Ravine (Kyiv 1941\u201343): A Novel-chronicle, 1956] is an account of the German occupation. The main protagonist, Mariana, is anti-Soviet, anti-Nazi, and critical of all forms of authoritarianism. The novel chronicles the population's response to the Soviet retreat, the arrival of the Nazis, the massacre in Babyn Yar, and the return of the Red Army. It demonstrates the fluctuation of public opinion, including attitudes toward the Jews. A thoughtful attempt to grapple with the Holocaust and with Jewish-Ukrainian relations in postwar fiction, the novel raises the issues of political conformism, the guilt felt by silent witnesses, and the need to construct a narrative for even the most traumatic events. It tells the story of both Jewish and Ukrainian suffering, and at the same time broadens the idea of nation. Humenna's imagined nation includes all who have throughout the millennia lived on the territory of Ukraine. In this way, the novel grapples with the issue of who constitutes \"family,\" how an inclusive identity should look, and how a narrative of inclusiveness can be constructed. The writer's concept of community stretches racial and national categories to the point of dissolving them. She invokes the Trypillians, the Scythians, the Polovtsians, the Jews, and other races, all of whom have blended into or left their mark on the people and culture of today's Ukraine.<\/p>\n

In the postwar Soviet period, writers such as Mykola Bazhan and Yurii Smolych produced images of Jewish suffering during the war, but the Holocaust as a subject and any expression of Jewish particularism was not permitted. These topics have emerged in the literature produced since Ukrainian independence. Writers such as Yurii Andrukhovych, Mariia Matios, Maryna Hrymych, and Volodymyr Yeshkilev have also complicated the self-image of Ukrainians by finding space within the culture for a Jewish presence. This aligns with the contemporary attempt to fashion an inclusive identity, one that accommodates regional, religious, ethnic, and other variations.<\/p>\n

In the post-independence period many writers have tried to dismantle stereotypes and to discredit the idea of simple, organic essences. As they imagine Ukraine and Ukrainian-Jewish relations, however, they still must contend with the history of representation in Ukrainian literature and culture \u2014 which includes not only the stereotypes that have been generated, but also the way these have been challenged and transformed.<\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Bhabha, Homi K. \"The Other Question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism.\" In his The Location of Culture<\/em>, 66\u201384. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.<\/p>\n

Dontsov, Dmytro. Khrestom i mechem<\/em>. Toronto: Homin, 1967.<\/p>\n

Dubnov, S. \"Tretia gaidamachina. Istoricheskoe vstuplenie.\" In Antisemitizm i pogromy na Ukraine, 1917\u20131918 gg. (K istorii ukrainsko-evreiskikh otnoshenii<\/em>), edited by I. Cherikover, 9\u201315. Berlin: Ostjudisches Historisches Archiv, 1923.<\/p>\n

Kalik, Judith. \"The Orthodox Church and the Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commmonwealth.\" Jewish History <\/em>17.2 (2003): 229\u201337.<\/p>\n

Kostomarov, N.I. \"Iudeiam.\" Osnova <\/em>(1862): 38\u201358.<\/p>\n

Zhidotrepannie v nachale XVIII veka. In his Zhydotriepanie<\/em>, 2005, 146\u2013225.<\/p>\n

Liubchenko, Arkadii. Shchodennyk Arkadiia Liubchenka<\/em>. Lviv and New-York: Vydavnytstvo M.P. Kots, 1999.<\/p>\n

Pchilka, Olena. Vykynuti ukraintsi<\/em>. Kyiv: Mizhrehionalna Akademiia Upravlinnia Personalom, 2006.<\/p>\n

Petrovsky-Shtern, Yohanan. The Anti-Imperial Choice: the Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Jew<\/em>. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2009.<\/p>\n

Safran, Gabriella. Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire<\/em>. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.<\/p>\n

Said, Edward. Orientalism<\/em>. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Shkandrij, Myroslav. Jews in Ukrainian Literature: Representation and<\/em><\/p>\n

Identity<\/em>. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.<\/p>\n

Tohobochny Ivan. (pseud. of Ivan Shchoholiv). Zhydivka Vykhrestka: Drama v V diiakh<\/em>. Lviv: Drukarnia Naukovoho Tovarystva im. Shevchenka, 1922. Orig. pub. 1909.<\/p>\n

Yeremenko,V. Zhydotriepaniie...Panteleimon Kulish, Mykola Kostomarov, Ivan Franko<\/em>. Kyiv: Mizhrehionalna Akademiia Upravlinnia Personalom, comp. 2005. Orig. pub. 1883.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> This poem was published in Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk <\/em>(Literary-Scientific Herald) 12 (1900): 116\u201317.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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