Constructing the Ukrainian Shtetl

In the early 1920s, the image of the shtetl coterminous with the bygone past of the now-abolished Pale of Jewish Settlement disturbed many East European po­ets, both Jewish and gentile.

The forehead of a hill, as if condemned by faith,

Is clutched by a dilapidated, tarred and severe

Ark of a square rusty synagogue,—

The Torah arch, pressed to the head.

A pestilent and nasty grey moss

Reeking of the cadaver’s putrid and mucus

Creeps on the stones, ribs, and pillars,

Ofbony and furious synagogues.⁵⁶

Bazhan’s shtetl is torn between its decomposing corporeity and its passionate spirituality. The dichotomy of the dying corpse and enraged spirit manifests only too well the shtetl’s impotence. As in case of Berdychiv in the poem of M. Bulatovych, the “evil consciousness” of the shtetl was covered by “the black burial shroud.”⁵⁷

O. Lan echoed this imagery in his poem “The Ghetto,” dedicated to Ieru- salymka, the Vinnytsia Jewish district. The “black walls” of his Jewish ghetto sheltered a centennial grief and a silent curse. The ghetto synagogue vainly tried to appease the exhausted people with the dry wisdom of the Talmud. The blind and enraged ghetto, argued Lan, had lost its way to the future. To survive, its Jews should abandon the ghetto, move into the fields, and breathe the fresh air of the ripening wheat.⁵⁸ This imagery coincided nicely with the interpretation of the backward prerevolutionary Jewish past in the critical annals of the emerging socialist realism.⁵⁹

Troianker was among the first to create in Ukrainian literature an ample ar­ray of images of the Jewish shtetl. In twentieth-century Ukrainian literature hardly anybody superseded the variety and abundance of her Jewish images, ex­cept perhaps Pervomais’kyi in his prose narrative.

Although she visited Uman long after she had became an established Khar­kiv poet, in her poetic universe Troianker never addressed Uman by name. Uman for her was nothing but a paradigmatic Jewish shtetl, an anonymous myth, an absolute colonial past. In her depiction of her mother’s funeral in “Spohady” (Reminiscences), Troianker introduced a unified image of the “little shtetls.” When imagining her return to her parents’ house, she claimed not to have remembered whether it was situated in Berdychiv or in Golta, neither of which was her native town.⁶⁰ Her home shtetl was immersed in a deep century- long dream: it did not notice how it had lost its sense of time and its name. Para­doxically, the more acute Troianker’s desire to be biographically accurate, the more she tended toward large-scale generalizations, which made her shtetl loose its recognizable corporeity.

Troianker’s Jewish shtetl is a myth and whatever occurs there acquires mythological proportions. Wrapped in the generalized metaphor of “a shtetl” or “any shtetl,” Troianker presented her mom’s funeral as “a funeral,” a symbolic fare-thee-well that replicated several motifs in a similar poem by Osip Man­delshtam (“Eta noch nepopravima”; This Night Is Irreparable, 1916) dedicated to his mother’s death.⁶¹Troianker’s poem unfolds against the backdrop of a hun­gry, immobile, and obscure town:

Small, scornfully bespat Golta,

Or perhaps Berdychiv? I don’t remember.

Stirred memories dangle in my bosom.

They stand up. They vanish.

Narrow unpaved streets.

Dreadful angst of small shtetls.

Grief flattens against the wall.

And at four it is already night.

My mom’s life. Dirty feather beds.

A grocery store. Hungry children.

Once straight, her back was

Bent down rushing for a two-penny.

Mom, they buried you in a simple manner.

Old Jews did not walk, they ran.

Outdoors summer turned into fall.

The body swayed on a black stretcher.⁶²

To underscore her message, Troianker amassed epithets: Jews are “old,” streets “unpaved,” the day is “dead,” stretcher “black,” and the town “scornfully be­spat.” Modern urban flowers and Mozart’s music, grieves Troianker, are incon­ceivable at a Jewish funeral. Nothing disturbed the stagnating shtetl except the hasty movements of the Jewish communal coffin carriers. Troianker observes them as they are running through the cemetery to the grave. They seem to want to get rid of the dead corpse as soon as possible, as if a sudden physical death challenges their endless spiritual agony.

The image of the body performs an ambiguous function here. Troianker fo­cuses on the stretcher on which the black corpse is swaying. She mentions it twice, as if trying to prolong her last meeting with her mother. There is nothing as humane and humanly normal in the shtetl as the swaying stretcher with her mother’s body. In contrast with the alien, distant, and dreadful town, her mother’s body in its macabre cradle unexpectedly becomes warm and dear. The dead body is dead, but by placing it at the very end of the last line of the poem Troianker makes it graphically oversized, psychologically significant, and poeti­cally focal. In a sense, her mom’s dead body seems more alive than the coffin car­riers and other inhabitants of the moribund shtetl. Together with the heroine, the early autumn day and the surrounding nature bemoan the death of the little Jewish woman. Death comes to be seen as an organic part of the agonizing Jew­ish tradition, of the moribund shtetl, and of its natural contour.

Although Troianker did not explicitly identify with the shtetl, she permeated it with her personal experience, her profoundly intimate sufferings, and her almost physically perceptible attachment to things Jewish. If the shtetl symbolized death, to paraphrase Karl Jaspers, this death was intimately close to Troianker. Such inti­macy with Jewish culture was unheard of in Ukrainian literature. Critics who re­buked Troianker for depicting an outdated conflict between the old religious and the new atheistic generation were socially right and poetically wrong. Troianker both rejected her Jewish past and deplored its loss. She seemed not to be able to ex­ist as a poet without repeatedly returning to her imaginary Uman, over the ruins of which she sang her lyrical dirges. She gravitated toward the colonial, simultane­ously trying to overcome it once and for all. Needless to say, Troianker’s nostalgia, frowned on in the late 1920s, would become quite dangerous the 1930s.

Although Troianker’s actual visits home were not necessarily imbued with gloom alone, her poetic visions were. She depicted her father’s house immersed in poverty, ruin, and sadness. “Grief” is perhaps the word she most often uses when she turns to her native shtetl:

Here it is, the shtetl. Like an old fur coat

Taken from a chest, naphthalene sprinkled.

Houses, hungry and sick with trachoma, screw up their eyes.

Eyes housing an eternal, centennial grief.

The wheel is splashing. Hurry up, old balagola,

Get forth, pull those ginger worn-out reins.

The first hut. A poster. Yankel Simon Gool.

“Salon for haircuts, curling, and shaving.”

More houses there—bent, blind Lilliputians,

Only the old stone synagogue sticks out.

Seems that it made its neighbors blind and barefoot

In the name of its old mad senseless god.⁶³

Note the metaphors that underscore the sense of grief: a worn-out overcoat permeated with naphthalene, the reigning sickness, a real and metaphorical blindness of the buildings and their dwellers, and a mad god supervising his last worshippers. The death of the shtetl is conveyed through the metaphor of a de­ficient or sick body: houses are blind, bent, diminished, hungry, and trachoma- stricken. The poster advertising how to make one’s body look better sounds in this context as a bitter mock. As if formulating the diagnosis of the shtetl, Troianker brings us from such symptoms as hunger and trachoma to such con­sequences as blindness.

Obviously, as a Jewess dragged into the revolutionary maelstrom and thrown onto the shore of the Ukrainian literary avant-garde, Troianker dismissed Ju­daism as an old-fashioned nuisance from Babel’s Gedali thrift shop.⁶⁴Yet her de­nial was ambiguous, mitigated by her intimate relations with her family, particu­larly with her father. Formally it manifested itself in polemical conversations, passionate dialogues, and sensitive pleas, not in a flat-out atheistic rejection. Troianker creates a poetic version of a family disputation, in which she defended her communist idealism against her father’s Judaic religiosity. Here is Troianker:

My dad is sad and calm.

A tired Jew with a Roman nose.

He can hardly breathe through his cough,

And he murmurs at night: “vey-vey-vey.”

But my dad has not lost his hope

In the bluish-golden Zion.

Says he: “A Jewish dreaming soul

Should live and grow!”

Says he, I am alien and distant,

For I like neither mezuzah nor Torah,

I dream not about Zion’s heat,

And I attend a youth cell at night.

Daddy, Daddy! The distant Canaan

Is nothing but a tale, dream, alien fantasy.

I am working at Vek’s plant,

And my child is a young communist.

I do not know the waters of Jordan,

Gloomy cedars and old legends

Of Moses and the hills of Lebanon

And the songs of those who vanished.

The old will die and disappear,

And Zion will no more be blue,

It will turn its color into red

And will knock at the commune door.

And now I don’t want to know it,

But you, Daddy, do not curse me.

Yes, your eyes have dimmed because of tears

And mine are joyful and clear.

I work at Vek’s plant.

My child is a young communist.

The blue Zion is as far from me

As a distant and alien legend.⁶⁵

Troianker’s poem betrays her familiarity with the biblical text, with the religious Jewish concept of the return to Zion, and, if I am reading the text accurately, with some speculations stemming from the Musar (Ethical) Judaism of Rabbi Israel Salanter, one of the key nineteenth-century East European rabbinic leaders.

Yet Troianker’s familiarity with things Jewish does not imply she was at­tached to them. Unable to find better arguments, her father rebuked her for dis­daining the most important artifacts of the Judaic ritual: the mezuzah, a folder containing a small, four-inch parchment scroll with the text of “Shma, Yisroel!” (Hear, O Israel! Deut. 6:4 - 9); the Torah—perhaps not the tradition in its in­tegrity but only the written parchment scroll of the Pentateuch; the idea of ethi­cal self-improvement; and finally, Zion with its all-embracing Judaic symbolism. In reply, Troianker assessed Judaism as alien (“distant Canaan”), vague (“a tale, a dream”), and dead (“songs of the dead”). Her father pointed out real objects and artifacts, Troianker turned them into bodiless metaphors and symbols. Judaism exemplified for her nothing but an artificial concoction. Three words—“leg- end,” “past,” and “alien”—appeared in her text as interchangeable synonyms. She emphatically rejected the past as alien and alienated it as legendary. It is bod­iless and hence superfluous.

Contrary to Judaic values, Troianker identified with the communist future, exemplified in the image of her daughter, the Octobrist—a member of the “youngest” communist league, modified for seven- to nine-year-old Soviet chil­dren. Her house of the future is an edifice, it is robust and somatic, one can knock at its doors—and who can knock at the doors of Zion? Troianker assured her fa­ther that sooner or later yesterday’s Zionist utopia would realize its artificiality and join the “communist tomorrow.” Although this was not yet true, Troianker preferred her fellow communism-inspired young men and her factory col­leagues to the vague and parochial Jewish people. But neither her preferences nor convictions implied that she rejected the dialogue with her father or with her past. She was ambiguous about her Jewish heritage.

Unlike Babel’s Liutov, who cut his Jewish ties and taught himself to kill, rape, and ride as a Cossack, and unlike Eduard Bagritsky’s comrade Kogan from “Duma pro Opanasa,” who confiscated grain from Ukrainian peasants, Troi- anker never cut the cord connecting her to the shtetl. Yes, her father imposed his rigidity and power upon her, but look, says the compassionate Troianker, how weak, touchy, and powerless his power was! Troianker underscored her self­awareness with remarkable sincerity: “I am a Young Communist League mem­ber, but I am not ashamed of loving my dad.”⁶⁶ Judaism, this vague and “pneu­matic” entity, was alien to her, whereas her father, coughing, murmuring, breathing hard, was still “somatic.” Therefore her attitude toward the shtetl was one of kindness and empathy. She consistently perceived her Jewish realm as old, pre-Bolshevik, and Ukrainian. She traced this parallel by marking her Jews with the yellow-bluish colors of Ukrainian national independence.

In the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks, as Taras Kuzio put it, attempted “to erad­icate Ukraine’s national symbols.”⁶⁷ First and foremost, they outlawed the light blue and yellow Ukrainian national symbol, considering it bourgeois, backward, and separatist. A red flag with a dark blue stripe, the new Soviet Ukrainian ban­ner eventually pushed out and cast a negative shadow on any other Ukrainian re­vivalist symbols. But the conscientious Ukrainian literati, who resisted political subservience, managed to smuggle yellow-blue colorings into their writings. They could sometimes mislead the communist censorship, but never a perspica­cious Ukrainian reader.

The attempts to combine a legally endorsed literary discourse with allegedly illegal national-revivalist allusions have not yet been evaluated by scholars, but they deserve an in-depth sociocultural study. Given this lack of study, mention should be made of the ubiquitous presence of Ukrainian national references in the poetry of the 1920s coming from various, if not opposing, literary trends. The following examples in no way exhaust this phenomenon, which far exceeds the scope of this discussion. Mykola Zerov (1890-1937) sang of a “blue of the sky nailed with gold.” Drai-Khmara (1889-1939), in his much-acclaimed “Stohnala nich” (The Night Was Groaning), depicted a “blue-golden” light­ning that incited a nightmare, the embodiment of wild passion, the drive to free­dom, and an unbridled free will. Iurii Klen (Oswald Burghardt, 1891-1947) praised the ability of “invincible beauty” to confuse even “the sunny blue sky.” Oleksa Vlyz’ko (1908 - 34) was particularly preoccupied with the yellow-blue coloring: he juxtaposed a “light blue tuxedo” and the “golden fox-trot”; the “golden burning of the horns” and the “blue blouses” of the workers; the “surf’s blue paw” and “amber”; a “light blue hallucination” and “golden braids.” In­deed, Sosiura, a former participant in the anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian resistance, consistently smuggled Ukrainian nationalist allusions into his verse, combining a “golden dawn” and a “blue valley,” the “light-blue-eyed May” and the “golden moon,” “a deep blue city” and “golden snow,” the “golden will” and the “light blue will” and even praising the “blue gold of your eyes.”⁶⁸

Troianker occasionally used Ukrainian national colors, both in Ukrainian and in Jewish contexts. Her palette seemed to have reflected something more than the random colors of empirical reality. Troianker’s Zion, for example, is bluish-yellow.⁶⁹ The religious artifacts of the old Leyb Troianker are blue (skull­cap) and yellow (prayer shawl). The shtetl evening entails a “blue cradle” and “sun beams.” Troianker contrasts “yellow” wallets sold in a Ukrainian town to the “blue air” of Nankin, where the British murdered the protesting workers. Her “yellow fall” is juxtaposed with “sleep” and “dreams” (sny, snyt^r), which phonetically refer to “blue” (syn^r) and sound like puns on Ukrainian syn and syn’, “blue” and “son.” Furthermore, her “yellow mandolin” of the past appears next to the images of “dreams” and a “son,” in Ukrainian sny and syn (cf.: syn’, blue). The Ukrainian fall and the Jewish shtetl appear in the same “yellow-blue” frame of reference. If the fall and the shtetl signify the past, or to be precise, the beloved and despised past, then one may only speculate why Troianker repeatedly clus­tered together the memories of the Jewish shtetl and those of Ukrainian national independence, equating “ethnic” Jewish and “national” Ukrainian. Be that as it may, there is hardly any doubt that she resorted to a secret language of visual symbolism permeated with ideologically charged colors, and that she used this language to bring together her Ukrainian and Jewish realms. It is particularly significant that these colors reflect the palpable somatic status of the shtetl and its inhabitants.

Before she found ways to bring together opposite identities, Troianker mused on the unbridgeable gap between the two. Attached to her Jewish past but already firmly established in her Ukrainian present, in her poem “Mene tato prohnav i prokliav” (My Father Has Banished and Cursed Me) Troianker real­ized that Ukrainian and Jewish identities were incompatible and irreconcilable. That a consensus between the Ukrainian and Jewish is unattainable she eluci­dates with her father’s curse (“may the earth fall through / Under both of us, my Olenka”), with his desperate lament (“Tears are in his eyes, /And in his beard, silver as hoarfrost”), and with his flat rejection of his daughter’s mixed marriage (“For my child has been born from a goy”). Troianker uses the strong Old He­brew designation of non-Jews, “goy,” which in the medieval era turned into a curse that counteracted scornful Christian anti-Jewish expletives. Troianker’s exogamy casts a heavy blow on her father (“Oh my cursed, my cursed girl, / There were not enough Jews for her!”). Her mother extends the curse into the next generation, refusing to accept Olenka (diminutive for Olena/Elena) into the family, where biblical names for girls was the norm (My mom cries, “Hers is Olenka, / Not Debora, nor Leah or Nehama”).⁷⁰

The gap between Raia and her Jewish parents is further corroborated by the personal pronouns of the poem: Raia talks to her daughter using “you,” explain­ing the reasoning of her parents, but her parents address her and her child in the third-person singular. “She,” “for her,” “hers,” “they,”—the lack of the sec­ond-person singular emphatically points to the lack of communication between the Troiankers and their daughter. Raia bitterly raises the national identity ques­tion, the notorious internal passport’s “fifth paragraph” that would become so crucial for many Soviet Jews beginning in the 1940s, and further exacerbated the problem: who would her daughter be in terms of nationality? Ukrainian like Turhan, her father, or Jewish like her mother? And if she chooses Ukrainian, would it not create the same tension between the Ukrainian Olena and the Jew­ish Raia as that which existed between Raia and her parents? Unlike her critics, who found her poetic discussion of Ukrainian-Jewish dichotomy “artificial,” Troianker gallantly ponders the identity of a child who has ethnic Ukrainian fea­tures and a Jewish legal mother:

My Olenka has blue eyes

And light-white hair.

What would my daughter answer

If sharply asked, what’s her “nation”?

Troianker’s “sharp question” seems to make the identity drama irreconcilable, but the solution arrives in an unexpected form and from an unexpected side. The Jewish past transcends its own boundaries and reaches out to Troianker’s Ukrainian habitat.

Suddenly Troianker’s mother acquiesces to a new reality and grudgingly, yet partially, accepts her. Addressing her daughter and referring to her new grand­daughter, she says, almost literally, “Why don’t you come with... what’s her name... that one... her”:

And my father cannot forgive

That I have a child from a goy.

But my mom has said: “Why don’t

Why don’t you come sometime with... that one.”⁷¹

Once her parents pronounce their final verdict, Troianker’s family clash catches momentum. The poet does not offer a superficial solution to the conflict. Troianker depicts with warm irony her mother’s desire to see Raia’s child and her simultaneous unwillingness to say out loud her “goyish” granddaughter’s name.

According to Troianker, reconciliation between the Jewish and the Ukrai­nian is possible on a biological but not on ethnic level: the Jewish grandmother is ready to accept a non-Jewish relative into the family but not the Ukrainian name of that relative. Paradoxically, the third-person singular (toiu—“with her”), which indicates a detached object here, performs the opposite function: it points to an object that is approximated to the speaker, integrated into her realm, and, as such, accepted. The child is accepted as a body or living entity, not as idea or a name. Perhaps her mom’s semi-reconciliation, which contained the seeds of a future conflict, is a more fitting culmination to the family drama than an all-for­giveness. In this context, Troianker’s yellow-blue visual symbolism testifies to her consistent attempts to find a cultural solution to the problem beyond the eth­nic, the religious, and the political. These attempts constitute her search for a personal Ukrainian-Jewish synthesis. Only a yellow-blue fall can appease both Ukrainians and Jews, particularly because it envelops a new Ukrainian-Jewish eros.