Epilogue
In the 1999s, Ukrainian intellectuals made an effort to recover the roots of the Ukrainian anticolonialist tradition, turning to authors whose work has been suppressed or stripped of its message.
As part of this process, critics began reinserting Ukrainian-Jewish figures into the Ukrainian cultural context—not only to demonstrate the tolerance of the new society and the openness of its culture but also to signal the rejection of the imperial/colonialist model. Kernerenko, a Ukrainian journalist argued, returned as a legitimate “son of Ukraine.” Troianker reemerged as a harbinger of poetic feminism, futurism, and eroticism. The posthumous publication of several previously forbidden Per- vomais’kyi writings for the first time in fifty years revealed his Jewish concerns and sympathies. Fishbein was accepted both as a Jew and as a Ukrainian poet by virtually every significant Ukrainian literary critic. Kulyk, with his unorthodox yet unpopular Marxism, still awaits a student capable of demonstrating his lifelong anticolonialist enthusiasm.While Ukrainian intellectuals expressed concern for the newly surfaced xenophobic tendencies in their society and celebrated those ethnic non-Ukraini- ans who contributed to Ukrainian culture, Jewish intellectuals began arguing for the need to study Ukrainian, to support Ukrainian national-minded leadership, and to resist Russian assimilation. Some understood the ability of Ukrainians to integrate, acculturate, and accommodate representatives of various ethnic minorities as a key factor in buttressing national cultural survival. Ivan Dziuba saw the Ukrainian language as a catalyst of this process and Jewish contributions as a highly commendable example. He wrote: “Many things depend on whether the Ukrainian Word becomes a divine Gift, a spiritual Motherland for those of other ethnicities [inonatsionaliv], as the Russian Word became for Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelshtam, Anna Akhmatova....
Certainly, we also can name some names—from Marko Vovchok to Iurii Klen, and from Leonid Pervomais’kyi to Moisei Fishbein. But who will be the next? Who—in the twenty-first century?”1To help answer Dziuba’s question, students of Ukrainian and Jewish history should delve into the colonial past to find the anti-imperial harbingers of what today is Ukraine. This book is only the first step in that direction, yet it might become a springboard for new research in the field of East European Jewish studies. This discussion of five Ukrainian poets of Jewish descent points out the need to closely analyze the image of the Jew in Ukrainian and the image of Ukraine in Jewish literature. In view of the implicit anti-imperial trend among many Rus- sian-Jewish literati, the scholarly discussion of Ukrainian themes in the works of Nikolai Minskii, Semen Frug, Kornei Chukovskii, Vassili Grossman, and others is a must for a future scholar of East European Jewish culture. This kind of research should be contingent on research into Ukrainian themes in the works of European literati—from Karl Emil Franzos, who portrayed the Ukrainian-Jew- ish encounter in German, to Piotr Rawicz, who did it in French.
A study of the recurrent use of the Ukrainian language and images in works by such Yiddish writers as Mendele Moykher Sforim could help us reconsider the perception of Ukraine and Ukrainians among East European Yiddishspeaking Jews. The study of a dialogue between Ukrainians and Jews in the prose and poetry of such Soviet Yiddish writers as Itsik Fefer, Leyb Kvitko, Ezra Fin- inberg, and Dovid Bergelson, only at the first and very superficial glance champions of the Soviet empire, would also be instrumental in crafting the image of the anticolonialist Jew sympathetic with the rise of a “minor” ethnicity. Therefore the discussion of Jabotinsky’s sympathies toward Ukrainian strivings for independence must be followed up by a study of Solomon Goldelman and Arnold Margolin, two outstanding Jewish politicians who contributed to the formation of Ukrainian statehood.
There is also a need to look at those Jews who entirely assimilated into Ukrainian culture, creating, as the Ukrainian-Jewish composer Ihor Shamo did, such masterpieces as “lak tebe ne liubyty, Kyieve mii” (I Cannot But Love You, My Kyiv), a song that has long been an anthem of the Ukrainian capital. The milieu of the national-minded Ukrainian and Jewish intellectuals of the 1969s and 1979s, both in Ukraine and in the Gulag, deserve thorough study, too. I believe this research into the wide array of the anti-imperial choices of, and anticolonialist identities among, East European Jews would help scholars create a more complex portrayal of the Jewish modernization.Compared to their Russian-Jewish counterparts, who were much more successful in addressing Jewish themes, poets from Kernerenko to Fishbein provide the impression of a Ukrainian literati of Jewish descent who randomly referred to things Jewish. Hence, the dilemma: are we dealing in this case with a consistent tendency to create a Ukrainian-Jewish literary tradition? Or do the texts discussed in this study merely demonstrate some heterogeneous efforts of Ukrainian writers (who happen to be of Jewish descent) to cover Jewish themes in the framework of what has come to be known either as the Russian all-embracing humanism or the Soviet-style internationalism? The historical context, much different in the case of Ukraine, suggests that the Russian-Jewish (or Pol- ish-Jewish) frame of reference can be applied to Ukrainian literary endeavors only partially and with a considerable stretch.
To assess properly the contribution of Ukrainian-Jewish poets, one may want to create a new frame of reference to explain the particularities of pre-1991 Ukrainian cultural development. Colonial Ukrainian culture, with its intense striving for autonomy if not independence, found itself under fiercer scrutiny than its metropolitan Russian counterpart. The area of the “legally allowed” was much narrower for a Ukrainian writer than for a Russian one.
National endeavors within Russian national perceptions were censored, whereas such endeavors within Ukrainian national feelings were expurgated. The regime would frown on certain Jewish motifs in Russian-Jewish literature but would immediately stifle recognizable Jewish hints in the texts of Ukrainian-Jewish writers. Ukrainian writers were more often allowed to refer to Jewish themes than were Jews writing in Ukrainian. A Russian Jew had to maintain a low profile but could survive. Ukrainian Jews were not blessed with this chance.From a methodological viewpoint, Ukrainian-Jewish identities are illuminating in many ways. They challenge the “insurmountability of cultural differences,” in other words, the “differentialist racism” threatening interethnic and cross-cultural dialogue.2 Looking for ways to recover suppressed Ukrainian voices and help emancipate Ukrainian culture, Ukrainian-Jewish poets discovered what Neil Lazarus called the “indispensability of national consciousness to the decolonizing project.”3 In a sense, Ukrainian anticolonialist-minded Jews were far ahead of their many Ukrainian contemporaries who were unable to see through the layers of imposed colonial meanings and values.
The principal characters of my story realized that for a Ukrainian Jew it is inconceivable to be liberal- or democratic-minded and at the same time reject or neglect the national strivings of the Ukrainians. This is true of Kulyk’s challenge to cultural parochialism, Troianker’s somatic path to emancipation, and Pervomais’kyi’s quest for universal ethical values, not to mention Fishbein’s articulate position on this issue. It is equally important that formulating their Jewish concerns Ukrainian-Jewish literati resorted to Ukrainian “tropes and frames,” as Natalie Zemon Davis put it.4 A new, symbiotic coexistence between the Ukrainian and the Jewish made it next to impossible to differentiate between “Jewish” and “Ukrainian” literary ingredients in their texts, although this book has demonstrated that historical and cultural Contextualization can help identify their “ethnic” origins.
Should we consider them in their entirety, what emerged from the literary texts composed by Ukrainian-Jewish literati is a new cultural hybrid, the Ukrainian-Jewish tradition. Remarkably, this hybrid has turned out to be productive: the tradition reenacted itself in each of the periods of Ukraine’s historical development.The Ukrainian-Jewish texts discussed in this book should be placed in their anticolonialist meaning-making context, even if their anticolonialist message is implicit. Positive Jewish images in Ukrainian literature are different from Rus- sian-Jewish or German-Jewish ones; they can be viewed as an attempt to reconsider and extend Ukrainian cultural boundaries created over centuries of Polish and Russian colonial domination. Likewise, the Ukrainian images that the Jewish literati created signal that the Ukrainian-Jewish writers resisted the cultural borders imposed on Ukrainian discourse. Moving from the Ukrainian to the Jewish realm and back, the Ukrainian-Jewish figures presented a challenge to the monopoly of the metropolitan colonizer on cultural traffic. They radically modified the imposed narrative patterns—and that modification allowed them to leave their corresponding cultural clusters and interact with one another, demolishing the walls of imperial power and imperial culture.
Ukrainian-Jewish writers demonstrated that they could unite adjacent but previously separate realms—activity that ultimately tear down the walls of the empire. Therefore, from the postcolonial perspective, the Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement demonstrated that “border crossings do not occur only across the dominant/dominated dichotomy, but that, equally, there is traffic within cultural formations of the subordinated groups and that these journeys are not always mediated through the dominant culture(s).”5 The Ukrainian-Jewish encounters also indicate that there are no “inherently colonial” ethnic groups or cultures or languages. Such language as Ukrainian can be the language and culture of emancipation—and not only of colonial subordination—and Diaspora nationalities such as Jews may relinquish the proverbial colonialist proclivities of Diaspora groups and join the colonial ethnicity in its quest for nationhood and independence.
Ultimately, the discussion of the Ukrainian-Jewish poets questions the ubiquitous exclusion of Jews and Jewish themes from postcolonial studies. The most arduous Marxist defenders of the colonized outcaste ethnicities and communities are remarkably reticent about Jews and Jewish themes—as if the Holocaust had never taken place; as if Israel had never fought for independence against the British Mandate; and as if Antonio Gramsci, the spiritual father of colonial studies, had never discussed Jews in an emancipating and nation-building context.6 But even a minor case of Ukrainian-Jewish synthesis underscores significant issues in the Jewish position vis-a-vis the colonial and imperial. Having integrated their Jewish concerns into a Ukrainian discourse at a time when even a single Jewish motif was considered ideologically unacceptable, Ukrainian-Jewish poets proved that the anti-imperial choice started with the study of the language and culture of a colonized people and that for the Jewish cultural elites to be antiimperial signified being modern.