Exile or Galut

What was a blessing for him as a Jew—leaving the Diaspora and moving to the Holy Land—turned out to be a curse for him as a Ukrainian poet: leaving his na­tive land and going into exile.

It comes as no surprise that Russian-speaking Jews from Soviet Ukraine con­sidered any manifestation of sympathy toward Ukraine and Ukrainians a per­sonal insult and aggressively resisted the attempts of a small circle of Israeli Ukrainophiles to establish public forums for a dialogue with the Ukrainian Di­aspora. Indeed, state-sponsored antisemitism in Ukraine was a result of the regime’s attempts to check the revivalist tendencies in the country, but this trig­gered a negative reaction in the Israeli establishment and the Israeli Russian-lan­guage press to things Ukrainian. This aversion was so intense and multifaceted, albeit baseless, that Israel repeatedly denied (and continues to deny) the title of righteous gentile to the Metropolitan Andrii Sheptyts’kyi (1865-1944), the head of the Ukrainian Uniate Church, who personally saved dozens of Jews dur­ing World War II.⁵³ Fishbein was well aware of the causes and consequences of the widespread Ukrainian-Jewish antipathy and repeatedly identified those who he considered to be behind it.⁵⁴ Yet given the Moscow orientation of Israel’s Russian media, he could hardly combat the anti-Ukrainian bias.

To add insult to injury, pundits from the Slavic Department at the Hebrew University, with their traditional Russocentric vision of Slavic studies, never es­tablished contact with Fishbein.⁵⁵ With all his literary and linguistic talent, Fishbein could not find work as a tutor or freelance editor. The position of jani­tor or night watchman—so familiar to blue-collar Russian immigrants in Israel under the name of shmirah—was his lot. He boasted in private correspondence of being promoted at a certain point to the position of caretaker at Binyanei ha- Ummah, the convention center in Jerusalem. Fishbein’s linguistic solitude in Is­rael seems to have been as desperate as it had been in Novosibirsk. The only dif­ference was that now he knew he was a Ukrainian poet involuntarily in exile. In a private conversation he claimed not to have written or published anything dur­ing his ten years in Israel. Some critics have observed that the absence of a Ukrai­nian-speaking environment contributed to his almost ten-year-long silence.

Fishbein’s random interlocutors belonged to the circle of Iakiv Suslens’kyi, a former prisoner of Zion from Moldavia who had spent some time in a Soviet correction colony, where he had befriended national-minded Ukrainian inmates.

Released from prison, Suslens’kyi made aliyah and began buttressing the dia­logue between Jews and Ukrainians in the Diaspora. In 1984, on the eve of radi­cal changes in the USSR, he began publishing a homemade journal, Diialohy, devoted to Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement and launched a campaign to im­prove Jewish-Ukrainian relations. Here, in his house in Ramot (Jerusalem), sev­eral Israeli sympathizers of the dialogue joined Suslens’kyi as members of the editorial board and regular contributors to Diialohy. But even those Israelis who wrote Ukrainian and sought contacts with the Ukrainian Diaspora routinely spoke Russian.

Several years before the journal crystallized as a feasible project, Fish- bein, through Suslens’kyi’s mediation, met and became friends with Mikhail Kheifets, one of the newcomers to the group.

During their first meeting in Jerusalem, Fishbein realized that Kheifets had spent time with Stus and urged him to write his memoirs. “Look at this black Jerusalem night,” Fishbein recalls of their conversation. “The black Jerusalem sky dotted with stars. What time is it now? At present Stus is sleeping on his wooden bed over there in the Mordova barrack.”⁵⁷ Kheifets allowed himself to be persuaded and penned a heartbreaking essay, which Fishbein translated for Suchasnist', a Ukrainian-language journal of literature and politics then based in Munich. Kheifets essay on Stus, translated by Fishbein into Ukrainian, was later included in his Ukrains’ki Siliuety (Ukrainian Silhouettes) and became an important contribution to Ukrainian literature.⁵⁸ In turn, for Fishbein, working on the memoir was not only a continuation of his encounter with Mikhail Kheifets, it was a virtual encounter with those Ukrainian-minded intellectuals whose fate he could have shared in the late 1970s when the KGB declared open season on Ukrainian human rights activists and national-minded thinkers.

Probably due to his submissions to Suchasnist', which still retains a preemi­nent place on the Ukrainian literary landscape, Fishbein was invited to work at the Ukrainian Division of Radio Liberty in Munich.⁵⁹The job provided a small yet vibrant Ukrainian-speaking environment, was closer to Ukraine, and the Free Ukrainian University was nearby. Yet this was still what they call in Hebrew galut, exile, with its simulacra of the Ukrainian cultural milieu. Here Fishbein befriended Ukrainian and Jewish emigres, refusniks, dissidents, and former Gulag prisoners who, like Izrail Kleiner and Mikhail Kheifets and their fellow Ukrainian inmates, started talking to one another as a way to overcome their in­herited biases. Before his reawakening as a Ukrainian poet in the late 1980s, Fishbein wrote three poetic texts commissioned by his Ukrainian colleagues. For example, he penned an “experimental” fixed-rhyme poem for Ihor Ka- churovs’kyi, a colleague at Radio Liberty, a renowned Ukrainian philologist, and the first to-date Ukrainian scholar who rediscovered Hryts’ko Kernerenko (see chapter ³). Kachurovs’kyi used Fishbein’s poetic experiment in his essay on po­etic creativity. For another of Kachurovs’kyi’s articles, Fishbein translated a poem by the Russian symbolist Maksimilian Voloshin (commissioned by Iurii Sheveliov for Suchasnist'). Fishbein also translated one of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s po­ems at the request of Izrail Kleiner, a friend from Jerusalem and a former Radio Liberty and Voice of America Ukraine correspondent. These three texts, accord­ing to Fishbein, constituted the only verse he put on paper during his Israeli and German exile in 1979 - 89. A new period in his biography began in the late 1980s, when, as Fishbein dubbed it, things began to clear up (rozvydniuvatys’) in Ukraine.