First Encounters with Ukraine

Leonid Pervomais’kyi was born Illia Shliomovych Hurevych (Rus.: Il’ia Solo­monovich Gurevich; Yid.: Elya ben Shloyme) on May 17 (May 4, old style), 1908, to a Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-singing Jewish family from Kon- stantinograd, later renamed Chervonohrad, in Poltava Province.

In his Heine-esque “Podorozh do Chervonohradu” (Travel to Chervo- nohrad), Ivan Senchenko, a good friend of Pervomais’kyi, left a detailed por­trayal of their native locale:

Before 1917, Chervonohrad was a lively town to which all the province dwellers flocked. In addition to two gymnasia and a prison, here stood the high building of the district administration and uncountable stores creaking with people on the market days and floating on the calm waves of income on regular days, since throughout the year Chervonohrad was one and the same human swarm. On top of that, Chervonohrad was adorned with three churches, two movie theaters, two theaters (a winter and a summer one), a bookstore with Russian books and the kiosk of ginger-haired Iosyp with Ukrainian books, a branch of the state bank, a branch of the Russian Asiatic Bank, the Rural Bank, the pedagogical courses and the higher professional school.

Besides pride in the town’s economic growth, Senchenko’s recollection refers obliquely to another important feature of the town: its multiethnic and multicul­tural environment. His red-haired Iosyp, for example, was a Jew dealing in Ukrainian books: Senchenko himself often went to him for books and usually obtained one even if he was penniless. As will become clear momentarily, what was but one of the town’s features in the case of Senchenko became the key one for Pervomais’kyi, whose earliest works focused on the Ukrainian-Jewish rap­prochement.

Unlike his good friend and colleague, Pervomais’kyi was much less inter­ested in Chervonohrad’s movie theaters, research labs, factories, banks, and sugar plants. His native town carved quite a different image in his memory. For him, Chervonohrad was first and foremost about his own encounter with Ukrainian songs and the Ukrainian landscape. The songs were sung by his mother, who “was only forty, but Jewish mothers turn grey when they are still forty.”⁷ Pervomais’kyi repeatedly recalled in memoirs, letters, and dedications that his poetry was a reflection of his mother’s Ukrainian songs.⁸ Because rural Ukraine spoke the language of his mother’s songs, argued Pervomais’kyi, he easily identified with it and claimed it as his native land.

In the midst of a horrible antisemitic campaign in 1949, the very day when Pervomais’kyi was accused of antipatriotism, “rootless cosmopolitanism,” and Jewish nationalism, he responded with the poem “Na ukrains’kii zolotii zemli” (On the Ukrainian Golden Land), an anthem to his bygone Ukrainian utopia in which he dated his poetic talent to his Ukrainian mother tongue:

To me that woman was a mom;

Her songs resonate in my songs,

From her lips I heard my first word,

That I later endowed with mighty wings.⁹

The Ukrainian songs of Pervomais’kyi’s mother seem to have turned him away from Chervonohrad urbanism and placed him vis-a-vis the surrounding rural landscapes. Pervomais’kyi’s poetic Chervonohrad was not even a town: it was a vast land as limitless as Poltavshchyna (Ukrainian for Poltava province), a multi­syllable Ukrainian word with an augmentative suffix and prolonged sibilant. For Pervomais’kyi, it was more important that he lived among rural landscapes on the picturesque Berestova riverbank than in Senchenko’s town with its factories and theaters. Pervomais’kyi’s Ukraine was a peasant milieu and a village land­scape. Portraying his native land, he introduced the silent sounds of the steppe, the light wind flying over the river banks, the green gates of the forests, the trans­parent leaves falling into cold well water, all those images of the “fairy tale” or “fairy song” of Ukrainian folklore and romantic poetry that originated in his mother’s songs and informed his childhood memories.¹⁰

The meeting of little Iliusha Hurevych, the future Pervomais’kyi, with Ukraine was not always idyllic. As a child, he witnessed the Jewish pogroms un­leashed by various disorganized gangs of looters and rapists of peasant or de­classe origin during the civil war. Violence inclemently burst into the Hurevych house and settled there for the long years of the war, and the nine-year-old Per- vomais’kyi saw it at close hand, retaining in his memories above all the victimiza­tion of his female family members.

Already an accomplished Ukrainian writer, Pervomais’kyi penned the short story “Odna nich z dytynstva Iliushi” (One Night from Iliusha’s Childhood, 1937), about a routine pogrom in a Jewish home perpetrated by a group of Cos­sacks. The story betrayed some familiarity with Vassili Grossman’s “Odnazhdy v Berdicheve” (Once upon a Time in Berdichev, 1934) and Isaac Babel’s “Istoria moei golubiatni” (My Dovecot, 1926), both of which consider Jewish responses to various forms of anti-Jewish violence. Like Babel, Pervomais’kyi perceived the Cossacks through the eyes of a little boy who scrupulously recorded the cir­cumstances of the pogrom yet was hardly capable of making sense of it. The ab­sence of an ideological frame of reference (so characteristic of Grossman’s liter­ary characters), the Babelesque perception of a child, and the emphasis on detail made the perception of the pogrom touching and humane. One would not find in Pervomais’kyi’s story the blatant anti-Cossack accusations and ideologically biased descriptions so popular in contemporary one-sided Ukrainian or Jewish stories on Ukrainian civil war warlords. The narrator’s visual memory reflected the Cossacks not as greedy antisemites thirsty for blood, as they were captured by the intimidated Jewish imagination, but rather as hungry, poor soldiers, dis­mayed by their retreat and sympathizing with their victims.

Pervomais’kyi’s Ukrainians were both the pogromists and redeemers. After the first pogrom and in the wake of the others, Iliusha recorded how the Ukrai­nian family next-door, the Hudziis, gave shelter to his parents—not because of their sense of self-sacrificial humanism but rather out of habitual human sympa­thy for a victim and a neighbor. Pervomais’kyi seems to have construed his Ukrainian-Jewish encounter by resorting to a complex vision of Ukrainian-Jew- ish relations, reflected in Shevchenko’s Haidamaky, and by simultaneously turn­ing this vision inside out, as if offering a new reading of the age-old Ukrai- nian-Jewish animosity.¹¹ Whereas Shevchenko humanized at least some Jewish “bloodsuckers,” such as Yankel, Pervomais’kyi humanized the civil war haida­maks, introducing Ukrainians who were not necessarily nomadic thugs. He re­jected the received Jewish perception of Ukrainians as ferocious murderers and staunch antisemites. Jews suffered indeed, but the pogromists were victims too: here Pervomais’kyi transcended ethnic and personal bias and demonstrated an unheard of sympathy for the victims of social, economic, or ideological oppres­sion who victimized his own family. There was hardly anybody among contem­porary Jewish writers capable of a similar humanistic gesture and ethical bal­ance, Babel included.