From Heaven to Earth

Fishbein arrived at his messianic identity by striving to revive and reinvent the universe after catastrophe (embodied historically by the Holocaust and poeti­cally in the poetry of Paul Celan).

Recalling how he watched hours and hours of World War II black-and-white newsreels depicting mass murders, concentration camps, and human bones, Fishbein calls himself and his generation “chorno-biloi khroniky dity” (the chil­dren of black-and-white newsreels), as if replicating Celan’s “black milk” for a post-Holocaust world. For Fishbein, “black” is associated with the “prachorna pit’ma prastolit’” (pitch-black darkness of prehistory),⁸⁹ with the absolute cos­mic past, with historical catastrophes, destructive power, and implacable death. The Holocaust and devastation reign in Fishbein’s poetic universe, echoing Celan’s imagery of total annihilation as, for example, in “Pohar, 1995” (Ruin, i995):

And the black raven was sitting on the black

And there were neither homes nor orchards.

In “Poezia” (Poetry), dedicated to the memory of Leonid Pervomais’kyi, Fish- bein uses variations on “black” (“gray,” “overcast,” “cloudy,” “darkness”) to produce the image of history as destruction:

From distant and cloudy realms—

wildly—toward me—

... a dark overcast races...

it ruins and crashes... ⁹⁰

Great catastrophes obliterate humanity and humanism. The poet is left with no escape and no hope, as is the case in the poem “A tam pustelia” (And There Is a Desert):

And there is a desert.

The last day of Pompeii. Black smoke.

And burnt ruins under your eyes,

And black ashes from under your hand,

Like a black bird.⁹¹

In Fishbein, the impossibility of resurrection leads to hopelessness. Just as the raven in “Ruin” is unable to bring orchards and homes back from the dead (“Could you really revive them, poor creature?”), so the poet is unable to resus­citate his dearest one:

You are performing, insane musician,

For the ashes of your beloved.

Fishbein also pursues this theme in “Babi Yar.” The cranes flying over the infa­mous ravine leave no hope for redemption either: Fishbein never refers to their promising white color, instead depicting them as “black shadows flying in heavy silence.”

The human presence is almost unnoticeable in Fishbein’s early universe: devastation reigns. The individual human conscience records the surrounding ruin and wreckage with a borderline despair, from which the poet, another Jonah or Job, cries to God. Yet God seems to be an unimaginable luxury in Fishbein’s universe. His only affirmative description appears much later. In Fishbein’s 2002 poem there appears a quotation from the Christian prayer, “Pater Noster qui es in coelis.” Fishbein takes the verb and elliptically drops the noun (the final “who art” in the following poem is a reference to “qui es”) as though casting doubt on the objectivity of the divine. There is no Lord in heaven and no landlord in the house. Hence the emphasis on the ontological emptiness of the universe:

Oh Lord, it is empty in our household,

Oh Lord, it is chilly and wet, and downstairs

The voice of a vanished master is drenched.

Behind the doors the heaven is murky.

Oh Lord, it is empty, give me strength!

Doors are wrecked and the padlock rusty.

Wind is dashing haze, which looks

Like an anonymous voice, a barren specie,

Behind the doors the glow wanes,

Behind the mist the autumn darkness reigns.

Over there, in the corner, the grain smolders.

It is empty, oh Lord, who art.⁹²

Here too the influence of (and disagreement with) Celan is evident. In Tenebrae Celan suggests that it is God who should pray and seek refuge “since we [the dead ones] are coming.” At the same time, in his “Psalm” Celan pronounces “Blessed art thou, No One,” denying the divine the ability to intercede in the historical process and perhaps even the right to exist. Celan assimilates the all­powerful divinity and the intimidating and destructive nothing (Lat.: nihil) of existentialism.⁹³ Measured against Celan’s theological void, Fishbein’s final “who art” might not seem so desperate. It is clear, however, that even when God appears at the very end of the poem, he is not a redeemer but a mere figure of speech. Fishbein becomes a mourner, the poem a kadish (prayer for the dead), and God, the deceased. Nothing remains of divine authority but a couple of words: a signifier without a signified, to use de Saussure’s parlance.

Fishbein changes the sequence of his poems from one collection to the next. He moves the poems he wrote in Chernivtsi in the 1960s and 1970s to the end of his collection, and he places the more recent poems at the beginning. Reading through the entire collection is akin to traveling through time: the reader, who has already accepted the poet’s messianic call, accompanies him to the time when this call began to crystallize. Back then, the poet contemplated, and sang praises to, the black-and-white world that surrounded him.⁹⁴ But the times of the black milk have passed, the black-and-white newsreel has ended, and Fish- bein makes an enormous effort to separate the black from the white, allowing them to dominate his poetic universe but assigning a separate function to each.

Fishbein has apparently picked up this theme exactly where Pervomais’kyi left off. Whereas his illustrious predecessor bemoaned the doves flying away from him, unable to stay, like words, on paper, Fishbein claims that the words, like doves, come back to him.

I will sit down in front of a white page.

I see in it, I feel in it

That torrent, a murmur, the smell and thunder.

I want the garden, not the scenery.⁹⁶

Fishbein takes a decisive step outside this realm by identifying in “Myt’” (A Moment) with someone who contemplates the “white” beauty of early winter:

The snows began to fall. As if to a birthday,

Nobody has gotten used to snow.

Evening motorbikes with their engines muffled

Were loosing their daily rage.

Meek and calm whiteness

Solemnly covered the motorbikes.

Every word sounded like prayer.

A face looking out the window

Was the face of a saint, white purity

Returned to evening ground....⁹⁷

But the poet cannot remain in his “white” realm: it is incumbent on him to re­turn words—these particles of eternity—to the Earth. Only the poetic Word (embodied in a bird, a light beam or a bumblebee) mediates between the two realms of Fishbein’s universe. This mediation is not only a sublime call but also a painful personal experience. In a poem from 1968, Fishbein seeks to connect past and present and is struck by the “electric current” of memory.⁹⁸ Yet, by connecting memory and history, the Above and the Beneath, art and life, Fish- bein—like Pervomais’kyi in his late poetry—transforms his mediating experi­ence into what Jorge Luis Borges called “an aesthetic event.”

Whatever course history may take, Fishbein argues, it cannot annihilate the sublime poetic realm of “whiteness” (an allusion to eternity, immaculate, divine, miraculous, and nurturing).

Impeccable and unyielding

The whiteness stretches throughout.

Although historical or natural calamity cannot entirely smash the realm of po­etry, this does not mean that darkness in the postdestruction world is eliminated once and for all. On the contrary, calamity creates an indispensable framework for an emerging new light.

Even in 2002, ten years after the proclamation of independence, Fishbein’s Ukraine is only a bunch of familiar, friendly faces glimmering in the chiaroscuro of a destroyed paradise, not an overwhelmingly optimistic symphony of colors:

... what are those ruins?... perhaps they are close.

... what desert is that?—... it’s the Arabian desert.

... aren’t they Druzes?—in the canteen’s corner? They are friends, and the rest of the forsaken troops.

—out there, in the corner—ruined contentment? —destroyed paradise... abandoned nirvana?

—over there, in a corner, there is my Ukraine—

The faces of Larysa, Oles’, and Ivan.¹⁰¹

The faces glittering in the darkness of Fishbein’s Ukraine entail the promise of change, which becomes possible only as a result of Fishbein’s return to Ukraine from exile—at first sporadic, and later permanent.

Fishbein’s source of creativity lies between the white snows and the black desert, on the border of which stands his father’s house. Moving into the past and to Ukraine is a “long way, a troublesome recollection.” But it is there where light and God might reappear:

This long journey. This troublesome recollection.

And there, among the ruins, I see the light

OfYour hand, and I am coming to You.¹⁰²

Fishbein’s “coming” to Ukraine was painful and lengthy indeed. In 1999 on the brink of desperation, Fishbein sent a macabre farewell letter from Germany to Ukraine, most likely addressed to Taras Shevchenko and to Ukrainians in gen­eral:

Right now we are emigrants.

(We live as if in caravans.)

And we will dream until the end

With Chernivtsi, if not with the Dnieper.

That’s it. The end. So long, Tarase.

So long to all.

Germanchin.

... strasse.¹⁰³

I transliterated the Ukrainian vocative of the Ukrainian name to preserve the full rhyme between Shevchenko’s first name and the German for “street”—a rhyme that reveals the irreconcilable opposition of the two phonetically similar words. What can be more distant for Fishbein than the symbol of Ukraine and a trivial German street name? And yet, in the context of Chernivtsi established in the previous line (again returning to Bukovina-dreamers and the German-language poets Rose Auslander and Paul Celan), this rapprochement does not seem en­tirely impossible.

Fishbein’s mood changed dramatically once he returned from exile. Sud­denly his universe, hitherto austere, rigid, and stoic, either red-hot or frozen- cold, bursts with warmth. Words descend from sublime realms directly to Fish- bein. The borrowed metaphors become obsolete: Fishbein regains his ability to produce words and metaphors. And the diminutive of “return” (vertanniachko) imbues his homecoming with warmth and intimacy:

This spring, so sudden and bold,

The lilacs’ torrent, the lily’s warmth,

The Easter harmony. Erase

The alien words from Paris, Vienna, and Vilna,

When it descends into your aorta a redeeming “Thunder... the Dnieper... a return... the winds.”¹⁰⁴

Once Fishbein descends from the heights of messianism to the thick of Ukrai­nian reality, his distilled black-and-white silence explodes with a thousand voices, dozens of colors, and the bourgeoning pulse of life. Colors and noises re­place silence and darkness. A snowflake turns into a dazzling warm spring rain­drop. Sublime celestial imagery gives way to the sudden symbolism of the trivial. His “white” broadens into a more subtle palette and acquires new meanings. His quintessential philosophical symbolism yields to the empirical, and his distanced worldview shifts to an almost physical immersion in contemporary reality.

Descending from the sublime, Fishbein encounters history. The peripheral motif of the polyphonic Ukrainian street clustered in the chapter “Ab-Surdo- camera” in his 1996 Apocrypha collection moves to center of his 2001 Roz- porosheni tini (Scattered Shadows). As if discovering the picturesque and poly­phonic universe of Ivan Kulyk, who sought to unite the prosodic experiments of Vladimir Maiakovsky with the mythological imagery of Walt Whitman, Fish- bein seems to have recreated his literary genealogy. Apparently the white realm of Fishbein’s “eternity” remains untarnished. In his poem “Koly my nevmy- rushchymy buly” (When We Were Immortal), the metaphor of immortality is linked to an imaginary space “beyond the March snows” and to “cold” utopian realms. The framework remains almost unchanged: in his “Changing Trains, 1948,” Fishbein continues to present the postwar upheavals in somber colors.¹⁰⁵

But a rediscovered history finds its way into Fishbein’s poetry via auditory and visual signs, such as political slogans, buzzwords and catchphrases of the re­mote past, and Soviet musical pop culture, as well as other easily recognizable elements of daily life in the Soviet and even Austro-Hungarian eras. In poems entitled “1901,” “Vlaskor, 1934,” “Musician, 1942,” “1948,” “1949,” “1953,” “1954,” and “Exile,” Fishbein creates a catalogue of the twentieth century that reflects the historical perspective of a rank-and-file denationalized Soviet citizen, in most cases an outcast or blue-collar worker. These figures emerge through the genres of Soviet mass culture, whose elements Fishbein masterfully imitates. Fishbein introduces imaginary outcasts, gangsters, harlots, petty bourgeoisie, rank-and-file communists, collective farm workers, pitiful orphans, worn-out women, and self-important fathers—and yet they do not transform his poetry into a trivial catalogue of a vanished world. Fishbein listens, and he invites his reader to listen and reflect upon the vanished voices that emerge from the gramo­phone recording. Listening to them, Fishbein aspires to help redeem the victims of history and to help add meaning to their apparently meaningless lives.

And yet, Fishbein fails to elevate them to the “darkness surrounded by snows.” Regaining its sounds, history loses its metaphysical colors. The only way to imbue sounds with metaphysical significance is to wrap them in the meta­phors of memory and culture. Dreams, antiquated gramophones, or scattered memories operate as metaphysical devices. Engaged with the past, Fishbein turns to the Jewish longue duree. He translated from Russian into Ukrainian Fridrikh Gorenshtein’s play Berdichev, which portrays the lowly life of several generations of Soviet Jews who exemplify the worst version of national amnesia and whose multilingual fusion “culture” is reduced to Yiddish and Ukrainian and Russian curses. Indeed, his ability to re-create history leads Fishbein far be­yond the Holocaust or the Soviet era. He moves back in search of a prehistorical utopia, back to a time and place where “the Austro-Hungarian hunchbacked girl is feeling the faces of old Chernivtsi” and the “female admirers of Dr. Freud are swinging on the swings between the mansions.”¹⁰⁶

The encounter with twentieth-century history neutralizes Fishbein’s bitter irony, replacing it with humor and satire. Most of his poems from the twenty- first century are hardly imaginable beyond the prison and street slang that shaped them. To be translated into English, they require not only a talented English-language poet but also someone proficient in the stylistic layers of mod­ern Slavic languages. Similar qualities are required to convey in English the most recent genre of Fishbein’s creative activity: aphorisms.¹⁰⁷ They manifest Fish- bein’s ever-increasing engagement with the everyday political reality of today’s Ukraine. Coined in accordance with Mykola Lukash’s poetic precepts, Fish- bein’s aphorisms reveal unexpected meanings in routinely used word combina­tions, abbreviations, and colloquialisms.

Fishbein perceives society in all the complexity of its political, social, and linguistic realities by means of homophonic puns, sometimes changing one vowel or one consonant in a common expression to produce an exploding nov­elty. Fishbein calls for a clear political position on any matter: “First Aid warn­ing: do not awaken the conscience for sleep cures.” He satirizes the collaborators by using the ambiguity of a noun: “A chance: do you want to live in tranquility next to a cannibal? Become a beast.” He pokes fun at cowards and hypocrites: “Rescue Service warns: if you do not dive deep into the truth, you have a better chance of remaining on the surface.” He scorns pseudo-patriots: “For sale: Motherland. Best offer.” Finally, he adds to his philosophical vademecum some indispensable Ukrainian-Jewish condiments, equating Ukrainian and Jewish national symbols: “Geometry: the sum of two tridents equals a six-cornered star.”¹⁰⁸ Aphorism suits Fishbein. He came to redeem and to teach. But he also came to discover for himself the literal, not metaphysical, significance of Ukrai­nian history.