Introduction

This book advances an alternative vision of the Jewish encounter with modernity. We were told that nineteenth-century Jews became modern by leaving their ethnic quarters and integrating either into majority national cultures or into the imperial Ottoman, Habsburg, or Russian cultures.

The story of Jewish integration into imperial cultures looms so large in mod­ern discourse that the few significant examples of Jewish integration into the colonial have been routinely ignored. We are asked to believe that in a multieth­nic state the imperial Jew represented a universal norm. Jewish modernization appears to be a process in which Jews integrated into an empire or into the cul­ture of the majority population.¹ The idiosyncratic parameters of the empire in­formed the peculiar features of Jewish modernization: a corporative Russian Empire offered its Jews nothing but selective integration into a limited number of estates, most prominently into the liberal professions. For a Jew to be imperial meant to be modern, emancipated, acculturated, enlightened, and loyal. When Hungarians, Ukrainians (who called themselves Ruthenians), and Czechs in the Austro-Hungarian Empire abandoned their old state-oriented allegiances and construed their new loyalties along the nationalist lines, Jews found themselves among the last champions of the imperial.² Austrian Ukrainians competed with Austrian Poles for a higher national minority representation in the Austrian par­liament, whereas the Jewish representatives in the Reichsrat were still addressed as Habsburg Jews. By the same token, Jews still cherished their loyalties toward the Ottoman Empire at a time when Turks were turning to radical nationalist agendas.3 In some cases, most notably in Russia, which was reluctant to emanci­pate its ethnic minorities, Jews on a par with other marginalized ethnicities be­came instrumental in overthrowing the old power and establishing a new one that would eventually make them emancipated, modern, and imperial, albeit in the Soviet vein. In a word, the more imperial the culture, the better for the Jew.

It could hardly have been otherwise. Nothing informed the Diaspora Jews’ plea for power more than their vulnerability. In premodern times, European Jews were a marginalized religious group stigmatized politically, socially, and culturally.

The rise of the early modern state added to this equation a new powerful agent: the empire or the imperial bureaucracy. Urged by enlightened philoso­phers, utilitarian thinkers, and millenarian Pietists, the state began readmitting Jews (as in England), integrating them (as in Austria and Prussia), emancipating them (as in Italy and France), or acculturating them (as in Russia). Now the Jews found that they had to negotiate the conditions and forms of their integration with the state.

The integration of Jews through state languages became paradigmatic throughout nineteenth-century Europe. For example, Alexander II of Russia saw Russification as a key condition toward further sblizhenie (rapprochement) between Jews and Russians. Realizing the importance of Russian acculturation, the East European champions of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, called for throwing off the rags of Yiddish and putting on the beautiful garments of Russian. The harbingers of Jewish equality expediently realized the advan­tages of imperial language. For not-yet-fully emancipated Jews, knowing the state language turned into a paramount negotiating point for their civil rights. Those few Jewish intercessors who late in the eighteenth century convinced Catherine the Great and Paul I of Russia not to use the derogatory “yid” in legal documents but rather the Russian neutral “Jew” did so solely because they could read, understand the implications, and argue against this usage in good Russian or in good German.

Acculturation into the empire changed the social profile of the Jews, firmly positioned them within gentile society, and shaped a new, secular type of Jewish social leadership. The new imperial identity brought Jews to the Austrian parlia­ment and the Russian Duma. It enabled them to become war ministers in Hun­gary and Italy without undergoing baptism. It moved them into the forefront in the arts, both visual and verbal. As an addendum to integration and equality, the empire promised Jews security, visibility, and influence. Striving for security, sometimes for visibility, and less frequently for influence, Jews eagerly identified with the imperial. In the countries that in the twentieth century emerged as new national states or republics with their newly legalized vernacular—Belorussia (now Belarus), Lithuania, and Ukraine—Jews spoke the Russian language and identified with the imperial Russian Soviet culture. In Prague, Bratislava, Tri­este, and Budapest, they preferred the imperial German, not Czech, Slovak, Italian, or Hungarian.

The enchantment of the imperial was so irresistible that having escaped the Soviet Union and its state-orchestrated antisemitism, East European Jewish em­igrants to the United States did not embrace traditional Judaic values (as their American brethren expected them to do) but instead created urban clusters of Russian Soviet culture based on the literary, musical, artistic, food, and fashion values of the USSR of the 1970s and 1980s. Because of this identification with the imperial, these Jews, wherever their point of origin—Moldova, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, or Latvia—were justly dubbed “Russian” Jews when they came to the New World. The fascination with the imperial and scorn of the colonial ex­plains why late nineteenth-century Jews shrugged their shoulders when some­body talked to them about Jewish settlement in Palestine, then a deserted land on the fringes of the Ottoman Empire associated with low-key husbandry, medieval artisans, dead shrines, and malaria. Based on cultural or agricultural revival, the proto-Zionist (“palestinophile”) projects brought meager results until Herzl came and struck a nerve with his Judenstaat (the Jewish State). He was well aware of what he was doing. He appealed to an idea whose lure Jews could not resist: the might of the state, of normalcy, of stability. Mind that according to his Alteneuland utopian vision, the Herzlean Jewish state would be polylingual, multiethnic, and secular and run by an elected bureaucracy—that is to say, a monarch-free version of his contemporary Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Modernization took Jews out of their peripheral ghettoized existence and moved them to the center of European political discourse. It goes without saying that on their move from the periphery to the center Jews adopted multiple iden­tities, becoming Habsburg, French, German, Russian, or Anglo-Jews. As such, they have often been the focus of recent historical studies. Russian or Austro- Hungarian Jews seeking to assimilate into the dominant Russian- or German- language milieu have become a sine qua non for historians studying the Jewish encounter with modernity. German-speaking Jews from Czech-speaking Bo­hemia, then still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, first and foremost Franz Kafka, have become crucial for the study of modern Jewish identities. The rise of East Central and Eastern European national movements, followed by the estab­lishment of a number of independent states, such as Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Poland, radically altered the Jews’ self-identification and their choice of lan­guage in the corresponding countries—the issue that has also become the focus of Jewish historians.⁸ In the Russian Empire, such poets and writers as Isaac Ba­bel and Il’ia Ehrenburg, both born in Ukraine, have been much acclaimed and their contribution to the formation of Russian-Jewish literature well studied. We are taught that in what was before 1991 the Ukraine, Jewish writers who did not write Yiddish or Hebrew chose the Russian language, sought a Russian reader­ship, and competed with one another to be the next Pushkin or Tolstoy.

Thus for those Russian-oriented Jews to become the next Taras Shev- chenko—the great Ukrainian romantic poet—was out of the question: Imperial Russia seems to have promoted Jewish modernization, whereas Ukraine, part of the Russian Empire and named Little Russia, apparently did not. By the same token, Jewish involvement with Polish culture—once Poland became an inde­pendent national state—has also recently received a good deal of scholarly atten- tion.⁹Yet the Jewish-Ukrainian interaction has not moved past basic discussions of Jewish participation in Ukrainian politics. Therefore we know very little about those Jews who, preferring to be part of the colonial rather than the impe­rial, chose to integrate into what appeared to nineteenth-century thinkers a non- historical nation, predominantly peasant, powerless, and bereft of statehood. We have finally learned that Kafka knew Czech better than other Jewish-German writers in his milieu, yet Kafka’s engagement with Czech literature and culture remains a murky issue.¹⁰

The assumption that Jews acculturate solely into the imperial has completely eliminated the discussion of their acculturation into the colonial.¹¹The imperial discourse implied that Slovak, Serbian, Lithuanian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian Jews do not and cannot exist because Jews were urban by default, and urban implied metropolitan, and metropolitan signified imperial British, imperial Russian or imperial Habsburg. At the same time Slovak, Serbian, Lithuanian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian were considered par excellence peasant not-yet-ur- banized cultures. As a result, we know virtually nothing about those Jews who identified with Serbs in the Habsburg Empire, with Greeks in the Ottoman Em­pire, or with Ukrainians in late Imperial Russia. Accustomed to discussing the East European Jewish interaction as the Russian-Jewish or Polish-Jewish, stu­dents of East Europe have not been able to answer even superficially the question of whether there is or ever has been a Ukrainian Jew in politics, society, arts, and literature. Neither have they come up with a list of texts that might fall under the rubric “Ukrainian-Jewish” or tried to explain what the “Ukrainian Jew” im­plied.

Ukrainian-Jewish identity has been considered an unlikely one and hardly worthy of research. It contradicted the received wisdom of social historians. Since at the turn of the century Ukrainian society was predominantly peasant, they wondered why would urban Jews integrate into peasant society or develop peasant concerns? A minority within the minority, the nonimperial Jews—if they ever existed—have been considered an insignificant constituency, which could hardly alter our perception of Jewish integration into European societies or of the Jewish contribution to European cultures. Arguing to the contrary, this book suggests that one could obtain a more nuanced picture of the East Euro­pean Jewry—representing in the nineteenth century two-thirds of the world’s Jewish population—by looking at those Jews in the Russian Empire, and later in the Soviet Union, who preferred Ukrainian to Russian (more generally, the colo­nial to the metropolitan/imperial) and who paralleled their few Polish-speaking brethren in the partitioned Poland; some Czech-writing colleagues in fin de sie- cle Prague in a not-yet independent Czechoslovakia; and even fewer Belorussian literati, such as the national classic Zmitrok Biadulia (Shmuel Plavnik, 1886 - 1941), who moved to the center of the Belorussian language and culture as early as 1911 -12.¹²

In addition to the received wisdom that writes nonimperial Jews out of the story, Jewish-Ukrainian identities have also been obfuscated due to another sig­nificant reason. So far Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue has developed as a reductive competition of victimizations.¹³ If one attempts to answer the question “What is Ukrainian-Jewish?” a la Derrida, perhaps one would pause at the hyphen be­tween the two words, the “silent witness” concealing mutual antagonisms, pain, hatred, and blood—those indisputable markers of victimized national memo­ries. According to the traditional Jewish narrative, based on incumbent political patterns, Ukrainians were inherent antisemites, violent persecutors of the Jews, whereas Jews were victims and their history in Ukraine, one continuous po­grom. Selected examples illuminate this point, some of them well substantiated. Ukrainians decimated the bulk of East European Jewish communities during the Khmel’nyts’kyi’s Cossack revolution of 1648-49; the contemporary Jewish chronicles number the victims in the hundreds of thousands. Ukrainians also slaughtered flourishing Jewish communities, such as those in Uman, in the wake of the 1768 Haidamak rebellion. They destroyed thousands of Jewish businesses and households in the 1880s—because if not they, then who else?—in the wake of pogroms that followed the assassination of Alexander II and that triggered the rise of Jewish emigration to the New World.

Ukrainians aware of their Ukrainian identity, we are to believe, eagerly par­ticipated in the atrocities in Kiev and Odessa orchestrated by the Russian army, police, and the racist Black Hundred organizations in the course of the 1905 Russian Revolution. During the civil war, Ukrainians conducted mass slaugh­ters of the peaceful Jewish population, most noteworthy in Proskurov in i9i9. And they stood behind the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust and sometimes volunteered in the mass execu­tions. The harsh state antisemitism of the i960s and i970s in Soviet Ukraine, much harsher than in Russia proper, was the last episode in this ongoing mis­treatment of Jews by Ukrainians that proved only too well the received wisdom: Jews and Ukrainians have nothing in common, they have never gotten along, and Ukrainians have always hated Jews, particularly in periods of political up- heavals.¹⁴ Discussing the Ukrainian Jew was inconceivable as the received wis­dom read political agendas back, associated the seventeenth- and nineteenth­century agents with to-date national identities, and ignored a simple fact: Ukraine as a nation is a recent, even recently nascent, phenomenon. Ukrainian political identity, as well as Czech, Polish, or Russian, could not emerge before Herder and Romantics triggered the rise of modern nationalism.

Ukrainian narratives have mirrored the Jewish ones. Ukrainians became the victims and the Jews, the sycophantic servants of an imposed colonialist power. Starting from the conservatively romantic Istoriia Rusov (The History of the Ruthenians) in the early nineteenth century, Ukrainian historians portrayed Jews as bloodsuckers; exploiters of the Ukrainian peasants and economic para­sites; servile assistants of the Poles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of the Russian and Polish landlords in the nineteenth, and of the Bolsheviks in the twentieth century. Through the centuries, they enjoyed economic and polit­ical benefits at the expense of the oppressed Ukrainian people. As the leasehold­ers for Polish magnates, Jews brutally exploited Ukrainian peasants by overtax­ing them and imposing heavy tolls for each and every kind of economic and social activity, purportedly even for going to the church and having their chil­dren baptized.

Later in the nineteenth century, in Austrian Galicia, Jews took advantage of their emancipated urban status to transform the voiceless Ukrainian peasant into a destitute proletarian toiling for inadequate compensation at the Jewish- owned oil boreholes and refineries. In this context, the civil war outburst of Ukrainian anti-Jewish atrocities was presented as a straightforward vengeance, an understandable Ukrainian response to Jewish exploitation. Yet, these narra­tives continue: to pay Ukrainians back for the pogroms and massacres, the cun­ning Jews turned into Bolsheviks, took hold of power in Soviet Ukraine, subse­quently orchestrated the Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s, and later helped the regime to purge the Ukrainian intelligentsia. After World War II, the treach­erous Jews systematically defamed Ukraine by making Ukrainians collectively responsible for the Holocaust atrocities. Although one can easily disprove these Ukrainian anti-Jewish and Jewish anti-Ukrainian narratives, as will become clear from the following discussion, they have shaped much of the Ukrainian- Jewish dialogue. In many cases Jews seeking integration into Ukrainian culture were fully aware of them. Paraphrasing Shimon Redlich, Jews and Ukrainians were much more often “apart” and almost never “together.”¹⁵

In the second half of the last century, both Ukrainians and Jews began ques­tioning the veracity of these narratives. Obviously, the key studies appeared out­side Ukraine, where the contested victimizations were moderated by a more bal­anced Western scholarly discourse. For Canadian and Israeli historians, unlike their Ukrainian colleagues, it was much easier to reconcile contested historical narratives since in the Diaspora, as Avtar Brah put it, the native is as much a Di- asporian as the Diasporian is the native. Perhaps Taras Hunczak was among the first to start questioning the ways of thinking about the myths of the past by dif­ferentiating between the antisemitic popular violence of Ukrainian warlords and the philosemitic individual stance of such Ukrainian national leaders as Simon Petliura. Sympathetic to the Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement, Hunczak sup­ported the organization of a conference that for the first time presented a nu- anced vision of the most painful issues of the Ukrainian and Jewish past by briefly outlining moments of symbiotic relations between the two people.¹⁶

Howard Aster and Peter Potichnyj, who inherited the Ukrainian-Jewish con­ference from Hunczak, advanced the metaphor of “two solitudes” of Jews and Ukrainians, yet the idea of a cross-fertilizing dialogue between the two people soon replaced it.¹⁷ Leading North American scholars significantly contributed to this dialogue by introducing Jewish themes into their works on Ukraine’s his­tory and culture.¹⁸ Ukrainian independence, obtained formally in 1991, fostered the rapid institutionalization of a dialogue between Ukrainian and Jewish schol­ars informed by the incorporation of the Diaspora intellectual pursuits into Ukrainian public discourse. Ukrainians began considering Jews from a new postcolonial perspective as an ethnic and national doppleganger of the Ukraini­ans. As Jews and Ukrainians established states of their own, intellectuals on both sides traced parallels between the two people spread all over the Diaspora world from Australia to Canada and yet attached to their historical motherland in East Europe or in the Middle East. Zionist-minded Jews fought against the imperial British colonialism, and Ukrainians resisted the Russian one; as Jews strove for national independence and cultural revival in a newly established postcolonial state, so did Ukrainians. Jews proved highly successful in both—Ukrainians should emulate their example, argue modern Ukrainian thinkers.

After 1991, Ukrainian public figures and journalists repeatedly pointed to the revival of the Hebrew language in Israel as to a remarkably successful achievement of the Jewish nation-making project. Jabotinsky, with his Jewish nationalist agenda, his support of the Ukrainian culture, and his rejection of Russian imperialism, turned for Ukrainian writers and journalists into one of the most-quoted Jewish politicians. Informed by new political realities, the last fifteen years have seen a revision of a plethora of issues in East European Jewish history, particularly in the field of Ukrainian-Jewish relations. Ukrainian schol­ars have advanced a multifaceted approach to Ukrainians and Jews in the early modern and modern context by outlining the social incoherence and political di­versity of both people.¹⁹

And yet, an imbalance between political and cultural history has character­ized and is still characterizing the study of Ukrainian-Jewish encounters. De­spite multiple efforts to revise the received wisdom, new narratives have fol­lowed slightly refashioned old schemes and outdated patterns. To help straighten this out, this book suggests that focusing solely on the political aspects of Ukrai- nian-Jewish encounter might be important but not very productive. Consider, for example, what Ukrainians and Jews did between 1649 and 1768, 1768 and 1881, or 1919 and 1941. Did they hate one another and seek opportunity for re­venge? Hardly. Suggesting that victimization issues should be put aside, Paul Robert Magocsi observed that for centuries Ukrainians and Jews coexisted in symbiotic relations that historians should scrutinize and reevaluate. But this reevaluation requires an entirely different approach, because conceiving of Ukrainians and Jews as two cultural entities capable of cross-fertilization yet radically different also imposes a priori limitations on historical possibilities. Difference and diversity as analytical devices for dissipating grand narratives can ultimately produce a leveling effect.²⁰

To avoid this, I suggest a new perspective and a new context. Instead of dis­cussing Ukrainians and Jews as suprahistorical national constants, this book pre­sents linguistic, ethnic, and national identities as historically informed variables that are created and rejected, adopted and adapted, traded and negotiated, mod­ified and transformed. Yet since they are defined by a specific cultural and his­torical context and expressed in literary writings, this book treats them as phe­nomena that “may be variable across time and across persons, but they may be stable.”²¹ While it is hardly feasible to define Ukrainian Jews as a sociopolitical group identity, it is doable in the case of individual Jews who expressed their quest for self-understanding in Ukrainian prose and poetic narratives. Recon­structing their self-understanding is even more plausible given their consistent tendency to retain their residual hold on Jewish cultural associations.

I suggest going beyond the political context into the cultural context, in which Ukrainians and Jews transcend their differences and share the same pool of ideas, concepts, and images. In this book, I discuss individual Jews for whom Ukraine was a desirable environment, for whom Ukrainian culture was a source of inspiration, and for whom Ukrainian themes became part of their artistic pur­suits. Recurrent waves of Ukrainian revivalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and again in the 1920s and the 1960s, facilitate brand new forms of Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement. Ukrainophile Jews emerge from the following discussion alongside Ukrainians for whom Jewish themes were an im­portant part of their own spiritual quest, their own search for a colonized minor­ity striving for emancipation. As Moses and Israel became for such Ukrainian poets as Lesia Ukrainka and Ivan Franko idiosyncratic metaphors of Ukrainians’ striving for nation and statehood, Ukrainians became for some Ukrainian-Jew- ish poets the metaphor of the marginalized Jewish people. But who were these obscure Jews seeking integration into the colonial Ukrainian culture? Why did they chose to adopt colonial identities, so shaky, murky, limited in scope, and perhaps not profitable, and why did they reject the sparkling glow, the stability, and the solidity of the widely available imperial identities?

To answer this question, I have chosen to portray five Ukrainian poets of Jewish descent who constructed their dual Ukrainian-Jewish identities through their literary activities. Instead of debating who among my Jewish protagonists became “genuinely” Ukrainian and to what extent, or who is not and why, I sug­gest defining as Ukrainian not so much the writers discussed but rather their ex­periences as mediated through literature. The following discussion argues that one can read literary narratives composed by Ukrainian Jews as their reflections on the colonial status of Ukraine and a plea for its national revival; it reads their behavioral patterns—such as their support of the Ukrainian revival of the 1900s, the national communism of the 1920s, and the national-democratic dissident movement of the 1960s and 1970s—in the context of contemporary political and literary debates; and it integrates their choice of language into a broader ethical, cultural, social, and intellectual context.

I argue that the choice of the Ukrainian language by Jewish writers was im­bued with an implicit anti-imperial message. Those Jews who joined the Ukrai­nian cultural revivalism in the 1900s articulated a message no less significant than those Yiddish-speaking Polish Hasidim who early in the nineteenth century defended the Polish national cause and readily went to Russian prison for their convictions. For a heavily oppressed shtetl Jew from the Pale of Settlement to identify with another persecuted minority—such as the Ukrainians or Lithua­nians—rather than to seek a safe haven under the aegis of the Russian-language imperial or Soviet culture, was unusual if not abnormal. The colonial was every­thing that the imperial was not; identifying with it signified an odd choice. In­deed, vis-a-vis all those Jews—as well as many Russian-speaking Ukrainians— who chose Russian culture, this choice was a challenge, and not infrequently, those who made it were suspected of lacking loyalty toward the empire. But adopting a Ukrainian colonial identity instead of the imperial all-Russian did not necessarily signify turning one’s back on Russia. Ukraine has boasted quite a number of pro-imperial figures among the Ukrainian literati of Ukrainian, Rus­sian, and Jewish descent who wholeheartedly supported the regime and en­dorsed the imperial Kremlin-orchestrated repressions against national-minded Ukrainian intellectuals. Besides, over last two centuries both the Russian and the Soviet empires successfully integrated the representatives of the Ukrainian elites who shared with the empire its religion or ideology, high culture, and ruler and yet preserved “the remnants of distinctiveness.”²² As far as the writers dis­cussed in the following chapters are concerned, the anti-imperial implies their anti-a∕∕-Russian proclivities and does not signify anti-Russian.

Ultimately, the rejection of the chauvinistic Russian political praxis could well coexist with the endorsement of Russian literary tendencies, particularly since some Russian democratic-minded writers sympathized with the Ukrai­nian cause. This is particularly evident in cases where Ukrainian-Jewish poets attached to Ukrainian classics mediated their Ukrainian concerns through the poetic themes and images of the Russian-language literati. To present Ukrai- nian-Jewish identities, the following discussion uses “anticolonialist” and “anti­imperial” indiscriminately yet with a difference in emphasis. The former em­phasizes the Jewish sympathy for colonial Ukrainians and the support of their national, democratic, or emancipating tendencies. The latter underscores the spiritual rebellion against a colonizer, the rejection of its power, and sometimes an open protest against its imperialist modus operandi. Indeed, the anticolonial­ist and the anti-imperial are two sides of the same coin: one could not simultane­ously sympathize with Ukrainian strivings for independence and approve of an all-Russian patronizing attitude toward the Ukrainian little brother.

Here a question must be asked: Was Ukraine a colony? Students of modernity understand colonialism and imperialism as a situation in which “people who live in one region of the world... subjugate those of another part of the world. So the concept suggests not only the largeness of the operation, or the ethnic, racial, or cultural differences of the parties, but the global scale upon which it is carried out.”²³ Apparently Ukraine does not fit in this scenario. Unlike “classical” colonies—distant; militarily subjugated; racially, ethnically, or culturally dif­ferent; and economically exploited—Ukraine bordered its alleged oppressors, Poland and Russia. It shared with Russia its autocrat, its Russian Orthodox Christianity, and its imperial high culture, if not an imagined common historical past. Territorially what today is Ukraine was under Poland between the four­teenth and the late eighteenth centuries and under Russia between the late eigh­teenth and twentieth centuries. Poland did not capture Ukraine; it attached the Ukrainian territories as the result of its unification with Lithuania into the Pol­ish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Lithuania had conquered these lands—for- merly belonging to Kievan Rus—desolated by the Mongols in the thirteenth­century. The Polish crown granted some privileges to the Ukrainian elites and shaped their sense of distinctiveness. In turn, Russia attached the eastern part of Ukraine (on the left side of the river Dnieper) through the personal union with Ukraine as the result of Pereiaslav Treaty of 1654 and western Ukraine during the partitions of Poland in the period between 1772 and 1795.

Both Poles and Russians significantly contributed to the rise of the Ukrai­nian economy, statehood, and nationhood. In the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, Poles successfully developed their newly acquired underpopulated territories, creating, with significant help from the Jews, multiple urban clus- ters—private Polish towns and a sophisticated manorial economic framework. Ukrainian towns, particularly on the right bank of the river Dnieper, were of Polish origin and preserved through the nineteenth century their Polish infra­structure. A student of Ukrainian history observed that the more urbanized the towns in nineteenth-century Ukraine, the less they were Ukrainian. Forms and ways of colonization have shaped and continue to shape the modern Ukrainian political divide between the pro-Russian Ukrainian southeast on the one side and the pro-European, particularly pro-Polish, center-west.

In the nineteenth century Russians efficiently continued the urbanization and industrialization of Ukraine, expanding its territory into the Crimea (cap­tured from the Ottoman Turks) and helping develop the Novorossiiskii province and the Donbass coal basin, which later became key economic and industrial centers in southern and southeastern Ukraine. Relations between Russia and Ukraine also seemed symbiotic and cross-fertilizing. The rise of Ukrainian cul­ture was inconceivable without the Russian imperial framework: the national classic Taras Shevchenko rediscovered himself as a Ukrainian poet and artist only after he had encountered the St. Petersburg literary and artistic milieu and had familiarized himself with the poetry and metrical system of the Russian ro­mantics. And the founders of Ukrainian political thought, such as Mykhailo Drahomanov, combined their defense of the Ukrainian distinctiveness with the loyalty to the imperial state and support of its imperial historical narratives. The Ukrainian contribution to Russian culture was no less significant. Kievan monks were responsible for the creation of the messianic myth that presented Moscow as the Third Rome and the Russian state as the savior of Christianity—it still serves as an operational idea in twenty-first-century all-Russian geopolitics. The ethnic Ukrainian Nicholas Gogol laid the foundations for the development of Russian prose for centuries to come. To say that Ukraine was a colony and con­tinued to maintain its colonial stigmata through the twentieth century is to ig­nore the fact that out of half a dozen Soviet state rulers, two—Nikita Khru­shchev and Leonid Brezhnev—were Ukrainian born and bred.

Yet this book is based on the assumption that Ukraine was a colony, at least during the periods of time it focuses on. Between the eighteenth and the twenti­eth century, neighboring Poland and Russia treated Ukraine as a bordering terri­tory (Ukraina literally means the borderland), the resources of which were ex­ploited, the people economically subjugated and socially oppressed, the elites successfully assimilated, the national-minded discourse shuffled or neutralized, and the culture and language considered uncivilized and scornful. Although one may argue to what extent Ukrainian political elites under Poland, Russia, or the Soviet Union experienced marginalization, the situation in the cultural realm clearly indicated Ukraine’s colonial status. First Russian imperial authorities, and then the Soviet rulers successfully outwitted Ukrainian elite. They rewrote Ukrainian historical narratives to convince Ukrainian elites that Russia and Ukraine had always been one; that Ukrainians, dubbed Little Russians, had al­ways cherished the unity between the two polities and striven to live with and under the protection of Great Russia; and that Ukrainian national-minded writ­ers were malicious traitors of eternal Slavic brotherhood. When this did not work and Ukrainians too vociferously attempted to remind Russia of their dis­tinctiveness, Russian imperial authorities suppressed Ukrainian culture by out­lawing the Ukrainian language. While Russian democratic-minded intellectuals helped Shevchenko out of serfdom, the Russian imperial administration drafted Shevchenko into the army where he was forbidden to write and draw. As we will see, a hundred years later, under the Soviets, those merely hinting at the possi­bility of Ukraine’s existence as a separate polity or an independent culture ended up in Stalin’s Gulag or in Brezhnev’s correction colonies. This book furnishes multiple examples illustrating how this mechanism of colonial control over Ukraine operated at certain periods of time in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The path of Ukrainian colonialism, from colonial to postcolonial to national, was long and by no means straight. The difference between Little Russia (Ukraine as part of the Russian Empire) and the Ukrainian Soviet Republic was striking, yet from a certain perspective the tsars’ treatment of Ukraine in the 1870s and 1880s did not differ greatly from Stalin’s in the 1930s or Brezhnev’s in the 1970s, since the USSR, as some have shrewdly argued, was no less a colo­nialist polity than the Russian Empire.²⁴ Over the past one hundred and fifty years Ukraine experienced various forms of colonialism. While the colonial sta­tus of Ukraine will continue to be debated among students of East European his­tory, it might be productive to compare Ukraine’s problematic colonialism with that of Ireland. In the nineteenth century, Ukraine was viewed as an agricultural addendum to the Russian Empire, as was Ireland vis-a-vis the British Empire. The 1932-33 Ukrainian famine devastated the countryside and shaped the na­tional memory of Ukrainians just as the mid-1840s Great Famine devastated the Irish village and shaped the memory of the Irish. The abolition of the last ves­tiges of the Hetmanate self-rule in the eighteenth century and the administrative incorporation of Ukraine as Little Russia into the Russian state administration might be seen as a possible parallel to the abolition of Lord Lieutenancy and submission of Irish local government to London.

Like the Irish in British imperial discourse, Ukrainians were stereotyped in Russian imperial discourse: they were uncivilized, unruly, pathetic, funny, prone to sudden violence and the regular consumption of alcohol, sentimental toward their Cossack past perfect and indifferent to their stagnating present continuous. Politically integrated into the Russian Empire and later the USSR, Ukraine ceased to be a subordinate nation, but as Terry Eagleton warns us, a country may be politically equal to another while being socially and culturally subjugated. Just as Ireland oscillated between its submissive imperial provinciality and its budding national revolt, Ukraine perceived itself either as a subservient south­ern province of the empire or as the freedom-loving rebel. The Ukrainian colo­nial situation was as mixed as the Irish, where “at different times and in different places, various... forms of colonialism have complexly co-existed.^,,2⁵Yet unlike Ireland, Ukraine’s passage to the national and postcolonial was obstructed by colonialist recidivism (i.e., in the early 1930s to late 1980s) that followed brief leaps forward to apparently complete national independence. Even if we admit that Ukraine underwent economic modernization during the Soviet era, bene­fited greatly from the Soviet cultural and industrial revolutions, and differed from agrarian economic dependencies, we cannot fail to recognize traces of colo­nialism in modern Ukrainian society, culture, and language. And since cultural history informs this book, I will make references to Ukrainian colonialism and spell out what I imply by it in every historical period under discussion.

In addition to opting for the Ukrainian in a highly Russified Russian metro­politan or Soviet culture, for the protagonists of this book the choice of the anti­imperial signified a preference for the particular over the general, the individual over the collective, the powerless over the regime, the victim over the violence, and certainly the colonial over the colonizer. Yet these dichotomies were not ab­solute: the principal characters of this book climbed social ladders, published their writings, and gained fame in and through the imperial cultural framework. Therefore my protagonists should be seen in their specific context, for only then do they demonstrate the historicity and the paradoxicality of the anti-imperial choice.

As far as the East European context is concerned, choosing to work in the Ukrainian language did not make Ukrainians or Jews automatically anticolonial­ist. Nor were those Jews who sought integration into the Russian culture neces-

sarily pro-imperial. The Berdichev-born Vassili Grossman grew up as a Russian writer and a supporter of the rising Soviet Empire but eventually turned sharply anti-imperial, a stance that made some chauvinistic-minded thinkers accuse him of Russophobia. Grossman emerged as an anti-imperial Jew not only when he, for the first time in Russian literary history, equated the Third Reich with Stalin’s regime, but also when he traced the path-breaking parallels between the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the Ukrainian victims of the early 1930s famine known as the Holodomor. Becoming a dissident-minded writer of any ethnic origin did not necessarily render one’s views anticolonialist: unlike Gross­man, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn remained imperial—ethically, politically, and cul­turally, among other things—because of his anti-Jewish bias, his dismissive gestures toward independent Poland, his all-Russian political myths, and his aversion to Ukrainian national strivings.

The anti-imperial choice was not exclusively a Jewish privilege: it was also an option for the Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians. When Mykola Rudenko, the all­powerful secretary of the Communist Party Committee within the Union of Ukrainian Writers underwent a political reawakening and became a national- minded dissident, he took a crucial anticolonialist step. Similar conversions to anticolonialism can be found far beyond the Russian-Jewish-Ukrainian triangle: Lord Byron, who joined the Greeks in their fight for independence; John Chilembwe, an American-trained Baptist preacher who started the 1915 anti­colonialist rebellion of the Nyasa people (today Malawi); the legendary Argen­tinean Martin Fierro, who deserted the governmental troops and went to live among the South American Indians; Louis Riel, a white Canadian Catholic who headed the 1885 rebellion of Native Americans—those canonical figures were no less anticolonialist-minded than the characters of this book. They pointed out the indispensability for the anticolonialist choice of the imperial/colonial framework. Indeed, without the presence of a powerful oppressor—political, ethnic, religious, or cultural—the choice of the powerless, oppressed, and colo­nial could not emerge as a manifestation of political resistance. Yet unlike these members of the anticolonialist pantheon, Ukrainian-Jewish poets who identified with the oppressed Ukrainians did not organize full-fledged political resistance and never denied Russian cultural values. Moreover, due to restrictive imperial censorship they were not able explicitly to articulate their spiritual resistance in their writings.

The anticolonialist resistance implied in this book is not an armed struggle of the Ukrainian branch of the Frente Farabundo Marti Para La Liberaction Nacional, nor is it a Jewish version of Gandhi’s ahimsa, the ideology of nonvio­lence channeled to millions through the mass media. Rather, to assert one’s Ukrainian-Jewish self-identification suggests a noncoercive resistance. This re­sistance was implicitly articulated through images and themes, the production and circulation of which rejected the mere possibility of coercion or ideological imposition. Texts produced by Ukrainian-Jewish writers had no chance of be­coming a mainstream product because of their inherent marginality, hybridity, and complexity. They were not composed with an eye to their becoming political mottoes or ideological constructs. By virtue of their marginality in cultural dis­course, the Ukrainian Jews could never become mainstream figures nor could Ukrainian-Jewish literary texts acquire a domineering position in the national culture. The Ukrainian-Jewish discourse was shaped by an inherent tragedy: it was about failure, not triumph. Ukrainian-Jewish poets represented a marginal­ized and powerless minority affirming the significance of the marginalized and powerless identity within the Ukrainian culture. They underscored an absolute value of the marginality and hybridity. Because of that, the presence of Ukrai- nian-Jewish texts in the Ukrainian culture helped resist coercive agendas (either of nationalist or of imperial origin) and contributed to the creation of a demo­cratic and pluralistic cultural space in post-1991 Ukraine.

This book draws from the methodology of colonial studies and postcolonial theory and from the productive critique of these schools of thought. I carefully considered the objections to postcolonial scholarship advanced by Robert Young.²⁶ When analyzing literary texts I make large historical generalizations based on them only in a dense historical context. Because this book is historical and cultural, I reconstruct the cultural contexts of my literary personalities and their literary products, pinpointing their historicity. My analysis focuses on what the texts in question represent, for whom, when, and why. I analyze the cul­tural field that generates and shapes the functioning of a text: it is in this field that I am able to reconstruct the meaning of “what is going on.” For me, literary texts are cultural and historical events that have a certain impact on the available pool of dominant popular “meanings and feelings,” as Jean-Christophe Agnew would have it. Texts in this book are read historically to uncover the suppressed individual experiences embedded into them, although I am aware that literary texts cannot be read as transparent windows on experience of a given time and place. Composed of five case studies connected methodologically and themati­cally, this book dwells on the differences—literary, historical, ideological, and even ethical—between its principal characters. It thus avoids homogenizing the participants from both sides of the Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue. In a sense, I am trying simultaneously to suggest the existence of an anticolonial tradition among

East European Jews and to recover its complexities, modifications, versions, and deviations, if not schisms.

My story begins late in the nineteenth century. By that time Jews lived through­out Ukrainian territories, which constituted the southwestern region of the Rus­sian Empire (Iugo-zapadnyi krai) and the southern part of the Pale of Settle­ment, the territory of the legal residence of East European Jews. Because only selective groups of Jews (university diploma holders, licensed artisans, guild merchants, and Nicholas I army soldiers) were allowed to reside in interior Rus­sia and because residence in rural areas was illegal for them, about two million Jews crowded in towns and shtetls of the southwestern region. Jews in general constituted 4 percent of the total population in the Russian Empire, io percent in the southwestern region, 14 percent in right-bank Ukraine, 32 percent in Ukrainian cities, and 53 percent of the Ukrainian shtetl population. At the same time, some 8o percent of seventeen million Ukrainians resided mostly in rural areas. No wonder the Jews played a predominant role in the urban economy. Ninety-five percent of all Volhynia Province factories were Jewish owned or leased. In the southwestern region, Jews owned or leased from the gentry 500 of the 564 distilleries, 148 of the 199 breweries, and 5,700 of the 6,353 mills. Thirty percent of Jews were involved in business (versus io percent of Ukrainians). While Jews in Ukraine were better off economically than their brethren in the northern regions of the Pale, salaries were low and poverty was rampant. The density of Jewish residence is best illustrated statistically: there were 510 Chris­tian residents per i00 houses (5 people per household) whereas there were i,299 Jews (13 per household).²⁷

The contradiction between the Russian-Jewish, formerly Polish, town and the Ukrainian village became particularly acute with the rise of Russian capital­ism. In the late i870s when recently emancipated yet landless peasants moved to the cities in search of jobs, they became first-generation urban dwellers and rec­ognized the already urbanized Jews as their major competitors. In i88i, the as­sassination of Alexander II sparked the first full-fledged anti-Jewish violence in the nineteenth century. It originated in southern Ukraine’s cities and towns and took the form of pogroms that claimed several dozen lives, caused ruin to thou­sands of small businesses, and 10 million rubles worth of damage to Jewish prop­erty. Russian authorities momentarily blamed the violence on the victimized Jews. Despite the Jews’ key role in creating highly competitive trade with very small income and rapid turnover, which kept prices low, Jews were identified as parasites and exploiters of the peasant, as those who exercised full economic control in the southwestern region, and as the innkeepers who made the peasant drunk. To separate harmful Jews from peasants, in 1882 Minister of the Interior Nikolai Ignat’iev introduced the May Laws, which further segregated Jews by banning their settlement in villages, banishing them from certain localities, and establishing rigid university and college quotas for them. This cast a hard blow on the economic life of thousands of Jewish who now, together with the ruined yet free peasants, moved to towns in search for employment.

Facing increasing economic hardships, Jews underwent rapid pauperization and proletarianization. Whereas in 1818, 86 percent of all employed Jews went into trade and 12 into handicrafts, in 1897 only 32 percent engaged in trade and as many as 38 percent were artisans and employed workers. Empoverishment of the Jews was further exacerbated by the industrialization of late Imperial Russia, which made most handicrafts redundant. An independent Jewish shoemaker in Berdichev could not compete with shoemaking factories that employed hun­dreds. In the 1890s, Jews joined en masse the newly established industrial enter­prises, creating the basis for the Jewish proletariat movement and bringing forth such Jewish socialist organization as the Bund. Others went in search of better economic opportunities overseas: between the 1880s and 1910s, some ι,270,000 Jews fled the Russian Empire.

The overwhelming majority of Jews in Ukraine (97 percent) spoke Yiddish and identified with the Jewish traditional values based on Jewish schooling through heder, on the religiously informed lifecycle, on Jewish dietary laws, and on local rabbinic leadership. But since the Russian administration conducted a policy of forceful Jewish Russification, there were increasing numbers of Jews, particularly in such big urban clusters as Kiev, Odessa, Kremenchug, Ekateri- noslav, Zhitomir, and Kharkov, whose children attended Russian schools and spoke fluent Russian. Those Russian-speaking Jews did their best to circumvent severe educational limitations and enter the liberal professions. For example, in Odessa at the turn of the nineteenth century, 49 percent of all medical doctors, 93 percent of the dentists, 80 percent of the pediatricians, 48 percent of the lawyers, and 65 of legal assistants were Jews. One hundred nineteen out of one hundred forty-four first guild merchants residing in Kiev were Jews—that is to say, 83 percent. They represented the most Russified part of the Jewish popula­tion in Ukraine and constituted not more than 1.2 percent of its total. The na­tionalist Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, himself a brilliant Russian writer, mocked their pro-Russian drive by depicting assimilated Jews who turned out to be “the only bearers and disseminators of the Russian culture” celebrating “Russian lit­erature” in a city bereft of a Russian cultural presence.²⁸ Indeed, while some city Jews were well integrated into the imperial economy and exemplified the impe­rial Jew, the overwhelming majority of their brethren in the shtetls could hardly make ends meet, lived from hand to mouth, and were residentially, socially, and economically oppressed. Yet some of these Jews chose to associate not with the Russian Empire but with the nascent Ukrainian nation and Ukrainian national strivings and become Ukrainian Jews.

This book traces the making and the unmaking of the Ukrainian Jew from the 1880s to the 1990s. It starts with a discussion of Hryts’ko Kernerenko’s at­tempts to integrate into Ukrainian culture and recreate the image of colonial Ukraine. In the late 1890s, Kernerenko’s literary activities made him visible within the milieu of Ukrainian thinkers in Austrian Galicia and later in Kiev, and the Ukrainian feedback to his literary experiments manifests early attempts by the Ukrainian intelligentsia to integrate Jews into Ukrainian literary discourse. The second chapter portrays Ivan Kulyk, a staunch supporter and later one of the leaders of the Ukrainian cultural revival who sought to synthesize his Ukrai­nian identity with his Marxist convictions. A renowned poet, politician, diplo­mat, journalist, and manager of cultural life, Kulyk became the first head of the umbrella organization of Ukrainian writers but tragically failed to remain loyal to Ukrainian Marxism. His fall marked the renewed efforts of the emerging So­viet empire to suppress Ukraine’s anticolonialist drive. The third chapter tells the story of Raisa Troianker, who placed herself between village poetry and the avant-garde and who crafted unparalleled Jewish and Ukrainian poetic images. Troianker sought emancipation by integrating into Ukrainian culture through her literary and erotic endeavors. Troianker’s later switch to Russian demon­strated that the Soviet Union provided its subjects with ways to choose between various modes of self-identification. Troianker, as well as many others, used this opportunity to camouflage her Ukrainian-Jewish self-awareness—a decision made by many in Ukraine and Russia at a time when the regime chose to unify its multiethnic culture and suppress marginal nonimperial voices.

Troianker’s contemporary Leonid Pervomais’kyi is the focus of the fourth chapter. This prolific Ukrainian literary figure started his career as a Ukrainian- Jewish writer, later abandoned his Jewish endeavors, yet after World War II reemerged as a writer of Ukrainian-Jewish themes who managed to translate his sympathy toward the colonial and his rejection of the imperial into an Aesopian language of ethics and semiotics. In the postwar years he did not subscribe to the official Soviet ideology nor did he cross over into the dissident rejection of the regime, yet his anticolonialist humanism far transcended the limits of the Soviet canons within which, critics thought, he was operating. Perhaps one of the most consistent anticolonialist writers, Pervomais’kyi became a paradigmatic Ukrai­nian poet of Jewish descent, one whose creativity has influenced and continues to influence the literary endeavors and self-identification of many Ukrainian-Jew- ish literati.

The fifth chapter focuses on Moisei Fishbein, in a certain sense Pervo- mais’kyi’s heir, who imagined himself a Jewish Messiah coming to redeem Ukrainian culture from its colonial marasm. Fishbein emerged as one of the most eminent champions of the Ukrainian linguistic revival and perhaps the first in the sequence of Ukrainian-Jewish literary figures aware of the long tradition he represented. Although the following chapters entail monographic portrayals of the Ukrainian-Jewish figures, they are connected methodologically (colonial studies), thematically (Ukrainian-Jewish identities), and also in terms of cul­tural genealogy. Kulyk endorsed the literary activities of the young Leonid Per- vomais’kyi; both Kulyk and Pervomais’kyi shared the literary milieu of Raisa Troianker and knew her personally; Pervomais’kyi blessed the literary endeavors of Moisei Fishbein; and Fishbein worked for years with the literary translator and scholar who rediscovered Kernerenko. Another feature common for these figures is the way Ukrainians received them and perceived their writings. De­spite obvious differences in the quality of their literary creativity, Kernerenko was welcomed by some L’viv- and later Kiev-based Ukrainian critics; Troianker established herself among Ukrainian writers and poets; Kulyk was well known to the contemporary mass reader; Pervomais’kyi was considered a living classic and was revered by hundreds of thousands of readers; and Fishbein enjoyed the overwhelming support of Ukrainian cultural elites in the 1990s and 2000s. The story of their reception is another concern of this book.

I look at these five anti-imperial Jews as representing dozens, if not hun­dreds, of Ukrainian figures of Jewish descent who contributed to Ukrainian cul­ture over the twentieth century. To be sure, they also represent those Ukrainian Jews who preferred the Ukrainian language to Russian, identified with Shev­chenko rather than Pushkin, yet enjoyed a lesser degree of public exposure. Thus Hryts’ko Kernerenko turned to Ukrainian poetry and prose on a par with other Jews sympathetic to Ukrainian national revivalism. Among them were, for ex­ample, such literati and public figures as Kesar Bilylovs’kyi, H. Hurovych, Maxym Hekhter, and Serhii Frenkel: the first was a prominent Ukrainian poet, the second wrote a number of Ukrainian poems as early as the 1860s, the third wrote Ukrainian political articles for the L’viv-based periodical Literaturno- naukovyi vistnyk (Literary and Scholarly Herald) edited by Ivan Franko, and the fourth was a member of “Pleiada” group and a close friend of Lesia Ukrainka.²⁹

In the 1920s and 1930s, along with Ivan Kulyk, literary critics, poets, and writers of Jewish descent joined by the dozens what was later called the Ukrai­nian renaissance. Suffice it to mention the playwright Leonid Iukhvid, the writer Natan Rybak, the critics Volodymyr Koriak and Iukhym Martych, the literary historians Ieremiia Aizenshtok and Abram Leites, the musicologist Abram Gozenpud, or less well-known literati, such as Liber Rabinovych, whose Ukrainian verse on proletarian themes not infrequently appeared in the Ukrai­nian press in the 192os.³⁰ Among literary figures of the generation of Leonid Pervomais’kyi, Ukrainian poets of Jewish descent became a norm on the Ukrai­nian cultural horizon: in different periods of his life Pervomais’kyi knew of, and was in complex relations with, such poets as Sava Holovanivs’kyi (191o - 89), Naum Tykhyi (b. Naum Myronovych Shtilerman, 1912-96), David Kanevs’kyi (1916 - 44), Abram Katsnel’son (1914 - 2oo3), and Aron Kopshtein (1915 - 40). Although Kopshtein and Kanevs’kyi died fairly young during World War II and did not leave texts on Jewish themes, Tykhyi and Katsnel’son underwent a pe­riod of personal reawakening at the very end of their literary career, well into their seventies and eighties, probably under the impact of the new Ukrainian state-building efforts and perhaps not without the influence of Moisei Fish- bein’s Ukrainian-Jewish imagery. To this list one should add dozens of Jewish literati who lived and were culturally active in Ukraine, who consistently identi­fied with Ukraine but wrote in either Yiddish or Russian. Some of them appear in the backdrop of my narrative.

Yet only five individuals became my protagonists: for them the Ukrainian language was not only a medium of literary discourse but also an object of anti­colonialist reflection. Furthermore, the turn of these five to Ukrainian does not mean they abandoned Jewish motifs: on the contrary, they incorporated Jewish themes, creating what might be cautiously defined as the Ukrainian-Jewish liter­ary tradition. For some of them, quite possibly, Ukraine and Ukrainians were a foil for their reflections over the fate of the Jewish people and Jewish statehood. Of course, one finds Jewish themes in the writings of Ukrainian writers and po­ets of Jewish descent not addressed in this book. For example, Nathan Rybak portrayed Jews who joined the Khmelnyts’kyi’s Cossack revolution in the 1640s; Naum Tykhyi penned a series of politically oriented plays based on Jewish cul­tural myths and arguing against antisemitism; and Grigorii Fliarkovs’kyi, the author of a number of poems on the Holy Land, called himself “the only Ukrai­nian poet who addresses Jewish themes.” And yet one does not find a consistent anti-imperial message in their writings. Their integration into Ukrainian culture clearly manifests their sympathy to colonial Ukraine, but their anti-imperial stance is questionable. Compare, for example, Pervomais’kyi’s texts, in which he imagines himself standing among the victims of the Nazi-conducted massacre in the Baby Yar, and the poem of Naum Tykhyi, who imagined the same massacre, expressed similar emotions about it, but observed it from the “safe” distance of the firing squad, as if assimilating his and the executioners’ viewpoint. To com­plicate the question of this book, the choice of the Ukrainian language does not render a Jew from Ukraine into an anti-imperial Ukrainian Jew: other factors should be taken into consideration in addition to the language ones.

This book explores the cultural accomplishments of multilingual Jews of various social backgrounds during various periods in which Ukrainian accultur­ation seemed neither beneficial nor propitious. The following discussion traces the spiritual biographies of the Jews who considered identification with the Ukrainian national cause part of their personal spiritual quest. This integration buttressed their attempts to reconcile Jewish and Ukrainian historical narratives traditionally regarded as incompatible. The following chapters focus on five Ukrainian poets of Jewish descent who attempted to craft an improbable iden­tity: Ukrainian-Jewish. The anti-imperial Jew emerges from this book as a har­binger of postmodernity, when the nations treated in the nineteenth century as nonhistorical, achieved independence, and started making their way out of colo­nial domination, as happened to Ukrainians after the collapse of the Soviet regime or in Israel after the end of the British Mandate and the War for Inde­pendence.

This book appears to represent a new subfield in European Jewish history. It applies the devices of colonial studies and postcolonial theory to modern Jewry. It discusses dozens of historical and literary texts never reviewed in any lan­guage; recovers previously unknown archival documents; and will, I hope, con­tribute to European, Slavic, and Jewish studies. For a student of Europe this book offers a very different concept of modern European Jewry and suggests a possible way to revise its historical itinerary. If not the imperial, but the anti-im­perial Jew was the protagonist of modern Jewish history, then one must rewrite the entire story of the Jewish agency in the Russian Revolution, in modernism, in the Holocaust, in national-democratic and dissident movements, and in Zion­ism. In this book I advance the importance of the anti-imperial Jew and chal­lenge the myth-making conception of Jews as nomadic triumphant colonialists.