Kyiv and Jerusalem
Fishbein’s Jewish-Ukrainian identity includes elements of both cultures but is not merely the sum of its parts. In the case of Fishbein, the Jewish and the Ukrainian help explain one another by revealing the similarities and discrepancies between the two cultures.
Once Fishbein’s Jewish and Ukrainian references are deciphered in their corresponding cultural and poetic context, it becomes clear that they not only are juxtaposed but also resist hybridization. They inform a complex poetic persona, more subtle and contradictory than the mere combination of “the Jewish” and “the Ukrainian.”Two examples illuminate this point. In the programmatic poems “I vzhe vusta sudomoiu zvelo” (A Mouth Contorted in Pain, 1989) and “Shche teploho velykodnia pora” (It Is Still a Warm Easter Day, 1996) at the beginning of the Apokryf collection, Fishbein resorts to the paradigmatic parallel between Kyiv and Jerusalem made by writers, poets, and thinkers from the Russian Mikhail Bulgakov to the Ukrainian Roman Rakhmannyi.78 But he views Jerusalem as a Jewish town, not Christian, and he presents Kyiv through its peculiar Ukrainian landscape, not through its East Orthodox (therefore, imperial) historical sights:
... A mouth contorted in pain,
And an immortal soul has taken on
The scorched hills of Jerusalem
And Kyiv’s burned over greenery.
O droplet, glimmer, bumblebee,
Little pearl, destiny, you half-invisible
Intangible rhyme of my existence,
Its sting, red-hot and sweet—
Bless these things, to be my own—
Fog falling over the Wailing Wall
And spring falling over the Dnieper.
Bless these things, to stay my own
As long as I walk in the world,
As long as I can still remember.79
At the first glance, Fishbein seems to compare the Land of Israel to Ukraine, the Jordan to the Dnieper, and the Western Wall in Jerusalem to the steep slopes running down to the banks of the Ukrainian river.
He brings together Israeli and Ukrainian symbolic realms, a novelty on its own. He spiritually encompasses both the “scorched hills” of Jerusalem and the “burned over greenery” of Kyiv. Their combination is the poet’s “destiny” and the “intangible rhyme of his existence”; he unequivocally wants us to see them as complementary and indispensable.Yet Fishbein avoids mechanical synthesis: Ukraine does not become a promised land, and Kyiv does not assume the place of Jerusalem. The poet absorbs Kyiv and Jerusalem alike but preserves their integrity.80 Thus Fishbein’s Word unites Jewish and Ukrainian realms: Israel and Ukraine form a new whole in which geographical and cultural spheres function as poetic rhymes—similar but different. A closer look provides a clue to Fishbein’s dual poetic identity: that in his universe the Ukrainian and the Jewish are similar only on a superficial level but are dramatically incongruent in substance.
The juxtaposition of two national shrines—the legendary Dnieper hills and the millennia-old Western Wall—entails something more than the cross-fertilization of multicultural elements. Phonetic structures point to the implicit disjunction, if not diametrical opposition, of Jerusalem and Kyiv. The beginnings and the ends of the simile emphasize the difference rather than similarity between the two images: rozpecheni (scorched, referring to Jerusalem hills) contrast with zelo (greenery, referring to Kyiv hills): o/e in the first case, and e/o in the second. Kyiv phonetically opposes Jerusalem, ie/y (Zerusalyma), and reverses the sequence of y/ye (Kyieva). Without providing any national or ethnic imagery underscoring the difference between Ukrainian Kyiv and Jewish Jerusalem, Fishbein still manages phonetically to underscore their intrinsic dissimilarity. In the next stanza he parallels the Jewish Wailing Wall and the Ukrainian River, perhaps capitalized to match the symbolic importance of the Wall, but at the same time he disassociates their absolute rhyme (StinoiufRikoiu) by placing one word at the end of a line, the another in the middle of the next.
The Ukrainian and the Israeli images rhyme, he seems to say, but only indirectly. It is not so much the cultural references as the poetic form itself that signals the similarities and differences of the two metaphors.Prefiguring the culminating juxtaposition, Fishbein transforms spatial parallels into temporal ones: iuha (fog) connotes the wet and rainy Israeli winter, whereas Ukraine is associated with the spring falling over the Dnieper. Ultimately, Jewish/Israeli and Ukrainian/Kyiv imagery blend into the poet’s personal reflections. Although the first line of the last stanza (Bless these things, to stay my own) appropriates and personalizes Kyiv and Jerusalem, the last two lines universalize them by replacing the personalized verbal form and the personal pronoun (“I” or “me”) with the infinitive (lost in the English version) and the impersonal verb (“there are”): literally, “live memoirs” or “as long as there are worldly memories” or “as long as people remember.”81 Jerusalem and Kyiv coexist for Moisei Fishbein as long as he is physically and spiritually alive—but they also coexist universally and for as long as humanity remembers. Living/ earthly memories—spohady zemni—transform Fishbein’s personal experiences into a universal cultural category. Kyiv and Jerusalem, Israel and Ukraine, Ukrainians and Jews will remain two parts of one and the same supranational metaphor so long as Ukrainian and Jewish culture—or civilization—exists.
Fishbein was not the first to trace the parallels between the Ukrainian and the Jewish/Biblical/Israeli realms: Czernowitz-born Rose Auslander did so long before Fishbein did. In “Ohne Wein und Brot” (Without Bread and Wine) she portrays desperate Bukovina Jews despoiled of even the hope for redemption: the Wailing Wall, a collector of tears, is their only patrimony.82 Auslander juxtaposes Zion and Austrian Bukovina by recalling her mother’s songs and dreams (“Meine Nachtigal”; My Nightingale).
Perhaps Fishbein, a connoisseur of Auslander’s poetry, appreciated that her Czernowitz, portrayed in German, reminded him of the Ukrainian Kyiv: both were towns on the hills (Gestufte Stadt, Hugelstadt), both watered the willow growing on the banks (Weiden entlang dem Pruth). Perhaps Fishbein borrowed and revisited AuslandeFs comparison of the Jewish people and bumblebees.83 Apparently he also reworked AuslandeFs river/eternity metaphor expanding it into a more recognizable Ukrainian and simultaneously more universal realm.84More important, Fishbein seems to have come across AuslandeFs poem about her father, who left the ghettoized Sadagora for the secular Czernowitz: here Auslander brought together Ukrainian and Jewish realms in a manner echoed in Fishbein. Auslander crafts a dense Judaic imagery: in her poetry the “trees of the holy letters spread their roots from Sadagora to Czernowitz.”85 She views the time of Torah learning as the space in which Ukraine and the Holy Land become one: when her father learned Jewish texts, “the Jordan flowed into the Prut.”86 Apparently borrowing from Auslander (as did Celan), Fishbein revisits AuslandeFs reference to the past times, to damals—the “then.” Whereas for Auslander the unity of Bukovina and Israel is possible only in the distant and irretrievable pre-Holocaust past, for Fishbein this impossible juxtaposition is still possible here and now.
Kyiv and Jerusalem are bound together as the realms of redemption. In “Shche teploho Velykodnia pora” (It Is Still a Warm Easter Day), a messianic image appears: a capitalized He, most likely an unnamed Jesus, God, or humanized divinity, comes from the other side of the Jordan to genuflect near the Dnieper banks. The first stanza contains a deliberately ambiguous reference to a feminine image (“her”) that this He views at a distance from beyond the Jordan. This unnamed “she” first appears as a reference to a warm Easter day (pora; Ukrainian feminine; literally, the season), but toward the last stanza it acquires a different—or additional—meaning: Ukraine.
The Redeemer comes from the other side of the Jordan to reveal himself to Ukraine through the “touch of the dove’s wing.” He comes to pray for Ukraine and to redeem her. The redemptive theme is underscored by the juxtaposition of the two meanings of “her,” Ukraine and season, one of which (Easter) is imbued with salvific connotations.Transforming the country into a sacred time, Fishbein reiterates his faith in Ukraine’s redemptive vocation. Yet his parallelisms become even subtler. After Fishbein has pointed to Him—“here He is, genuflecting near the Dnieper”—a second important parallel appears. Ukraine merges with Easter and the Ukrainian poet, with He, the mysterious Redeemer. The Redeemer perceives Ukraine as “murdered, not killed, not bewailed,” very much like Fishbein perceives Ukraine elsewhere. The Redeemer promises to reveal himself through the touch of the dove’s wing—and Fishbein calls his own words “the doves” (“Slova moi”; My Words). Just as the Redeemer comes from the other side of Jordan, elsewhere Fishbein, too, visualizes his return to Ukraine as a redemptive exodus. Finally, the Redeemer and Fishbein both exemplify Logos, the immortal Word, which oscillates between the two cities: prophetic in the case of Jesus, poetic in the case of Fishbein. Without this important parallel, Fishbein’s image would have remained trivial, since Jesus has connoted political and cultural redemption in many postcolonial cultures. But by making Jesus part of his own poetic alter ego, Fishbein permeates the redemptive scenario with personal, intimate, and intimately Jewish connotations. “He” in the poem signifies not only Jesus. It signifies the poet, Moisei Fishbein, no less a redeemer, who—as if replicating his student prayers in Novosibirsk—now comes to the Ukrainian Holy Land to genuflect at the hills of the Dnieper, to thank God for the opportunity to come back from exile, and to pray for Ukraine’s salvation.
Ultimately, Fishbein construes a utopian realm that obliterates the differences between Ukraine and Israel, the Dnieper and the Jordan, Kyiv and Jerusalem.
He backdates this realm to the times of his childhood, when, the poet argues, “we were immortal.” Back then the world seems a dazzling myth in which Chernivtsi and Ravenna become neighbors, making geography obsolete, and the “black” imagery has no chance to interfere with the divinely “white” realms of lofty dream and eternal bliss. This is Fishbein:Jerusalem glittered in the crystal,
The River flowed from God’s palm,
And our City glimmered on the throne
And the star confessed to a bumblebee.87
Here the proximity of Kyiv and Jerusalem becomes possible among other things since the Heavens meet the Earth—or, as Fishbein, argues, a cold distant star comes to talk intimately with a warm fuzzy bumblebee. In the utopian future, Fishbein seems to argue, Ukraine would become a country where diverse cultures and languages, as Auslander put it, “coexist caressing the air.” This utopia comes to life due to a new spin that occurred in Fishbein’s poetry in the 1990s.