Moisei’s Revelation

Fishbein reemerged as a Ukrainian poet in a Russian-dominated metropolis when it was neither propitious nor advantageous for a Jew to do so. The advan­tages were few; the disadvantages, multiple and obvious.

Dialogue with the Jews, yet another victimized group, became one of the key features of the Ukrainian renaissance of the 1960s. Perhaps the best example was Ivan Dziuba (b. 1931), the liberal-minded and nationally oriented Ukrainian lit­erary critic and thinker. His much acclaimed treatise Internatsionalizm chy Rusy- fikatsiia? (Internationalism or Russification?) turned Lenin against the Com­munist Party’s policies toward ethnic minorities.³⁴ Dziuba canonized the new Ukrainian stance on Jewish issues in a speech commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the mass murder at the Babi Yar (September 29, 1967), which later generations of intellectuals considered a blueprint for any further Ukrai- nian-Jewish discourse.³⁵ Among the more radical Ukrainian dissidents, Svi­atoslav Karavans’kyi (b.

In some cases the cooperation between assimilated Jews and Ukrainian na­tionalists resulted in the national reawakening of the former. Thus, for example, Iosyp (Joseph) Zisels (b. 1946), who was active in the human rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s, claimed that the prominent Ukrainian dissident Mykhailo Horyn' “had a serious impact on the rise of my national self-perception.”³⁸ In­deed, the Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement went far beyond dissident circles. A number of contemporary Ukrainian literati introduced in their prose sympa­thetic images of Ukrainian Jews no less victimized by the regime than the Ukrainians.

Soviet authorities quickly realized that there was nothing more detrimental to the perpetuation of the Ukrainian colonial status quo than the dialogue be­tween the two ethnic groups. Indeed, in the early 1970s, a “total” anti-Ukrainian pogrom, to use Fishbein's characterization, targeted first and foremost national- minded figures, among them the painter Alla Hors'ka (1929 - 70), the movie di­rector Sergei Paradzhanov (1924 - 90), the poet Vasyl' Stus (1938 - 85), the critic Ivan Svitlychnyi (1929 - 92), the writer Mykola Rudenko (1920-2004), and dozens of intellectuals and rank-and-file Ukrainians.³⁹ But among the perse­cuted, those who defended representatives of other ethnic minorities, Jews above all, were well represented.

Suppressed elsewhere, the Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue moved to the prisons, where the Ukrainian and Jewish inmates, circumscribed by barbed wire, started to talk to one another. Jewish dissidents from throughout the USSR, such as Mikhail Kheifets, Arie Vudka, Semen Hluzman, and Iosyp Zisels, met with Ukrainian dissidents, such as Viacheslav Chornovil, Mykhailo Horyn', Zynovii Antoniuk, Myroslav Marynovych, Ievhen Sverstiuk, and Vasyl' Stus. They es­tablished brand new forms of Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement that shaped not only the Ukrainian dissident movement of the 1970s but also new trends in Ukrainian politics in the 1990s.⁴⁰ Their rapprochement gave birth of a new genre of Gulag writing: the Ukrainian essay on Jewish issues and the Jewish memoir on Ukrainian personalities.⁴¹ Later Fishbein contributed to populariz­ing their writings and making their voices better heard in the West, and some of them became Fishbein's readers and admirers.

Fishbein’s travails from the late 1960s to the early 1970s make sense in the context of the encounter between national-minded Jewish and Ukrainian fig­ures, although he entered into the “legal” liberal, democratic opposition rather than the dissident one. Fishbein’s early poems proved to the Kyiv literati that he was a mature Ukrainian poet. Several Ukrainians decided to give him a hand. First, young poets—such as Ivan Drach, the future leader of the Ukrainian Peo­ple’s Rukh of the 1990s, and Vitalii Korotych, the future spokesperson of pere­stroika—helped Fishbein to transfer from Novosibirsk to the Department of Philology at Odessa University. Then Mykola Bazhan (1904 - 83), a well-con­nected and influential Ukrainian literary celebrity (in the 1940s he was the vice chairman of the Council of Ministers of Ukraine), arranged for Fishbein’s transfer to the Kyiv Pedagogical Institute.⁴²

In Odessa, he studied in the evening department and worked during the day in a suburban library; in Kyiv, too, Fishbein had to work to make ends meet.

Fishbein found himself among those literati for whom the East European Jewish heritage was an integral part of their Ukrainian cultural identity. In the early 1970s, through Bazhan’s mediation, Fishbein became friends with Mykola Lukash (1919 - 88), who reinvented in Ukrainian the best works of Western clas­sic writers from Cervantes to Rilke and whom Fishbein nicknamed in his mem­oirs “Don Quixote.”⁴³ Lukash welcomed Fishbein and magnanimously shared with him his Ukrainian linguistic endeavors. Fishbein acquired from Lukash a predilection for eighteenth-century poetic vocabulary and paronymous puns, which he later transformed into one of the key devices of his innovative rhyme­making. An analysis of Fishbein’s prosody shows that he prefers Lukashean, paronymous and homophonic rhymes, which highlight phonetic similarity and semantic difference. When Fishbein later left Ukraine, Lukash, who knew Yid­dish and Hebrew, wrote in his honor the following rhyme based on his favorite homophones: “Shcho zh ty koish / I kudy ty yidesh, / Hetsi-goyish, / polovyna yidysh?” (What are you doing / and where are you going, / half a goy, / half a Yid?).⁴⁴

Thanks to Bazhan’s happy intercession, Fishbein also met Leonid Pervo- mais’kyi. Fishbein was unaware of Pervomais’kyi’s early Jewish prose and dis­liked Pervomais’kyi’s early work, which was permeated with the enthusiasm of a neophyte communist.

Pervomais’kyi’s poetry, particularly the messianic themes of his late verse, had a significant impact on Fishbein’s imagery. Fishbein recalled much later his first visit with Pervomais’kyi:

Pervomais’kyi was listening to me with his eyes closed. He was reclining on the sofa, leaning on an elbow and with his head on his palm (his favorite position). His face was furrowed with wrinkles; he had bags under his eyes, also wrinkled. He smoked a lot. Perhaps those two daily boxes of Stolychni cigarettes caused his sudden and untimely death, if death can ever be timely. That was the first night I heard about the new generation of Ukrainian poets, about modern Ukrainian poetry. That night he fascinated me with his erudition, with his subtle sense of poetry, art, and music. I saw before me a wise, yet tired, dreadfully tired man: it was the tiredness of many years, not of one day. He gave me his The Tree of Knowledge as a gift; he signed it “To Moisei Fishbein for his long journey in po­etry. ” (Who among us knew at the time that this journey would be long, above all, geographically?) When I was about to leave, he suggested that I translate Heine’s poems for a four-volume edition he was editing (several poems I translated soon appeared in the first volume that Leonid Solomonovych edited). Later I often visited him, in Kyiv on Kotsiubyns’kyi Street, and at his dacha in Irpen. During the last year of his life he often repeated one and the same sentence to me: “You do not know anything yet, young man, you do not know.” What did he imply? The situation in the country? His upcoming death, the approach of which he probably felt? Now one can only speculate.⁴⁵

Among other things, Pervomais’kyi implied the fate of the Ukrainian-Jewish lit­erary figure in a colonial environment and under a totalitarian regime.

Fishbein proved to be well equipped to take that risk. Not only did he paral­lel Pervomais’kyi ethnically and linguistically, but he also shared Pervomais’kyi’s ethical principle of solidarity with the voiceless victims of violence. Fishbein appropriated and nationalized Pervomais’kyi’s ethical dichotomy “victim­redemption.” Fishbein’s take on it was cultural and linguistic: not merely the language of poetry (as Pervomais’kyi thought) but primarily the Ukrainian lan­guage was a victim. Therefore, reflected Fishbein, merely writing in Ukrainian acquired redeeming connotations associated with the “white” of immortality, metaphysics, and the eternal. This is, perhaps, what he thought in December 1973, standing in the crowd at the Baikove cemetery near Pervomais’kyi’s freshly dug grave and impassively recording the empty and senseless speeches of the bureaucrats from the Union of Writers. The Literaturna Ukraina newspaper found his own poetic eulogy to Pervomais’kyi—eloquently entitled “Poeziia” (Poetry),—in which he pondered the opposition of history and poetry, too sug­gestive to publish.⁴⁶

Fishbein’s encounter with the Ukrainian intelligentsia in Kyiv was intense yet short-lived. He had hardly spent two years in Kyiv when, in February 1973, four months after the regular November draft and half a year before the regular spring one, he was unexpectedly drafted into the army and sent to the Far East. He was assigned to serve as a rank-and-file soldier in a technical construction battalion near Vladivostok. Though not a combat position, it was still in a Soviet army environment intolerant of those who were not ethnic Russians.

Moisei built bridges and did not complain of his exile far from Ukraine, yet his officers’ contempt for non-Russians embittered him. That his immediate su­pervisor was of Ukrainian origin was particularly insulting. He could not grasp the disdain of native Ukrainians toward Ukrainian language and culture. This is Fishbein pondering his army travails:

People without a language, uprooted people. My warrant officer, Slys’, was ashamed of being Ukrainian. When his son was born, he announced publicly that he was sending his child to a Russian-language school. During the reloca­tion of our battalion to the Far East, on a train stricken with Krasnoiarsk frost, I congratulated him on Shevchenko’s birthday. He dropped a filthy curse and mentioned that his wife’s or his godfather’s birthday meant more for him than Shevchenko’s. He was steadily forgetting his Ukrainian and had not learned Russian. He called Ukrainians khokhly [the derogatory for Ukrainian—ÓÐ5] and non-Slavs churki [“lumps;” derogatory for Central Asian peoples—ÓÐ5]. Getting drunk, he stopped by my cubbyhole: “You think you are a Ukrainian poet? You’ve got a Jewish mug! Screw you!”⁴⁷

This was one of the first but not the last episode in which Fishbein suffered for his Ukrainian convictions and was victimized by those who wanted to pass for Russian. Not infrequently, Private Fishbein viewed himself as a poet who was destined—albeit in a more modest way—to repeat the fate of Taras Shev­chenko, who was drafted, or better to say, exiled into the Russian army, a crucible of Nicholas I’s comprehensive and compound Russification. Unlike Shev­chenko, who was forbidden to write in Ukrainian while a private on the deserted Kos-Aral peninsula near the Caspian Sea, Fishbein could write. Therefore, per­haps, he found it crucial to address Shevchenko’s experience.

Fishbein did so in the poem “Tarasovi sny” (The Dreams of Taras), dedi­cated to Shevchenko’s night dreams. Those dreams that Shevchenko saw but could not record, Fishbein put on paper. These shared dreams drew the two po­ets together against the destructive power that sentenced both to exile. Fishbein did not entirely identify with Shevchenko: the differences between them were far too obvious. But the dreams, Shevchenko’s homeless orphans, found shelter in Fishbein’s verse. “The Dreams of Taras” entailed no reference to Shev­chenko’s army service, but the reference to the alien land (chuzhyna) is sufficient to reconstruct the parallel he was tracing:

Where the boundless Letha streams its black waters

Where lies the Milky Way without milk—

The dreams wander, the stepsons of the centuries,

The homeless orphans of the Poet.

They wander. There is the Milky Way.

There is a foreign land. And the endless black night.

They are somewhere here. When I go to sleep

They stand over my head.⁴⁸

To emphasize the hidden parallels, Fishbein makes a significant note: “1973. The Far East. The Army.” And the parallel was striking indeed: a Jewish poet, writing in Ukrainian somewhere near Vladivostok, dreamed the dreams of the Ukrainian classic, Taras Shevchenko. Yet the parallels between them should not be exaggerated. After all Fishbein was lucky: the only means of support for his elderly parents, he was demobilized in the fall of the same year. Another exile from Ukraine ended, and he again found himself among friends and colleagues. Even more important, his first book was finally published after several years of effort.

Fishbein’s first book, Iambove kolo (The Iambic Circle), appeared four year after his poems were published in the Ukrainian press. His five Vitchyzna poems had been introduced as the “debut” of a poet from Chernivtsi. They established Fishbein as a hermetic poet who, unlike other poets of his generation, adhered to the rigid metric traditions of the Ukrainian Neoclassicists, such as the early Bazhan or the late Pervomais’kyi. Two of the five poems demonstrated his en­gagement with the homophonic rhymes so characteristic of Mykola Lukash (i.e., pro zori/prozori; about stars/transparent) but not of his “serious” contempo­raries. Fishbein’s patriotic themes also distanced him from the official patriots who praised the greatness of Soviet Ukraine: he spoke about the “oneness” of the feminine-gendered Ukraine to which he had finally returned—a dangerous hint at his “exile” in the interior of Russia. His Ukrainian references went far be­yond the officially endorsed “love” of Ukraine. His intimate patriotism bordered on an explicit nationalism and a rejection of the Communist Party’s vision of Russian-Ukrainian friendship. Finally, one poem—the only one included in Fishbein’s later collections—makes the difference between Fishbein and his contemporaries clear vis-a-vis their engagement with postmodernism.⁴⁹ Fish- bein emphasized the dark, tragic, and destructive side of the imagination, whereas Ukrainian poets of the 1960s generation pointed out its creative power.

Publication in Vitchyzna had required Bazhan’s intercession, and the com­bined efforts of several people were needed to extricate The Iambic Circle from the editor’s drawer and force it through the censor’s red tape. The mid-1970s were the least propitious moment for this kind of publishing endeavor: the ideo­logical hunting dogs were thirsty for the fresh blood of dissident-minded poets, especially after what was considered a coup in Ukrainian politics—the inaugu­ration of the Russofile Shcherbyts’kyi as first secretary of the Ukrainian Com­munist Party—and the arrests of many Ukrainian national-minded literati in 1972-73. Fishbein’s book was accepted for publication and shelved. Drach con­vinced Fishbein to add a “locomotive” (Rus.: parovoz or Ukr.: potiah), Soviet literary argot for an ideologically pristine text celebrating Communist Party leaders, the founders of the USSR, or the peace-making role of the USSR. “Lo­comotives” demonstrated an author’s political correctness and firmly procom­munist stance to the censors and the Communist Party curators. They “dragged forward” other texts that the authorities found ideologically, thematically, or for­mally questionable. Fishbein wrote three “locomotives,” including a classically constructed sonnet about the Komsomol, but this did not help. Bazhan wrote a “locomotive” preface that underscored Fishbein’s commendable service in the armed forces and his even more commendable internationalism. This helped. Finally the Molod’ (Youth) Publishing House published 2,500 copies of Fish­bein’s book of twenty-two poems and five translations.⁵⁰

Leaving aside the opening poems, such as “Ide Komsomol” (The Kom­somol Is Coming), “My buduvaly mist” (We Were Building a Bridge), and “Malen’ka Mariana” (Little Mariana), which are obvious “locomotive” poems, a common theme runs through the collection: the metaphysics of nonbeing. “Povernennia” (The Return), “Hopak voiennoi nochi” (The Hopack Dance of the War Night), “Povoennyi khlib” (Postwar Bread), “Syny zasynaiut” (Sons Are Falling Asleep), and “Ty moia tetyva” (You Are My Bowstring) focus on the fate of war victims and survivors and integrate their experience into a metaphys­ical discourse. Other Ukrainian poets were also preoccupied with aspects of nonbeing, but Fishbein’s metaphysical take on it was unusual. Perhaps unaware of the famous postwar question—is poetry possible after the Holocaust?—he grapples with this problem and answers it positively. Dominated by the theme of death, “Torknutys zapovitnoi mety” (Touching the Utmost Hope), “Zymove prypushchennia” (A Winter Supposition), “Zrechennia Churlionisa” ((Ziurlio- nis’s Denial), and “Ni, ia nikoly ne zasnu” (No, I Will Never Fall Asleep) all question the meaning of creativity on the brink of death. He ponders the ability of art to redeem and revive and admits its failure.

Yet Fishbein’s poetic form contradicts his poetic claims. Consider, for ex­ample, the fourth fragment of his long poem “Povernennia” (The Return), ded­icated to a Buchenwald survivor. The poet portrays the young Hungarian violinist Vlaso Nadelstikher, who had brought his violin to Buchenwald. Nadel- stikher’s music cannot revive his beloved from the dead: poignantly, he performs only for her ashes. Art was powerless and useless against the crematoria, a fact that the violinist—a mad musician (bozhevil’nyi muzykant)—fails to grasp.⁵¹ Yet it was exactly his madness, his ability to perform on the brink of total annihi­lation, that Fishbein immortalizes. While art might be futile, the human capac­ity to produce it overcomes death and destruction and is destined to immortality. Fishbein shapes his vision into classic constructed lines, providing them with a rigid five-syllable iambic meter and the absolute rhymes of a classical sonnet. The faultless form of his verse negates the pessimistic coda of the poem: art is mortal, as are human beings, but human talent is not.

Fishbein’s poetic reflections created a sharp rift between him and his con­temporaries. Like other lyrical poets of the 1960s, Fishbein discussed impres­sions and experiences—for example, a child observing ants crawling over his body or a poet making a snowflake melt in his palm—yet he did this sub specie ae- ternitatis. His emphasis was not on a sudden gloomy or happy impression, but rather on a cosmological, divine, and intransient meaning. While his contempo­raries discussed the planetary repercussions of human experience, Fishbein ob­served from a metaphysical distance. What they placed in space, he integrated into time. What they placed against the backdrop of cosmic universality, he saw from universal eternity.⁵² The last minutes of Jews before they disappeared in the ovens of the Holocaust he viewed as the last day of Pompeii.

An obsession with the eternal and mythological informed Fishbein’s further itinerary, prefiguring what could be seen as his “lyrical theology” of the 1990s and 2000s. Viewed as a coherent text, The Iambic Circle reflects modifications of his poetic worldview. Fishbein’s focus moves beyond black-and-white to a sub­tler perception of the world. The poem “Sad” (A Garden), with its multicolored palette of the Ukrainian fall, concludes a sequence of poems dominated by de­pressingly dark images and a white winter backdrop. Fishbein’s later collections follow a similar structure and internal dynamic but with greater subtlety and complexity. As far as Fishbein’s first collection is concerned, Bazhan had every reason to claim that it was astonishingly mature. The Iambic Circle textually, the­matically, and structurally represented what Fishbein was about to become.

How did Fishbein feel about himself in the mid-1970s, after he had revealed himself to Ukrainian audiences as a Ukrainian poet with explicitly Jewish con­cerns? On the surface, the circumstances seemed favorable: his first book had been published; a number of sympathetic reviews had appeared in the Kyiv and Chernivtsi press; his translations of Heine had been included in a volume of Heine’s poetry; the literary monthly Vsesvit had published his translations of some twentieth-century poets; he had worked two years for Mykola Bazhan as his literary secretary; Dmytro Pavlychko, then chief editor of Vsesvit, and Bazhan had both written strong recommendations for Fishbein to the Union of Writers; in 1976, after ten years of transfers, he had finally obtained his univer­sity diploma.

But the times had changed dramatically. By the mid-1970s, most of the na­tionally active Ukrainian intellectuals had been either silenced or sentenced. The security services had eliminated the dissidents and now sought full control over the liberal-minded intelligentsia. A KGB official approached Fishbein and suggested that he should become an informer, given his excellent standing and good reputation among Ukrainian writers. This was a serious proposal that could have secured his position and bolstered his career, not to mention the priv­ileges and tangible commodities involved. Fishbein rejected the offer. In such cases the security organs were known to offer two options to nonconformist in­tellectuals: spend time in a correction colony or emigrate. Fishbein chose the lat­ter option and left for Israel. At that time, emigration signified what Byron had called “still forever fare thee well”: leaving the country for good.