The Birth of a Messiah

Fishbein was born in 1946 in Chernivtsi, a city in Bukovina, western Ukraine af­flicted by postwar trauma, despair, and famine. Fishbein’s early memoirs paint this epoch in black-and-white.

Poetically reconstructing his childhood, Fishbein portrayed little Moisei as meticulously picking crumbs of scattered bread and collecting them in his hand—the same way his family was gathering relatives scattered throughout the country. Despite the apparent gloom of his early childhood, Fishbein sanctifies its time and place. This is Fishbein’s autobiographical voice:

That small town with its postwar starvation, its primus and paraffin stoves, its in­cessant lines of people waiting to buy bread, charcoal, railway tickets, kerosene, New Year’s trees, wood, anything—that small town, which had no room for Jews, Ukrainians, or Moldavians, and yet had room for them all—that small town with its eternal “Early Sunday Morning” show in the Musical Drama Theater, with its astonishing walls, which one could paint as thick as one desired but on which the old Latin inscriptions would still be seen—that small town with the dusty grain of its suburbs, with horses in the streets, with the old faces in the basement windows—that small town of the not-yet-destroyed multifamily apartments, the corridors of which blended and forever preserved the smells of weddings and fu­nerals, diapers and borscht; blended and forever preserved the greetings “Bit­ter!” and “No, you are an asshole!” and “Retard!” and “Yid!” and “Why have you abandoned us!”—that bygone small town of my nighttime dreams is the di­vine heritage of my childhood.⁷

On a tour through his Chernivtsi past, Fishbein reproduces minuscule details that emerge as idiosyncratic “signs of the era,” quotidian symbols, and recogniz­able markers of a bygone era: the Soviet Union of the postwar 1950s.

Chernivtsi was (and still is) an unusual Ukrainian conduit into East Central and Central European culture. Before 1918 the city was Habsburg Czernowitz, from 1918 to 1939, Romanian Cernauji. When the USSR annexed Bukovina in June 1940, the city still retained some of its Habsburg character. It was situated in what had been an Austro-Hungarian backwater but had an imperial multi­ethnic constituency population that practiced interethnic tolerance. “Four lan­guages coexist together, caressing the air,” wrote Rose Auslander (1901- 88), the locally born and raised Jewish-German poet, depicting her native town; else­where she dubbed Czernowitz “the land of the four-language songs.”⁸ Georg Drozdowski (1899 -1987), a Czernowitz-born German writer, called his home­town “a replica of Austria.”⁹ In the 1940s, local Jews used to ask: “Have you ever been to Vienna? No? So you may want to know that Chernivtsi is a spitting image of Vienna!”¹⁰

This statement was true as far as the local Jewish culture was concerned. Launched by Joseph II in the 1780s, the modernization of Austrian-Jewish soci­ety left profound traces on the face of the town. Chernivtsi hosted a modern He­brew school, Safah-Ivriah, where Paul Celan (Paul/Pessach Antschel, 1920-70) received his Hebrew education.¹¹ In 1908, on the initiative of Benno Straucher, the then-head of the Jewish community and a member of the Austrian parlia­ment, Czernowitz Jews established the first secular Jewish community center in Eastern Europe, the Jewish House, whose formidable Viennese-style headquar­ters in the town’s central square were far more impressive than the Polish or Ro­manian ones.

Vestiges of traditional Judaism enveloped Fishbein’s childhood. Unlike many other towns in Ukraine devastated during World War II, Chernivtsi pre­served some of its prewar Jewish community. The occupying Romanian troops were relatively less brutal to local Jews than the Nazis. Deportations and mass executions wiped out most but not the entire Jewish population. As a result, the postwar Chernivtsi Jewish community hosted refugees from elsewhere, helped smuggle some of them across the border to Romania, established a slaughter­house and a number of underground prayer groups, and enjoyed a cozy syna­gogue, which the Soviet authorities did not manage to shut down. Residential buildings in the late 1940s along what had been the prewar Synagogstrasse, where the town’s huge and numerous seventeenth- and eighteenth-century syn­agogues were located, boasted quasi-Sephardic Jewish ornaments and Hebrew inscriptions on their faςades.

Chernivtsi, in its Czernowitz incarnation, was home to a number of key fig­ures in the history of modern Judaism and Jewish culture. Not far from the rail­way station was the Sadagora (Sadyhora, Sadgora) Palace of the legendary tsad- dik Israel of Ruzhin (Israel Friedman, 1797-1850), who led the lifestyle of a monarch and was one of the first Hasidic leaders to ponder the mystical mean­ings of progress and modernity.

A town of many cultures, Chernivtsi spoke to Fishbein in many languages. It was perhaps the last town in Soviet Ukraine in which Yiddish was often heard in small stores or at the marketplace and where Yiddish culture retained its institu­tionalized character. Between 1945 and 1950, the town hosted the GOSSET Theater, formerly of Kyiv and one of the two last state-sponsored Yiddish the­aters in the country. Its spacious hall in a constructivist building on Schiller Street was always packed. Here the cast met with many Yiddish literati, includ­ing Perets Markish, who visited the town in 1946. The 1949 campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans,” which started with insinuations against theater critics of Jewish origin and was followed by the murder of Solomon Mikhoels, the dis­solution of the Moscow GOSSET Theater, and the arrest of Yiddish writers, led to the closure of the Chernivtsi Yiddish theater.

But even after the theater was shut down in 1950, enterprising Jewish actors created the so-called Jewish small forms theater, disguised as the Estradon En­semble, which performed Yiddish songs and Russian one-act plays in Yiddish and was in great demand among local Jews.

Coming here from Poland, Moldavia, Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine, the Chernivtsi Jews established Yiddish and Russian, not Ukrainian, as their conver­sational languages. Avrum (Avraam) Fishbein, Moisei’s father, came from Ro­mania: he knew Yiddish, German, Hebrew, and some Romanian, but in Cher- nivtsi he spoke predominantly Yiddish, and only after the war, while working in the army warehouse, did he manage to learn some Russian. Fishbein recalled that his father was afraid to lose his job and therefore never attended synagogue (the security organs closely supervised its congregation), yet before the High Holidays a man with a heavy beard, dressed in high military boots and a nonmil­itary cloth cap, came to their apartment and was expediently taken to the kitchen, where he received some brandy and kugel—a modest payment for the kadish (mourning prayer) he was commissioned to recite for Avrum Fishbein’s de­ceased parents. To conceal their arrangement, the Fishbeins talked to the man only in Yiddish.¹⁹

And there was the Ukrainian language. Suppressed by the all-powerful Rus­sian elsewhere in Ukraine, especially in the country’s heavily industrialized east­ern and administrative central area, it flourished in Chernivtsi, on the periphery of the Soviet empire, at least among the conscientious city intelligentsia and its first-generation town dwellers, yesterday’s Bukovina peasants.

Although Ukrainian was taught at school as a second language, Fishbein picked up most of his Ukrainian from his classmates, in the streets of the town, and, significantly, in the Ukrainian theater. Though not an autobiography as such, Fishbein’s unfinished novel “Apri-i-il!” reflects the multilingual environ­ment of Chernivtsi street life in the 1950s. In the following episode, the Russian­speaking Vovchara, an augmentative for Vladimir, pokes fun at the Ukrai­nian-speaking Ios’ka, diminutive of Joseph. The “Leader” is Josef Stalin, and Bandera is Stepan Bandera (1909 - 59), leader of the wartime Ukrainian national resistance, some of whose adherents fought both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis; “the cult” is the “cult of personality,” the Soviet euphemism for Stalin’s devia­tions from socialist legality, and western Ukraine appears in association with Bandera: “Ios’ka was born on April ι, 1953. He was named after the Leader. It was his father’s April Fool’s joke. Ios’ka tries to explain this to Vovchara. ‘A vic­tim of the cult!’ Vovchara laughs. ‘Don’t you know how many Iosifs there are in western Ukraine?’ Ios’ka looks for a way out. ‘Bandera!’ laughs Vovka. ‘A Yid- Bandera!’”²² As is clear from this episode, Fishbein retroactively reinvents him­self as a Ukrainian Jew, not a Russian one. Given that as a child he seems to have been little exposed to a Ukrainian-speaking environment, his later self-discovery as a Ukrainian intellectual and Ukrainian poet seems to be a puzzle.

In the late 1950s, Fishbein was a Chernivtsi Jewish teenager who spoke Rus­sian and dreamed of an acting career on the Russian-language stage. Moisei was fascinated with the theater. It made his head go round. It uplifted him and his speech. Impressed by this dedicated young man, the director of the Chernivtsi amateur theater at the Palace of Pioneers, Halyna Menzheres, accepted him to her troupe. Moisei typically played the role of the scoundrel. In the heroic Pesnia o chernomortsakh (Song of the Black Sea Sailors, Boris Lavrenev’s heroic play of 1934), he starred as a Nazi; he also played the sheriff in Skovannye odnoi tsep’iu (Chained Together; the Soviet version of Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones from 1958). Later he switched to the Creative Youth Theater, under the direc­tion of the talented and philosemitic Valentina Bezpoliotova.²³ Instead of going to high school, he chose an evening school so he could work at the Kobylians’ka Chernivtsi District Musical Drama Theater. Yet at the theater they let him on stage only for crowd scenes. Any further promotion required an artistic degree.

Rigorously and meticulously, Fishbein prepared himself for an acting career. But although he was ready to overcome obstacles, suffer humiliations as a Jew, undergo painful experiences in a highly competitive artistic milieu, he was not able to outwit his mother Sara. She took pains to dissuade her son from an artis­tic career. She contacted a local theater star, the People’s Actor (narodnyi artyst) Iurii Kozakivs’kyi, and begged him to convince her son that he had no chance of becoming a professional actor. Well, thought the young Moisei, it is still possible to become a “scene reader,” a popular artistic occupation in the Soviet Union. To prevent this from happening, his mother asked a visiting celebrity to demon­strate to Moisei that his enthusiasm regarding his reciting talents was baseless.

Once the theatrical illusions of their son dissipated, Moisei’s parents con­vinced him to become an engineer, considered the safest profession for a Jew in the USSR: it was modern, stable, relatively lucrative, nonideological, and non­verbal. And yet for Moisei, it was an ordeal to gain admission to a Soviet higher educational institution, particularly with Ukraine’s unannounced but effective numerus clausus and its Jew-free departments. On his tour through the Cher- nivtsi of his youth, Fishbein walks into the railway station and depicts local Jew­ish teenagers: “from here they left for colleges in Chita, Saransk, Novosibirsk, Tomsk—over there, into the backwoods, running away from the percentage norm [for Jews in local colleges].”²⁴ Russian provinces, among other things, proved more tolerant. Fishbein enrolled at Novosibirsk University in the De­partment of Economic Cybernetics and moved to Akademgorodok (“the town of academics”), the headquarters of the Siberian technocratic intelligentsia near Novosibirsk.²⁵

“The sun rises behind Siberia,” goes a well-known Ukrainian song. Fish- bein, an unsuccessful actor and now an unwilling student of cybernetics, found himself in Siberia on his first but not last exile from his homeland, some three thousand miles from his native town. The Russian-speaking environment, the depressing distances, and the subject of his studies sharpened his identity crisis. But the sun did rise for him over Novosibirsk. Unhappy with his private and aca­demic circumstances, he discovered something he could partially identify with: the poetry of Aleksandr Galich (1918 -77), a subversive Russian bard, poet, dis­sident, and a baptized Jew.²⁶At the same time, Moisei turned to Ukrainian poets, including the young, rebellious, and innovative Ivan Drach (b. 1936).²⁷Through the local student society, he organized readings by Galich and Drach, bringing both to the Novosibirsk University campus. Keeping himself busy with organiz­ing logistics for these presentations helped Fishbein to feel obliquely connected with the humanities, but only for the time being.

Fishbein’s rare visits home brought some, but not permanent, relief. He re­calls how on one New Year’s Eve he was sitting in front of a cheap reproduction of a Carpathian landscape he had cut out of the literary journal Dnipro (The Dnieper). Alone in the room, Moisei was sitting and, as he put it, “praying for Ukraine.” He reiterated: “Yes, that is what it was. I was looking at the picture praying for Ukraine.” The crisis he was going through seemed insurmountable. To overcome it, Fishbein made a bold decision: he switched departments. Fish- bein trained himself for the tests, passed them, abandoned math, and trans­ferred to the humanities. Given the notoriously inflexible system of Soviet uni­versities, this was a next-to-impossible enterprise. But Fishbein managed, for he knew that the humanities, particularly philology, would give him more options to find himself and become who he had to be: a Ukrainian poet.

Fishbein has often been discussed as a Ukrainian poet but never as a person who had other linguistic choices. The choice of language is a delicate and subtle matter; the outcome is obvious, but the process of choosing is murky. At approx­imately the same time that Fishbein switched from math to philology, the twenty-year-old Kyiv poet Leonid Kyseliov (Kiselev, 1946 - 68), already the au­thor of some 130 poems, switched from Russian to Ukrainian poetry. By the mid-1960s, Kyseliov had gained recognition for his anti-imperial poems belit­tling Russian tsars and had stirred a commotion among intellectuals in Russia and Ukraine. In Kyiv, hardly anyone among Ukrainian-reading intellectuals was unfamiliar with his acclaimed poem culminating in the two proverbial lines: “Everything in the world is just a song / In the Ukrainian language.”²⁸ Follow­ing his own discovery, the twenty-one-year-old Kyseliov switched to Ukrainian and began writing Ukrainian poetry half a year before leukemia took hold of him.

We can speculate at length about the implications of Kyseliov’s linguistic choice but can hardly look into the reasons behind it. Kyseliov grew up in a bilin­gual family and could switch between Ukrainian or Russian with ease. A Cana­dian scholar of his poetry links Kyseliov’s choice to an issue of some interest in Fishbein’s context: “At the end of our quest for the national roots of the poet, it turns out that Leonid’s mother is Jewish. Albeit in a writer’s biography this is not the most important moment, in Kyseliov’s case this detail is important and might shed more light on the mystery of his poetic transformation—the switch from Russian to Ukrainian poetry.”²⁹ But Kyseliov did not address Jewish issues in his poetry and never presented himself as a Ukrainian Jew. No one can guess which topics he might have addressed had he lived past the age of twenty-two. And yet Kyseliov is an obvious parallel to Fishbein: they were both born in 1946, both were Jewish according to the letter of Jewish law, and both began writing at approximately the same time.

It seems that Kyseliov’s verse, his love of apocryphal plots, his sharp anti-im­perialist orientation, his symbolism, and perhaps his language choice exerted an impact on Fishbein: Kyseliov’s Ukrainian poetry appeared in the Dnipro literary journal, the only Ukrainian periodical Fishbein recalls having read in Novosi­birsk. Ivan Dziuba’s reflections on Kyseliov’s choice of language might well ap­ply to Fishbein: “Kyseliov was one of the first to realize that in order to stand firm on civil and political grounds, one should understand the needs and rights of the Ukrainian people, define one’s attitude to the Ukrainian renaissance and renewal—not only literary but also political.”³⁰ But Fishbein’s turn to Ukrai­nian seemed less logical. At the time, Ukrainian was not the language he spoke. Unlike in Kyseliov’s case, it was not the language of Fishbein’s immediate stu­dent environment. Neither was Ukrainian a manifestation of his Jewish self or an indispensable element of his identity. Unlike Kyseliov, Fishbein had hardly been exposed to the timid Ukrainian revival of the late 1950s up to early i960.

But what made Fishbein think, as Kyseliov had, that everything in the world— at least in his poetic world—was just a song in the Ukrainian language?

For Fishbein, Ukrainian had never been incumbent or imposed (as the He­brew his father made him study), had not been inculcated at school (as Russian), had not been the secret language of parochial communication (as Yiddish), and was never associated with omnipresence, power, or authority. In most contexts, it was an oral language and there was nothing dominating about it. When Fishbein mentions Ukrainian in his poetry, he always genders it using the diminutive of the feminine mova (tongue; moveniatko, little tongue). It was kind, languid, charming, and feminine. Indeed, Ukrainian was the language in which his mother taught—it was Fishbein’s mameloshn (“mother tongue” in Yiddish). When Sara Fishbein sang, she did so in Ukrainian. This was the language of the Bukovina countryside, the Chernivtsi suburbs, and the Carpathian landscapes that Fish- bein adored. It was not the language spoken across the profoundly Russified Ukraine, but Fishbein in Novosibirsk treated it as a synecdoche: it stood for the entirety of Ukraine.

Paradoxically, Ukrainian presented a good balance of the particular and the universal, for it embraced, not rejected, his Jewish self. Those Jews with whom Fishbein eagerly identified appeared in front of him on the stage of the Cher- nivtsi Ukrainian Musical Drama Theater. Velychko and Bezpoliotova, as Acosta and his mother Esther, respectively, in the Ukrainian version of Uriel Acosta by Karl Gutzkow (1811-78), made a profound and long-lasting impact on him.³¹ Fishbein perhaps spoke to Chernivtsi Jews in Russian, but the great Jews of the national past, such as Benya Krik, Acosta, and Tevye, spoke to him in Ukrainian. It was in Ukrainian that Fishbein heard about Spain, Amsterdam, and Odessa, and the modern Jews of the Pale of Settlement. The dual identity that was ap­parently impossible for Fishbein to have in Russian or Yiddish turned out to be feasible in Ukrainian. Moreover, it was already part of Fishbein’s personal expe­rience. Indeed, Ukrainian solved many other questions: it linked Moisei Fish- bein to his native Chernivtsi, his Bukovina, his beloved Ukraine, his much- sought-for family, and to the theater, the enthusiasm of his youth. This choice accommodated both his Slavic and Jewish self. Ukrainian helped reveal but did not suppress his Jewishness. By speaking Ukrainian he recompensed himself for the unrealized career at the Ukrainian Drama Theater.

Fishbein’s turn to Ukrainian helped him mobilize various elements of his past and present. Far removed from the Ukrainian language and culture in Siberia, Fishbein began writing Ukrainian verse. One of his earliest Ukrainian compositions was a translation from Yiddish of a poem by Meir Charatz (1912­93). The choice had been made: Moisei Fishbein reemerged as a “Yid-Bandera,” a Ukrainian poet with articulate Jewish and Ukrainian concerns. Shortly there­after, Fishbein began to seek a way to return to Ukraine from Siberia.