The East European intelligentsia was indifferent to Ukrainian cul­tural endeavors at the time the descendant of an affluent Jewish family, Grigorii Kerner, made up his mind to identify with the Ukrainian national strivings, dedicate himself to Ukrainian poetry, and adopt the pen name Hryts'ko Kernerenko.

His actions seem to make no sense. In the late 1850s and early 1860s, Ukrainian books and primers appeared in print for the first time in the modern era, Taras Shevchenko was allowed back into the capital, and a couple of Ukrainian periodicals, such as Osnova (1861- 62) and Chernyhovs’kyi lystok (1861-63), were authorized, albeit in the imperial Russian language.

For Ukrainian writers who sought publishers within the borders of the Rus­sian Empire, moderate Ukrainian populism of a vaudevillian character or bu­colic lyricism became the only relatively innocuous form of expression available. At the same time, Austrian-published Ukrainian books and periodicals were for­bidden in Russia, translations from Western European languages were put under a total ban, and the Ukrainian theater repertoire was altogether eliminated.³ Afraid that Ukrainian publications would sooner or later trigger separatist ten­dencies detrimental to the integrity of the empire, the authorities also uprooted Ukrainian from education, liturgy, and the press.

Some changes took place under the brief term of Minister of the Interior Loris-Melikov toward the end of the reign of Alexander II (1856 - 81). Whatever was allowed to be published in the Malorosskii (Little Russian) dialect, as Rus­sian authorities condescendingly dubbed Ukrainian, had necessarily to be tran­scribed in iaryzhka, in which the characteristic Ukrainian vowels were substi­tuted by Russian equivalents to make the language font look similar to Russian.

The authorities expediently stifled any attempt of the Ukrainian-minded in­tellectuals to display in public their innocent folklore sympathies. For example, when several national-minded women reacted against the anti-Ukrainian stance of the authorities by appearing in the streets of Kiev donned in Ukrainian attire, the governor general of Kiev immediately responded by publicly allowing city prostitutes to wear the national dress. In this context, the Russian authorities considered suspicious—and the liberal-minded Russian intelligentsia ridicu­lous—any attempts to promote Ukrainian literature. Ukrainian was stigmatized as a lingua peccata: even the Bible could not be translated into Ukrainian or used by village parish priests. To paraphrase a medieval rabbinic metaphor, the Ukrai­nian language was a devaluated currency with no apparent signs of recovery. What, then, were Grigorii Kerner’s reasons for investing in it?

Nor were Ukrainian-Jewish relations stimulating any mutual rapproche­ment. An unexpected manifestation of what could be called one of the first stages of the Ukrainian-Jewish cultural encounter ended abruptly and ugly. Although in 1859 such Ukrainian figures as Taras Shevchenko and Panteleimon Kulish had denounced the notorious antisemitic publication in the Russian journal Il- lustratsiia, in 1861- 62 the Ukrainian press canonized the image of the Jew as an enemy alien of the Ukrainian people, in full accordance with the populist stereo­type of the Jews as petty bourgeoisie. Leading Ukrainian writers presented Jews as selfish innkeepers and leaseholders. Jews were represented as humiliating the poor, insatiable capitalist entrepreneurs sucking blood of the Ukrainian urban hired workers, greedy exploiters of the voiceless Ukrainian peasants.

Due to Kostomarov’s contribution, the myth of the seventeenth-century Jews who leased Eastern Orthodox churches firmly embedded itself in the im­perial antisemitic discourse. In 1875, Panas Myrnyi portrayed a quintessential Ukrainian village in which a Jew (and a German) mistreat and rob the Ukraini­ans, former serfs. In the 1870s and 1880s, Ukrainian publications in Austrian Galicia (subjected to a more lenient Austrian censorship) expressed even less sympathy for the Jewish cause. The arguments of enlightened Jewish polemi­cists for the abolition of the Pale of Settlement and the emancipation of Russian Jews, inundating the Russian-Jewish press at the time, seem to have not res­onated among Ukrainian public figures. The initial reports of the Vienna-based journal Hromada on the 1881 pogroms in Ukraine, unique in their moderate sympathy toward the Jewish victims, perhaps conveyed Mykhailo Drahoma- nov’s solitary viewpoint rather than the feelings of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, which was quantitatively insignificant and bereft of its own media in the Russian Empire.⁶

In the literary circles the climate was far from benevolent to the idea of Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement. In the late 1850s, Panteleimon Kulish was an ardent adept of the Ukrainian-Jewish encounter: he wholeheartedly supported and publicly praised the literary endeavors of Kesar Bilylovs’kyi, a Jew who en­tirely sacrificed his Jewishness for the sake of his newly adopted identity of a Ukrainian poet; yet later Kulish claimed that a Jew cannot become a Ukrainian any more than a camel can pass through the eye of a needle, a sudden switch that naturally caused Bilylovs’kyi’s consternation, bitterness, and distress.⁷ In the 1880s, the philosemitism of Ivan Franko and Lesia Ukrainka, who at the begin­ning of the twentieth century challenged the inherited bias of Ukrainian anti- Jewish attitudes, had not yet become part of the new Ukrainian sensibilities.⁸ And there was no Volodymyr Vynnychenko to create the complex, predominantly positive Jewish characters that appeared in his plays and prose in the 1910s and after.⁹ To say that Grigorii Kerner emerged as the Ukrainian poet Hryts’ko Kernerenko from a welcoming milieu that fostered a Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue is to misunderstand completely his bold, independent, and apparently lonely deed.

Kerner was no less a curious figure among those Jewish intellectuals who, from Osip Rabinovich in Odessa to Arnold Margolin in Khar’kov, routinely as­sociated with and integrated into the Russian imperial milieu. To the enlight­ened Jews seeking integration into the general society and arguing against any ghettoized Yiddish-based and shtetl-shaped Jewish mentality, Russian was an imperial language, the language of power and protection—therefore, a praise­worthy language, a lingua laudata. This is not surprising, given that in the new burgeoning urban centers of Ukraine, such as Khar’kov, Ekaterinoslav, and Odessa, Russian was the spoken language of the overwhelming majority, Jews in­eluded, whereas Ukrainian was unheard of. Ievhen Chykalenko poignantly no­ticed that in the 1900s there were only five families in Kiev that spoke Ukrainian at home, and his bitter remark does not seem an exaggeration.¹⁰

In the hierarchy of Jewish linguistic preferences, German—the language of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment—and later Russian occupied the first and foremost positions, followed by Hebrew and Yiddish, the last being the least important. Ukrainian was simply not in the Jewish linguistic repertoire, despite the fact that Ukrainian words and colloquial expressions were prominently pres­ent in both spoken and written Yiddish; they were well familiar to Jews.¹¹ Fur­thermore, for the Jews, Russian was not only the official language of the empire but also the language of high culture, university education, and public discourse, whereas Ukrainian was at best the language of the peasantry. For an urban dwelling, petty-bourgeois German- or Russian-oriented Jew, the Ukrainian lan­guage signified nothing but a marketplace babble of no cultural value. Jews considered Shevchenko talented, albeit rough and uncombed. To use David Roskies’s metaphor, in the shtetl-based Jewish linguistic imagination, Russian functioned as a High Goyish and Ukrainian as a Low Goyish dialect, with goyish referring to the non-Jewish or gentile.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, East European Yiddish writers, above all Mendele Moykher Sforim, included in their prose narratives many colorful, albeit episodic, Ukrainian characters and even brief dialogues in Ukrai­nian. Later in the 1900s, Isaac Leybush Peretz and Sholem Aleichem traced hu­morous parallels between the Ukrainians and the Jews in their short stories. Ukraine-born Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s arduous defense of the Ukrainian language and culture, articulated in his impeccable Russian, was another important episode of the Jewish-Ukrainian cultural rapprochement at the beginning of the twentieth century.¹²

Yet Ukrainian-Jewish literary interaction did not yet signify the integration of Jewish intellectuals into the Ukrainian milieu. And in the 1880s, it was simply inconceivable for a Jew—as well as for an acculturated urban dweller with a uni­versity degree—to be willing to associate with, or acculturate into, the Ukrai­nian language and culture. A colonial nonentity in the family of East European languages, Ukrainian could not be a decent means in which to express oneself. There seemed to be no reason for a Jew, who perhaps occupied the lowest rank in the imaginary Russian imperial hierarchy, to identify with those mute, rustic, uncultivated peasants, the Ukrainians, bereft of their own voice and tongue. But Grigorii Kerner, alias Hryt’sko Kernerenko, thought otherwise.