The Ukrainian Ascension
Perhaps Kernerenko was among the first, if not the first, to discover that the Ukrainian language is capable of conveying Jewish political, social, and cultural concerns. This was not the same as making such a claim in Prague about the Czech language or in Paris about French.
Even in Russian, Austrian, or Prussian Poland, the Polish language was not as despised as Little Ukrainian in the Russian Empire. Kernerenko’s discovery suggests that the Ukrainian-Jewish poet treated Ukrainian as any other European language and perhaps on a par with Hebrew and Yiddish. Trying to recreate the voices of his Ukrainian “colonials,” Kernerenko incorporated into Ukrainian the elements of a non-Ukrainian dis- course—Russian-Jewish, German-Jewish, or Yiddish. Although it was also shaped by colonial imagery, it offered a wider array of literary devices that existed at that time in Ukrainian culture only in the form of the victimized Russian-Ukrainian dual identity. Ukrainian-Jewish was unheard of. Simultaneously, Kernerenko reinforced his Ukrainian poetry with a romanticized Jewish imagery drawn from the Hebrew Bible, which, as for example, Psalm 137 (“By the Rivers of Babylon”), was permeated with colonial motifs. He also uplifted East European Jewish discourse by infusing it with an anticolonialist revolutionary vocabulary borrowed from the no-less-despised Ukrainian poetry.One, however, should not draw far-fetched conclusions from this discovery: Moments of Inspiration was apparently Kernerenko’s last collection. Whether he continued his search for a better synthesis of Ukrainian lyrics and Jewish themes is unknown. Yet there is hardly any doubt that he was the first to move toward a Ukrainian-Jewish literary identity. By doing this, Kernerenko underscored similarities between the national agendas of the Jews and Ukrainians. He made the Ukrainian language into a medium suitable for the expression of national concerns of non-Ukrainians.
He was the first Jew to discover and look for ways to adapt Shevchenko’s legacy making it suitable for Jewish concerns. Going against the mainstream, Kernerenko seemed to suggest that Ukrainian was not only the language of some Jews and some Ukrainians but also a universalistic language with a humanistic capacity able to accommodate many, Jews included.Kernerenko made a discovery quite unusual for a person of his upbringing, milieu, and class: if the despised, oppressed, forcefully Russified, grammatically and phonetically mutilated Ukrainian language conveyed Jewish sensibilities, it could then fit any national concern and ideology. Kernerenko seemed to suggest that Ukrainian was not only a language of freedom, it was a free language. Yes the Ukrainian language—despite an enormous imperial oppression—had become by that time a mature vehicle, as the twenty-first century reader can admit. But for the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century observer this was far from obvious. Since Ukrainian and Jewish national agendas required similar if not identical metaphors, the Ukrainians and the Jews had a lot to share and learn from one another. Kernerenko’s old banner of Zion and Lesia Ukrainka’s predawn lights both pointed to the new way of bolstering national interests. Ker- nerenko tended to surpass in his literary endeavors the obstacles for cultural encounter yet the quality of his verse fell short of his groundbreaking intentions. It took another generation before Jews in Ukraine distinguished themselves as high-quality Ukrainian poets.
Kernerenko was not only among the first to start constructing Ukrainian- Jewish identity as a literary narrative and a lifestyle, but also among the first obliquely to underscore its profoundly imaginary nature. Kernerenko witnessed the 1881- 83 pogroms, which destroyed thousands of Jewish households in Ukraine and were carried out by the local declasse population. Kernerenko was well familiar with the far right accusations against Jews, alleged destroyers of Russian Orthodox peasantry, which loomed large in the imperial political discourse of the 1880s and 1890s, and in particular, in the Kievan press.
Kernerenko could not have ignored the fact that the Russo-Japanese War and the first Russian Revolution triggered a wave of the most horrible pogroms in Russian imperial history, and in which the rural Ukrainian population and the Russian army (80 percent of which was composed of the peasantry) played a significant role. For sure he knew that the deteriorating economic situation of the East European Jews pushed hundred of thousands of them outside the Russian Empire. And yet he called Ukraine “the land of joy and freedom”!Kernerenko points to a paradoxical character of the Ukrainian-Jewish discourse. An avid reader of Ukrainian books, Kernerenko probably learned that Ukrainian writers were not necessarily as philosemitic as Lesia Ukrainka or Ivan Franko and that an antisemitic bias shaped to a great degree the images of Jews in nineteenth-century Ukrainian literature. One may assume Kernerenko realized that most Ukrainian literary critics held a low opinion of his poetic talents and even questioned his sincere pro-Ukrainian empathy. Kernerenko’s available epistolary heritage testifies to the weak and random contacts between him and Ukrainian intellectuals. In addition, apparently Kenrerenko left neither disciples nor admirers. He was marginalized among Russian Jews as a Kernerenko and among conscientious Ukrainians as a Kerner.
And yet Kernerenko seemed to have deliberately ignored social reality, which consistently enticed Ukrainians and Jews to act against one another. Kernerenko continued polishing his Ukrainian language, construing his Ukrainian imagery, attempting a Ukrainian-Jewish concoction, bringing his Ukrainian books to press, establishing contacts with Ukrainian literary figures, and hoping against all odds that his literary creativity and social stance would merit either acceptance or sympathy. In historical perspective Kernerenko’s case seems to indicate that a Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement could exist only in the realm of fragile personal relations.
Apparently there was no chance to institutionalize them socially or canonize them literally. Hence, unaware of his major discovery, Kerne- renko pinpointed the illusory character of the nascent Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue. His case seems to prove that Jews and Ukrainians could sing their lyrics together while the doors of their utopian realm were tightly shut and bloodthirsty epical history stayed outdoors.The following hundred years of the Ukrainian-Jewish poetic tradition, predominantly lyrical, as well as the cultural solitude of the Ukrainian poets of Jewish descent, has emphasized only too well the quintessential character of Kerne- renko’s case. And yet Kernerenko should be seen as the very beginning of a discourse that the students of East European Jewish history a hundred years later are advised to call “Ukrainian-Jewish.” A Ukrainian thinker in writing about Moisei Fishbein, a Kyiv-based Ukrainian poet of Jewish descent who is in the focus of the last chapter of this volume, has noted that “for the first time in history in Fishbein’s poetry, Judaism speaks Ukrainian.”76 Hryts’ko Kerne- renko seems to have been the first who merited this compliment, exactly a century before his distant and illustrious successor.