Ukraine is God-given and God-chosen.
And it will survive, for God wants it to survive. I do not know why I, a Jew, was given this knowledge. But I know.”1 This aphoristic and ambitious statement belongs to Moisei Fishbein, who views himself as a biblical prophet sent to Ukraine on a mission.
Moisei—or Moses—Fishbein occupies a unique place in Ukrainian belles lettres. A Ukrainian poet, he insists on his Ukrainian identity, yet he lights candles on Hanukah; congratulates friends on Passover; says mourningyizkor in remembrance of his deceased parents; and introduces Jewish imagery into his Ukrainian verse, prose, and journalism. Juxtaposing elements of Ukrainian and Jewish culture, Fishbein imagines Ukraine as a country that God has destined for redemption. His concept of the Ukrainian language cements this belief. Fishbein views it as “humiliated, raped, and sacred.” Though it has been humiliated, colonized, and suppressed throughout modern history, Fishbein claims that a revived Ukrainian language will come to perform a key role in Ukraine’s national revival and move toward Europe. Mind Fishbein’s affirmative, imperative, and prophetic “will survive.” Fishbein makes Ukraine’s future indisputable, as if carved in stone, for it is knowledge that has been “given” to him, as he says elsewhere, “from above.”2 And he views Ukraine’s lofty vocation as a function of its sacred language.Fishbein’s sanctification of Ukrainian replicates the attitude to national languages adopted by the harbingers of other European national movements. The linguistic revival of national groups seeking independence has been a key phenomenon of modernity. In most cases, such revivals started out as cultural resistance to second-class citizenship or to forced assimilation in imperial contexts. The Fenian-minded Irish turned to Gaelic against English, Italians to Italian against French, the Poles and Lithuanians to Polish and Lithuanian against Russian, the Zionists publicized Hebrew at the expense of other Diaspora languages, and Serb and Czech nationalists used their vernacular as a political tool against the bureaucratically imposed German.
Language was a central instrumental in advancing national independence in the course of anti-imperial fights on cultural, political, and sometimes military fronts. To be sure, the Irish and Czech were not fighting all alone. There were many ethnic aliens, individual Jews included, who joined the rising national trends of variegated political orientation.Yet Moisei Fishbein is unique even among them, particularly since he has tirelessly and emphatically pointed out his uniqueness. Noting Fishbein’s paradigmatic image as a Jewish poet writing in a gentile language, the Israeli writer Israel Axenfeld told him: “You are not a Jew, you are the Jew.”3 By the same token it would not be wrong to call Fishbein “the Ukrainian.” Indeed, he claims to be more Ukrainian with his Israeli passport than most Ukrainians are with their Ukrainian passports. He views his role in the Ukrainian cultural renaissance as that of a prophet or even a messiah. He claims to be in the forefront of the nationally minded Ukrainians. Yet to use Benjamin Nathans’s conceptualization, he acculturates into Ukrainian but does not assimilate to it.4 While moving ahead of his contemporary Ukrainian revivalists, Fishbein remains a conscientious Jew. He maintains his loyalty to the Ukrainian and to the Jewish cause in his poetry, as well as in his oral presentations, journalism, and daily life. His Ukrai- nian-Jewish identity—the existence of which he disputes—is his literary theme and calling. And like the messianic Jew who he is not, Fishbein claims that his calling is divinely inspired.
To deal with messianic issues is a challenge, the more so to deal with a person who presents himself as a messianic figure. Imagine interviewing Moses crossing the Red Sea or Jeremiah sitting amid the ruins of the Jerusalem Temple. Fish- bein speaks in aphorisms, just as a troubled Hebrew prophet would. Yet he avoids personal leadership, instead pretending to assume the role of an elusive prophet, to use the words of Steven Zipperstein.5 To be sure, Fishbein does not merely speak, he preaches.
His oral presentations, journalism, and interviews are monologues. When he speaks, he tries to control not only the minor biographic details that he is willing to share but also the way in which his interlocutors interpret them. He preaches even when he is discussing the obscene language of a passersby in the provincial town of his youth. He never returns to details of his life once they are sketched in prose or mentioned in an interview. Nobody can challenge him or make him change his word. Thus the angle he offers in his memoirs may never be altered: what he does not remember does not exist.Given the scarcity of information in his autobiographical prose, we know as little about the elusive Fishbein—who can be reached by cell phone or the Internet any time of the day—as about the obscure Kernerenko, the enigmatic Troianker, or the reticent Pervomais’kyi. Furthermore, Fishbein’s silence is as eloquent as his talk. At different periods, he has resided in Central, Western, and Eastern Europe; the Middle East; and the Far East, yet there are many episodes of his life that he is reluctant to speak about and for which there is little evidence. Critical reviews dedicated to Fishbein are of no avail, since they focus predominantly on his verse and not on how his person is related to his verse and identity. Although there is consensus that Fishbein is an outstanding poet, there is also tacit agreement that he is far from being an easygoing person.
Telling Fishbein’s story is further complicated by circumstances best characterized as “poet in exile.” Although he dreamed of Kyiv, or at least of Ukraine, Fishbein wrote his Ukrainian poetry not only in Kyiv and Chernivtsi, but also in Siberia, Germany, and Israel. Resettling in Kyiv in 2003, he found himself a first-generation Ukrainian retourne in a Russian-speaking urban environment. As a Jew he is not entirely at home in his Ukrainian milieu, and as a Ukrainian he is at odds with Jews in Ukraine, who are predominantly Russian-speaking. Doomed to solitude, Fishbein seeks interlocutors, yet when his interlocutors engage him in conversation, Fishbein teaches them some Ukrainian phraseology; corrects their Ukrainian syntax and banishes Galician, Polish, or Russian elements from their vocabulary; and makes sure his interlocutors hate his enemies, love his friends, appreciate his solitude, and share his unreserved support of Ukraine no matter who is in power and what the contemporary situation in the country. Interviews with Fishbein, as with any other postmodern literary figure, should be treated as literary texts on their own, in need of deciphering and commentary. Therefore Fishbein’s life trajectory can be traced only cursorily, and some key episodes reconstructed only hypothetically.