Ukrainian-Jewish Usage

Despite the absence of evidence, it is not improbable that Pervomais’kyi and Troianker knew each other, for example through Ivan Kulyk or other common acquaintances in the Blakytnyi Literary House, and could have influenced one another in Kharkiv around 1926.

Consider “V paliturni” (In a Bookbinding Shop, 1928), the story that opens the third volume of the formidable seven-volume Soviet edition of Pervo- mais’kyi’s collected writings. Here the author introduces a group of apprentices, both Jews and non-Jews, sweating day and night in a bindery, sharing their mea­ger food and professional habits, and laughing over Yiddish anecdotes that all of them understand perfectly well. Iliusha, a Jewish lad mastering the art of a binder, is looking for friends and finds himself more attached to a Ukrainian lad, Pan’ko, with whom he shares reading impressions, than to a Jew, Feivel, whose spicy jokes and disapproval of book reading do not find favor in Iliusha’s eyes.

But this theme was remarkably visible in what one may want to call the orig­inal version of the story, which appeared in the Molodniak. This version told the story of Pervomais’kyi’s spiritual growth in the bindery, a multiethnic environ­ment in which a Ukrainian and a Jew for the first time started to talk to one an­other. The interethnic implications of their encounter almost entirely disap­peared in later versions of the story. For example, Moyshe Tarnopifskyi, who in the 1928 version is a Jewish secondhand book dealer from whom the Ukrainian Pan’ko buys Shevchenko’s Kobzar, loses his Jewish name and identity in the 1958 version: in a country that had declared the construction of socialism ac­complished and a new identity, the Soviet citizen, already created, it was inap­propriate to have a Ukrainian lad obtaining Kobzar, the Bible of the Ukrainians, through a Jewish mediator. It had also become bad taste to emphasize a charac­ter’s national, especially Jewish, identity: Jewish realities like rebbe or heder were conveniently replaced by the culturally neutral “teacher” and “school.” Feivel Zavulonov, whose last name dated back to Zevulun, one of the twelve tribes of Is­rael, turned into Feivel Katsenko.

The 1928 text delineated the ethnic, if not national and religious, identities of both of its personages. Not only were Iliusha and Pan’ko well aware of the cul­tural differences separating them, they also tried to ponder and explain this sep­aration. For both lads, Shevchenko became the point of rapprochement and de­parture. The joint reading of Shevchenko demonstrated how far both characters were from one another. Pan’ko, flabbergasted with his discovery of Shevchenko, turned to Iliusha:

“What a book! It’s the first time that I have read something like that. Everything is written about us. But why does he not like Jews so much?”

The next night, we both read Shevchenko. Pan’ko was exited but the bitter and short word “yid” that I found on almost every page offended me and I went to bed. I have been sick and tired of hearing this word from Hanka and Stepan, Maleivka village boys, from the janitor Savka, from the police in the town park, and I could not understand how my best friend Pan’ko admired the poetry of a person who could not avoid this word even in his verse.⁵⁴

The encounter of a rebellious yet ghettoized Jew with Shevchenko could hardly be different. Pervomais’kyi’s Iliusha could not place Shevchenko in an accurate historical and sociolinguistic context. Neither was Pan’ko capable of explaining that the word “yid,” standard and neutral for Shevchenko, eventually became in­sulting and derogatory because of Russian linguistic imperialism.⁵⁵ Nor was there a Jewish mentor to tell Iliusha that Shevchenko cannot and should not be reduced to his attitude to the Jews, a highly complex issue on its own.

Iliusha seemed to ask how it could be that the greatest Ukrainian poet, so merciful to the oppressed Ukrainian people, was at the same time incapable of seeing the all-too-obvious injustice done to Jews squeezed in the Pale of Settle­ment like some harmful outcasts.

In the light of newly discovered archival data testifying to Pervomais’kyi’s later reediting of his early autobiographical stories, it seems that the writer’s ini­tial goal was indeed to fashion a thick Ukrainian-Jewish narrative. In the 1950s, Pervomais’kyi eliminated many of the Jewish references and neutralized the Jewish content of his early stories, either in an attempt to secure for them a sep­arate book edition if not some room in his collected writings, or under the pres­sure of censorship, or both. Although not all his short story drafts are available, extrapolating Pervomais’kyi’s corrections from one of his texts onto others would lead us to the conclusion that in the 1920s the writer tended to construct Ukrainian-Jewish prose whereas in the 1950s he wanted to sound more univer­sal and less Jewish.

The short story “Parasol’ka Pinkhusa-Moti” (The Umbrella of Pinkhus- Motia, 1926) furnishes grounds for such a conclusion. This small book of three stories (where “The Umbrella of Pinkus-Motia” appeared for the first time) was praised by the critics—one of whom called Pervomais’kyi, “a profound connois­seur of the poor shtetl Jews able to create vivid images against the backdrop of the nicely reconstructed shtetl quotidian.”⁵⁶ To be sure, the Ukrainian-Jewish encounter appeared in the very center of Pervomais’kyi’s shtetl. The story’s main character, Pinkhus-Motia, is a poor and inoffensive shtetl carpenter with an irresistible philosophy of life: “A simple mixture of fatalism and optimism helped the old man to survive.”⁵⁷ In addition, Pikhus-Motia is a genuine shtetl philosopher, who lives the life of a traditional Jew, takes care of his orphaned grandson, performs his everyday religious rites, repairs his neighbors’ old furni­ture, and rebukes an unjust God.

In the midst of ruin, poverty, and the ongoing civil war, Pinkhus-Motia cheers up his fear-stricken Ukrainian neighbors after they have abandoned all hope and belief. Black humor is his preferred genre. When confronted by the most ardent skeptics, he retorts with a macabre joke: “‘Do not pray to my or your God, pray simply to God! You should invent him and pray to him.... And if

your God betrays you, banish him from your heart and look for another! What is God? It’s the branch of a tree on which you will hang yourself. Choose one which is firmer.’”⁵⁸ The carpenter Pinkhus-Motia, “inoffensive, rebel and heretic,” and his Ukrainian friend, a tailor, do not survive the upcoming pogrom. Both fall victim to a bored White Guard officer looking for fun in the streets of the god­forsaken shtetl. The murderer beheads and scoffs at the dead Pinkhus-Motia: he pulls his body to a fence, puts his head into one of Pinkhus-Motia’s hands, and his open umbrella in the other. Perhaps the final image becomes symbolic of the demise of shtetl Jewry: Pinkhus-Motia is sitting like a decapitated king with his scepter-umbrella and orb-head, a king whose kingdom is gone forever.

A pioneering publication of some excerpts of the draft of “The Umbrella of Pinkhus-Motia,”⁵⁹ as well as the recovery of the full 1958 draft of the story with the author’s corrections,⁶⁰ allows us to discuss the impact of Soviet censorship on Pervomais’kyi’s reediting of his own Jewish stories. The all-powerful God of the Hebrew Bible, who in the 1926 version of “The Umbrella” had been able to stay the motion of the sun and send down rain on a sunny day, in the 1958 version of the same story was metamorphosed into “nature.” The religiously minded Pinkhus-Motia turned into an “old philosopher.” The main character, with an explicitly Jewish name, “Reb Pinkhus-Motia,” had by 1958 become an implicitly Christian “good man.” In 1926, Pinkhus-Motia had wrapped himself in a pecu­liar Jewish tales, which in 1958 turned into a neutral prayer shawl.

Stylistically, the 1958 text (later incorporated into all editions, including two mass editions of Pervomais’kyi’s selected writings) was rewritten so that it would conceal the linguistic characteristics of the protagonists. It seems as though the Soviet censor (or Pervomais’kyi himself) was aware of the connection between “name,” “culture,” and “myth,” and he bent over backwards to eliminate ethni­cally significant “names” that entailed religious “myths” and national “cul- tures.”⁶² Even the full name of Pinkhus-Motia (Shiber Pinkhus Motia Khuno- vich) and of his grandson Itsik, which refer to a Yiddish-speaking milieu, did not make it into the 1958 version. The Ukrainian carpenter, Dratva (whose peculiar name connotes the “thick thread of a shoemaker”), lost his idiosyncratic Slavic name and remained merely a “carpenter.” The later version also eliminated sharp anti-Russian overtones. In it, the speech of the White Guard officer, like that of any other character in the story, was Ukrainian.

Originally the story was not only more “Yiddish,” it was also more “Rus­sian”! In the 1926 version, the murderer of Pinkhus-Motia and his Ukrainian friend had been the only one who spoke Russian, or to be more precise, twisted Russian. This final detail is particularly significant, given that another White Guard officer, apparently dismayed by his comrade’s baseless hatred, had spoken Ukrainian. One might want to argue that back in the mid-1920s, Pervomais’kyi had tried to shape the linguistically marked images of the Jewish-Ukrainian dia­logue that had been jeopardized by an abrupt and murderous Russian intrusion. But even in the 1950s, Pervomais’kyi took pains to preserve some features of the Ukrainians and Jews, whose class origins and powerlessness did not contradict the imposed literary canons whereas their ethnic background certainly did.