Vasyl' Rolenko, the Anticolonialist Jew
Whatever the names he acquired or roles he performed in the 1920s—Rolinato or Rolenko—Izrail Iudovych Kulyk never abandoned his Jewish roots or his Jewish “role.” Nor did his Ukrainian name or his Polish patronymic protected him from the antisemitic accusations, to which he replied with an amazing sense of personal dignity and unshakable integrity.56 When the street on which he lived as a child was renamed after Ivan Iulianovych Kulyk in 1959, a childhood friend remarked: “I was surprised and could not understand why ‘Ivan Iu- lianovych,’ and not ‘Izrail Iudovych'? I remember him very well as a personality and assure you that he shunned neither his nation nor origins.” This and similar remarks in essays about Kulyk were thoroughly expunged from the collection of memoirs dedicated to him, in order to make his work fit in with nationally cognizant Ukrainian authors.
Thus Surovtsova’s memoir on Kulyk was eliminated altogether and Voloshenko’s was censored. Among some of his passages the censors dropped was the following paragraph that justified an account of a Shabbat in the Kulyks’ house: “Perhaps the reader will say, ‘Why should we go into all that detail? Why savoir all those cookies, rolls, pike? Why recollect how the old one went to the synagogue and on his return drank unsweetened tea with a lump of sugar in his mouth? Generally, there are too many unnecessary details, whereas I. Iu. Kulyk’s individuality, his character, tastes, and personality, are not sufficiently elucidated.’ Excuse me, my dear, but to the best of my abilities I tried to depict the environment and the milieu in which Kulyk spent his childhood and youth. Without those details, I suppose, the whole picture would be incomplete. I remember the cookies, rolls, and pike since Rol’ka often fed me with them, and they were gorgeous!”57 This curious piece of evidence notwithstanding, for Ku- lyk his Jewish themes apparently remained somewhere in his childhood, in the Pale of Jewish Settlement, and among Uman’s dusty synagogues and its senile ghettoized Jews. One of his Ukrainian colleagues recollected that Kulyk loved to sing a popular antireligious song containing the lines: “Down with monks, rabbis, and priests, / We will climb to the skies and disperse all gods.”Judaism was too gloomy, pessimistic, and outdated for Kulyk’s poetic universe, imbued as it was with the rattling of urban modernity and illuminated with the torches of the international socialist revolution. In depicting his childhood, Kulyk could not avoid mentioning the bitter Judaic liturgy:
Only in July the synagogue lament
Cut our eardrums like a knife.
But we did not care then
Jumping around barefoot.58
The context of these lines seems to be Tisha be-Av (Ninth of Av), the darkest day in the Jewish calendar, often falling in July, when Jews hold a twenty-five-hour dry fast to bemoan the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 c.e., sing dirges, and read Jeremiah’s Lamentations, and, especially in Uman, recite the acrostic on the Uman massacre. For the little Rolik the dirges were disturbing and irritating, but for Kulyk Judaism was just a distant synagogue lament. Kulyk spells out his childhood feelings in the aside: “we did not care then.” But did Kulyk care later?
Apparently he did. While fighting for the Bolsheviks in Uman district, he was attacked by the Ataman Grigor’iev gangs—who fought against “our and Western Yids”—and had to organize a retreat. He realized the immediate threat posed to the local Jews and “cautiously warned” them.59 Whenever it was needed, he would resort to Yiddish to send a Marxist message to the Jewish pro- letarians.60Already a prominent party leader, in the late 1920s Kulyk introduced Ukrainian readers to such American Jewish writers as Mike Gold (1894-1967), a proletarian poet and the author of the autobiographic novel Di Yidn On Gelt (Penniless Jews).61 In the early 1930s, Kulyk successfully encouraged Der Nister (1884-1950) to translate into Yiddish and publish his novel The Adventures of Vasyl Rolenko.
Kulyk himself penned the Ukrainian versions of Leyb Kvitko’s Yiddish children’s poems, including such classics of Soviet Yiddish poetry as “Hazerlekh” (Little Pigs).62 He promoted young Ukrainian writers of Jewish descent, such as Leonid Pervomais’kyi, Sava Holovanivs’kyi, Iukhym Martych and others, into the mainstream. It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that there were contacts between Kulyk and the Ukrainian-Jewish poetess Raisa Troianker, particularly since both were apostates who had abandoned their traditional Jewish households in their native Uman and were regular participants in the discussions at the Blakytnyi Literary House (to be discussed in the next chapter). Moreover, in his journalism Kulyk repeatedly addressed the Jewish question. He strongly endorsed Jewish agricultural colonization, debunked myths about the Jewish republic in Ukraine, and convincingly justified Soviet policy toward Jews.63 As head of the newly created Union of Ukrainian Soviet Writers and at the first writer’s congress in Moscow in 1934, Kulyk represented not only Ukrainian but also Yiddish writers from Ukraine and openly discussed Ukrainian Yiddish literature’s ups and downs. Curiously enough, in Moscow he emphasized that Yiddish writers developed new proletarian themes, motifs, and images more expediently and efficiently than their Ukrainian colleagues.64In one famous verse Kulyk addresses Ukraine and ultimately resorts to a biblical metaphor (unthinkable for a Ukrainian Soviet poet, albeit the norm for Yiddish proletarian poetry):
Nobody has composed your song
Nor will I, so frail, compose it.
My passionately desired Ukraine,
My worker’s Ukraine!
Your song has not yet been created,
Your proud Song of Songs,
My unconquered Ukraine,
My sparkling-steel beacon!65
Given the presence of some Jewish motifs in Kulyk’s activities and the predominance of his Ukrainian themes, what made him devote his heart, nerve, and sinew to the Ukrainian cause? Why did he, a Jew and a Bolshevik, live and die with a strong Ukrainian national and Bolshevik faith? I believe the answer to this question is in Kulyk’s stance on the issue of colonialism, which he understood in the terms of the 1920s, not those of modern scholarship.
Kulyk interpreted Ukrainian culture before 1917 as colonial. The imperial- minded Russian intelligentsia applied its high standards of humanism and cultural sensitivity elsewhere, and it perceived Ukrainian national strivings as ethnic treason, religious blasphemy, and geopolitical threat. Kulyk was painfully aware that such liberal-minded Russian writers as Maxim Gorky considered Ukrainian a peasant dialect of Russian, not a separate language.66 Unlike condescending Russian liberals, Kulyk was attached to the Ukrainian language and culture. In his literary endeavors he seemed to imitate Walt Whitman. To counteract the imposed cultural parochialism, he was now embracing an entire humanity on behalf of the pantheistic Ukrainian self. Kulyk was well versed in Russian, as one can see from his Russian poetry, prose, and journalism; he could have easily become a Russian writer and joined the officially endorsed majority culture. Kulyk hardly had any doubts that the “Russian” path would have brought a wider readership and a better career, given the rich tradition of Jewish integration into Russian belles lettres. Russian was about the imperial aegis, power, and protection. In choosing between mainstream metropolitan Russian and oppressed and underdeveloped Ukrainian, however, Kulyk dismissed the former and preferred the latter.67
As a Jew who knew how uncomfortable it was to belong to a suppressed minority seeking emancipation, Kulyk joined those who were trying to erase the traces of their colonialism. Among many historical figures whom Kulyk cherished, if not imitated, one played a key role. His name was Louis “David” Riel (1844 - 85), a Catholic seminary student in Montreal who joined the struggle of the Canadian Metis for economic equality, civil rights, and ethnic dignity. Twice he headed an anticolonialist revolt by the autochthonous North American population. To spell out his credo, Riel resorted to a Jewish metaphor: “Do you know these people of mine like the children of Israel, a persecuted race deprived of their heritage.
But I will wrest justice for them from the tyrant. I will be unto them a second David.”68Viewed as a King David of the Metis and the Indians, Riel was arrested, accused of high treason, and hanged. Kulyk was not as ambitious vis-a-vis Ukrainians as Riel was vis-a-vis Metis, but his desire to decolonize Ukrainians fits well with Riel’s ethical program and perhaps even Riel’s messianic zeal.Kulyk not only knew of Riel, he glorified him. He devoted dozens of pages to him, calling him “Riel, Riel, you are one single contradiction, a Catholic—a heretic—a Frenchman—a Metis.” Kulyk depicted Riel in an essay published in the journal Hart that emphasized “Reil’s heroism and absolute integrity, his true commitment to the cause of the liberation of the serfs from English oppression, and his complete selflessness and self-abnegation in regard to the revolt.” He presented his vision of Riel in the first chapter (“Chotyrnadtsiata liul’ka”; The Fourteenth Pipe) of his novel Zapysky Konsula. He also featured Louis David Riel in the poem “Prairies.” Kulyk seems to be identifying with Riel when he tells the story:
How the Indians and brother-Metis
Followed the white leader Riel,
How Riel was caught and hanged
Where the rocks stopped the prairies.
How the Almighty Voice, the chief Fought the British once and again, And how willfully the Red race Fought and fell.
The same way my nation
(Which one of them was mine?)
Looked for its right to exist
In its own memories. 69
Note the parenthetical insertion. When Kulyk identifies with Riel he draws parallels between Metis and his nation, underscoring his double, perhaps Ukrainian and Jewish, origins. My nation, he says, also looked back to the glorious days of the past for self-justification. Which nation does he imply, Ukrainians or Jews? Or both?
Kulyk is not misleading his reader, claiming that he entirely belongs to the Ukrainian people. Nor is he abandoning his Jewish self-identification altogether.
The question of which was “my nation” emphasizes the magnanimous inclusiveness of any possible answer. Kulyk underscored this inclusiveness not only in his poetry but also in his journalism.70 Whatever the answer to this question, the point is crucial. It is not clear whether Kulyk was familiar with the American ethno-genetic myth that considered the Red Indians as descendants of the biblical Red Jews, the representatives of the Ten Lost Tribes.71 But it seems obvious that he entertained the hidden idea of seeing himself as a messianic figure, a redeemer, who fights against the colonization of an alien nation with which he eventually comes to identify. Red Jews of the apocalypse or Red Indians or Bol- shevik/Red Ukrainians have two common features: their colonial past and their messianic present. Riel could have easily become a respected priest or a schoolteacher, yet he preferred to join the Metis and defend their national struggle. Likewise, Kulyk could have become a Russian political leader or a Russian-Jew- ish writer. Perhaps he thought that a genuine Marxist identifies with the oppressed culture, not only with the oppressed class.The more Kulyk tried to identify with the belligerent Riel and the oppressed Indians, the more he made palpable his hidden agenda. Kulyk started his Notes of a Consul with a monologue by Imasiz, a blind old Indian who gave Kulyk a pipe “smoked by many tribal leaders, famous tribal leaders, among them the most famous Louis David Riel.”72 Imasiz recalls his tribal upbringing, his initiation and marriage, and his joining the struggle against British colonizers. The last among the unyielding aborigines, Imasiz headed the Indian revolt against the whites in the 1880s, in the course of which he was deceived, caught, and sentenced to death. When Imasiz was brought to the scaffold, his executioners decided to mock him by making him see Riel’s hanging. Yet Imasiz managed to outwit them: he asked for a final smoke, heated his pipe in a fire, and blinded himself with the red-hot mouthpiece. The executors were so shocked that they allowed him to escape alive. Significantly, Imasiz interrupted his tragic narrative about the Indians’ failed struggle against colonizers only when he made up his mind to pay homage to the people of “the Winter country on the other side of the Big Water” guided by “the great tribal leader” called “comrade Illich.”73 Imasiz emphasizes similarities between the Indians in Canada and the people in the “Winter country,” depicting, for example, how the Indians, the Metis, and the whites sat together in their revolutionary council (Kulyk uses the word rada, the Ukrainian equivalent of “soviet”). Therefore he dubs Kulyk a messenger “of the greatest leader of all tribes and colors on earth.” Indeed, due to Kulyk’s masterful imitation of the language of his interlocutor, Indians are turned into revolutionaries, socialists, and internationalists. But even more important, Kulyk’s Indians are also Jewish.
The similarity between the Jews and the Indians shapes Kulyk’s imagery in a variety of ways. Kulyk entitled his chapter dedicated to Imasiz “The Fourteenth Pipe,” thus making it clear that he was following up on Il’ia Ehrenburg’s collection of short stories called Thirteen Pipes. But though he admitted imitating Ehrenburg, Kulyk was silent about drawing heavily from Isaac Babel. First, like the Odessa Stories, the Imasiz monologue was built around aphoristic statements, rhetorical devices, and succinct yet picturesque descriptions that resemble the skaz of Babel’s narrator. Second, like Babel and unlike Ehrenburg, Kulyk has his protagonist tell the story while he reserved for himself the role of the passive listener. Imasiz is as talkative as Froim Grach and Kulyk is as silent as Babel. Third, and more noteworthy, Kulyk makes his Indian into a narrator, a Native American Froim Grach, who constantly confuses the pathetic and the ironic. “If you wanna know, follow me,” says Babel’s Froim Grach. Kulyk’s Imasiz is even more demanding: “If you strive to know, listen.” In “Karl-Yankel,” Babel looks at a newly circumcised Jewish child and says: “You should be happier than me. It’s impossible that you will not be happy.” Imasiz addressing Kulyk continues the same thought: “You are young and you must be happy.” Kulyk’s replaces Babel’s Russian-Yiddish-Ukrainian argot with an invented Ukrainian-Indian argot, an analog to Babel’s unique fusion language.74 Finally, there are curiosities: for example, Babel narrates the saga of Benia Krik (literally: shriek); Kulyk tells the story of Imasiz, the kruk (literally: raven).75
Kulyk’s attempt to depict his Indian as a Jewish narrator comes as no surprise in view of an even more striking and explicit comparison between Jews and Indians: “I do not want to repeat myself since I have already depicted this trip in my long poem ‘Prairies.’ I will add only one detail. The reservation with its mob of women in rags and dirty children, eaten out by diseases and boils, reminded of a Jewish ghetto—the ghetto that retained its horrible motionlessness only in the godforsaken Polish townlets. Here even the speckled and small mustangs looked like downcast nags of the balagolas. ”76 Thus Kulyk evoked his Indian setting by resorting to Jewish references and by tracing parallels between the reservation and the ghetto, congruent colonial realms. As a Jew who had found his way out of the ghetto and who came back to demolish its colonial walls, Kulyk could well identify with Imasiz, whose attempt to eradicate the walls of the reservations failed. Red Jews and Red Indians had much in common, much more than the seventeenth-century messianic legend of the Ten Lost Tribes identifying Native Americans with biblical Hebrews.
Kulyk’s postcolonial penchant also informed his enthusiasm for American literature. While in Canada, he corresponded intensively with literary critics, journalists, and poets, who helped him to amass a substantial collection of modern American poetry. Kulyk selected thirty-three of them to be translated into Ukrainian, and thus the first anthology of American poetry in the Ukrainian language emerged. Among those selected were such celebrities as Carl Sandburg, who by the 1920s had authored several books of poetry, and such lesser known as Mike Gold, whose poetry was scattered among left-wing literary journals. In several cases Kulyk discovered poets whose talents had not yet fully blossomed, a fact that attests to his keen eye and exquisite literary taste. The anthology constituted of four parts, corresponding to Kulyk’s vision of the stages in the development of American poetry: “The Precursors of Modern American Poetry,” “The Democratic Renaissance,” “The Younger Generation,” and “The Pioneers of Proletarian Poetry.” Kulyk started with Walt Whitman and Edwin Markham and ended with Ralph Chaplin, J. S. Wallace, and Herschell Bek. Despite the fact that Kulyk’s personal preferences rather than any objective criterion dictated the selection of poems, for contemporary Ukrainian culture the publication of Kulyk’s fundamental Antoliohiia amerykans’koi poezii (Anthology of the American Poetry, 1928) was by all standards a groundbreaking event. In addition to brief essays on each author, Kulyk prefaced the book with a lengthy essay defining the main periods through which American literature was emancipated from the British literary canon.77
Kulyk entirely excluded from his anthology those poets who, to his mind, imitated English poetic styles and shared British literary values. Cultural imperialists were out. This explains why Kulyk did not favor Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 49), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807- 82), or Ralph Waldo Emerson (1787- 1863)—and leads the Ukrainian poet and thinker Mykola Zerov to wonder why. But those who sought to undo British influence and break new literary paths deserved his praise and a place in the anthology. Kulyk did not avoid pointing out—or at least hinting at—the Jewish origins of some of those who appeared in his anthology. But he also emphasized an unmistakable trajectory that brought them to a rupture with their petty-bourgeois milieu, as for example Robert L. Wolf, the Marxist economist and the author of the collection After Disillusion (1923). For Kulyk, the acclaimed African-American poet Claude McKay (1890 -1948) once and for all dismissed the common view of a Harlembased, scornfully colonial, and underdeveloped youngster from godforsaken Jamaica who purportedly could never become culturally, morally, and so more so literary superior to white Americans. Kulyk included the seventy-five-year-old Charles Erskine Scott Wood (1852-1944), among the pioneers of proletarian poetry because of Wood’s unmistakable anticolonialist and revolutionary orientation: Wood had fought against Indians in the army, was promoted to the colonel, saw that the war was unjust, left the army, became an attorney and later an anarchist and revolutionary poet—a biography that strongly resembled some episodes of Louis David Riel’s life.78
Elsewhere Kulyk explained why he sympathized with American poetry— and what ignited his lexical innovations: introducing his translations of Carl Sandburg, Kulyk observed that “word-invention in Ukrainian and American poetry was the result of pushing off from the colonialist linguistic milieu.”79