I recently chaired an event at Jewish Book Week with three leading translators of some of the greatest Soviet and Russian émigré writers.
The writers included Isaac Babel (born in Odesa), Vasily Grossman (who grew up in Berdichev) and Lev Ozerov (born in Kyiv). In other words, some of the greatest Soviet writers were in fact Ukrainian. To make things more complicated, they were also Jewish.
Yuri Felsen, the author of Deceit, published last year to huge acclaim, was born Nikolai Freudenstein, and was murdered at Auschwitz. Grossman’s mother was killed by the Nazis in Berdichev.
Babel might well have been killed by the Nazis, but he was murdered by Stalin a year before the Nazi invasion. So what do we call these writers; Russian, Soviet, Ukrainian or Jewish-Ukrainian?
These are the kinds of questions that fascinate Dr Uilleam (pronounced William) Blacker, one of this year’s judges of the International Booker Prize.
He is one of Britain’s leading literary translators from Ukrainian and is Associate Professor of Ukrainian and East European Culture at The School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London.
Isaac Babel
Isaac Babel
He is also the author of Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe, co-author of Remembering Katyn and co-editor of Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe. He has published widely on Ukrainian, Polish and Russian literature and culture.
Born in Glasgow and brought up in the Western Isles, he speaks with a soft Scottish burr. He also speaks at great speed and fires off ideas at an extraordinary rate.
One minute he is talking about the legacy of the Holocaust in east-central Europe. The next minute he is talking about what Jewish writers from the early and mid-20th century mean to a young generation of Poles and Ukrainians today.
SY Agnon wikimedia
SY Agnon (Wikimedia)
Blacker is particularly interested in what he calls “the problems of cultural memory”, in particular, in Ukraine, but also in Poland and Russia, the area that the American historian Timothy Snyder famously called “the Bloodlands”, the countries trapped between Hitler and Stalin. The Bloodlands, wrote Snyder, “are simply where Europe’s most murderous regimes did their most murderous work”. Fourteen million people were killed there in the 1930s and 1940s, around ten million by Hitler and four million by Stalin.
Why is “cultural memory” so important? For two reasons. First, because the scale of the historical trauma that Ukrainians and Poles experienced was so extreme. In Ukraine it wasn’t just the destruction caused by the war but the 1930s as well — “the famine and more than a decade of terror and totalitarianism”. “People in Ukraine lived through multiple invasions,” says Blacker.
“The Soviet Union invading eastern Poland; the German conquest in 1941; then the Red Army again.” People often don’t talk about this kind of “deep psychological trauma” to their children. There was, what he calls “a rupture between generations”. “People often don’t know what happened to their parents or grandparents. People mysteriously disappeared.”
Crucially, there was a two-fold silence after the war. In addition to the silence many experienced at home, there was the silence imposed by the Soviet state. You couldn’t talk about what happened to the Jews.
“You could come to the attention of the police,” Blacker says, “or face professional obstacles in your career. So, Ukrainians didn’t talk about the fate of the Jews.”
Lev Ozerov wikimedia
Lev Ozerov (Wikimedia)
This started to change in the 1960s, says Blacker, when dissidents and activists — Ukrainian as well as Jewish — called for a monument to the Jews killed at Babyn Yar. But it was in the 1980s and 1990s that things really started to change and then, above all, “in the last decade and a half”.
Ukrainians, especially young Ukrainians, started to come to terms with two very different aspects of the history of Jews in Ukraine.
First, the terrible antisemitism. The pogroms at the beginning of the 20th century, most famously at Kishinev, then the pogroms after the First World War, and the terrible history of collaboration, the Ukrainian accomplices who helped the Nazis during the Shoah by bullets.”
But in addition to the dark history of anti-Jewish violence there is also a rich history of the Jews in Ukraine and perhaps, in particular, an extraordinary cultural legacy, all those great writers, artists, musicians and thinkers creating a
rich Jewish culture, but one which was also shaped by the national cultures of the societies in which they lived — Russian, Polish, Austrian, Soviet or Ukrainian.
The Jewish culture of Ukraine is, therefore incredibly diverse, complex, and rich, reflecting and excelling in every artistic and political trend, from Romantic nationalism to the revolutionary avant-garde.
What do Ukrainians make of this complicated legacy? Young Ukrainians, in particular, started to become interested in this Jewish heritage with festivals, cultural centres, translations and creative engagements with Jewish culture.
They were partly inspired by the discovery of Jewish culture in Poland, especially in Kraków, during the 1980s and 1990s. “Ukrainians looked at what was happening in Poland, all these pioneering initiatives, and since the early 2000s there have been festivals dedicated to many of the great Jewish-Ukrainian writers.
There is a Bruno Schulz Festival in his birthplace, Drohobych, which was once in Austrian Galicia, and is now in Ukraine.” Schulz was once regarded as one of the great modern Polish-Jewish writers but now he’s being reclaimed by Ukrainians.
“Today there are three different editions of his stories in Ukrainian.”
There is also the Paul Celan Literary Centre founded in 2013 in his home town, once known as Czernowitz but now Chernivtsi in Ukraine. Celan was a Holocaust survivor, now regarded as perhaps the greatest German-speaking Jewish poet of the 20th century.
The Agnon Literary Centre is named after SY Agnon, a Jewish Nobel Prize-winning author, in his home town, once Buczacz, now Buchach. Then there are the Soviet-Jewish writers, Babel, Grossman, Ozerov and others, who are also being rediscovered and translated into Ukrainian.
Just as Ukrainians are coming to terms with this dark history and this rich and complex cultural legacy, barbarism has returned to Ukraine with the Russian invasion. Young Ukrainians today increasingly turn to the great Jewish writers of the past from Ukraine to help understand their own cultural history and identity and now, tragically, to help them understand the past year.
Astonishingly, a few months after the Russian invasion publishing started to take off again. Literary events took place in packed rooms.
Blacker suddenly starts to sound very optimistic. “The insight into processing collective trauma and the experiences of violence that can be garnered from Jewish-Ukrainian writers like Grossman and Babel could be of great value to Ukrainians.
“Some of the most powerful writing on historical trauma,” he tells me, “comes from Jewish writers: Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan from Czernowitz, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide, and Hersch Lauterpacht, who defined human rights, both Jews from Lviv, who now help us how to think how we might prosecute Russian war criminals.”
One of the most interesting stories on east and central Europe, he says, “is how this Jewish past inspires a younger generation from Cracow to Lviv”. After a conversation about tragedy and violence, we have managed to end on a positive note.
