Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands
by Amelia Glaser
Buy on Amazon“Ukraine” means borderlands. In the territory that is now present-day Ukraine, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Yiddish and German languages, literatures, humors, cultures, joys and despairs intermingled for hundreds of years. In this study spanning the century from 1829 to 1929, Glaser leads us into encounters among the most variegated characters. The book takes us through the First World War, the fall of the tsarist empire, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Civil War that followed. In these years, Kyiv alone was occupied by five different armies; the confusion was breathtaking—the literature as well. The author is a scholar of comparative literature who is herself not Ukrainian, but who came to learn Russian, Ukrainian and Yiddish and to grasp Ukraine extremely well. The book allows us to wander among and within wonderful tales and wonderful literature. The setting of the marketplace is in some ways the center of this book, the marketplace as a site that illuminates the simultaneous drama and everydayness of encounters with others. To me, Ukraine is precisely this pluralism, these encounters. Americans, or maybe Westerners in general, have a tendency to use ethnic categories as a shorthand for understanding other parts of the world. There’s a sense that if these are Ukrainian speakers on the Maidan, then they must be Ukrainian. And if they’re Russian speakers, they’re really Russian. And if there’s a war going on, it must be the ethnic Russians versus the ethnic Ukrainians. In my opinion, this would be a deep misunderstanding. To me, the essence of Ukraine’s identity is precisely this intermingling, these riches of the borderlands. In a New Yorker piece about Serhiy Zhadan’s novel Voroshilovgrad , I describe how I wrote to Zhadan in Polish about a novel he had written in Ukrainian and I had read in English—and he answered me in Russian. And that this whole situation was very Ukrainian—which it was.