I have been thinking about Ukraine a lot lately. Of course, most of us are. The wanton killing of civilians by Russian bombardment, the searing images of the brutal destruction of Ukraine’s cities, and the staggering number of refugees caused by Russia’s “special military operation” have affected most Americans. I certainly hope the nation of Ukraine emerges from this cataclysm intact and with a future. I wish, in the end, that there will be some way to make Russia pay for the havoc it has wreaked under President Vladimir Putin.
And yet, unlike many others, I am ambivalent about Ukraine. Let me be clear: I hope Ukraine survives. But, three of my grandparents left Ukraine. They left because they knew they had a much brighter future in America than in Eastern Europe. They left because, as Jews, they knew, at some level, that a catastrophe awaited European Jewry. Zionism as a political movement emerged in the late 19th century as a response to a rise in antisemitism. Some Jews joined the new movement and worked to build a Jewish state in Palestine. Others emigrated to countries in the Diaspora, notably the United States.
My paternal grandfather came from Lemberg, which at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The history of Lemberg, which is the city’s German name, serves as an apt descriptor of the tortured history and shifting nationalities of that part of the world. Austria obtained the city as a result of the first partition of Poland in 1772, the first of the 18th century partitions that obliterated the nation of Poland. As Lwów, it became part of a newly reconstituted Poland after World War I, then after World War II, it was annexed by the Soviet Union (Lvov in Russian), and now it is is Lviv in Ukraine.
I never knew Isaac Ginsberg, but I did know my maternal grandparents, Carl and Rebecca Smith (name changed, so I was told — though the story is probably apocryphal — at Ellis Island when Carl arrived in America in 1910). They both were from a small town near Kyiv. I was particularly fond of Rebecca, known to one and all as Becky. We shared many things, but one thing she refused to share with me were her recollections of Ukraine. After all, she left Ukraine, where life was so miserable for her as to be unworthy of recalling. She never talked about it. She even refused, at first, to see “Fiddler on the Roof,” saying, in so many words, Why would I want to? I left there, after all.
Carl and Becky built a good life in America, and they were proud of their adopted country. Becky kept on her living room wall, for many years, a picture of Norman Thomas, the perennial presidential candidate of the Socialist Party. The picture testified to her background in the leftwing progressive political milieu of early 20th century Eastern Europe. But, that picture was replaced by one of John Kennedy in 1960, which was joined by a photograph of Pope John XXIII. The latter was on her living room wall not because she was about to convert, and not because Kennedy was Catholic, but because the pope was good for Jews since he convened the Second Vatican Council, which absolved Jews of collective guilt for the death of Jesus. Good or bad for Jews was the prism through which Becky viewed history. Who can blame her?
Jews lived in Ukraine for at least a thousand years. Not unlike in the rest of Europe, Ukraine’s Jews suffered virulent antisemitism, epitomized by cycles of pogroms. Bohdan Khmelnytsky is revered as a founding father of the Ukrainian nation, but Jews remember him as a brutal murderer, known as Chmiel the Wicked. Perhaps 100,000 Jews were slaughtered in pogroms led by Khmelnytsky in the mid-17th century. This tragic tale was repeated a century later in the massacres of Jews carried out under Ivan Gonta. Organized, officially sanctioned anti-Jewish pogroms occurred in the early 1880s after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II (the bulk of Ukraine by this time had become part of the Russian Empire) and again in 1905 following the failed first Russian Revolution.
Ukraine suffered under Bolshevik rule. Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine vividly describes the horrendous Soviet-induced famine of the early 1930s in which millions died. Known as the Holodomor in Ukrainian, the famine affected all Ukrainians, Jews and non-Jews. But, for Jews in what Timothy Snyder calls the Bloodlands, the 1930s and 1940s were catastrophic, ending in the Holocaust in which virtually all of Europe’s Jews were murdered by the Nazis. Thousands of Ukrainians aided the Germans in killing roughly one-and-a-half million Jews. The great Soviet writer Vasily Grossman described Ukraine as a place where “there are no Jews. Nowhere…. [Now] stillness. Silence. A people has been murdered.”
Yet, it would be an error to reduce the history of Jews in Ukraine to a narrative stressing only pogroms culminating in the Holocaust. Ukraine is the birthplace of the Hasidic movement, an 18th century Jewish spiritual revival that relied on mysticism as opposed to the formal and scholarly approach of Talmudic Judaism. The founder of Hasidism, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Besht, an acronym for Baal Shem Tov (Hebrew for “one with a good name”), lived in Ukraine. Ukrainian cities, especially Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odessa, were home to a vibrant and flourishing Jewish cultural scene. Klezmer music (the traditional folk music of Eastern European Jewry) got its start in Ukraine, and the famous writer Sholom Aleichem, author of tales on which “Fiddler on the Roof” is based, was born in a shtetl (small town with a mostly Jewish population) south of Kyiv.
But, nations like people, change. Modern Germany has assumed a place in the civilized world as it has come to terms, for the most part, with its Nazi past. Ukraine today has a Jewish president, and since the revolution of 2014, which ousted a pro-Russian president who headed a kleptocratic regime, Ukraine has promoted reform, attacked corruption, and tried to lessen its dependence on Russia for energy and financial support.
Becky probably would not recognize the place, at least not the place Ukraine was before Russia invaded. But, I am sure, were she alive now, Becky still would not regret her decision to leave Ukraine, though she would have been gobsmacked that Ukraine has a Jewish president. Nonetheless, her Ukraine was worth leaving!
Posted April 1, 2022
Thank you for the historical perspective.