“Wherever I went I found, as in few other places I have been, just how happy ordinary people were happy to talk. Then I understood that this was because no one ever asks them what they think.” So writes Tim Judah, a reporter for The Economist, in his compelling book In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine. The Londoner Judah covered the war in Ukraine for The New York Review of Books. Judah has a specific approach in his portrayal of the complexities of today’s Ukraine for the Western reader. He stressed that he wanted to mix people, stories, history, politics, and reportage instead of explaining why one event followed another. In addition to witnessing some horrifying scenes on the front lines of the war in Donbas, he traveled far and wide throughout Ukraine. He talked with people high and low, from impoverished refugees, elderly villagers, city sophisticates, and wealthy businessmen. One major theme is teased out of all the talks with Ukrainians. History weighs very heavily on Ukraine, Judah writes, “because of what really happened, what people believe happened, what people are told happened, and what is forgotten.” Furthermore, as Judah notes, what a Ukrainian believes today depends on what he […]

A young woman working in an office in New York City writes: “I was just another girl in a cubicle, doing the usual two years before leaving for graduate school. I was a mass produced good. My row of cubicles was almost entirely female, dark-haired and petite. We all wore colorful pashmina shawls to protect us against the air-conditioning, and we got our periods at the same time.” Her life changes radically when she meets a charismatic Ukrainian doctor at a conference. He is an activist who helps Eastern European drug users get HIV treatment. And soon our restless young woman, named Sophie Pinkham, starts working in programs to reduce drug-related harm through needle-exchange, drug treatment, and other services. Pinkham plunges into the chaotic harm reduction world of sex workers, junkies, and other lost souls in contemporary Ukraine. This is a world not often seen by foreigners. She meets a fascinating cast of characters. And her adventures in what she calls “post-Soviet punk delirium” are told in a riveting book called Black Square: Adventures in Post Soviet Ukraine. Pinkham deepens her encounter with Ukraine by collecting oral histories about women’s rights and AIDS activism, as well as making a documentary […]

Ukrainian folk songs and Hasidic music. Mutual borrowings between the Ukrainian and Yiddish languages. Striking similarities in the architecture of eighteenth-century wooden synagogues and Ukrainian wooden churches. A fascinating new book, The Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter: Cultural Dimensions, documents the vivid highlights of two formerly stateless peoples with strong national aspirations. This collection of essays by a distinguished group of global academics presents an intriguing premise. Namely, a focus on culture illuminates crucial aspects of the Ukrainian-Jewish relationship often missed in standard historical accounts that only leap from crisis to crisis. In other words, cultural interaction between Jews and Ukrainians that unfolded over centuries through diverse and daily encounters had a profound impact on both communities. Culture shapes so many key aspects of life. The cultural history of Ukraine reflects long periods of normal coexistence between Jews and Ukrainians. This cultural history also set the broader context in which the Ukrainian and Jewish peoples developed. Cultural links also reflected the complex nature of their relationship. The book emerged from a pioneering conference held by the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter in conjunction with the Israel Museum and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The conference, entitled: “The Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter: Cultural Interaction, Representation, and Memory,” brought […]

Leszek Allerhand vividly remembers that day in the summer of 1941, when he was a ten-year-old boy. The Germans had recently occupied the city of Lviv. Two civilians wearing armbands came to his family’s flat and warned them not to leave the building. The Allerhands were puzzled when they watched a giant water tank roll onto their street. Soon the street was enveloped with fumes and heavy smoke. The family fled their building through an unguarded back way and began a desperate saga of hiding and survival. And so the historic heart of the oldest Jewish neighborhood on what is now called Staroyevreiska Street went up in flames. German soldiers set on fire the 16th century Golden Rose synagogue, the City Synagogue, and the Beth Hamidrash, a house of learning. And the site remained derelict for decades. A fascinating article by the journalist Olesya Yaremchuk in a recent edition of the on-line journal The Ukrainians recounts this destruction and a 21st century Ukrainian response to acknowledge and commemorate this loss. A memorial complex called the “Space of Synagogues,” dedicated last September, now occupies the historic site. Sofia Dyak is the director of the Center for Urban History of East Central […]

Today we begin with a dispatch from the past. “Kiev in the morning. A lot of people are already walking on the main street Khreshchatyk, now called ‘Vorovski.’ Everybody holds under their arm a stick of plain black bread, and everyone picks crumbs from it and drops it in their mouth. This applies to men, to women and to children: constantly, constantly, constantly. Everybody has a stick of plain black bread under their arm, under their suit coat, under their overcoat. And from there they pick: crumbs, crumbs, crumbs. So it goes for an entire city.” This traveler’s account from the Ukrainian capital in the autumn of 1933 hints at the disaster that afflicted the country in those grim years of the brutal man-made Famine. And this rare account comes from one of the very few Westerners allowed into Ukraine at that time. Harry Lang was the labor editor of the Yiddish-language newspaper Jewish Daily Forward, or Forverts, published in New York. It was then the largest and most influential Yiddish newspaper in the world and the largest non-English newspaper in the United States. Lang and his wife Lucy spent several weeks traveling freely throughout Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. They […]

In 19th century Ukraine, Jewish boys were being spirited from their families to serve the czar, Hasidism was sweeping Jewish practice from Kyiv and Chernobyl through central Europe, and a Jewish girl became a controversial but charismatic Jewish leader. Hannah Rochel, born Hannah Rachel Verbermacher, was the only independent female Rebbe in the 300-year history of the Hasidic movement. Known as “the Maiden of Ludmir,” she has jokingly been called the second-most famous virgin in Jewish history. But to the people of her time, and even long after her death, Hannah Rochel was no joking matter. She severely challenged the social and religious order of her time. Her leadership was based not on dynastic authority, but on the original Hasidic tradition of charisma. Furthermore, she did not ask for money or promote herself. Little is actually known of Hannah Rochel. Only four of her teachings are recorded, and she wrote nothing of herself. The first scholarly study of her life was published in 1909, some 30 years after she died. Even that was based on hagiography, folk tales & legends. Considerable poetic license has been taken to fictionalize her life. She is the subject of four novels, two plays, and […]

Today we have a special story for our listeners, a story that transcends time and generations. A story from the heart. And a story that reminds us of the powerful role that memory plays in our lives. Yana Rathman is an educator and activist in the Jewish community of San Francisco. She recently traveled to Ukraine. Here, in her own words, are some of her reflections. “He was tall, with broad shoulders, olive skin, and a full head of black hair. He joined the Soviet army in the first days of the war with Nazi Germany. He was seriously wounded twice, and finished the war by signing his name on the Reichstag wall in Berlin in May 1945. However, when he returned home to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, there was no one there to greet him. His entire family—including his young wife and two young daughters—had been killed at the ravine of Babyn Yar. They were among the nearly 34,000 Jews—mostly women, children and the elderly—shot by the Nazis over the course of three days in late September 1941. “It is considered one of the largest massacres of the Holocaust. Estimates indicate that more than 100,000 people were killed […]

Bias, stereotypes, and prejudices. We all strive to rise above them but history often proves to be a burden, as well as a challenge to deeper understanding. A newly published book entitled Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-Existence forthrightly tackles sensitive and controversial topics. Two distinguished academics have undertaken a bold project to outline in an intriguing new manner the long and complicated history of Jews and Ukrainians. Paul Robert Magocsi is professor of history and political science at the University of Toronto where he holds the John Yaremko Chair of Ukrainian Studies. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern is the Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of History in History Department at Northwestern University. Writing separately, and at times together, the co-authors produced a parallel narrative of two peoples that ultimately provided a single story. And this story reveals as many similarities as differences between the two peoples. Both ethnic Ukrainians and Jews are shown to be multilingual, multicultural, mobile, and highly culturally productive peoples. The perceived legacy of difference gives way to one of commonality. Jews and Ukrainians first began to interact on a significant scale in the early seventeenth century. From that time historical memories were formed. The […]

    Today we look at symbols and mythologies. When competing narratives on history clash, the battle over symbols becomes heated and emotional. Vitaliy Nakhmanovich is a Ukrainian historian who has written extensively on the formation—and manipulation—of national memory. He has been particularly incisive in analyzing the politics of memory. Nakhmanovich contributed an important essay to the book Babyn Yar: History and Memory, which was recently published to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the tragedy. His essay, entitled “Babyn Yar: A Place of Memory in Search of a Future” details the complex—and sometimes cynical—debates over the symbols of commemoration in a contested landscape of memory. Nakhmanovich points out that Babyn Yar provokes a confrontation. During the Soviet era this was a confrontation between the public’s need to honor the memory of Jewish victims of the Nazis and the actions of the Soviet government trying to impose an artificial memory of events. The Soviet authorities also physically destroyed the scene of the crimes at Babyn Yar. Nakhmanovich reminds us Babyn Yar was flooded with a deluge of pulp from nearby brick plants in the 1950s. This resulted in a notorious mudslide in 1961, when the pulp smashed through a flimsy dam […]