The Construction of an Improbable Identity: The Case of Hryts’ko Kernerenko

191 Ab Imperio, 1/2005 The propensity of modern Jews to integrate into metropolitan cultures has become so deeply embedded in modern historiographic narratives that the few yet significant examples of Jewish integration into colonial cultures have been routinely ignored by scholars. Those Jews who lived in the Russian or Austro-Hungarian empires and sought to assimilate into the dominant Russian- or German-language milieu have become part and parcel of the research of modern double identities.1 But students of modernity have Yohanan PETROVSKY-SHTERN THE CONSTRUCTION OF AN IMPROBABLE IDENTITY: THE CASE OF HRYTS’KO KERNERENKO* * I gratefully acknowledge the generous and timely help of Dr. Stepan Zakharkin from the Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv). My special thanks to Victoria Zahrobsky from the Northwestern University Interlibrary Loan Department and to the staff of the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign Library Slavic Division and of the Phillips Reading Room at Widener Library at Harvard University. Special thanks to the staff of the Huliai-pole Historical Museum, the Chernihiv Historical Museum, and the Department of Manuscripts of the Shevchenko Institute of Literature (Kyiv). 1 On the integration ofAustro-Hungarian andAustro-Galician Jews to German culture, see LoisDubin.ThePortJewsofHabsburgTrieste:AbsolutistPoliticsandEnlightenmentCulture. Stanford, CA, 1999; Peter Hanak. The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the Cultural History ofVienna and Budapest. Princeton, 1998. Pp. 44-62, 174-172;William McCagg, Jr. AHistory of Habsburg Jews, 1670-1918. Bloomington, 1989; Hillel J. Kieval.The Making 192 Y. Petrovsky-Shtern, The Construction of an Improbable Identity... expressed little interest in those Jews who, preferring to be part of the colonial rather than metropolitan discourse, already in the nineteenth century chose to integrate into Lithuanian, Slovak, or Ukrainian (Ruthenian) culture. Whatever the significance of the Jewish contribution to Ukrainian culture, the choice of the Ukrainian language by Jewish writers should be considered highly charged with a profound, albeit implicit, anti-colonial message. For a former shtetl Jew from the Pale of Settlement to identify with another persecuted minority such as the Ukrainians or Lithuanians, rather than to seek a safe haven under the aegis of the Russian-language imperial or Soviet culture, was unusual, if not abnormal. The rise of East Central and Eastern European national movements, followed by the establishment of a number of independent states such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, radically altered the Jews’ self-identification and, subsequently, their choice of language in the corresponding countries.2 In Soviet Ukraine, even after the unsuccessful yet significant Ukrainian state-building experiment in the late 1910s, most Jewish literary figures who did not work in Yiddish or Hebrew chose the Russian language, sought a Russian readership, and competed with one another to be the next Pushkin or Tolstoy.3 The success of poets and writof Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870-1918. New York and Oxford, 1988; Marsha Rozenblit. The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1914: Assimilation and Identity. Albany, NY, 1983; Jerzy Tomaszewski (Ed.). Najnowsze dzeje żydow z Polsce w zarysie. Warsaw, 1993. Pp. 79-122. On the assimilation of Jews in the Russian Empire to Russian culture, see John D. Klier. Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855-1881. Cambridge, 1995; Benjamin Nathans. Beyond the Pale: the Jewish Encounter with Late ImperialRussia.Berkeley,2002;AlexanderOrbach.NewVoicesofRussianJewry.A Study of the Russian-Jewish Press of Odessa in the Era of Great Reforms, 1860-1871. Leiden, 1980; Michael Stanislawski. For Whom Do I Toil? Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry. New York, 1988; Steven Zipperstein. The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-1881. Stanford, CA., 1986. 2 See Kinga Frojmovics. Ha-Zeramim ha-datiyim be-Yahadut Hungaryah: ortodoksya, neologyah ve-status kvo ante: ben ha-shanim 1868/1896-1950. Ramat Gan, 2002; Ezra Mendelsohn. On Modern Jewish Politics. New York and Oxford, 1993; Idem. The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars. Bloomington, 1983; Antony Polonsky and Michael Riff. Poles, Czechoslovaks, and the “Jewish Question”, 1914-1921: A Comparative Study // Volker Berghann and Martin Kitchen (Eds.). Germany in the Age of Total War. London and Totowa, NJ., 1981. Pp. 63-101; Liekis Sarunas.AState Within a State? Jewish Autonomy in...