Setting Ukrainians and Jews against each other. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern on the Soviet “friendship of peoples”

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern is a man of many trades. He is a historian, a linguist, a translator, an essayist, and an artist, and the list goes on and on. Currently living in the United States, he teaches at multiple universities worldwide, conducts research, and writes engaging, remarkable books, particularly about the history of Jews in Ukraine. His study The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew won Encounter: The Ukrainian-Jewish Literary Prize in 2021. It is safe to say that the ideas presented in this book have become even more relevant against the background of the war in Ukraine.

Professor Petrovsky-Shtern talks about living at the intersection of cultures, building identities, and Soviet-era propaganda clichés still used by Russian propaganda to separate Ukrainians and Jews.

Chytomo: Let me start from afar and ask you to share what it’s like to be a person combining different cultural identities and living at the intersection of cultures and geographies. You seem to be the epitome of this type of personality.

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern: Several questions arise here. First, is this “combination” physically and intellectually possible? Second, if it is, does this “combination” occur at the level of knowledge of these intersecting cultures and interactions with them? I have never considered myself as someone doomed to one culture: Ukrainian, Jewish, or, in my previous incarnation, Russian-speaking. I say Russian-speaking, rather than Russian, because I never thought I belonged to Russian culture in terms of geography or ethnicity. You can add several other cultures to this. In the 1970s, I pursued Spanish studies and dreamed of transporting myself to the 17th-century Spain. I associated myself with the era of Miguel de Cervantes. Later, I did research on Gabriel García Márquez and dreamed of going to Colombia. This was an important dimension of what I wanted to see and what I associated myself with. Over the past 25 years, it has all crystallized, the excess disappeared, and my various interests have been distilled to three points on the map — Ukraine, Israel, and the United States.

I work, teach, earn money, and publish my books in the US, and 98% of what I write is English-language essays or research. I spend a lot of time in Israel, where I conduct research and deliver lectures. Most importantly, there are libraries and archives there, as well as a broad circle of my closest colleagues with whom I interact. And there is, of course, Ukraine, where I have students and colleagues both on the frontline, fighting in the trenches near the Ukrainian town of New York, and in the rear, raising funds for drones.

I think that the question of a personal intersection of cultures and living in different cultures is primarily about how involved you are spiritually, socially, linguistically, and intellectually in each country’s events.

 YouTube — Marta Farion

Language proficiency has always been the most important thing when it comes to how seriously I am involved in different cultures. No less important for me is direct participation in the life of the country. In this sense, I am more Israeli and Ukrainian than American, although I only have an American passport.

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Another circumstance of living at the intersection of cultures is the environment with which I communicate. I do not communicate with Russian-speaking Israelis in Bat Yam or Haifa (with just a few exceptions). I don’t interact with Russian-speaking (ex-Soviet) Jews in Brooklyn or Chicago. And I do not communicate with the Russian-speaking milieu in Ukraine. That is, it is crucial for me that the environments I choose are autochthonous, rooted in the land, culture, establishment, and academic institutions with which I deal. Their language should be English, Hebrew, and Ukrainian. Fluency in the language of the country with which you associate yourself is a fundamental thing, and I cannot exaggerate its importance.

Photo from the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy archive

Third, how much do these countries pain you? The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset once said, “me duele España” (Spain pains me). How much does 7 October [when Hamas launched a war against Israel — Ed.] or 24 February [when Russia launched a full-scale war against Ukraine — Ed.] pain you? How much does 9/11 pain you [when Al-Qaeda carried out a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon — Ed.]? Your reaction to such dates shows whether you actually feel part of a certain continuum, or whether this is just a place to relax, sometimes teach, or earn money.

Chytomo: Is development within a certain cultural environment, especially when you stay in it for a significant period, an inert process, or is it always a matter of conscious choice?

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern: When I started to leave the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, I told myself absolutely clearly that I would not communicate with émigré circles. I was not interested in them because they lived in the past, cherished it, and, in most cases, had nothing but this past. I became convinced that people in that milieu would not rebuild themselves as people of a new generation in new cultural conditions, and it pushed me away from them once and for all. After learning about this choice, my late father said that I was a snob. I smiled in response.

When I was 13 years old, I realized that if I wanted to study other cultures, I definitely needed to master their languages and know down to the smallest details what I was dealing with.

So, when I became interested in Zen [one of the most important schools of Buddhism — Ed.] and started learning karate, it was important for me to balance the physical exercises on the tatami with studying Japanese, which I did for a year and a half. The highly talented Yurko Pozayak (whom I knew as Yurko Lysenko) sat at a desk next to me.

This year, I have to teach a course on the history of Jerusalem from the 10th century BCE to the present, and I realize that I speak almost all the region’s languages but not Arabic. This summer, I mastered elementary classical Arabic and reached the intermediate level (what the Germans call Mittelstufe). For three months, I cradled the newborn Ruth with one hand and wrote endless Arabic exercises with the other. I am not young, so why would I need to learn another language, say, number 17? Nevertheless, I am spending my time and making quite an effort to learn it. I am interested in the system of thinking in terms of cultural categories, which is reflected at the language level.

When I saw that for me, the Ukrainian area is not only the space where I was born and grew up, but also the lands that I deal with professionally as a historian, I asked myself: How well do you speak the Ukrainian language? When you need to teach a course on the history of the Jews in Eastern Europe, where the Ukrainian context constantly arises, you need to know the language perfectly. At one point, I was invited to give lectures at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and realized that either I would have the Ukrainian language at the level of professional Ukrainian lecturers or I would not do it. So, over 10 years, I taught myself to give lectures and conduct interactive seminars in Ukrainian. Contemporaries will write one day about how successful I was.

Chytomo: Even though we have active citizens who have different ethnic backgrounds and often combine different cultural identities, we still tend to think of Ukraine as a certain homogeneous environment. Is it really so? Your book The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew seems to undermine this idea.

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern: Such a homogeneous environment has never existed. The Ukrainian community and the Ukrainian land are interesting precisely because they are incredibly diverse. The environment of Chernivtsi is not the same as in Lviv, while Lviv’s milieu is different from that of Kyiv. And Kyiv is not Kharkiv, while Kharkiv is like no other. Ask Serhiy Zhadan.

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern. The Anti-Imperial Choice. The Making of the Ukrainian Jew. Ukrainian edition book cover

For the past 10 years, I have intensively taught at the Ukrainian Catholic University, the Chernivtsi National University, less often at the Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University, the Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute, and often in Dnipro, in various, primarily non-Jewish institutions. Also, I frequently go to Uman, Zhovkva, Berdychiv, and Kamianets-Podilsky. I know other Ukrainian cities and towns well and can see how diverse they are in terms of Ukrainian language proficiency, Ukrainian identity, and understanding of what Ukraine is.

I am lucky because most of my environments in all these cities and towns are either traditionally Jewish (mostly Russian-speaking, but absolutely loyal to Ukraine’s independence and even showing patriotic fervor) or Ukrainian, consisting of intellectuals and university professors, among which I have almost never seen xenophobes.

Most people in such circles — the Ukrainian intelligentsia — are convinced that Ukraine is interesting precisely because of its attitude toward various ethnic communities and that their presence makes Ukraine a heterogeneous environment, to use your terminology. This is precisely the reason why I find it interesting to interact with such people, most of whom are liberals and democrats with deep ethnonational convictions. The way they treat me as a teacher of Jewish disciplines is also a certain litmus test, which pretty much shows they treat Jews in Ukraine.

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern. The Golden Age of Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe. Ukrainian edition book cover

Chytomo: In this context, it is interesting to mention that so-called “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” very often went hand in hand with Zionism in Soviet times during the so-called struggle against cosmopolitanism. For example, the Kyiv architect Joseph Karakis, who was of Jewish origin, was accused of both of these “sins” at once, and this was not an isolated case. It is interesting how communist propaganda combined these two components and, at the same time, set them up as contradictory when accusing Ukrainians of antisemitism. But no one seemed to pay attention to this inconsistency.

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern: This is a fascinating and underresearched topic. I try to study opposite phenomena, for example, literary contacts, language diffusion, and symbiosis of cultures. But we do not have good works that would professionally analyze the astonishing phenomenon I touched on, say, in my Paris lecture. We had a conference in Sorbonne University, where I said that Soviet literature about the Holocaust actually existed and was not banned to some extent, but there were two conditions under which it was allowed in the USSR to talk about the destruction of the Jewish population. (The word Holocaust was taboo). You could do that if you accused Ukrainian nationalists of complicity in mass executions or blamed Zionists, Jugenrat leaders, for the deaths of ordinary Jews.

For example, if novels or studies about the Holocaust were published in Lviv, and they described how the Nazis exterminated Galician Jews, the culprits had to be identified as Ukrainian nationalists.

Judenräte, Jewish self-government bodies in ghettos supposedly headed by bourgeois Zionists, saved the lives of “their kith and kin” by helping the Nazis kill ordinary Jews using bourgeois-nationalist Ukrainians. This was the Soviet class approach to Ukrainian-Jewish understanding.

Thus, the Soviet empire insidiously and pragmatically tried to set Ukrainians and Jews against each other in order to convince both sides that Ukrainians hated Jews, while Jews hated all things Ukrainian. They managed to hammer it into people’s heads to a certain extent because these stereotypes have survived to this day and age, no matter where you are — in New York, Chicago, or Lviv.

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It all began with the launch of the campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans,” i.e., Jews among the professional, administrative, teaching, and artistic elites. At the same time, the Soviets started persecuting the Ukrainian intelligentsia, more precisely, what remained of it after its total destruction in the 1930s. For example, Sava Holovanivsky was instructed by the Union of Writers to go to a meeting of the Belarusian Union of Writers in Minsk and report there that Maksym Rylsky was a covert Ukrainian nationalist. At the same time, speaking at the plenum of the Union of Writers, Lyubomyr Dmyterko argued before his comrades in the audience that Leonid Pervomaisky was a secret Zionist. One can only guess how much such KGB-style accusations shortened the lives of Rylsky and Pervomaysky.

Persecution of “rootless cosmopolitans” and anti-Ukrainian campaigns took place in parallel, but we studied them from the viewpoint of either the persecution of Ukrainian writers or the fight against Jewish writers.

However, it was the same campaign and the same story. It is very painful and unpleasant, but if you just write it down, you will see how much these parallels are an integral part of what shaped our worldview. In fact, the misunderstanding that it was not two, but one story, and the unwillingness to study such diverse processes as one process is the wall that I have been trying to break through for the past 15-20 years.

Chytomo: Do you think that these propagandistic narratives, formed in Soviet times, still show no signs of weakening?

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern: I can only give you this answer: if you look at Ukrainian social networks and how they react to extremely complex issues, for example, related to the front, provisions, and war strategy, there are countless posts with hundreds of comments (and Russian bots with Ukrainian nicknames produce just a fraction of these), openly saying: “They elected this Jew Zelensky, and now he is surrendering Ukraine.” This sometimes comes from xenophobically minded individuals, while at other times, from those who were ordered to artificially sow discord in society. Thousands of social media users do not see or prefer not to see it.

Let’s remember why Ukraine lost its struggle for independence in 1917–1920. One reason was that 15-16 different armies, deprived of rear support, passed through its territory. Another reason was the absence of a strong centralized government to run anything but the train car under which was the only government-controlled “territory,” as they joked in 1919. Yet another reason was that Soviet propaganda and Leon Trotsky very “accurately proved” that when Petliurites came, they destroyed the Jewish population, while the Red Army came and liberated the Jews. And people accepted this myth.

Unfortunately, Bolshevik propaganda managed to convince various minorities in Ukraine that pogroms started whenever Mazepyntsi, i.e., Ukrainian separatists who wanted to build an independent Ukraine, came to a particular area.

Remember that this monarchic-Bolshevik myth was actively employed against the Rukh party in 1989-1990! Therefore, their “divide and rule” is based on the belief that the minorities in the Ukrainian lands were supposedly mutually hostile, had nothing in common with each other, and therefore could only co-exist in the Russian imperial context. This most terrible geopolitical imperial myth has no right to exist in the Ukrainian segment of the Internet. When it emerges there, I see how dangerous it is.

Chytomo: You are a person combining several cultural identities, and the same can be said about your work, which is not limited to research. You have an education in philology and history and also do painting. What about fiction?

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern: There was no fiction, although I did compose 20–30 poems at some point and made numerous attempts to translate poetry, primarily Spanish. But it was all irretrievably destroyed and crossed out, and I have not returned to it. It’s not my thing.

 Photo from Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern’s Facebook page

Twenty years ago, I started writing an autobiographical novel in Russian, but now I cannot finish it. Of course, I think I have a good command of Russian well. I believe I have mastered plasticity, shades of meaning, and stylistic registers, but I cannot force myself to write in Russian. I wrote about a quarter of it, and I hope I won’t finish it. There are simply other things to do and other texts to work on, even if they are inferior in terms of “plasticity.”

Chytomo: Could you continue writing it in Ukrainian?

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern: You know, the Spanish writer Camilo José Sela wrote the ending in Arabic in, I think,  his penultimate novel. A failed experiment. So, we’ve seen this before, and it doesn’t work. Stylization in a different language is possible, but to do it, you have to master this language extremely well and at many levels. Even though I read and write in Ukrainian, I would not undertake the continuation in Ukrainian. Let my posthumous biographer deal with it.

However, I do have memoirs about other people, written mostly in Ukrainian. For example, I have a text about my colleague and student from Kamianets, who died at the front, an exceptional restorer of antiquities from Ostroh, my Kyiv teacher Bohdan Zholdak, and my linguistics teacher, Kostiantyn Tyshchenko, from Kyiv University. Some of these texts were published on the Zbruch portal. However, memoirs are different from fiction, which I will not attempt to write. There are some things you must give up.

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This material is part of a special project supported by Encounter: The Ukrainian-Jewish Literary Prize. The prize is sponsored by the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter (UJE), a Canadian charitable non-profit organization, with the support of the NGO “Publishers Forum.” UJE was founded in 2008 to strengthen and deepen relations between Ukrainians and Jews.

Translation: Vasyl Starko