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 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 writers like Isaac Babel and Ilia Ehrenburg with sophisticated Russian audiences was proverbial, and their contribution to the formation of Russian-Jewish literature is much-acclaimed and well-studied.^[4] Jewish involvement with Polish culture has also recently received a good deal of scholarly attention,^[5] while the Jewish-Ukrainian interaction has not moved past basic discussions of Jewish participation in Ukrainian politics.^[6]
Not only did colonialism (first Polish, then Russian) for centuries suppress the development of Ukrainian culture, it also took a heavy toll on scholarship. Students of East European Jewish history have tended to focus on assimilation to “things imperial,” while neglecting to discuss Jewish involvement in Ukrainian culture.^[7] As a result, we know virtually nothing about the attempt to construct a Jewish identity in Ukrainian literature, culture, and politics. Having become accustomed to discussing the East European Jewish interaction as Russian-Jewish or Polish-Jewish, we are not even able to answer superficially the question of whether there is or ever has been a Ukrainian-Jewish literature, or to come up with a list of texts that might fall under the rubric “Ukrainian-Jewish.”
To fill in this gap, this paper traces the patterns of Ukrainian-Jewish identity by looking at the case of Hryts’ko Kernerenko,^[8] perhaps the first Ukrainian poet of Jewish descent to contribute to what could be cautiously dubbed the Ukrainian-Jewish literary tradition. This tradition was established in the 1880s, developed in the 1920s-1930s by such figures as Ivan Kulyk (b. Izrail Iudovych Kúlik, 1897-1937), brought to fruition by writers like Leonid Pervomais’kyi (b. Il’ia Shliomovych Hurevych, 1908-1973) and Sava Ovsiiovych Holovanivs’kyi (1910-1992), rediscovered late in the late 1980s by poets Abram Isaakovych Katsnelson (1914-2003) and Naum Tykhyi (b. Naum Myronovych Shtilerman, 1912-1996), and canonized in the 1980s-2000s by the Ukrainian-Jewish poet Moisei Fishbein (b. 1946).^[9]

LINGUA LAUDATA and LINGUA PECCATA

Grigorii Kerner began composing Ukrainian verse under the name Hryts’ko Kernerenko in an era unreceptive to Ukrainian cultural endeavors. The brief political thaw in the late 1850s and early 1860s – when Ukrainian books and primers appeared for the first time in modern era, Taras Shevchenko was allowed back into the capital, and a couple of Ukrainian periodicals were authorized, albeit in the Russian language^[10] – was followed by an almost total ban on things Ukrainian.^[11] The 1863 Valuev decree^[12]and 1876 Ems edict^[13] uprooted the timid Ukrainian revival by dramatically limiting the legally endorsed culture of Little Russia (Malorossia), which is how the imperial bureaucrats euphemistically referred to the altogether redundant concept of Ukraine.^[14] The authorities grudgingly endorsed Ukrainian discourse only if it contained no hint of the nation-making fervor of the Jena romantics, let alone of the revolutionary enthusiasm of Sturm und Drang. The notorious claim that the Ukrainian language “has not, does not, and cannot exist” defined and exhausted the situation of Ukrainian culture in tsarist Russia.^[15] For those Ukrainian writers who sought publishers within the borders of the Russian Empire, moderate Ukrainian populism of a vaudevillian character or bucolic lyricism became the only relatively innocuous forms of expression available. At the same time, Austrian-published Ukrainian books and periodicals were forbidden to be brought into Russia, translations from Western European languages were put under a total ban, and the Ukrainian theater repertoire was altogether eliminated.^[16] Afraid that Ukrainian publications would sooner or later trigger separatist tendencies detrimental to the integrity of the empire, the authorities also uprooted Ukrainian from education, liturgy, and the press.^[17]
Some changes took place under the brief term of Minister of Interior Loris-Melikov toward the end of Alexander II’s reign (1856-1881). Whatever was allowed to be published in the Malorosskii (Little Russian) dialect, as Russian authorities condescendingly dubbed Ukrainian, had necessarily to be transcribed in iaryzhka, in which the characteristically Ukrainian vowels were substituted by Russian equivalents to make the language font look similar to Russian.^[18] Ukrainian scholarship such as ethnography was endorsed only if it was in Russian.^[19] The suppressed literature sublimated into collecting Ukrainian folklore, predominantly folk songs and ballads, or imitations thereof. When several national-minded women reacted against the anti-Ukrainian stance of the authorities by appearing in the streets of Kyiv donned in Ukrainian attire, the general-governor of Kyiv immediately responded by publicly allowing city prostitutes to wear the national dress.^[20] In this context, the Russian authorities considered suspicious – and the liberal-minded Russian intelligentsia ridiculous – any attempts to promote Ukrainian literature. Ukrainian was stigmatized as a lingua peccata: even the Bible could not be translated into Ukrainian or used by village parish priests. To paraphrase a medieval rabbinic metaphor, the Ukrainian language was a devaluated currency with no apparent signs of recovery. What, then, were Grigorii Kerner’s reasons for investing in it?
Nor were Ukrainian-Jewish relations stimulating any mutual rapprochement. An unexpected manifestation of what could be called, ex post facto, the first stage of the Ukrainian-Jewish cultural encounter ended in an abrupt and ugly manner. While in 1859 Ukrainian figures such as Taras Shevchenko and Panteleimon Kulish had denounced the notorious antisemitic Russian journal Illustratsia,^[21] in 1861-1862 the Ukrainian press canonized the image of the Jew as a rapacious capitalist entrepreneur and greedy exploiter of the Ukrainian peasantry.^[22] In 1875, Panas Myrnyi portrayed a quintessential Ukrainian village in which a Jew (and a German) mistreat and rob the Ukrainians, former serfs.^[23] In the 1870s and 1880s, Ukrainian publications in Austrian Galicia (subjected to a more lenient Austrian censorship) expressed even less sympathy for the Jewish cause.^[24] The arguments of enlightened Jewish polemicists for the abolition of the Pale of Settlement and the emancipation of Russian Jews, inundating the Russian-Jewish press at the time, seem to have not resonated among Ukrainian public figures. The Vienna-based Hromada journal’s initial reports on the 1881 pogroms in Ukraine, unique in their moderate sympathy toward the Jewish victims, perhaps conveyed Mykhailo Drahomanov’s solitary viewpoint rather than the feelings of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, which was quantitatively insignificant and bereft of its own media in the Russian empire.^[25] On the grassroots level, the climate was far from benevolent to the idea of Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement.^[26] In the 1880s, the philosemitism of Ivan Franko and Lesia Ukrainka, who at the beginning of the twentieth century challenged the inherited bias of Ukrainian anti-Jewish attitudes, had not yet become part of the new Ukrainian sensibilities.^[27] And there was no Volodymyr Vynnychenko to create the complex, predominantly positive Jewish characters that appeared in his plays and prose only in the 1910s and after.^[28] To say that Grigorii Kerner emerged as the Ukrainian poet Hryts’ko Kernerenko from a welcoming milieu that fostered a Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue is completely to misunderstand his bold, independent, and apparently lonely deed.
Kerner was no less a curious figure among those Jewish intellectuals who, from Osip Rabinovich in Odessa to Arnold Margolin in Kharkiv, routinely associated with, and integrated into, the Russian cultural milieu.^[29] For those maskilim (enlightened Jews) who sought integration into the general society and who argued against any ghettoized Yiddish-based and shtetl-shaped Jewish mentality, Russian was a praiseworthy language, a lingua laudata. This is not surprising, given that in the new burgeoning urban centers of Ukraine (Kharkiv, Zhytomyr, and Odessa) Russian was the spoken language of the overwhelming majority, Jews included, whereas Ukrainian was unheard of.^[30] Yevhen Chykalenko poignantly noticed that in the 1900s there were only eight families in Kiev that spoke Ukrainian. In the hierarchy of Jewish linguistic preferences, German, the language of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), and later Russian occupied the first and foremost position, followed by Hebrew and Yiddish, the last being the least important. Ukrainian was simply not in the Jewish linguistic repertoire, despite the fact that Ukrainian words and colloquial expressions were prominently present in both spoken and written Yiddish and were well familiar to Jews.^[31] For the Jews, Russian was not only the official language of the empire but also the language of high culture, university education, and public discourse, whereas Ukrainian was at best the language of the peasantry. They found Shevchenko rough and uncombed, though talented. For an urban dwelling, petty-bourgeois German- or Russian-oriented Jew, the Ukrainian language signified nothing but a marketplace babble of no cultural value. To use David Roskies’s metaphor, in the shtetl-based Jewish linguistic imagination, Russian functioned as a High Goyish while Ukrainian as a Low Goyish dialect (goyish referring to the non-Jewish or Gentile).
Yet already in the second half of the nineteenth century East European Yiddish writers, above all Mendele Moykher-Sforim, included in their prose narratives many colorful, albeit episodic, Ukrainian characters and even brief dialogues in Ukrainian.^[32] Later in the 1900s, Isaac Leibush Perets and Sholem Aleichem traced humorous parallels between the Ukrainians and the Jews in their short stories. Ukraine-born Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s arduous defense of the Ukrainian language, articulated in his impeccable Russian, was but another important episode of the Jewish-Ukrainian cultural rapprochement in the late 1900s and early 1910s.^[33] Later in the 20th century the Hebrew writer Shmuel Iosef Agnon (born in Buchach) presented a benign and mutually respectful encounter between Oleksa Dovbush, a leader of the Ukrainian peasant revolt, and the Galician Jews, only half-a-century after Kerner’s entry into Ukrainian literature. After the Holocaust, L’viv-born Piotr Rawicz in his French-language novel Blood from the Sky made the survival of his Jewish protagonist during the Holocaust depend on his profound knowledge of the Ukrainian language and literature.^[34] Yet Ukrainian-Jewish literary parallels did not yet signify the integration of Jewish writers into the Ukrainian milieu. And in the 1880s, it was simply inconceivable for a Jew – as well as for an acculturated urban dweller with a university degree – to be willing to associate with, or acculturate into, the Ukrainian language and culture. To paraphrase an acclaimed post-colonial metaphor, the Ukrainian was a subaltern who could not and should not speak.^[35] There seemed to be no reason for a Jew, who occupied a rank lower than the subaltern in the imaginary Russian imperial hierarchy, to identify with those mute, rustic, uncultivated subalterns, the Ukrainians, bereft of their own voice and tongue.
But Grigorii Borisovich Kerner, the descendant of an affluent Jewish family, thought otherwise.

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

Biographical data on Kerner is insufficient for a coherent narrative. What is known about him raises more questions than provides answers. Ihor Kachurovs’kyi’s short yet very informative note on Kerner’s itinerary,^[36] and a brief note included in Kerner’s file at the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Literature manuscript collection,^[37] with some variation, simply follow the succinct introduction to Kernerenko’s poetry from the 1908 anthology The Ukrainian Muse.^[38] From these sources we learn that Hryts’ko Kernerenko was born in 1863 in Huliai-pole, Ekaterynoslav Province. He graduated from Simferopol high school (gimnazia). The notorious numerus clausus introduced and enforced in the Russian empire in the early 1880s dramatically limited educational opportunities for Jews, making university education very problematic for Kerner, who, instead of a Russian university, chose the agronomy department of a polytechnic college in Munich.^[39] Kerner’s choice, however, was not an uncommon one for heirs of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie.^[40] In 1883, Kerner traveled through Europe and visited Austria and Italy.^[41] The few available sources lead us to believe that upon finishing his studies abroad, Kernerenko returned to Huliai-pole, where he managed his own estate.^[42]
<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/yps51.jpg>

Fig. 1. Huliai-pole, City council (Duma), former Althausen Hotel.

Kerner’s family was not atypical for the Jewish nouveaux riches that emerged in the 1870s-1880s. Kerner’s grandfather, perhaps involved in the century-old propinatsia business (distilling of and trading in alcohol), had amassed enough capital that by the time of Alexander II’s liberal reforms, he was able to invest his entrepreneurial skills into the burgeoning Russian industry. In the 1870s, together with the merchant A. A. Ostrovs’kyi, he built a comparatively large liquor plant that employed 32 workers and earned 32,000 rubles annually. In 1892, Kerner established his family company, Kerner B. S. and Sons, and built a second machine-building factory in Huliai-pole (the first belonged to a certain Krieger). By the end of the century there were 70 workers at Kerner’s factory, which generated revenues of 65,000 rubles and was marketed through the local Kerner-owned Trade House. In 1901, together with other wealthy merchants and industrialists, the Kerners sponsored Mutual Credit Bank, built in the center of the town. Later under the Soviets, the building hosted the Jewish Colonization Society (Agro-Joint), which supported Jewish agricultural settlements in left-bank Ukraine.^[43]
Anatol Hak (b. Ivan Antypenko), a Ukrainian writer, literary critic, and journalist born in 1893 in Huliai-pole personally knew the Kerners and provided elucidating insights into Kerner’s life. Among other things, Hak notes that Kerner’s family was comprised of a father and his three sons. The family owned an agricultural machinery plant, a vapor mill, a large store, and about 500 hectares of land outside Huliai-pole, which they leased to German colonists.^[44]

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/yps52.jpg>

Fig. 2. Huliai-pole, Mutual Credit Bank, ca. 1901, the Kerners were among its sponsors. In the 1920s it hosted Jewish Colonization Society. Now Huliai-pole Historical Museum.

Here is Hak:

“As to the rich dwellers of Huliai-pole, who shared pro-Ukrainian sympathies, it is worthwhile to mention the poet Hryts’ko Kernerenko. Unfortunately, there is not a word about him in the Ukrainian Encyclopedia. A member of a rich Jewish family (his real name is Kerner), Kernerenko, who got his higher education degree in Munich and Kharkiv, composed genuine Ukrainian poetry, and also translated into Ukrainian the poetry of Heine, Pushkin, etc. In 1909, he published in Huliai-pole a collection of his poetry The Moments of Inspiration (Menty natkhnennia). Yet it is obvious that his nationality and social position prevented Kernerenko from having firm contacts with Huliai-pole’s intelligentsia, let alone with the peasants. However, when my relatively “Ukrainian” moustache began bristling, I found my way to Kernerenko: I used to go to him for Ukrainian books. Hryhorii Borysovych [Kernerenko] treated me benevolently. Besides the books he gave me to read, I remember him giving me the address of the bookstore Ukrainian Antiquities [Ukrainskaia starina, based in Kyiv], from which I eventually began ordering Ukrainian books.”^[45]

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/yps53.jpg>

Fig. 3. Huliai-pole, “Nadiia” (Hope) Mill, former Shreder Mill, ca. 1894.

Hak’s insights are illuminating in different ways. They suggest that Kernerenko belonged to the well-to-do of Huliai-pole; that he was known to be a lonely Jewish Ukrainophile at odds with his bourgeois Jewish, Russified Cossack, and intellectual Ukrainian milieu; that he had a collection of Ukrainian books; and that he seems to have inspired and encouraged those interested in things Ukrainian. Unfortunately, except for a brief reference to the post-1917 turmoil, when Kerner was made to pay ransom to local anarchists, Hak does not provide any details on Kerner’s later years.^[46]

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/yps54.jpg>

Fig. 4. Huliai-pole, Big Synagogue, 19th century. Now one of the attached buildings of the District Hospital.

Though we do not know why and how Grigorii Kerner started to compose Ukrainian verse, we do know that Kernerenko’s poetry, appearing between 1890 and 1910 in four diffe-rent collections, did not go unnoticed by Ukrainian literary figures.^[47] Ivan Franko included a couple of Kernerenko’s poems in his representative anthology The Accords (1903).^[48] Oleksa Kovalenko, himself a poet and translator, published three of Kernerenko’s poems in his literary anthology Entertainment (1905)^[49] and seven poems prefaced by a biographical note and a portrait in his classic anthology Ukrainian Muse (1908).^[50] Even in the 1920s some of Kernerenko’s verse made its way into the diaspora-edited collection The Strings.^[51] In addition, Kernerenko’s verse appeared in Ukrainian periodicals such as Ukrains’ka khata, Hromads’ka dumka, and Rada, and also in Skladka in the 1890s and Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk in the 1900s, where first, Aleksandrov and second, Franko noticed Kernerenko and found his voice worthy of joining the select Ukrainian literary milieu.
Volodymyr Stepanovych Aleksandrov (1825-1893), a medical doctor, writer, and folklorist from Kharkiv, belonged to the “old style” Ukrainian-oriented intelligentsia generated from the clergy and integrated into the East European populist movement of the 1870s. Aleksandrov served as a military doctor in left-bank Ukraine and was known for The People’s Songbook (1887)^[52] and his populist folklore-based plays.^[53] Apparently he studied Hebrew and translated such parts of the Bible as the Books of Genesis, Psalms, and Job into Ukrainian.^[54] In the 1880s, he edited two issues of the rare and therefore highly representative almanac The Collection (Skladka).^[55] A memoirist notes that Aleksandrov’s house in Kharkiv served for irregular meetings of some old-style Ukrainians.^[56] Kernerenko, who shared the same principles of Ukrainian populism and imitated Ukrainian folk poetry, seems to have been very close to Aleksandrov, calling himself the latter’s disciple and perceiving his death as a personal loss. It is likely that Aleksandrov introduced Kernerenko to local publishers (all of Kernerenko’s books but one appeared in Kharkiv’s Zilberberg printing-press, apparently owned by a Jew) and to the cast of Ukrainian actors at the famous Kharkiv theater, for which probably Kernerenko penned his folklore-based play.^[57]
Perhaps without knowing he was writing to the only contemporary Ukrainian-Jewish poet other than himself, in February, 1898, Kernerenko penned a letter to Kesar Bilylovs’kyi,^[58] who continued editing the Skladka.^[59] The letter seems to suggest that Kernerenko (unlike Bilylovs’kyi) was not part of the narrow circle of Ukrainian literary figures rallying around Aleksandrov’s almanac and that he was not even known to the friends of the person whose disciple he considered himself. Kernerenko’s spiritual solitude is further corroborated by the letter’s closing: as he did in many other cases, he signed the letter with his pen name, but asked Bilylovs’kyi to respond to Hryhorii Borysovych Kerner in Huliai-pole.^[60] While perhaps a mere convenience or formality, it may also suggest that in his native town, Kerner, the author of three books in Ukrainian, was hardly known to anybody as the Ukrainian poet Hryts’ko Kernerenko.^[61] However, in the 1900s the constellations on the literary firmament were more benevolent toward Kernereko, who was then blessed with the acquaintance of Ivan Franko.
Kernerenko’s encounter with Ivan Franko requires a brief digression. Back in 1880, the Kiev governor-general Dondukov-Korsakov had allowed Ukrainian plays to be staged if they were not about the intelligentsia and if the cast could simultaneously dilute any Ukrainian performance in the Russian repertoire also offered to the public. Apparently in the mid-1880s, Kernerenko tried his pen as a playwright. For the plot of his play – the only one we know he penned – Kernerenko chose a village-based love story entitled Those Who Conceal the Truth, God Punishes; or You Can’t Force Love (Khto pravdy vkryvaie – toho Boh karaie, abo Liubov syloiu ne vizmesh).^[62] The play, ornamented with all the accessories of a sentimental folk drama, may have been written for the Kharkiv Ukrainian Theater. Kernerenko’s cast of characters includes the astute and cruel village clerk, Rad’ko (pysar’), and his romantic-minded sister Nastia, the ambitious nouveau riche, Mykyta Syla, and his rebellious daughter Horpyna, the village orphan Levko, the inn-keeper Lukeria, who is engaged in witchcraft, and Semen, a handsome young man about to be drafted into the army. The play was set in the safe and distant first half of the 19th century: in the opening scene potential village draftees discuss the humiliating custom of “forehead shaving” (zabryiut’), the marking of conscripts in the Russian Army (cancelled as part of Alexander II’s Great Reforms).

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/yps55.jpg>

Fig. 5. The title page of Kenrerenko’s play sent to, and marked by, the censor.

But neither the inoffensive plot nor the artificial characters could help Kernerenko.^[63] Both Russian and Ukrainian literature have long portrayed the horrors of Nikolaevan conscription, the arbitrariness of communal elders, the corruption of the administration, the prejudices of the peasants, the passions of the simple folk, and witchery.^[64] But, quod licet jovi non licet bovi: Ukrainian authors had to be content with the beauties of the Ukrainian landscape and the pastoral innocence of the Ukrainian peasantry. The censor closely followed Kernerenko’s play, painstakingly identifying and angrily marking each and every socially explosive theme. The censor did not like Rad’ko’s deliberate forging of the conscription lists to include Semen, his twice rival, the object of passionate love of both his sister Nastia and of Syla’s daughter Horpyna. The censor also angrily underlined those lines in which Kernerenko echoed Ukrainian folk songs by criticizing the Nikolaevan draft and by depicting draftees streaming into a local inn to “waste their freedom in drink.” And the entire act two of the play, according to the aggressive red-pencil marginal notes, simply enraged the censor: he had no desire to authorize the portrayal of the horrible conditions of female inmates in the Russian prison system and the sexual harassment and brutal language of the prison supervisor.^[65] The play was forbidden and returned to the author despite that its more than moderate social criticism never went as far as the classical drama of the Russian Aleksandr Ostrovskii (1823-1887) or the Ukrainian Ivan Karpenko-Karyi (1845-1907).
To Kernerenko’s good fortune, in the last quarter of the 19th century the center of Ukrainian culture moved across the border of the Russian empire to Ukrainian Galicia, part of the Austrian empire.^[66] In the 1880s, known as the “dead years” (Hrytsak) for the development of Ukrainian culture, most literati either had to emigrate, like Mykhailo Drahomanov, who began his Hromada (first published as a collection of articles, then made into a journal) in Vienna, or remain in the Russian Empire and take the risk of sending their works for publication to L’viv, where in 1898 Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi and Ivan Franko launched Literaturno-Naukovyi Vistnyk (Literary and Scholarly Herald, hereafter LNV), a journal of paramount significance for 20th-century Ukrainian thought. On June 13, 1899, Kernerenko penned a self-disparaging letter to the editorial board of LNV, asking for publication his translations and poetry, and promising a play.^[67] The editors welcomed Kernerenko, publishing him twice in the course of a year.^[68] Inspired by this new opportunity, on May 1, 1900, Kernerenko apparently made some changes in his play, shortened its somewhat pretentious and cumbersome title to the more concise The Power of Truth (Syla pravdy) and sent it to the LNV editors.^[69] In January 1901, LNV informed Kernerenko that his poetry and play would be published, yet two years passed without any publication. Kernerenko sent one inquiry after another, then asked that his manuscripts be returned (he even sent payment for the return postage, but again received no response). Finally, in February 1903, he turned to Ivan Franko.^[70]
By the 1900s, Ivan Franko had drifted from depicting Jews as corrupt capitalist entrepreneurs to sympathetic portrayals of rank-and-file Jews. He also became personally acquainted with Theodor Herzl and developed a deep appreciation for the Zionist cause.^[71] Franko’s interest in Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) suggests that the Galician thinker and poet supported and was ready to promote a Jewish encounter with the vernacular language and culture, be it German, Polish, or Ukrainian.^[72] Kernerenko represented for him a rare yet commendable Ukrainian case. Franko’s acquaintance with Kernerenko hardly changed Franko’s perception of the East European Jewish problem, yet it widened Franko’s vision of Jewish intellectual endeavors. Though Franko’s answer to Kernerenko is not extant, nor do we know how their relations evolved between 1903 and 1906, one of Kernerenko’s later letters helps us to understand the character of his epistolary relations with Franko:

“I thank you so much for your kind letter. You have asked who Sholem-Aleichem is. This is the pen-name of S. Rabinovych, one of the most outstanding modern writers in jargon [Yiddish]. S. G. Frug is no less talented in poetry, also in jargon. On Sholem-Aleichem and S. G. Frug you may learn a bit from the encyclopedic dictionary Brokhaus, vol. 22, page 495 “Jewish-German dialect or jargon.” I am sending you a poem “Wine” that I translated from S. Frug’s Yiddish poetry. The tale I have sent you is entitled “Der veter Pini mit der mume Reizi,” though I translated “Reizi” as “Khyvria” – it seems to sound better in our language (bil’sh po-nashomu). As for an article on the most recent Jewish literature, I am afraid I would not be able, nor would I dare, to write it, yet as for translations from Yiddish (z ievreis’koi) I will be sending you from time to time poetry and prose, and also something from my own writings […].”^[73]
Kernerenko’s answer to Franko is remarkable in many ways. It demonstrates that Kernerenko apparently was responsible for introducing Franko to such classic Yiddish writers as Sholem-Aleichem and Frug, and eventually to the phenomenon of Yiddish as a national Jewish language possessing high quality literature and outstanding literati.^[74]
Also, Kernerenko emerges from his letter as a modest, even shy individual, who understands both his capabilities and his limitations and who addresses Ukrainian as his mother tongue. Unlike the situation in the 1910s, LNV publications in the 1900s imply that in Franko’s milieu at that time, no Jews except Kernerenko were able to write in Ukrainian and were familiar with modern Jewish culture.^[75] Finally, Franko welcomed Kernerenko both as a poet and as a translator who helped enrich the LNV rubric “From Foreign Literatures” that Franko launched and edited.^[76] It is not clear whether Franko knew Kernerenko before 1903, but there is little doubt that he eagerly supported the Huliai-pole poet: between 1904 and 1908, Kernerenko’s publications appeared at least ten times in LNV, sometimes twice in one issue.^[77] Kernerenko was not the only Jew published in a major Ukrainian journal, but he was the only Jewish literary figure who merited the regular attention and readership of the Ukrainian audience of LNV, serving as a conduit between Jewish literature and the Ukrainian reader. Kernerenko’s active collaboration with LNV is the last more or less documented episode of his life.^[78] No surviving evidence would allow us to reconstruct his life and literary endeavors after his last publication in LNV appeared in the 1908 issue.
Perhaps inspired by his relations with LNV, some time around 1907 Kernerenko began planning his Menty natkhnennia. It seems that with all his contacts with editorial boards and his rising number of publications in periodical press, Kernerenko still did not belong to any literary circles and remained outside the Ukrainian literary mainstream. His letter to Oleksa Kovalenko of November 5, 1907 implies that he did not even know how to go about getting his book published:

“Dear Mister Oleksa Kuz’mych! It occurred to me to publish my writings (though not numerous) in a separate book, yet I do not know what to begin with. Will you be so kind as to instruct me where and to what censor committee I have to send my writings first to obtain from them permission for publication? Many things have changed since the time I published my small books, and together with them, indeed, conditions for publication have changed. You, my dear sir, are an expert in this field, therefore I turn to you for advice on how to start this issue.”^[79]
Perhaps Kovalenko did help Kernerenko to find a publisher: the book Menty natkhnennia appeared in 1910 and, as will be discussed momentarily, was extensively reviewed by the most prominent Ukrainian literary critics. Yet we know virtually nothing about the life of the poet after the 1910s. It is not difficult to imagine what might have happened to Kerner, a Jew and capitalist, in the midst of the Civil War turmoil, the White Army advance and retreat, the military campaign of the Ukrainian Directory, the Red Army advance, and Makhno’s anarchist revolt, each of which coincided with or was followed by pogroms and Jewish casualties. Whatever the circumstances of Hryts’ko Kernerenko’s death, it is significant that before 1934 there was a grave with an inscription “Kernerenko” at the local Huliai-pole cemetery.^[80] There is little doubt that neither Hryts’ko’s brothers nor his father would have wanted to have this name inscribed on their gravestones. It could have only belonged to Hryts’ko, who in his life was routinely addressed as Hryhorii Borysovych, but whose last wish apparently was to be buried as a Ukrainian poet.