JUDEO SUM, UCRAINUM NIHIL A ME ALIENUM PUTO

Before the 1900s, three themes permeated Kernerenko’s poetry: love, Ukraine, and Shevchenko. Common to a good many Ukrainian poets at the turn of the 19th century, these themes had an unexpected spin in Kernerenko’s writings. Kernerenko praised love as a family or at least family-making feeling, different from the topical 19th-century romantic Eros. He depicted Ukraine as a utopian country of redemption and lofty freedom rather than a godforsaken land of spiritual and economic slavery. And he worshipped Shevchenko as the Messiah of the Ukrainians. The focal role of the family in the preservation and reenactment of the Judaic tradition, the centrality of the Holy Land as the country of freedom, milk, and honey, and the redemptive function of the national poet and prophet were among the ideas Kernerenko translated into Ukrainian, making Jewish concepts serve the Ukrainian cause.
Not surprisingly, only the first theme (love) found its way into Ukrainian anthologies; the love poems “Everything has its Time” (Na vse svoia pora), “A Vain Expectation” (Marne dozhydannia), “To a True Friend,” (Pevnomu druhovi), “Mädchens Wunsch,” and “On a Borrowed Tune” (Na pozychenyi motyv) represent Kernerenko’s whole universe. Other Kernerenko poems, especially those dedicated to Ukraine and to Shevchenko (whose very name infuriated Russian authorities), could not make it through the censor. For example, in 1894 a Russian censor allowed Kernerenko’s collection V dosuzhyi chas to be published on the condition that the poet remove a poem entitled “The 31th Anniversary of Shevchenko’s Death.”^[1] To a great extent these circumstances explain the anger of Pavlo Hrabovs’kyi, who in his acclaimed essay “On Poetic Creativity” (Deshcho pro tvorchist poetychnu, 1896) – to be discussed later – pronounced his verdict on Kernerenko, finding him guilty of pursuing “art for art’s sake.”^[2] In fact, Kernerenko’s poetry to a great extent exonerates him as no rhapsodist of pure love and broken hearts.
The images of Ukraine, his motherland, are crucial in Kernerenko’s writings. His poem “Abroad” (Na chuzhyni, 1909) introduces the dichotomy “Ukraine” and “Europe.” The unnamed but recognizable Europe is “sunny,” “sociable,” and “warm,” yet it does not alleviate the poet’s profound solitude and sorrow. Kernerenko compares himself to a bird in a golden cage: the allegory significantly suggests that Ukraine, and only Ukraine, is the poet’s freedom. In his “And again in Ukraine” (I znov na Vkraini, ca. 1900), Kernerenko associates his native land with an island of utopia: there no evil exists, no calamity, no sorrow, only immense happiness. Kernerenko uses the Biblical metaphor of the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey, but recasts it as a different promised land, Ukraine. For Kernerenko, Ukraine allows for poetic enthusiasm and creativity. Ukraine, a metaphysical rather than social category, is about holiness and freedom. It is associated with the dearest and most humane images. Not only is Ukraine its people’s “mother” but also the poet’s own “mom,” his nurse, his closest and dearest kin. The poet is overwhelmed with the joy of return: “And now, again, my holy Ukraine, /I returned to your sacred land; /Do accept me, my nurse, for I am your child, /And for you I sing my song!”^[3] Yet Kernerenko’s love does not blind him: he is aware of Ukraine’s colonial underprivileged and humiliated status. Kernerenko conveys this vision through the Shevchenkian peasant metaphors (and even direct quotes). An itinerant Truth wanders throughout the land and sings the song bemoaning its native Ukraine, a decaying flower: the sun burns it, the winter dries it out, and the people abandon it. With a hidden rebuke to the negligent listeners, Truth depicts Ukraine as a field covered by weeds, preventing the growth of its grain-bearing stems. The final stanza is a crescendo of the national idea: uproot the weeds and let the field grow!^[4] Placed in a broader context, this second-person-singular vocatives seems to suggest that it was Russification that prevented the Ukrainian field from growing – a dangerous and not inoffensive idea for a turn-of-the-century Ukrainian poet, let alone for a Jew.
As for most Ukrainian poets of his generation, Shevchenko had become for Kernerenko coterminous with both poetry and the Ukrainian people. In his “Shevchenko’s Death Anniversary” (Rokovyny smerty Shevchenko, 1890), Kernerenko makes everybody in Ukraine aware of Shevchenko’s omnipresence. A redeemer who suffered for his people and died an untimely death, Shevchenko is on everybody’s mind and tongue. His word is that of a Messiah who heals the dumb. Under his impact, the ability of speech miraculously returns to a poor widow, an illiterate orphan, a child, as well as to the Ukrainian mountains, their endless steppes, and sharp slopes. What Shevchenko ascribed to his native land and his language, Kernerenko ascribes to the author of the Kobzar. Through Shevchenko Ukrainian nature learns to speak.^[5] In his poem Kernerenko resorts to Biblical agricultural imagery with strong messianic overtones: Shevchenko planted a redeeming Word, and is followed by “us,” new planters who sow the seeds of the Ukrainian language and consciousness, and who pray for a crop.^[6] This “us” should not be lost on the readers: Kernerenko emphasizes Shevchenko’s all-encompassing, universalistic and humane character, calling the author of the Kobzar “a fighter for the common good.” There is little doubt that Kernerenko ignores those Shevchenko writings, such as Haidamaky, in which Jews are “them” and Ukrainians “us.” He boldly includes himself, a Jew, among those associated with Ukraine and with “us.”^[7] Continuing to elaborate the idea of Shevchenko’s all-embracing humanity, Kernerenko resorts to the Kobzar’s “family” metaphors, conveying his own self-identification with the Ukrainian people, in “To Shevchenko’s Memory” (Pam’ati Shevchenka, 1909). As human beings are children of God, all Ukrainians are Shevchenko’s children (“Usi na Vkraiini /Buly ioho dity”). Shevchenko, sensitive to human suffering and grief, is a fighter for universal freedom (“za spil’nuiu voliu”). His death was the greatest sorrow for the Ukrainian people, but his immortal soul continues to live in the songs and in the “houses and palaces of Ukraine.”

TRADUTTORE – TRADITTORE

It is difficult to identify which factor was more likely to trigger Kernerenko’s sudden national awakening: the rising Zionism, the Jewish socialist movement, or the fin-de-siиcle reinvention of self that made many Jews across Europe use their experience as acculturated intellectuals to construct their new Jewish identities.^[8] Whatever the reason, it is obvious that in the 1900s Kernerenko unexpectedly switched to Jewish themes with articulated social if not political overtones, making use of his entire arsenal as a Ukrainian lyrical poet. Some of his Jewish motifs could have been inspired by his friend Ia. D. Revzin, to whom he devoted a passionate and romantic-minded panegyric “Kaznodievi-sionistovi” (To a Zionist Treasurer), which praised his friend’s message as one that restores hope, returns faith, strengthens the sinner, and promises the time of the Messiah.^[9] The poet resorts to canonic, almost clichéd Judaic liturgical references, secularizing religious metaphors and sanctifying the Zionist cause. Although Kernerenko’s treatment of traditional Jewish concepts was not uncommon for the turn-of-the century Zionist discourse, it should not be lost on us that before Kernerenko, no one had ever tried to make Jewish liturgy speak Ukrainian.
It turns out, however, that some of his “Jewish” poems, which occasionally appeared in journals and anthologies as his own, were in fact his translations of Semen Frug (1860-1916), who wrote in Russian and Yiddish.^[10] Kernerenko turned to Frug for a number of reasons. Frug, nowadays semi-forgotten, was one of the most popular Jewish poets in Russia at the turn of the 19th century.^[11] His songs commemorating the 1881 and 1903 pogroms were sung at public meetings and demonstrations throughout Russia. Perhaps much more important for Kernerenko was that Frug, like Kernerenko himself, was born in southern Ukraine, in a free settlement (and not in a shtetl), that he was a self-educated man, and, like Kernerenko, was not indifferent to the charms of the Ukrainian landscapes.^[12] That Frug was the first Jewish poet to write in Russian was perhaps significant for Kernerenko, who considered himself the first Jewish poet to write in Ukrainian. No less important for Kernerenko was Frug’s enthusiasm for, and spiritual attachment to, Ukraine and the Ukrainian language.^[13]
Kernerenko’s translation repertoire is telling. Frug’s famous poetic lamentations and cumbersome Biblical epic verses were of little interest to Kernerenko. On the contrary, some of Frug’s brief, ironic, and almost apocryphal reinterpretations of Biblical plots, and especially his strong national and patriotic content, inspired Kernerenko’s talents. From a considerable amount of Frug’s lyrics, Kernerenko picked those that encouraged national thinking and ignited Zionist enthusiasm. Kernerenko chose those Yiddish poems in which Frug views Jewish historical experience in the diaspora as nothing but galut (Yiddish: golus): exile, life under oppression outside the Promised Land, and perennial and unresolved anguish. Thus Kernerenko translated “Two Troikas,” a poem depicting a Jew Srul (Yiddish diminutive for Israel) who, through times and epochs of the galut, across lands and countries, is riding in his Gogol-like troika, a symbolic van of Jewish fate driven by three horses named Faith, Hope, and Endurance.^[14] Also, Kernerenko penned a version of Frug’s poem “A New Year,” in which galut is symbolized in the metaphor of a harp hung on a tree that knows only one type of song – a classic image from the famous Psalm “By the Babylonian Rivers.” The forlorn exilic song bemoans the loss of the Zion and constantly reminds Jews of a distant yet imminent happiness, freedom, and liberation from bondage.^[15]Frug’s vision of galut had a refreshing impact on Kernerenko’s utopian perception of Ukraine as the land of joy and freedom. At least in the 1900s, Kernerenko’s own poetry on Ukraine appears less flattering, and more critical and socially engaged, as in the already discussed “And again in Ukraine.”
Kernerenko’s fascination with the classic Frug poem “Zamd un Shtern” (The Sand and the Stars; Ukr.: Pisok ta zirky) suggests that he perceived “national” issues not only in a socio-political but also in a theological sense.^[16] In the poem, Frug addressed the Almighty’s prophecy of Abraham’s magnificent future, which, according to the plain sense of the Hebrew Bible, extended to all the chosen people. The quote that generates the metaphors and shapes the imagery of “The Sand and the Stars” originates in the Book of Genesis, 22:17: “I will indeed bless you and I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven and as the sand which is upon the sea shore.” There are numerous exegetical insights in this verse, as well as traditional medieval midrashim (compilations of homiletic narratives), which explain on various levels the apparent contradiction between the stars and the sand. Frug discusses the second part of the verse, challenging Providence’s control over the prophecy. The Jewish people, he argues, did become as useless and scattered as the sand that everybody disgraces and mercilessly tramples down. The first part of the prophecy was fulfilled: Jews have been turned into sand. Yet, should not everything that God promises come true? What about the stars?
Frug boldly challenges the power and omnipotence of the Almighty – “Di shtern, di shtern – vu zaynen zei, Got?”^[17] – yet Kernerneko’s theological humility does not allow him boldly to follow Frugs. Instead, he submissively pleads to the Almighty to expose the Jews to the light of the stars, if the fate of the stars is unattainable.^[18] Frug challenges, Kernerenko begs. As we will see later, however theologically indecisive, Kernerenko seems to have resorted to the revolutionary motifs of Ukrainian poetry in order to find an appropriate Ukrainian vocabulary for Frug’s imagery. Kernerenko’s evolution in the 1900s suggests that his translations from Frug should be placed in the context of his consistent search for a better synthesis of his Ukrainian poetic upbringing and his Jewish themes.
By the late 1900s the national theme in Kernerenko’s work gained momentum. In 1909 Kernerenko published his version of Frug’s Zionist poem “Shtey oyf,” which could have very well become the Jewish national anthem had it been penned in Hebrew.^[19]The poem is written as a rhymed political motto. Frug claims that galut, a new kind of Egyptian bondage, with its hard labor, suffering, and oppression, has enslaved the Jew not only physically but also mentally. The sweat has covered the Jew’s eyes, making him blind. Wake up, Jew, trumpets Frug, recognize your old mother’s voice calling you back home, raise your old banner, the banner of Zion, and triumphantly return home. To convey Frug’s message in Ukrainian, Kernerenko resorts to commonly used revolutionary metaphors articulated in the Ukrainian language by Lesia Ukrainka and Ivan Franko. “Raise, whoever is alive, whoever’s thought has rebelled,” (Vstavai, khto zhyvyi, v koho dumka povstala) wrote Lesia Ukrainka in her celebrated “Pre-dawn Lights” (Dosvitni vohni). “Forward, for the native land and freedom,” (Upered za krai ridnyi ta voliu) penned Hrabovs’kyi. Kernerenko coins his version in the language of the approaching national revolutionary awakening, reworking the same metaphors: it is the banner of Zion that has to be “raised,” whereas his somewhat conservative movement “back home” is the opposite of Hrabovs’kyi’s socialist-minded “forward.” It would not be an exaggeration to say that translating Frug’s verse into Ukrainian and finding equivalents in Ukrainian turn-of-the-century revolutionary metaphors, Kernerenko began shaping Ukrainian-Jewish poetry. And just as he started to forge the Ukrainian-Jewish poetic language, he realized that the point of the encounter between the two was also the point of departure.
Kernerenko cast this idea in his “A Step-son” (Ne ridnyi syn). Kernerenko firmly placed the poem within his own personal, intimate relations with Ukraine. One could find in “A Step-son” various confessions of loyalty to, and love of, Ukraine typical of Kernerenko’s earlier writings. But it is more subtle. In “A Step-son,” Kernerenko juxtaposes the romantic Shevchenkian image of the lonely poet-orphan with the populist image of Ukraine as a mother-nurse, creating an unprecedented dichotomy: a step-son who is a Ukrainian poet of Jewish descent, and Ukraine, his step-mother.^[20] An orphaned child under custody, the poet dedicates his muse, his love, and his life to his step-mother (za tebe ia otdav zhyttia i voliu i dushu) who, in turn, segregates him among her own children, poisoning his life with mockery (pro mizh dryuhykh ditei tvoikh ia ne zhvy – strazhdaiu). The poet does not hesitate to realize that his faith—different from the faith of the other children in the family – is the only reason for the scornful attitude toward him (zate shcho ia i tvoi syny ne odnu maem viru). Attached to his family, but no longer able to withstand humiliation, the poet pronounces his final farewell to his step-mother, who apparently had done nothing to protect her child from the insults of her own offspring (proshchai, Ukraino moia). Nevertheless, though scorned, mocked, and humiliated, the poet is far from accepting the tone of an accuser. He claims that mistreatment and misunderstanding will never prevent him from eternally loving his step-mother (tebe zh Ukraino moia /Ia budu vik kokhaty).^[21]
Here Kernerenko articulates his Ukrainian-Jewish identity as an impossible cultural concoction that has no chance to survive outside his poetically shaped feeling, and that perhaps is not shared by anybody in his imaginary family, including his step-mother. Two last lines of the poem, almost a prophecy, became what could be dubbed the paradigm of Ukrainian-Jewish identity for a century to come. Their pathos transforms the bitterness of a humiliated yet egotistic self into the lofty hymn of a truly disinterested, selfless, and unrequited platonic love of a magnanimous poet. A Byron-like romantic hero adapted to Ukrainian folklore imagery, Kernerenko claims that although Ukraine treats him as her step-son, he rejects addressing her only as his legal guardian and insists on considering her his own “mom.” He overcomes his socio-cultural segregation, his profound solitude, and his national bias, elevating his feeling to the level of European romantic humanism.^[22] A Jew and a poet, he is rejected – but does this imply that the object of his desire should not be cherished and poetically uplifted? His personal Ukrainian-Jewish identity is utopian through and through, yet is not Ukraine a universal value that supercedes personal ambitions?
One can only guess whether Kernerenko sent this poem to the editors of LNV or to Franko himself. It is evident, however, that his Ukrainian fellows did not rush to publish the poem, which appeared only once in Rada (no. 6, 1908), and unlike other Kernerenko verses it was not reproduced in poetic anthologies. The reason seems to be self-evident. Not only did Kernerenko forge in this poem an unheard of Ukrainian-Jewish identity, but he also pointed to its imminent, if not incipient, dramatic end, and to its romantically-shaped utopian nature. This could hardly have pleased Ivan Franko, who argued for a feasible Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement. Not without bitterness, Kernerenko seems to have lost his hope.

ARS POETICA DENUDATA

Because of the inclement censorship, it took Kernerenko’s nationally-oriented symbolism some fifteen years to make its way into the Ukrainian press. And the publication of those verses imbued with folk eroticism made him an easy target for the literary adepts of social positivism and utilitarianism. Though most of Kernerenko’s critics agreed upon his very secondary significance for Ukrainian literature, the more they were aware of Kernerenko’s nationally-shaped Ukrainophile imagery and his Jewish themes, the higher they assessed his contribution. The lifting of the ban on Ukrainian publications in 1905, which opened the pages of the newly established Ukrainian periodicals to previously unpublished Kernerenko verses, could not save him from critical attacks, yet it certainly allowed his critics to revisit the received perception of the poet.
In the 1890s, hardly aware of possible attacks against him, Kernerenko unintentionally triggered the sharp criticism of Pavlo Hrabovs’kyi (1864-1902), one of the democratically-oriented 19th-century Ukrainian poets. Hrabovs’kyi’s only reflection on Kernerenko was his famous pamphlet On Poetic Creativity (1896), which has since become a manifesto of the social trend in Ukrainian poetry. Hrabovs’kyi penned it after having read a review of Kernerenko’s collection In the Time of Leisure (V dosuzhyi chas). The review was signed “M.K.” and published in the Odessa-based journal Po moriu i sushe (On the Sea and Land). Hrabovs’kyi was not personally familiar with Kernerenko’s poetry, nor did he know the poet: in his critical essay he did not quote a single line of Kernerenko, relying solely on Mykhailo Komarov’s review.^[23]It is even more certain that Kernerenko’s Jewish origins were unknown to Hrabovs’kyi, whose philosemitic stance has not gone unnoticed in 20th-century Ukrainian thought.^[24] However, the fact that his essay targeted Kernerenko, whom Hrabovs’kyi apparently judged solely on the basis of a negative review, is of particular importance. Mykhailo Komarov’s review, apparently reprinted in the Galician bimonthly Zoria, singled out Kernerenko as an inept author of weak verse, in which poor poetic motifs were almost entirely limited to erotic coquetry (horobtsiuvannia) and in which “limpy” rhymes and lengthy nonsensical plots revealed nothing but the poet’s graphomania.^[25]Indeed, Kernerenko was neither a first-class poet nor an influential thinker. But one has to keep in mind that Kernerenko served as a pretext for Hrabovs’kyi’s pondering the goals of positivistic-oriented poetry rather than as the immediate target of his critique.
Ironically, Hrabovs’kyi used Kernerenko as an example of one of the most egregious examples of what he himself considered a purely aesthetic and antisocial turn-of-the-century trend, “art for art’s sake.” Hrabovs’kyi associated this trend with Kernerenko, basing his critique on unshakable positivistic grounds. For Hrabovs’kyi, poetry was synonymous with socially-defined utility.^[26]If it was useless, it was not poetry. Utilitarian purpose defined and exhausted the quality of art. The verdict that he meted out on Kernerenko, irrelevant from the perspective of what his reviewer was reticent about and what Kernerenko managed to publish in the 1900s, was ultimate and merciless. As a poet, argued Hrabovs’kyi, Kernerenko lacked three major features: a humanistic education, a sober and civil worldview, and an understanding of poetic goals. Not knowing anything about Kernerenko’s attempt to build bridges between Ukrainian and Jewish cultures, Hrabovs’kyi wrongly suggested that Kernerenko, as well as all poets who stand for “art for art’s sake,” failed to show the reader “the way to follow.” His poetic concoction had nothing to do with the genuine goal set before the poet, which Hrabovs’kyi defined as “the struggle against universal falsehood.” Ignoring Kernerenko’s defense of the Ukrainian cause and of colonial Ukrainian culture, Hrabovs’kyi argued that his verse was not a “brave voice for all the oppressed and slandered.” Kernerenko did not correspond to a positivistic (that is, the only trustworthy) vision of poetic utility, and therefore deserved nothing but admonition. Kernerenko’s alleged “art for art’s sake” Hrabovs’kyi defined as vociferous tendentiousness, the satiated landlord’s whim, and negligence toward contemporary empiric reality. The more Ukrainian poets educated themselves and turn their attention toward contemporary events, claimed Hrabovs’kyi, the less were the chances for such collections as Kernerenko’s to emerge on the Ukrainian literary landscape.
In the early 1900s, Kernerenko vividly demonstrated that Hrabovs’kyi’s (and Komarov’s) criticism was partially misplaced, when among other things he sent to LNV his highly charged socially-oriented poem “The Monopoly” (Monopolia).^[27]Ivan Franko liked it so much that he placed it on the first page of LNV. In “Monopoly,” Kernerenko pondered the ramifications of the prohibition on Jewish engagement in propinatsia. The privilege to keep inns, and to distill and sell liquor, dated back to the earliest privileges given to Jews by Polish magnates in the 14th and 15th centuries.^[28]With some modifications, the Russian government endorsed Jewish propinatsia until the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1881-1883. In the wake of the pogroms, the Minister of Interior Ignatiev, who blamed the Jews for triggering the violence, issued the ignominious 1882 May Laws, which banished Jews from the villages, significantly limited their presence Russian colleges, and introduced a state monopoly on alcohol production. Amazingly, what seemed a dreadful economic blow to the thousands of Jewish families that earned their meager income in fierce competition in the Pale of Settlement, and that became immediately impoverished as the result of the decree, had different repercussions for Kernerenko.^[29]
Very much sympathetic to the Jews, Kernerenko assessed the post-1882 situation not so much from the Jewish viewpoint as from that of the Ukrainian peasant. Kernerenko found more important that from then on no one had the right to insult a Jew with the nickname shynkar, an inn-keeper, usually associated with one who exploited peasants by making them drunk. This unexpected conclusion (placed at the very end of the poem) demonstrates that Kernerenko, without betraying his Jewish concerns, identified with the social concerns of the Ukrainian peasantry and, significantly, called Jews by the normative Galician ethnonym (zhydy) that was used by Ukrainian peasants and not by the urban Russified equivalent (ievrei).^[30] In a way, Kernerenko claimed that whatever was ethically more appropriate was, in a way, more appropriate for the Jews. He therefore suggested that egoistic and national economic concerns be sacrificed for the sake of the ethical reputation of his nation.
Once his socially and politically-sharpened poetry on Ukrainian and Jewish themes appeared in such Ukrainian periodicals as Ukrains’ka khata, LNV, Rada, and especially after the publication of what is presumably his last collection, Menty natkhnennia (1910), the reviews of Kernerenko’s poetry became more balanced. Yet the attitude toward Kernerenko depended on whether his critics cared about his unusual Ukrainian-Jewish identity, whether they noticed his Ukrainian-Jewish motifs, and whether they were ready to ponder the patriotic Ukrainian lyrics of a Jew. For example, Mykola Yevshan, an amazingly mature literary critic and one of the harbingers of Ukrainian modernism,^[31]passed over those motifs. He placed Kernerenko together with other fin-de-siиcle poets, such as Marko Kropyvnyts’kyi (1840-1910) and Platon Panchenko, whose poetry is permeated with an outdated Ukrainophile romanticism, a sense of tiredness and weakness, and an absence of élan. With his Nietzschean ideals firm in hand, Yevshan criticized Kernerenko (among other representatives of the “old” poetic school) for blindly imitating Ukrainian 19th-century romantics. The sarcastic Yevshan argued that Kernerenko, one of the elders, did not even attempt to alter their dead stereotypes.^[32] Serhii Yefremov, a prominent literary historian, was also quite skeptical of Kernerenko’s talents. In his review of Kernerenko’s Moments of Inspiration for the Kyiv daily Rada^[33] he argued that inspiration “is exactly what is lacking in Mr. Kernerenko’s book” and that there was no reason for publishing those epigone love verses.^[34] Amazingly, Yefremov, who was usually quite sensitive to Jewish issues, did not see in Kernerenko anything worth mentioning except his erotic verse.
On the other hand, Khrystia Alchevs’ka, herself a Ukrainian poet, focused above all on Kernerenko’s Ukrainian-Jewish stance – therefore her review was perhaps the most positive of his poetry. Reviewing Kernerenko for the influential Ukrains’ka khata, she called the poet from Huliai-pole a “nice and generous person” whose verse is imbued with “dramatic observations and philosophic ponderings” and “marked by poetic talent”:

“Those of our patriots who in their indignation against Jews confuse in one impossible mixture their uncountable national-cultural thoughts and their uncountable national-economic concerns should, I suggest, look through the book by Hryts’ko Kernerenko. This book eloquently proves that in fact a contradiction between the cultural goals of both people – Ukrainian and Jewish – does not exist and that on the grounds of the ideals of an entire humankind (idealiv vseliuds’kosti) to which they strive, they can both meet and stretch a hand to one another. In front of the Ukrainian verse of this alien by his origin, we feel even more acute pain, and recollect our own brethren, “also Little Ukrainians.”^[35]
That Ukrainian-Jewish “stretching of hands” emphasized in Alchevs’ka review became the focus of Mykyta Shapoval’s extensive reflection on Kernerenko’s poetry, too. Shapoval, whose articles were dubbed “the pinnacle of contemporary Ukrainian journalism,”^[36]pointed to the centrality of “Ukrainian patriotic sympathies” in Kernerenko’s poetry, stressed how unusual a Jew with Ukrainian sympathies was in the early 1900s, and lamented that Kernerenko’s verse does not allow one to trace the evolution of his “Ukrainian identity.” It was particularly crucial, argued Shapoval, that Kernerenko managed to overcome the barriers of faith and entirely identify with Ukraine and the Ukrainians. Shapoval did not hesitate to underscore the major paradox of the phenomenon of Kernerenko, centered in the choice of language, by no means trivial:

“To be brief: why did Kernerenko write in Ukrainian? Given […] Ukraine’s situation, he could have easily written in the “cultural language,” that is to say, in Russian. Certainly, he could have. But his Ukrainian aesthetic and psychological element had its upper hand over the “culture,” casting his humanistic ethical convictions into the Ukrainian mold.”^[37]
Despite his emphasis on Kernerenko’s Ukrainian-Jewish aspects, Shapoval found it crucial to distinguish between Kernerenko’s praiseworthy civil stance and his artistic qualities, which left much to be desired. His opinion, however, was not supported by Bohdan Lepkyi, the editor of the Ukrainian poetic anthology Strings, who emphasized that Kernerenko’s verse manifests a high-level “literary culture.”^[38]
Thus, Kernerenko’s deliberate deviation from the Russian-Jewish acculturation trend and his Ukrainian schism through philosophic language noticed by Alchevs’ka and Shapoval shaped one of the features of the rising Ukrainian-Jewish literary tradition. What Hrabovs’kyi did not like in Kernerenko was exactly the feature that a quarter of a century later a number of Ukrainian poets of Jewish descent, such as Leonid Pervomais’kyi, independently and perhaps without any knowledge of the “Hrabovs’kyi – Kernerenko” case, began to develop and cherish.

POETA REDIVIVUS

Completely erased from Jewish popular memory, Kernerenko was resurrected again in the 1990s as one of the significant figures in the utopian discourse on Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement, rather than as a solitary Ukrainian poet of Jewish descent. More precisely, Kernerenko emerged as a paramount Jewish supporter of the Ukrainian anarchist movement in David Markish’s Russian-language novel Poliushko-pole (1991).^[39] Markish’s novel betrays the author’s unrestricted sympathy for, and support of, the anarchist Ukrainian movement led by the warlord Makhno. Out of three Jews, the Veselovskii brothers, who in the wake of the Civil War joined correspondingly the White Guards, the Red Army, and the anarchists, only Semen, the last one, manages to survive and preserve the strong ethical principles of a democratic-minded Ukrainian patriot and a good Jew. For Markish, Makhno was no murderer, no reckless politician, and no antisemitic popular leader.^[40] On the contrary, assisted by such Jews as Liova Zadov, his “minister” of counter-intelligence, Makhno emerges as a key figure of Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement. Born in the midst of the Ukrainian peasantry, Makhno imagines his utopian community of workers and peasants as a Ukrainian version of the Degania kibbutz in Palestine. Chased from Ukraine, Makhno addresses his adept Semen Veselovskii with a Zionist final blessing. The leader of Ukrainian anarchism argues that despite the failure in Ukraine, Semen should go and try to find Degania, a Jewish settlement that throughout the novel serves for Makhno as an essential Ukrainian socialist utopia.
Thus, Markish places Kernerenko in the benign context of Ukrainian-Jewish interaction. Semen Veselovskii, eager to join the Ukrainian anarchists, arrives in Huliai-pole, Makhno’s headquarters. While approaching the village, he talks to his companion, the anarchist Terentii, learns about the village’s rich men who “readily” share with people, and casts doubt on Terentii’s answer.

– Readily? Seems improbable!
– Why not! – exclaimed Terentii, as if he was offended for his rich fellow countrymen. — What about Kernerenko Hryts’ko? – He looked at Semen: does he know who this Hryts’ko is?
– Who is he? – Semen did not know.
– Our poet, he writes songs! – explained Terentii. – There has been nobody in Huliai-pole richer than the Kernerenkos: they own a factory, and steam mill, and a store, and some five hundred acres of land. It was Semeniuta himself, about ten years ago, who hinted: so, Hryts’ko – one thousand rubles on the table for the world revolution! And Hryts’ko gave him five hundred, he did not have more at that time. […]
– And what about that poet? – asked Semen. – About Hryts’ko?
– He lives here, – informed Terentii. – And in general, he is no Kernerenko…
– How come?
– So. – Ternetii glanced somewhat suspiciously at Semen. – He is Kerner Grigorii Borisovich. His dad sits in our synagogue, in the first row.
“Hersch Borukhovich,” – Semen noted to himself and immediately felt shame for his untimely joy. What difference does it make who gave money first for the anarchist movement, a Jew or not a Jew? But a pleasing feeling remained despite his attempt to suppress it.
– Are they … friendly? – Semen asked somewhat hesitantly. – Nestor Ivanovich [Makhno – YPS] and the poet?
– What’s the friendship between a horse and a rider? – Terentii smiled. – The rider rides, the horse carries and composes songs: “Black banner, red fire…”
“Poemhorse,” – Semen thought with sympathy for the writer. – “Poor Jewish Hershversemaker (Gersheplet).”^[41]

Some details, such as the brief inventory of Kerner’s ownership, the expropriated 1,000 rubles of which only 500 were given back, and the Ukrainophile stance of the poet, as well as the name of the anarchist Semeniuta, suggest that David Markish was quite familiar with Anatol Hak’s memoir on Kernerenko, discussed earlier. Perhaps the late Shimon Markish (1932-2004), a renowned Geneva-based professor of Russian literature, another son of Perets Markish and David’s brother, introduced David Markish to Hak’s important memoir. If this assumption holds, then it is clear that the novelist closely follows the memoirist but alters the way the town-dwellers perceived Kernerenko. For them, Kernerenko is a populist poet, he “writes songs,” a preeminent genre of Ukrainian folklore, he is referred to as “our” poet, he praises the revolution, and he “readily” helps the peasant rebellion. In a word, Markish creates for Kernerenko a welcoming atmosphere of respect and admiration about which the poet could only dream – a utopia of mutually beneficial Ukrainian-Jewish literary, economic, and political interaction. It also seems that Markish attempted to recast Kernerenko in the mold of a Ukrainian-Jewish Alexander Blok, who had morphed from symbolist lyrics to the revolutionary epic The Twelve.
Recently Ukrainian literary critics have made an overt attempt to revive Kernerenko and overcome centennial Jewish-Ukrainian animosity. First, the Zaporizhzhia-based Ukrainian poet Petro Rebro published an enthusiastic essay on Kernerenko, in which he attempted to solve what he considered a puzzle: can a Jew be a Ukrainian poet? If yes, is it possible to consider genuine his feelings toward Ukraine? Rebro analyzed some of Kernerenko’s poetic writings and emphasized that his “open-minded yet sometimes naďve” poetry was imbued with a profound empathy toward Ukraine. Considering the relation of Kernerenko to Ukraine and paraphrasing Kernerenko’s famous lines, Rebro stated that Kernerenko was “Ukraine’s son, not a step-son” and called for reprinting his best works, commemorating him as the Huliai-pole poet, and researching his later fate.^[42]Following Rebro, Kushnirenko and Zhylyns’kyi, two Ukrainian “local historians” (kraieznavtsi), picked up Rebro’s question and answered it in a short essay on Kernerenko included in their representative anthology The Huliai-pole Region Literature.^[43] Curiously enough, the editors spent most of their essay defending Kernerenko against Hrabovs’ky’s invectives. The authors emphasized that Hrabovs’kyi was wrong: he did not see a single line written by Kernerenko and he used Kernerenko to convey his own literary mottoes. They dubbed Hbabovs’kyi a “hurray”-critic and summed up by saying, “we feel bitter and shameful for Hrabovs’ky.” This was a bold step by the editors, given Hrabovs’kyi’s reputation as a staunch democrat and a martyr of tsardom. Significantly, the editors selected eight poems from the legacy of the Huliai-pole poet (one of them, Frug’s “The Sand and the Stars,” is erroneously attributed to Kernerenko), pointing to the predominance of Ukrainian and Jewish themes in his writings.^[44]

DE LINGUA UCRAINICA ASCENSIONE

Perhaps Kernerenko was among the first, if not the first, to discover that the Ukrainian language suits Jewish political, social, and cultural concerns. This was not the same as making such a claim in Prague about the Czech language or in Paris about French. Even in Russian, Austrian, or Prussian Poland the Polish language was not as despised as the Little Ukrainian in the Russian empire. Kernerenko’s discovery suggests that the Ukrainian-Jewish poet treated Ukrainian as any other European language, and perhaps on a par with Hebrew and Yiddish. Trying to teach the Ukrainian “subaltern” to speak, Kernerenko resorted to an alternative, non-Ukrainian discourse, either Russian-Jewish or Yiddish. Although it was also shaped by colonial imagery, it offered a wider array of literary devices that did not exist at that time in Ukrainian culture. Simultaneously, Kernerenko reinforced his Ukrainian poetry with a romanticized Jewish imagery drawn from the Hebrew Bible that knew not the colonial yoke. He also uplifted East European Jewish discourse by infusing it with an anti-colonial revolutionary vocabulary borrowed from the no-less-despised Ukrainian poetry. One subaltern could not speak, Kernerenko would perhaps agree, but two could find their voice creating a “narrative of subaltern freedom.”^[45]However, one should not make far-fetched conclusions from this discovery: Menty natkhnennia (1910) was apparently Kernerenko’s last collection. Whether he continued his search for a better synthesis of Ukrainian lyrics and Jewish themes is unknown. Yet there is hardly any doubt that he was the first to move toward a Ukrainian-Jewish literary identity. By doing this, Kernerenko underscored similarities between the national agendas of the Jews and Ukrainians. He seems to have elevated the Ukrainian language, making it into a medium suitable for the expression of national concerns of non-Ukrainians. If the despised, oppressed, forcefully Russified, grammatically and phonetically mutilated Ukrainian language conveyed Jewish sensibilities, it could then fit any national concern and ideology. In other words, it was not only a language of freedom, it was a free language. Not only did Kernerenko’s verse surpass the obstacles of mutual Ukrainian-Jewish animosity but it also created a language of cultural rapprochement.^[46]Since Ukrainian and Jewish national agendas required similar if not identical metaphors, the Ukrainians and the Jews had a lot to share and learn from one another. Kernerenko’s old banner of Zion and Lesia Ukrainka’s pre-dawn lights both pointed to the “new way” of bolstering national interests. Therefore, a mere “translation” from a Jewish poet triggered the birth of a new type of discourse, one that students of East European Jewish history a hundred years later are advised to call “Ukrainian-Jewish.” A Ukrainian thinker, in his article on Moisei Fishbein, a Kyiv-based Ukrainian poet of Jewish descent, has noted that “for the first time in history in Fishbein’s poetry, Judaism speaks Ukrainian.”^[47] Hryts’ko Kernerenko seems to have been the first who merited this compliment, exactly a century before his distant and illustrious successor.
Kernerenko was not only among the first to start constructing Ukrainian-Jewish identity as a literary narrative and a lifestyle, but also among the first obliquely to underscore its profoundly imaginary nature. Kernerenko witnessed the 1881-1883 pogroms, which destroyed thousands of Jewish households in Malorossia (the Ukraine) and were carried out by the local déclassé population. Kernerenko was well familiar with the far right accusations against Jews, alleged destroyers of Russian Orthodox peasantry, which loomed large in the imperial political discourse of the 1880s and 1890s, and in particular, in the Kievan press. Kernerenko could not have ignored that the Russo-Japanese War and the first Russian Revolution triggered a wave of the most horrible pogroms in Russian imperial history, and in which the rural Ukrainian population and the Russian army (80% of which was comprised by the peasantry) played a significant role. For sure he knew that the deteriorating economic situation of the East European Jews pushed hundred of thousands of them outside the Russian Empire. And yet he called Ukraine “the land of joy and freedom”!
Kernerenko’s case is even more complex. An avid reader of Ukrainian books, Kernerenko probably also learned that Ukrainian writers were not necessarily as philosemitic as Lesia Ukrainka or Ivan Franko and that an antisemitic bias shaped to a great degree the images of Jews in nineteenth-century Ukrainian literature. One may assume Kernerenko realized that most Ukrainian literary critics held a low opinion of his poetic talents and even questioned his sincere pro-Ukrainian empathy. Kernerenko’s available epistolary heritage testifies to the weak and random contacts between him and Ukrainian intellectuals. In addition, apparently Kenrerenko left neither disciples nor admirers. He was marginalized among Russian Jews as a Kernerenko and among conscientious Ukrainians as a Kerner. And yet, Kernerenko seemed to have deliberately ignored social reality, which consistently enticed Ukrainians and Jews to act against one another. Kernerenko continued polishing his Ukrainian language, construing his Ukrainian imagery, attempting a Ukrainian-Jewish concoction, bringing his Ukrainian books to press, establishing contacts with Ukrainian literary figures, and hoping, against all odds, that his literary creativity and social stance would merit either acceptance or sympathy. In historical perspective Kernerenko’s case seems to indicate that a Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement could exist only in the realm of fragile personal relations. Apparently there was no chance to institutionalize them socially or canonize them literally. Hence, unaware of his major discovery, Kernerenko informed the utopian character of the Ukrainian-Jewish discourse. His case seems to prove that Jews and Ukrainians could sing their lyrics together while the doors of their utopian realm were tightly shut and bloodthirsty epical history stayed outdoors. The following hundred years of the Ukrainian-Jewish poetic tradition, predominantly lyrical, as well as the cultural solitude of the Ukrainian poets of Jewish descent, has only too well emphasized the quintessential character of Kernerenko’s case.

* * *

Hryts’ko Kernerenko, alias Grigorii Borisovich Kerner, was perhaps the first Jew to start composing Ukrainian verse and to articulate Jewish national strivings in the Ukrainian language as early as the 1880s. As such, he deserves interest from both a historical and cultural viewpoint. A second (if not third rank) poet, with the exception of two or three poems of better quality, Kernerenko left several hundred poems, poetic translations, a couple of short stories and tales, and at least one play. The five books that he published (Pravdyva kazka, 1886, Nevelychkyi zbirnyk tvoriv, 1890; Shchetynnyk, 1891; V dosuzhyi chas, 1894; Menty natkhnennia, 1910) are rarities and have never been reproduced. Some of his poems appeared between 1899 and 1910 in Ukrainian periodicals such as Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk, Rada, Hromads’ka dumka, and Nasha khata. Although in the 1900s and 1910s half-a-dozen of Kernerenko’s poems were regularly reproduced in Ukrainian poetic anthologies (Akordy, 1903; Ukrains’kyi deklamator, 1905; Ukrains’ka muza, 1908; Struny, 1922), after the 1920s his poetic legacy was generally neglected – not only because great Ukrainian poets eclipsed him but also because his major themes, such as Ukrainian and Jewish national revival, made him an outcast among the endorsed pre-1917 Ukrainian poets.
Kernerenko’s private archive was apparently destroyed during World War I. The local museum in Huliaipole holds no documents from Kernerenko’s private collection. So far, local historians’ attempts to uncover Kernerenko’s family archive have brought no results. Kernerenko’s literary documents are scattered throughout the collections of turn-of-the-century Ukrainian literary figures and located in the Chernihiv Historical Museum, and the Department of Manuscripts of the Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv). The AI reader is offered seven of Kernerenko’s poems, three poetic translations, and three letters. This selection does not represent the entire Kernerenko’s legacy, but it pursues a modest goal of demonstrating Kernerenko’s attempts (to a great extent utopian) to construct Jewish identity in the Ukrainian language, and points out the linguistic, cultural, religious, and social challenges he encountered.