Kiev Revisited
August 18, 2008
Community | Jewish Living | The Future
(3 comments)
By Larry Kaufman
As regular readers of this blog may have noticed through my comments on other people's posts, I've recently returned from a river cruise through Ukraine -- fortunately arriving home before the Georgian crisis erupted -- and want to share some thoughts in three general areas:
- Differences between Jewish and secular travel
- The changes that appear to have taken place in Ukraine since my prior trip in 2001
- Ukrainian roots for American Jews
Differences between Jewish and secular travel
Our trip was organized by Alumni Holidays International, and sponsored
by several university alumni associations. Although open seating and
general mingling prevailed aboard ship, our busses for shore excursions
were organized by school, with passengers from less represented schools
assigned arbitrarily to the busses of the dominant institutions,
University of Chicago (my alma mater), Cornell, Dartmouth, Tufts, and
William & Mary. Substantive content beyond that provided by very
good local guides came through two lectures each from three professors,
covering history, identity, and language issues. The role of the Jews
is integral to talking about Ukrainian history, and was discussed both
by the guides and by the academics. My guess is that about 20% of the
audience was Jewish, with the percentage probably a little higher on
the University of Chicago bus.
My 2001 trip didn't focus on Ukraine, but it did start in Kiev, where
this trip ended, and then went on to St. Petersburg and Moscow. That
trip was organized as a leadership mission by ARZA World Union, the
short-lived combination of the Association of Reform Zionists of
America and the World Union for Progressive Judaism - with the
expectation that we travelers would return to the U.S. as missionaries
for strengthening Progressive Judaism in the Former Soviet Union.
As might be expected, on the ARZA World Union trip, Jewish content was
central, although we also got excellent coverage of key tourist sites
in Kiev like the Friendship Arch, the Founders monument, and the Great
Gate - but no churches. (We did visit churches in Moscow and St.
Petersburg.) The first stop in Kiev on the Alumni trip was Babi Yar,
where the local guide was open not only about the Nazi round-up but
also about the Soviet effort to memorialize the tragedy without
reference to Jewish victims. As the guide was concluding the visit
with an eloquent recitation of the Yevtushenko poem, I asked those of my
traveling companions who wished to join me in reciting Kaddish.
But beyond Babi Yar, the Jewish content in the professors' lectures
and guides' commentaries was essentially peripheral, as part of
discussing Ukraine's incredibly polyglot history. Nor were we shown
any of the Jewish landmarks of Kiev: No Sholom Aleichem statue, no
plaque marking Golda Meir's birthplace, no Brodsky synagogue.
The other contrast came in terms of creature comforts. Think dorm
rooms and dorm food for the alumni trip; think four and five-star
hotels when you travel with the Reform movement. (For a trip I was
thinking of organizing, the travel counselor at ARZA's favored trip
arranger advised nothing less than four-star hotels - our clientele
likes its luxury.) My bottom line on this, as someone who travels
three-star when I travel on my own, is that I'll go to France or Italy
or the British Isles on a commercial tour, or an alumni tour, but if
I'm going to places rich in Jewish history and culture, I'll choose the
Jewish tour for its content, and accept the luxury as a bonus.
Changes in Ukraine since 2001
On our first night in Kiev in 2001, we came back to the hotel after
Shabbat services at Congregation Hatikvah, and were having dinner in
the glassed-in rooftop restaurant when the night skies lit up with
fireworks. It turned out we had arrived on the tenth anniversary of
Ukrainian independence and the city was alive with excitement and
patriotic fervor....but it was still very much a Russian city. Three
years after that visit, Kiev became the rallying point for the Orange
Revolution, a successful peaceful uprising with its roots in protesting
election fraud, but whose outcome placed in power the faction that
looks towards Europe, ousting the faction that looks towards Russia.
We sensed a little more prosperity on this trip, but that may have been
a matter of what we were shown each time - in 2001, a Joint
Distribution Committee soup kitchen, in 2008, the riverside McMansions
of the Ukrainian oligarchs. The city has grown about ten percent, to
three million, in these seven years, including major expansion on the
other side of the river, and the years since the Orange Revolution have
seen a new emphasis on tourism. Only in Kiev, among the five Ukrainian
cities we visited, did we find restaurants with English menus and with
serving personnel who had a little of our language at their command.
As part of the move to identify more with Europe than with Russia, the
push is on to grow the use of the Ukrainian language in preference to
Russian. Historically, Russian was more prevalent in the cities,
Ukrainian in rural areas, especially in the western provinces, farther
away from Russia. Both are Slavic languages, with Ukrainian more
heavily influenced by Polish and by the Russian dialect of Belarus.
Both languages are written in Cyrillic, but there are subtle
differences between the Russian and Ukrainian alphabets. (As a side
note, I taught myself the pronunciation of the Cyrillic letters by
using a siddur that included Hebrew transliterations.)
Whatever growth in affluence the city may have experienced, it has not
rubbed off on the Progressive congregation. We visited Hatikvah's new
home - which Rabbi Duchovny explained is half the size at twice the
rent of the prior facility. Membership has been stable, which
apparently is also true of the two Orthodox congregations, one
Lubavitch, one not. Kiev has an estimated one hundred thousand Jews,
about the same number as before the Nazis and the Soviets - but in the
pre-Nazi days that hundred thousand represented about twenty percent of
the population; where today it's about three percent. The Progressive
movement has a great opportunity in Ukraine, as throughout the former
Soviet Union, but only if we North Americans subsidize its
development. One change that hasn't taken place in these seven years
is the FSU budget of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, approximately $1.5 million compared to Chabad's $70 million.
But that's a topic for another day.
Ukrainian roots for American Jews
One of the highlights of our 2001 trip to Kiev was a visit to the
residence of the U.S. ambassador, which was decorated with paintings
and sculpture by American artists of Ukrainian descent like Louise
Nevelson and Andy Warhol. One thing I hadn't realized prior to seeing
that art was how many artists I had thought of as Russian were actually
Ukrainian.
This shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did. I had always
thought of my paternal grandparents as coming to the U.S. from Russia -
but actually they were from the outskirts of Kiev. My mother was born
in what was then Poland, but is now Belarus. One tends to forget how
fluid the borders were, as control of various territory shifted -- one
day under the control of the Russians, another day of the Poles or of
the Austro-Hungarian empire.
In fact, a story is told of the Jewish couple who were given their
preference when the boundary line was being drawn between Poland and
Russia - did they want to be in Russia or Poland. When Shmuel
immediately opted for Poland, Rivke pointed out that the Poles were
arguably more anti-Semitic than the Russians, True, Shmuel responded,
but at least if we're on the Polish side of the line, we'll be spared
the rigors of the Russian winter!
Looking at the borders as they are drawn today, and as they were in
Czarist times, we have to remember that Jews could live only in the
so-called Pale of Settlement, which included much of what is today's
Ukraine. Whether our individual pictures of European Jewish life are
drawn from family memory or from Fiddler on the Roof or similar
literary sources, we have to remember that Anatevke/Kasrilevke and the
rest of Sholom Aleichem-land lay somewhere between Odessa and Kiev -
subject to the Czar, but in Ukraine, not in Russia.
Virtually every couple among our Jewish compatriots on the trip
included at least one spouse who talked about a parent or a grandparent
who had come to America from Ukraine. However, none mentioned adding
an Everything is Illuminated excursion with a shtetl-shlepper in search
of their roots. On our 2005 WUPJ trip to Poland, many of our travel
companions visited the towns their ancestors had left sixty to a
hundred years before.
My wife hopes eventually to visit
Kamenetz-Podilsky, in western Ukraine, where her grandparents came
from; our children adopted our grandson from Kharkov, in eastern
Ukraine. But I have no family nostalgia, no sense of wanting to visit
Kobrin or Bershtivke, partly because my grandparents and older aunts
and uncles never wanted to talk about "the old country" with its
apparently painful memories.
So why do so many of us travel to Warsaw, Cracow, Prague, Budapest,
Moscow, St. Petersburg, and especially, I ask myself, why do I keep
going back? It's more than the pull of the traveler's desire to see
something new, or to see something old for the first time. I think
maybe it's to fit a few more pieces into the jigsaw puzzle of who we
are and of the forces that shaped us - and to gain an appreciation for
our grandparents (or parents, or great-grandparents) who had the
foresight and the courage to pull up stakes , bringing with them to
America not much more than the treasure of Yiddishkeit.
But there's
also some pleasure in seeing the resurgence of Jewish life, slow though
it be, in places where so many efforts were made to eradicate it. My
congregation in Evanston is Beth Emet, the house of Truth - but my
congregation in Kiev is Hatikvah - the house of Hope.
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Sounds like some very interesting travel, Larry. Did you have trouble with visas? Russia is notorious for making it difficult to get a visa (and that was before the invasion of Georgia). I understand that group tours have easier access to visas in some countries than families or individuals.
Was there much nervousness about Russian action against the more democratic and western leaning Ukraine? I am sure that the Georgian attack was intended to scare Ukraine back in line also.
Some friends from the Ukraine tell me that there is still a lot of anti-Semitism there. Did you detect any signs of it?
What options are there for helping out progressive congregations in Ukraine?