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TIME OUT
A city where God eavesdrops
By Dmytro DESIATERYK,
The Day 
Photos of Chernivtsi by Yurii Chuchko courtesy of www.sky-tour.com.ua with the kind permission of Tetiana Lakusta. Photo:Zynovii FRIS
There are towns whose provincial obscurity conceals their truegrandeur, next to which some capital cities fade into thebackground. The works of Olha Kobylianska and Yurii Fedkovychare taught in our schools curricula, but Chernivtsi was the hometown of other writers without whom it is difficult to imagine modernworld literature. Paul Celan, the celebrated German-speaking poet,whose poem “Death Fugue” served as a textual symbol of the painand horror of the 20th century in German and world poetry, wasborn here. Rosa Auslaender, the most prominent contemporaryGerman-speaking poet, was also born in this city. A list of namesof other famous people would fill more than one paragraph: thelyric poet and translator Georg Drozdovsky; the poets Alfred Gong,Moses Rosenkrantz, and Alfred Kittner; and the prose writerGregor von Rezzori. Their works enchanted the United States,Germany, Romania, and Austria, yet all their family roots werehere in Bukovyna. In an effort to understand the Chernivtsiphenomenon, we interviewed a man who lived in this city for anumber of years, and who made his first steps in the literarydomain there. His name is Ihor Pomerantsev, a poet and journalist.My interview with him about another celebrated city, Prague, waspublished in
The Day 
on Jan. 18, 2008.First the traditional question: What are your ties to Chernivtsi?These ties are deep. I can even tell you their approximatedepth: about two meters. The city cemeteries contain the graves ofmy aunts, my grandmother, father, and elder brother. Among mysurviving relatives are my sister-in-law, who is unfortunately awidow now, and my nephew.
Why did you leave Chernivtsi?
I left after graduating from the university in 1970. I can nametwo reasons. The first one is quite simple. As a graduate of theDepartment of English in the Faculty of Romance-GermanicPhilology of Chernivtsi University, I had a very small chance offinding a job in the city. At the time Chernivtsi was surrounded byan iron curtain on all sides. Of course, there were campinggrounds for foreign tourists, but somehow my name was in theKGB’s bad books since my youth, so I was not even allowed toapproach tourists. The second, less evident, reason is that as ayoung man with great ambitions, I viewed the future valiantly. I alsoloved poetry and was sure that it loved me in return. I thought Icould make a career in any capital city, that everywhere I would begreeted with applause. I was wrong. But I left the city.
Do you visit it?
No, I haven’t been there for almost 35 years. It’s terrible to saybut I live in Kyiv, and somehow I never make it to Chernivtsi.
Why?
I know that you have to do what you fear, go where you fear,thereby overcoming fear.
Are you afraid of Chernivtsi?
The way I feel is best described as embarrassment, likemeeting a woman I fell in love with 40 years ago and whom I havenot seen in all that time. I wouldn’t know what to say. There areridiculous phrases like, “How are things?” I would ask Chernivtsi,“How are things?” and it would reply, “We managed very wellwithout you.” In other words, I can’t say like the provincial Plutarch:
IHOR POMERANTSEVYURII FEDKOVYCH NATIONALUNIVERSITY OF CHERNIVTSI, THEFORMER RESIDENCE OF THEMETROPOLITANS OF BUKOVYNA, WASDESIGNED BY THE NOTED CZECHARCHITECT JOZEF GLAVKA (1891-1908)
 
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“As for me, I live in a small town and so that it does not becomesmaller, I gladly stay here.”
Did it become too small for you?
It is the same as it always was. You know, you have a favoritepair of pants with suspenders from your childhood.
But you must have preserved some especially vividmemories.
My encounter with this city was an event. I spent my pre-schoolchildhood in Chita, in Russia’s Transbaikal region, past LakeBaikal. This was a black-and-white period of my life, when winterand darkness seemed everlasting. When I was five years old, weleft Chita. My father was working for a military newspaper. He wasconstantly ill and the climate of the Transbaikal was bad for hishealth. We went to Chernivtsi where our relatives lived. That washow I found myself transferred from the black-and-whiteTransbaikal film to the faraway Mediterranean. Emigres are oftendescribed as victims of “culture shock.” I didn’t have it in emigrationbecause I had had it in Chernivtsi after Chita: it wasn’t cultureshock but rather a sensual and childishly erotic shock. I simplylanded in a color motion picture, where the sun is blinding, whereyou almost faint from the scent of ripening apples, cherries, and
moreli 
, as apricots are called in Bukovyna. These sensualmemories still warm me today.
What were your favorite routes?
I rode all over the city on my Orlenok bicycle. Thanks to the cityand my bicycle, I understood what the Ukrainian word
strimholov 
means (headfirst). As for my routes, I lived on Lermontov Street, ashort walk to Olha Kobylianska Street. If you walk up Lermontov,cross what used to be Lenin Street, and walk across the streetcartracks past the Passage Shopping Mall (I think it’s still called that),then cross two other streets, you will reach the university’sconference hall. This route led to the places of my first love trysts.There was another dramatic route. You walk down KobylianskaStreet to Tsentralna Square, then turn left to a former synagogue,which the Romanians fascists did not destroy but the Bolsheviksblew up-there’s a movie theater there now-walk past the movietheater and step into the drugstore on the corner — I’m not sure it’sstill there. In the early 1960s, when my father had his first heartattack, I would run over there almost every second day to buy twooxygen bags for him. Maybe there are old-timers who remember aboy breathlessly running downtown with oxygen bags. That wasme.
Since those days you have seen quite a few cities. What isthe difference between them and Chernivtsi?
I’m thinking of style. In the late 1950s there was a handful ofAustrian Jews in Chernivtsi. These people were markedly different,especially from the local dandies, all of whom sported dark Bolognaplastic raincoats and white hats with gray stripes. This handful ofAustrian Jews wore old dark blue hats, threadbare pinstripe double-breasted suits, pointy shoes, and matte amber cufflinks —everything was so old-fashioned, but how stylish they looked!Chernivtsi is different from other Ukrainian cities because of theseold Austrian Jews, who were transported by a time machine into aSoviet preserve. Chernivtsi went out of fashion, just like all thosevelour fedoras and gray double-breasted suits, but it remained astylish city, where people walked lightly, even though it was a poorone.
What were the people of Chernivtsi like?
I don’t know whether the kind of people I’m about to describeare typical of this city. For me Chernivtsi was a town populatedprimarily by Jews. After all, German literature always referred to itas a Jewish town. True, when my family arrived, the populace wasonly one-fifth Jewish, with Jews from Bessarabia dominating,compared to those of Austrian origin. However, the Jews have anexcellent energy field; even if they are numerically few, they define
OLHA KOBYLIANSKA STREET(FORMERLY PANSKA) WAS BUILT IN THESECOND HALF OF THE 19TH AND THEEARLY 20TH CENTURYTHE DORMITION GREEK CATHOLICCHURCH ON RUSKA STREETTHEATER SQUARE AND THE OLHAKOBYLIANSKA DRAMA COMPANY
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the spirit of a city. Even at that time I knew that Jews lived inKyiv, Moscow, and Leningrad, but I thought of all them as wealthy,respectable individuals, while in Chernivtsi there were all kinds ofJews: riff-raff, prostitutes, murderers, currency dealers,wunderkinds; there were Jewish hunchbacks, who walked thestreets carrying contraband matzo bread in their humps. Of course,besides riff-raff, there were well-known boxers and wrestlers whohad taken part in the Olympic Games and world championships.When I was small, I believed that Jews made the best athletes,especially in wrestling and boxing.We are discussing the image of this city, but I would like to populate it and make it more true to life. I remembermy father’s friends. He was working for the regional newspaper
Radianska Bukovyna 
. Incidentally, he was born inOdesa, but he fit in well with the Chernivtsi environment because he knew Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish, whichwere part of Odesa’s culture. I remember a Jewish poet by the name of Meer Haratz, who wrote in Yiddish. He laterbecame a classic in Israel. This man survived the Holocaust and then the GULAG. Some time in the late the 1950sthe authorities wanted to do away with this wreck of a man.
Why?
He had published a few poems in a Polish Jewish newspaper. He was harshly reprimanded at the editorial officeof
Radianska Bukovyna 
. I hope that my father had no part in it. Otherwise Haratz would not have come to our house.Anyway, he came and sat at the table like a silent sparrow. Then he started reciting his poems in Yiddish. Neither Inor my mother, who had grown up on Zaikovska Street in Kharkiv, could understand a single word. I was 12 and tome Yiddish was scum slang, something you hear in basements, from people who were cut off from culture, somethinglike a crow cawing, not a language at all. But when I heard Meer Haratz reciting his poems I heard an eagle scream.That was the first time I realized what the poet’s mission is all about.
What is it all about?
Giving wings to language. I still remember his inspired Yiddish. I also remember strolling down the streets ofChernivtsi with my father, who would quietly point out such talented Ukrainian writers as Volodymyr Babliak andRoman Andriiashyk. I would gawk at them, although my father always tugged on my sleeve to remind me to behavemyself.I remember the strained expressions on their faces; they looked as though they were carrying a great burden. Itwas only after moving to Kyiv in 1972, a city gripped by fear after the purges in Ukraine, that I realized what burdenBabliak and Andriiashyk had really borne and why both died so early. Well, these were men of letters, but there werealso great sambo wrestlers, and a big gangster, who later controlled Lviv and then Berlin, and who would later bemurdered in Munich by one of his partners, either Timokha or Tenghiz. I also remember an inspired prostitute by thename of Fira, popularly known as Sosiura.
Oh, dear.
I had dreamed about her since I was 12, but by the time I could make my dream come true, Fira had disappeared.She left for Haifa (Israel) to please the local stevedores and sailors, much to the chagrin of her colleagues there,because she offered considerably lower prices for this kind of service without sacrificing quality.
Clearly, the history of Chernivtsi is a complex German-Jewish conglomerate. Which of the components isstrongest?
You see, my friends and I were pathological book lovers in our teens; we were barbarians.
How do you mean?
We walked on air. We didn’t know what treasures were hidden beneath our feet. Of course, we were a specialkind of barbarian; we had knowledge of Russian, American, and French literature, so by barbarianism I mean theabsence of memory, including historical and cultural memory. That wasn’t our fault. I traced the name of Paul Celanto Chernivtsi all the way from Kyiv. Later I met people who had studied and been friends with the poet. I remembervisiting Mykola Bazhan in 1972 (the Chernivtsi poet Moses Fishbein brought me there). Bazhan spoke aboutChernivtsi and Celan with a great deal of respect. Anyway, the capital city knew more about history and understood itbetter.
Paul Celan, Rosa Auslaender, Olha Kobylianska — why was Chernivtsi fortunate enough to produce suchtalents?
It wasn’t a stroke of luck. Chernivtsi stands at the crossroads of various cultures. Pasternak wrote: “... the air ispitted with shrieks.” In Chernivtsi the air was pitted with shrieks and groans in German, Yiddish, Ukrainian, Hungarian,Romanian, Polish, and then Russian. Photographers work with light and shadow, composers work with a sequence ofsounds, but a writer works with words, using a certain language. Just try to imagine this wonderful linguistic backdropor linguistic landscape. I described it
na protiazi linhv 
, which can be translated roughly as “throughout languages.”You learn to understand your mother tongue better if you can compare it to other languages. Nothing can be born outof nothing. When you have polyphony, a multilingual environment, you have poetry.The province is the capital city of modernism. That is where young people “polish their blood.” What other optionsdo they have besides deviations, breakdowns, besides these curvatures of cornices, and roofs that are germane tothe modernist style? Heine wrote that eras in decline are rich in subjectivism. He probably disapproved. But I cite this
TWIN BULDINGS ON IVAN FRANKOSTREET
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