- Czernovitz expelled its Jews, and so did Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and Lemberg. Now these cities live without Jews, and their few descendants, scattered through the world, carry memory like a wonderful gift and a relentless curse.
- Aharon Appelfeld
This
is a book about a place that cannot be found in any contemporary atlas, and
about a community for whom it remained alive “like a wonderful gift” and
“relentless curse” long after its disappearance. It is a historical account of a German-Jewish Eastern
European culture that flourished from the mid nineteenth century until its
shattering and dispersal in the era of the Second World War. But it is also a family and communal
memoir spanning three generations that explores the afterlife, in history and
memory, of the city of Czernowitz.
Nowadays,
of course, Czernowitz is nowhere.
As a political entity, it ceased to exist long ago, with the collapse of
the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire in 1918. Its name now is Chernivtsi—a city located in the
southwestern region of the Republic of the Ukraine, east of the Carpathian
Mountains, on the River Pruth, some fifty kilometers north of the present-day
border of Romania. After the First
World War, when it fell under Romanian authority and became part of Greater
Romania, it was called Cernăuţi.
Subsequently, under Soviet rule after the Second World War, it was
renamed Chernovtsy.
But
for many of the surviving Jews who lived there in the decade before the First
World War and in the interwar years—now “scattered,” as Appelfeld notes,
“through the world”—the place forever remained Czernowitz, capital of the
outlying Austrian-Habsburg imperial province of the Bukowina, the “Vienna of
the East,” a city in which (in the words of its most famous poet, Paul Celan)
“human beings and books used to live.”[i] For members of these generations, the
long imperial connection of Czernowitz to Vienna, and their own whole-hearted
embrace of the German language, its literature, and the social and cultural
standards of the Austro-Germanic world, are intimately connected—a core
constituent of their identity.
Yiddish certainly remained alive for many of them, as a language spoken
in some of their homes and as a predominant language in nearby villages and
among urban intellectual proponents of Jewish diaspora nationalism. But, as many of their parents and even
grandparents had done, they had accepted the premise inherent in the
century-long process of Jewish emancipation and acculturation to Germanic
culture that had taken place in lands once ruled by the Habsburgs. One could remain a Jew in religious
belief, was the basis of this premise, while also becoming culturally,
economically, and politically integrated within the Austro-Habsburg dominant
social order. The promise of admission to modernity and cosmopolitanism—of
turning away from the poverty, segregation, and what they perceived as the
restrictive lifeways of shtetl Jewry—was its motivating assumption. Karl-Emil Franzos, the Bukowina’s first
internationally famed German-language writer, best characterizes the
complicated cultural identity of most assimilated Bukowina Jews at the end of
the nineteenth century: “I wasn’t
yet three feet tall, when my father told me: ‘Your nationality is neither Polish, nor Ruthenian, nor
Jewish—you are German.’ But
equally often he said, even then:
‘According to your faith you are a Jew.’”[ii]
Even
after Czernowitz’s and the Bukowina’s annexation into Greater Romania in 1918
and the institution of a policy of “Romanianization,” a predominant segment of
the Jewish population of the city and region remained devoted to the German
language and its culture.
Czernowitz, the city, with its Vienna look-alike center, its
Viennese-inspired architecture, avenues, parks, and cafés, largely remained a
physical manifestation of this continuing allegiance to, and nostalgic longing
for, a by-gone Austrian imperial past.
The
continuing vitality and strength of this identification is not surprising. It attests to the positive connection
so many of Czernowitz’s Jews had drawn between Jewish emancipation and
assimilation in the imperial Habsburg realm, and the significant social,
political, and cultural rewards that this process had yielded. Despite the immediate, and the
increasingly vehement, anti-Semitic assaults on Jewish emancipation and assimilation
that occurred in the imperial core and its periphery in the nineteenth and
early twentieth century, citizenship privileges enjoyed by Jews were not
withdrawn. In contrast, for the
majority of the approximately 100,000 Jews in the Bukowina region in the
immediate years after 1918, Romanian rule and Romanianization closed doors to
rights and opportunities that they had enjoyed for decades under the Austrians.[iii] For several years after Romania gained
control of the area—indeed, until 1924—Jews in the Bukowina were denied the
full citizenship rights from which they had benefited under Austrian rule. Their new legal definition and
exclusion as “foreigners” greatly inhibited their cultural integration and social
advancement within the Greater Romania that they now inhabited. In this context, the German language in
which they communicated with each other, and the Austro-German/Jewish cultural
background they shared, provided them with an alternative basis of continuing
group identity.
It
is perhaps this point that is most startling: that even when political reality
indicated otherwise, Jews here kept alive an
idea of a pre-First World War multi-cultural and multi-lingual
tolerant city and a modern, cosmopolitan, culture in which German literature,
music, art and philosophy flourished among a significant majority of their
numbers. Instead of the Cernăuţi in
which they now lived, they continued to nourish and perpetuate the idea of
“Czernowitz” as it had been transmitted to them physically and in cultural memory. The place where these Jews grew up was
thus already haunted by the memory of a lost “world of yesterday” that many of
them had actually never experienced but only inherited from parents and
grandparents who had enjoyed the benefits of Jewish life under the Habsburgs.[iv] If, in their youth they held on to that
lost world nostalgically, it was not simply to reconstitute or to mourn what
they posited as a better imperial past.
It was also one of the ways in which they resisted Romanianization and
its increasing social, political and intellectual restrictions. In this sense, their “resistant
nostalgia” reflected what Svetlana Boym has characterized as inherent in all
nostalgic constructions: the longing “for a home that not longer exists or has
never existed.”[v]
At
the same time, however, Czernowitz/Cernăuţi was also that place where Jews suffered
anti-Semitism, internment in a Fascist Romanian/Nazi ghetto, and Soviet
occupation. It was where they were
forced to wear the yellow “Jew” star, and where, a fortunate minority among
them, managing to escape deportation, survived the Holocaust. Of the more than 60,000 Jews who
inhabited the city at the start of Second World War, only some 25,000 were
alive at its conclusion. When,
after the war, the bulk of these survivors left the, by then again,
Soviet-ruled Chernovtsy, they thought it was forever. They knew that the place they had considered their home had
now definitively been taken from them.
Czernowitz in the Bukowina, now twice lost to Jews, came to persist only
as a projection—as an idea physically disconnected from its geographical
location, and tenuously dependent on the vicissitudes of personal, familial and
cultural memory.
•
Our
primary goal in Ghosts of Home is
to illuminate the distinct culture of the city of Czernowitz and its Jewish
inhabitants during the Habsburg years before the outbreak of the First World
War, and the afterlife of that urbane cultural ideal over subsequent
decades. By focusing on how the
inhabitants of this one city constructed their life worlds over time, we trace
the exhilarating promises and shattering disappointments associated with the
process of Jewish emancipation and assimilation. Within the span of this objective, moreover, our book
engages two relatively unexplored chapters of recent European Jewish
history. It tells the story of a
place and of a Jewish population that was confronted by a largely
Romanian-perpetrated Holocaust during the Second World War, facing different
structures of persecution, deportation, and possibilities of survival than
those characterizing the more thoroughly studied Nazi Judeocide in Poland and
other areas of German-occupied Europe.
And it considers the positive as well as negative aspects of the role
that the Stalinist Soviet Union played for Jewish refugees from Fascism and
Nazism: the possibility it offered them for rescue and survival, but also the
consequences of its own anti-Semitism, repression, and persecution. Within a larger analytical framework,
this work also particularizes how Jewish Czernowitz/Cernăuţi/Chernovtsy
engaged and participated in some of the grand narratives of the European
twentieth century: the intensity, reach, but also the tragedy, of the
German-Jewish symbiosis; the encounter between Fascism and Communism; the rise
of Zionism and modern Yiddishism; the displacement of refugees; and the shadow
of Holocaust memory on the children and grandchildren of survivors.
Two
temporal levels structure our narrative in Ghosts of Home. On the level of the past, our book is
an account of Jewish Czernowitz and key moments in its history over the course
of the past hundred-and-twenty-five years. On the level of the present, it is fueled by a collaborative
quest, reflecting four journeys we made to Ukrainian Chernivtsi—in 1998, 2000,
2006, and 2008—and to Transnistria, during two of these visits. The first of our trips inspired this
project. We made it with Carl and
Lotte Hirsch, our parents/parents-in-law—their first return to the city of
their birth since their hurried departure (with false papers) from Soviet-ruled
Chernovtsy in 1945. With them as
guides and mentors, we searched for physical traces of old Czernowitz and Cernăuţi, for
material connections to the places, residences and times that had been so
central to their, and to their fellow exiles’, sense of origin and
identification.
In
that regard, our first journey could be characterized as a “roots” trip. But it differed in two significant
respects from other second-generation “return” journeys to old Jewish East
European towns chronicled in a number of recent books. We were fortunate in being accompanied
by articulate eye-witnesses, and to hear and record accounts they narrated in
place as we walked, explored, and videotaped the time-worn but still largely
intact streets and sites of what had been Habsburg-era Czernowitz. Secondly, unlike others who had
undertaken such journeys, we were not primarily motivated to travel to Western
Ukraine in search for traces of sites or family members victimized or erased
from records by Holocaust destruction.
Certainly, as the chapters in Part I of this book reveal, the
surprisingly divergent experiences of Cernăuţi Jews during the Second World War did come to
absorb our interest during our explorations of the city. Yet, what most fascinated us initially
was the fact that its Jewish survivors—even those who had lived through
deportation and immense suffering in Transnistria—continued to maintain and to
transmit to our post-war generation such strong, positive, nostalgic memories
of a city and culture that had long disappeared in reality, though not in the
realm of remembrance, image, and re-creation.
We
went on our second journey to Chernivtsi in 2000, without accompanying parents,
to a city no longer unfamiliar to us.
Confident enough of our bearings, we were now able to act as guides for
a cousin, David Kessler, and a colleague, Florence Heymann—second-generation
Czernowitzers like Marianne, who were visiting the place for the first time.[vi] We set off as academic researchers,
intent on mining the city’s public and private archives, and on broadening and
deepening our knowledge of Czernowitz/Cernăuţi and its Jewish community, for the book we had
begun to conceive. Yet in the
course of our investigations, the ever-darker side of the city and region’s
story emerged in greater detail.
We found material and documentary evidence of old anti-Semitism,
Habsburg-era, Romanian, as well as Soviet, of persecutions, impossible choices,
and painful compromises faced by the city’s Jews during the Fascist and
Communist periods, of struggles for survival during the Second World War. And we also found evidence of normality
and continuity, of kindness and rescue, in these grim historical
circumstances. We made a side trip
to Transnistria then, to the region to which Jews from Czernowitz, the
Bukowina, and nearby Bessarabia (now Moldova) were deported, and where approximately
200,000 of them perished. We went
in order to see and to actually make contact with the place that its survivors
had referred to as “the forgotten cemetery.” There we also searched for, and were ultimately able to
find, remains of the once notorious Romanian-run Vapniarka concentration camp
to which David Kessler’s father and a number of other Cernăuţi Jews
had been deported—a camp whose very existence had been erased from the records
and memories of the present-day residents of the sizeable town near which it
had been located.
Our
third trip in 2006, basis for Part III of this book, reflected a somewhat
different intent on our part. This
time we went to Chernivtsi, and through Transnistria, to participate in a large
multi-generational gathering of people who had either been born in inter-war
Cernăuţi, or who were children and grandchildren of
Czernowitzers. The group consisted
of persons from all over the world who had “met” through the internet and World
Wide Web on what had, in effect, over the course of two or three years, become
a site in which Czernowitz was actively being reconstituted in virtual reality,
through extensive contributions and on-line postings of photos, maps,
documents, memoirs, recipes, and links to relevant scholarly and popular
materials. This group’s passionate
interest and heartfelt effort to discover and re-discover minute details about
the history of a place where many of them had lived only a few childhood
years—and from which some had been deported as very young children—confirmed
for us the unusual nexus between nostalgic and traumatic memory that Czernowitz
elicited among its Jewish survivors and their descendants.
We
returned to Chernivtsi again in 2008 to find the city in the midst of ambitious
renovations in preparing to celebrate its 600th anniversary. Accompanied by Cornel Fleming from
London and, again, by Florence Heymann, we went as representatives of the
growing Czernowitz-L internet listserv group that had taken an active part in
urging city officials to include Chernivtsi’s Jewish history in the planned
commemorations. Bearing images and
objects donated by list members, and our own knowledge of Bukowina history, we
came to participate in discussions about the small museum of Bukowina Jewish
history and culture that was in the process of being installed in two rooms of
the former Czernowitz Jewish National House. Except for a few memorial plaques on buildings formerly
inhabited by Jewish writers and intellectuals, the extensive Jewish
contributions to the city had, until that moment, been forgotten, if not erased
from its public face. With the
planned establishment of this tiny museum, Chernivtsi was entering a new phase
of acknowledgment of its layered multi-cultural past. But the memorial debates we engaged only served to
demonstrate how fraught the politics of memory are, and are likely to continue
to be in the foreseeable future, in the Ukraine.
The
dialogue between the past and present levels of this book raises some of the
key questions that shape our inquiry: How did this small provincial Habsburg
capital produce such a rich and urbane cosmopolitan culture—one that would
remain so vivid and powerful in the imagination of the generation of Jews who
came of age in Romanian Cernăuţi during the interwar years? What had made their identification with
Czernowitz and its Habsburg-era German-cultural appeal so strong as to enable
them to preserve and protect their positive memories of the city in the face of
devastating negative and traumatic experiences? What role did the Habsburg Empire’s multi-ethnic tolerance,
however real or mythic in retrospect, play in the construction of this layered
and contradictory memory? How,
moreover, did nostalgia for the past, and negative memories of anti-Semitic
discrimination and persecution, co-exist and inflect each other in the outlook
of the city’s Jews, and how were these memories passed down over
generations? And how are Jews
currently remembered in the Eastern European cities they so actively helped to
build before being deported or exiled from them?
To
address these questions and illuminate our representation of Czernowitz’s past,
we rely on a variety of historical and literary source materials. We employ official and private
contemporary documents, public and family archival materials, letters, memoirs,
photographs, newspapers, essays, poetry, fiction, internet postings, as well as
material remnants that we think of as testimonial objects.[vii] Central to our approach is the use of
oral and video accounts from old Czernowitzers and their offspring—histories
and narrations that we collected and taped in the course of our research in the
Ukraine, Israel, Austria, Germany, France, and the United States, or that we
heard and watched in oral history archives in several places. These materials are more than
evidentiary sources for us. They
focus our narrative around telling individual anecdotes, images and objects,
serving as “points of memory” that open small windows to the past.[viii] They also enable us to reflect more
theoretically on how memory and transmission work both to reveal and to conceal
certain traumatic recollections, and how fragmentary, tenuous and deceptive our
access to the past can be. In the
effort to capture the effects of the past on the present and of the present on
the past, and to trace the effects of the “telling” on the witness and
listener, our book exemplifies what James Young has called “received
history.” It explores “both what
happened and how it is passed down to us.”[ix] And, in that process, it exposes the
holes in memory and knowledge that puncture second-generation accounts—accounts
motivated by needs and desires that, at times, rely on no more than speculative
investment, identification and invention.
Our
own two voices and reflections are certainly present within this book, singly
and in dialogue. We write
collaboratively, from the perspectives of a literary and cultural critic and of
a historian, both active in the emergent field of memory studies. But we would enjoin our readers not to
assume that our distinct disciplinary training is reflected in different
sections of this book, or that the “I” we use in different chapters is in any
way stable. On the contrary, in the
process of writing and rewriting, our voices have often merged and
crossed. Our perspectives are
those of the Romanian-born daughter of parents who were born, raised, and who
survived the Holocaust in the place they never ceased to call Czernowitz, and
of the Bolivian-born son of Austrian refugees who had fled to South America
from Hitler’s Vienna. Family
narratives are important components of Ghosts of Home, but this book is
not a family chronicle. Instead,
we think of it as hybrid in genre—as an intergenerational memoir and an
interdisciplinary and self-reflexive work of historical/cultural
exploration. It engages many
individual voices, including our own, within a web of narratives, recollections
and analyses that connect with each other, and over time, through familial and
communal relationships. Such a web
of recollections and interconnections, together with our other historical and
cultural source materials, allows for the affective side of the afterlife of
Czernowitz to emerge in fuller and richer dimensions.
The
title of our book, “Ghosts of Home,” highlights this affective aspect of
personal, familial, and cultural remembrance. But it also points to the contradictions that shape
persistent memories. It evokes the
haunting continuity of Czernowitz as place and idea for generations of Jews who
survived its political demise—a spectral return emanating both seductive
recollections of a lost home and frightening reminders of persecution and
displacement. These layers and
contradictions, we found, are still remarkably absent from present-day Chernivtsi,
a city whose repeated twentieth-century transformations—albeit materially
evident in its architecture and urban design—are just beginning to be
acknowledged in its cultural landscape.
When we first traveled there with Carl and Lotte Hirsch in 1998,
visitors, like the four of us, searching for traces of this history, appeared
like ghostly revenants or haunting reminders of a forgotten world: we unsettled the present by refusing to
allow the past to disappear into oblivion. But now, ten years later, this is no longer so. Roots travel has become ever more
popular, and 2008 Chernivtsi has made space for tourist groups with several new
or renovated hotels, new restaurants with translated menus, English language
city maps. Tour buses pull up on
the city’s central squares on a regular basis, spewing families of survivors
and their descendants from Israel, Western Europe, Australia and the
Americas. What accounts for this
dramatic shift? Certainly, the
economic evolution of Eastern Europe since the dissolution of the Soviet Union,
and the increased availability of the internet with the multiplication of
genealogical and cultural sites that disseminate more and more information,
have made travel to places of origin easier and thus perhaps also more compelling. But what do these trips to the past
actually reveal? What do we find
when we identify the streets where our forebears walked, the houses they
inhabited, the locations where they suffered mistreatment, deportation,
extermination? These, too, are
among the central questions propelling our inquiry in Ghosts of Home.
[i] Paul Celan, “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving
the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen,” Selected Poems
and Prose of Paul Celan, ed. and trans. John Felstiner (New York: Norton,
2001), 395.
[ii] Handwritten document in the Franzos archive at
the Wiener Stadt-und Landesbibliothek, cited in Ernest Wichner and Herbert Wiesner,
eds. In der Sprache der Mörder:
Eine Literatur aus Czernowitz, Bukowina— (Berlin: Literaturhaus
Berlin, 1993), 31.
[iii] The 1910 census of the region—the last under
Austrian rule—counted 102, 919 Jews in the Bukowina, 13% of the total
population of the province. See,
“Bevölkerungsentwicklung” in Albert Lichtblau, ed., Als hätten wir
dazugehört: Österreich-jüdische Lebensgeschichten aus der Habsburgmonarchie
(Vienna: Böhlau, 1999), 43-45.
[iv] See Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday
[Die Welt von gestern] (New York: Viking Press, 1943).
[v] Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia
(New York: Basic Books, 2001), xii.
[vi] See Florence Heymann, Le Crépuscule des
lieux: identités juives de Czernowitz (Paris: Stock, 2003).
[vii] Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, “Testimonial
Objects: Memory, Gender, and Transmission,” Poetics Today 27, no. 2
(Summer 2006): 353-383.
[viii] We use this notion, “points of memory,” as an
alternative to Pierre Nora’s well-known, but more nationally based “lieu” or
site of memory. See Pierre Nora, Realms
of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press,
1996).
[ix] James Young, “Toward a Received History of the
Holocaust,” History and Theory 36, no. 4 (December 1997).
