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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Recalling the Phoenix

13 November, 2012 - 00:00

For some years I have been following the translations and publications of Petro Rykhlo, a Germanist translator and publisher from Chernivtsi. Thanks to his efforts, the great literary myth of Chernivtsi is being partially restored. This is a tragic myth about the chimerical coexistence of languages and cultures on a small spot of the earth, brutally cut short by contemporary history with its two world wars, genocides, deportations, barbed wire, and crematoria. Thus, this is a myth about a city people flee.

The myth has various poles. Among its heroes is the German language, not real German, but primarily the tongue of Chernivtsi Jewry at the turn of the century. Present in this myth is Paul Zelan, an outstanding carrier of that language, its owner, a passenger on board the fatal Chernivtsi-Paris express. Present also is an easy-going and extravagant fantasizer named Gregor von Rezzori, author of anecdote-cum-parables like Maghrib Stories. And now Time of the Phoenix - selected verse by Rosa Auslander (1901-1988), a two-volume German-Ukrainian edition put out by the Molody Bukovynets Publishers with financial support from the Goethe Institute in Kyiv.

Rosa Auslander’s has remained one of the most popular names in German poetry over the past several decades, despite the fact that wider reading circles first heard it in the second half of the 1960s when the aging poetess, exhausted by escapes and losses, at last found refuge at a boarding home run by a Jewish community not far from Dusseldorf and started publishing overwhelmingly nostalgic books of verse, one after the next. The reader was offered access to yet another unique world, surreal and tortuous, of an old European province, “green Mother Bukovyna” with its constantly emphasized “four languages,” “quadrilingual songs,” a “lost paradise” in which “we were without sin until the bombs started falling,” a native land now dead.

This world is permeated with mysterious metamorphoses and geographical aberrations, when “the Jordan flows into the Prut” and the Dead Sea is glimpsed through the windows of the Chernivtsi ghetto. In this world scriptural texts come alive and angels appear in the flesh. It is a world of tender mysticism where Jacob’s ladder leans against Bukovynian skies, an eternal element of the landscape “beyond the willows, by the water mill.”

This myth, this Bukovynian idyll can be refuted a thousand times. Specific historical facts speak not only of angels and saints (the latter are actually mentioned less frequently), and not so much of the quadrilingual dialogue among “kind-hearted people living in the verdant city.” On the contrary, historical realities testify to the privileged status of some languages over others, and about those others being suppressed – or, at least one such downtrodden language. Still, there is a poetic fact – as embodied by Rosa Auslander’s creative legacy – and it holds its own truth which is as irrefutable and maybe even more convincing: “the quadrilingual harmonious choir in these devastating times.” A cultural landscape which, in the poetess’s own words, begot her.

We inherited this landscape toward the end of the century, in time with the collapse of yet another “most tolerant” empire. We inherited Chernivtsi with its inimitably seedy and magical grapevine aura, with its postwar inhabitants, so very different in manners and thinking, and backyards with stinking garbage heaps and unintelligible graffiti (Romanian? German?) looking like sinister cabalistic signs. We inherited this city together with all its losses. It happened not so long ago, yet it has been quite some time; in 1989, a German publicist friend of mine was horrified that in this city, with its age-old culture of serving Viennese coffee, one can only get “some brown over-sweetened swill.” But this is another topic, the account of someone accidentally passing by.

What really counts is that we inherited the responsibility for our own cities, most of which are on the bum and all need repair. Rosa Auslander reminds us of this in Ukrainian: the time has come to reach an understanding with the past, the time of the Phoenix.”

 

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