A city where God eavesdrops

There are towns whose provincial obscurity conceals their true grandeur, next to which some capital cities fade into the background. The works of Olha Kobylianska and Yurii Fedkovych are taught in our schools curricula, but Chernivtsi was the home town of other writers without whom it is difficult to imagine modern world literature. Paul Celan, the celebrated German-speaking poet, whose poem “Death Fugue” served as a textual symbol of the pain and horror of the 20th century in German and world poetry, was born here. Rosa Auslaender, the most prominent contemporary German-speaking poet, was also born in this city. A list of names of other famous people would fill more than one paragraph: the lyric poet and translator Georg Drozdovsky; the poets Alfred Gong, Moses Rosenkrantz, and Alfred Kittner; and the prose writer Gregor von Rezzori. Their works enchanted the United States, Germany, Romania, and Austria, yet all their family roots were here in Bukovyna. In an effort to understand the Chernivtsi phenomenon, we interviewed a man who lived in this city for a number of years, and who made his first steps in the literary domain there. His name is Ihor Pomerantsev, a poet and journalist. My interview with him about another celebrated city, Prague, was published 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 approximate depth: about two meters. The city cemeteries contain the graves of my aunts, my grandmother, father, and elder brother. Among my surviving relatives are my sister-in-law, who is unfortunately a widow now, and my nephew.

Why did you leave Chernivtsi?

I left after graduating from the university in 1970. I can name two reasons. The first one is quite simple. As a graduate of the Department of English in the Faculty of Romance-Germanic Philology of Chernivtsi University, I had a very small chance of finding a job in the city. At the time Chernivtsi was surrounded by an iron curtain on all sides. Of course, there were camping grounds for foreign tourists, but somehow my name was in the KGB’s bad books since my youth, so I was not even allowed to approach tourists. The second, less evident, reason is that as a young man with great ambitions, I viewed the future valiantly. I also loved poetry and was sure that it loved me in return. I thought I could make a career in any capital city, that everywhere I would be greeted 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 say but 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, like meeting a woman I fell in love with 40 years ago and whom I have not seen in all that time. I wouldn’t know what to say. There are ridiculous phrases like, “How are things?” I would ask Chernivtsi, “How are things?” and it would reply, “We managed very well without you.” In other words, I can’t say like the provincial Plutarch: “As for me, I live in a small town and so that it does not become smaller, I gladly stay here.”

Did it become too small for you?

It is the same as it always was. You know, you have a favorite pair of pants with suspenders from your childhood.

But you must have preserved some especially vivid memories.

My encounter with this city was an event. I spent my pre-school childhood in Chita, in Russia’s Transbaikal region, past Lake Baikal. This was a black-and-white period of my life, when winter and darkness seemed everlasting. When I was five years old, we left Chita. My father was working for a military newspaper. He was constantly ill and the climate of the Transbaikal was bad for his health. We went to Chernivtsi where our relatives lived. That was how I found myself transferred from the black-and-white Transbaikal film to the faraway Mediterranean. Emigres are often described as victims of “culture shock.” I didn’t have it in emigration because I had had it in Chernivtsi after Chita: it wasn’t culture shock but rather a sensual and childishly erotic shock. I simply landed in a color motion picture, where the sun is blinding, where you almost faint from the scent of ripening apples, cherries, and moreli, as apricots are called in Bukovyna. These sensual memories still warm me today.

What were your favorite routes?

I rode all over the city on my Orlenok bicycle. Thanks to the city and my bicycle, I understood what the Ukrainian word strimholov means (headfirst). As for my routes, I lived on Lermontov Street, a short walk to Olha Kobylianska Street. If you walk up Lermontov, cross what used to be Lenin Street, and walk across the streetcar tracks past the Passage Shopping Mall (I think it’s still called that), then cross two other streets, you will reach the university’s conference hall. This route led to the places of my first love trysts. There was another dramatic route. You walk down Kobylianska Street to Tsentralna Square, then turn left to a former synagogue, which the Romanians fascists did not destroy but the Bolsheviks blew up-there’s a movie theater there now-walk past the movie theater and step into the drugstore on the corner — I’m not sure it’s still there. In the early 1960s, when my father had his first heart attack, I would run over there almost every second day to buy two oxygen bags for him. Maybe there are old-timers who remember a boy breathlessly running downtown with oxygen bags. That was me.

Since those days you have seen quite a few cities. What is the difference between them and Chernivtsi?

I’m thinking of style. In the late 1950s there was a handful of Austrian Jews in Chernivtsi. These people were markedly different, especially from the local dandies, all of whom sported dark Bologna plastic raincoats and white hats with gray stripes. This handful of Austrian 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 these old Austrian Jews, who were transported by a time machine into a Soviet preserve. Chernivtsi went out of fashion, just like all those velour fedoras and gray double-breasted suits, but it remained a stylish city, where people walked lightly, even though it was a poor one.

What were the people of Chernivtsi like?

I don’t know whether the kind of people I’m about to describe are typical of this city. For me Chernivtsi was a town populated primarily by Jews. After all, German literature always referred to it as a Jewish town. True, when my family arrived, the populace was only one-fifth Jewish, with Jews from Bessarabia dominating, compared to those of Austrian origin. However, the Jews have an excellent energy field; even if they are numerically few, they define the spirit of a city. Even at that time I knew that Jews lived in Kyiv, Moscow, and Leningrad, but I thought of all them as wealthy, respectable individuals, while in Chernivtsi there were all kinds of Jews: riff-raff, prostitutes, murderers, currency dealers, wunderkinds; there were Jewish hunchbacks, who walked the streets carrying contraband matzo bread in their humps. Of course, besides riff-raff, there were well-known boxers and wrestlers who had 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 remember my father’s friends. He was working for the regional newspaper Radianska Bukovyna. Incidentally, he was born in Odesa, but he fit in well with the Chernivtsi environment because he knew Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish, which were part of Odesa’s culture. I remember a Jewish poet by the name of Meer Haratz, who wrote in Yiddish. He later became a classic in Israel. This man survived the Holocaust and then the GULAG. Some time in the late the 1950s the 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 office of 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 I nor my mother, who had grown up on Zaikovska Street in Kharkiv, could understand a single word. I was 12 and to me Yiddish was scum slang, something you hear in basements, from people who were cut off from culture, something like 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 of Chernivtsi with my father, who would quietly point out such talented Ukrainian writers as Volodymyr Babliak and Roman Andriiashyk. I would gawk at them, although my father always tugged on my sleeve to remind me to behave myself.

I remember the strained expressions on their faces; they looked as though they were carrying a great burden. It was only after moving to Kyiv in 1972, a city gripped by fear after the purges in Ukraine, that I realized what burden Babliak and Andriiashyk had really borne and why both died so early. Well, these were men of letters, but there were also great sambo wrestlers, and a big gangster, who later controlled Lviv and then Berlin, and who would later be murdered in Munich by one of his partners, either Timokha or Tenghiz. I also remember an inspired prostitute by the name 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 is strongest?

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 special kind of barbarian; we had knowledge of Russian, American, and French literature, so by barbarianism I mean the absence of memory, including historical and cultural memory. That wasn’t our fault. I traced the name of Paul Celan to Chernivtsi all the way from Kyiv. Later I met people who had studied and been friends with the poet. I remember visiting Mykola Bazhan in 1972 (the Chernivtsi poet Moses Fishbein brought me there). Bazhan spoke about Chernivtsi and Celan with a great deal of respect. Anyway, the capital city knew more about history and understood it better.

Paul Celan, Rosa Auslaender, Olha Kobylianska — why was Chernivtsi fortunate enough to produce such talents?

It wasn’t a stroke of luck. Chernivtsi stands at the crossroads of various cultures. Pasternak wrote: “... the air is pitted 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 of sounds, but a writer works with words, using a certain language. Just try to imagine this wonderful linguistic backdrop or 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 out of 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 options do they have besides deviations, breakdowns, besides these curvatures of cornices, and roofs that are germane to the modernist style? Heine wrote that eras in decline are rich in subjectivism. He probably disapproved. But I cite this as a diagnosis. When everything around you — empires, canons, reputations — are tumbling down, who can you rely on except yourself? You become “subjective” and work with your own “I.” You arbitrarily break down realities.

Which of Chervnivtsi’s literary figures is the closest to you?

His name is Gregor, although he is Grisha to me. In fact, he isn’t close to me in the literary domain. He is a prose writer, although all his life he introduced himself as Grisha — an aristocrat’s irony perhaps. I am talking about the excellent German writer Gregor von Rezzori, an Austrian literary classic. In his prose writings he refers to Chernivtsi as Chornopol. His lifestyle is close to me. Not long ago Viktor Pivovarov, a gifted Russian artist, gave me a decorated plate in Prague inscribed with this legend: “The happy melancholic.” That’s the way he sees me. I guess Gregor von Rezzori was also a happy melancholic. By the way, he worked as a journalist for a radio station, as I have done for some 30 years, and wrote culinary recipes (Pomerantsev is also the author of a book about dry red wines and writes a column on wine for the Russian edition of Forbes — D. D.). He also acted in movies, including with the French star Brigitte Bardot. Instead of Germany he preferred Italy, where he lived and died. Talking about favorite routes, that was his route, all the way from the faraway Mediterranean to the real one.

Celan is probably the best known writer to come out of Chernivtsi. What do you think is the most attractive aspect about him?

His pauses and gaps. His syntax. He experienced the death of his parents in Romania’s prison camps, where he was also imprisoned. That was when his heart stopped beating. His gaps between words and grammatical constructions are not an avant- garde technique, they are the pauses between the beat of his heart that one day stopped beating. He responded to Theodor Adorno’s rhetorical question, whether it was possible to write poems after Auschwitz in a non-rhetorical fashion — with his poems.

Has this great literature left any noticeable trace in Chernivtsi the way you remember it?

Chernivtsi is a quotation rather than a city, and it belongs to a different age. Only sensitive researchers can delete the quotation marks. Chernivtsi is gradually turning into quotations from poems created by the excellent Austrian poets who lived there between the world wars.

A quote from a quote?

I mean that walking down its streets is like quoting from a text that no longer exists, because the city I remember is no more. There are just words and phrases that became part of the German and Austrian reader’s consciousness and culture.

Talking about readers, I know that there is an institute in Austria that specializes in Bukovynian studies. Does the metropolis remember?

Now wait a second. You are underestimating Chernivtsi as one of the most retro cities in the German- speaking world. This city is associated with poems and prose created by Germany’s greatest writers of the second half of the 20th century. There is a children’s game known as freeze-tag. Chernivtsi played it between the world wars, as though ordered by someone to “freeze” at a certain period, like an insect in a piece of emerald, and allowed to exist only within its limits, never suspecting the Holocaust. It was a city of book lovers. Much has been written about, including by Rosa Auslaender.

Let me tell you a funny story. In 1978, when I was living in Germany, my girlfriend, a high school teacher, called Rosa Auslaender in Dusseldorf and told her, “We are not personally acquainted, but there is a Russian poet from Chernivtsi who is visiting me (she told her my name), so perhaps you would be interested in meeting him.” She replied: “I would be happy to meet him, but I am ill.” Auslaender was already a laureate, a celebrity, a classic. She was suffering from a debilitating form of arthritis and could not write. She was dictating her poetry. However, I think there was another reason. She had once described Chernivtsi as a “drowned city.” I think she was scared to meet someone who had lived and written poetry there. It turns out that this Atlantis was populated. My physical presence, discussing poetry, the fact that I was writing this poetry destroyed her beautiful, crystal-clear image of that drowned city. To date, the last celebrity to be photographed against the backdrop of Chernivtsi has been the American actor Harvey Keitel whose parents were born there. In other words, this city has a beautiful family tree and reputation in the German-speaking world.

Any old German city has its mystery...

Indeed, this is a city with a secret. Let me tell you first about its secret and then its mystery. There are cities that are not only fortunate but ones that deserve the best of luck. These are cities at which our Lord has gazed out of the corner of His eye. But why did they draw His attention? There is logic to culture, its magnetic fields. So God gazed upon this city, but he didn’t even glance at it. He just heard something, this rustling and flow of diphthongs and phonemes, these intersecting languages, and He became amazed: what a small place and yet what a strange and wonderful breeze is blowing from there — a linguistic breeze. That’s the secret. As for the mystery of Chernivtsi: mysteries are born in us, they are products of our imagination, and as long as these attics and basements exist, Chernivtsi will remain an enigmatic city. Let me read a few lines from Auslaender whom I could have met but never did. She has a poem called “Czernowitz.” First I will read a couple of lines in German, and then I will give a rough translation: Gestufte Stadt im grunen Reifrock
Der Amsel unverfalschtes Vokabular
Der Spiegelkarpfen in Pfeffer
versulzt schwieg in funt Sprachen.Here is my version: A terraced city in a luxurious green skirt
A thrush with the purest dialect
A mirror carp in spiced aspic,
Was silent in five languages.

As for Celan’s poetry, I would recommend some excellent Russian translations by Marko Bilorusets (Kyiv) and Ukrainian translations by Petro Rykhlia and Leonid Cherevatenko.

You have given Chernivtsi several poetic designations. Could you give us a couple of more metaphors, perhaps from what you have written?

When I was young, I wrote poems about Chernivtsi. I remember this image: My small town, out of the chimneys
Blows not smoke but Dimshitz.
Here he is flying
With a smile and tears in his eyes.

My latest essay, “My Little Israel,” is also about Chernivtsi. And my story “Reading Faulkner” has these youthful and understandable lines: “My Dublin, my Vitebsk, my small town.” You see, when we are young we often suffer from megalomania, and involuntarily I compared myself to James Joyce and Marc Chagall. I was wrong. I was a long way behind them, very much so. But Chernivtsi matches them all, including Dublin and Vitebsk.