This small, multiethnic, plural, and cosmopolitan region has produced great literary creators, such as the poet Paul Celan, the writers Norman Manea and Gregor von Rezzori, and many more lesser-known ones.
by Ricardo Angoso
Writer and professor Galynka Dranenko tells us the history of this region very succinctly: “Since the 15th century, this area has been called Bucovina, or Land of the beeches. Previously, it was called 'Land of Chypyntsi' (in German, Schipenitz), a name that comes from a Ukrainian town now located in the Kitsman district. Paul Celan's father was born here. It must be said that for centuries this land was disputed by the kingdoms of Moldavia, Hungary, and Poland, before the Habsburgs annexed it to their empire in 1775. In 1884, with the creation of the Duchy of Herzogtum BukowinaThe name "Bukovina" became the official name of an administrative unit. This lasted until 1918. From then on, this region, like all of Europe, experienced a particularly turbulent history. After having been Austrian, Bukovina became Romanian, Soviet, Romanian again, Soviet again, and now Ukrainian.
Turks, Russians, Romanians, Soviets, and Ukrainians have all passed through this small region of just over 10.000 square kilometers, as Dranenko reminded us. After World War II, and as a consequence of the Paris Treaties of 1947, Bukovina was divided between Romania and the Ukrainian Socialist Republic, part of the USSR, which was awarded two-thirds of the region's historical territory. Thus, Romania was punished territorially for its collaboration and loyalty to the Nazi cause almost until the very end.
CULTURAL CONFLUENCE
The Jews, caught up in these imperial games, if they can be called that, were one of the constituent peoples of the region and played a leading role in the life of Bukovina, but, as in so many other areas of Europe, this did not prevent them from falling victim to the antisemitism prevalent in this part of the continent. As we read in the Yiyo Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, "the first Austrian census of 1775 indicated the presence of 526 Jewish families in Bukovina, concentrated mainly in the market towns.
This Jewish presence grew gradually and reached its zenith in 1930, when Bukovina already belonged to Romania and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had disappeared as a result of the First World War (1914-1918), when the Jewish population constituted 10% of the region's population, some 93.000 of its inhabitants, constituting, to a certain extent, the cultural, social and economic elite of the region.
This cultural confluence of so many nationalities and peoples living side by side influenced culture and literature, whose main expressions were in several languages, although German predominated until the 8,7s. From a cultural perspective, the choice of German—in which most local newspapers were published and in which poets such as Alfred Margul Sperber, Rose Ausländer, and the young Paul Celan wrote—was overtaken by the growing impact of Yiddish, declared as their mother tongue by XNUMX percent of Bukovina's population. Yiddish writers included Eliezer Shteynbarg and Itsik Manger. But Romanian, the language of the new state to which Bukovina belonged, was also beginning to have a significant influence in the region because it was the official language and the one used primarily by farmers, ranchers, and merchants.
Dranenko referred to that period of Yiddish splendor and quoted another of its key authors: "I would also like to remember that it was in Chernivtsi that one of the last Yiddish writers, Josef Burg, lived and wrote for almost a century. He died in 2009 at the age of 97. This did not prevent him from writing some of his texts in German. I cannot help but tell a very significant little anecdote about this cultural, linguistic, and identity-based plasticity: when he was asked what he considered his nationality to be, he replied, not without humor: 'I am neither Austrian, nor Romanian, nor Russian, I am a Bukovinian through and through.'"
As in other parts of Europe, the Holocaust, perpetrated in this region by Romanian troops in collaboration with the Germans, sadly put an end to Jewish life forever. Furthermore, as a result of the war, Bukovina, as we explained before, was divided between Soviets and Romanians, and relations between the Romanian part and the part that remained in the hands of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic after 1945 were null and void, breaking the cultural ties of nearly three centuries of cultural unity. Then, after the long communist ice age (1945-1991), they were one region, but two very different souls.
THE LITERATURE OF BUCOVINA
Although he is not a well-known author nor has he been translated into Spanish, we begin this brief list with the psychiatrist and also writer Robert Flinker, who spent the entire Second World War hiding from the Nazis and also from the Romanians who collaborated with the Germans in the “final solution”, seeing how his friends and family fell during the Holocaust. When the Soviets liberated Bukovina in 1944, Flinker came out of hiding and returned to “normal” life.
Author of a mythical book in Romanian literature not translated into other languages, Prabusirea (The Collapse), Flinker moved to the Romanian capital, Bucharest, after the war in 1945, where he worked as a doctor at the Bucharest Central Hospital and eventually committed suicide that same year. He couldn't bear having survived the Holocaust. He felt guilty for being alive without having done anything for his unfortunate neighbors; he couldn't look himself in the mirror without blushing, and he considered living like that fit only for the most cowardly. Flinker decided to put an end to what he considered an unbearable farce, and he did so on July 15, 1945, when the nightmare had already ended, leaving behind millions of dead and the burning ashes of the horror of the camps.
Claudio Magris would write of this writer: “Robert Flinker, a psychiatrist and Kafkaesque writer, lived in Bukovina. He was the author—in German—of novels and short stories about enigmatic trials, obscure guilt, and mysterious tribunals; despite his obvious debt to Kafka, a disturbing and personal narrator. Flinker, a Jew, had lived in hiding during the Hitlerian occupation; he committed suicide in 1945, after the liberation.”
THE CASES OF PAUL CELAN AND NORMAN MANEA
That same vital anguish, that feeling of indifference to the plight of millions in Europe who hadn't seen the first rays of hope, was perhaps the same anguish that gripped the Romanian, yet German, writer of sentiment, Paul Celan, perhaps one of the greatest poets, paradoxically, in the German language. Celan survived the Holocaust, knew the horror of the camps, and witnessed firsthand the great European tragedy of the 19th century. He fled to Paris because he could no longer live on the same land where he had seen his family and friends depart to their deaths. In France, he wrote compulsively but could no longer live while others had not enjoyed his fate. Existence became unbearable and unbreathable for him; his poems did not justify continuing to live in a cruel and unjust world, alien to even minimal standards of ethical and moral compliance. On the night of April 1970, XNUMX, after suffering several crises and disorders and even having been admitted to a psychiatric institution, Celan committed suicide by throwing himself into the Seine River from the Mirabeau Bridge.
Gregor von Rezzori is another of the great writers from Bukovina, and although he is not Jewish, we have included him on this list because several of his works address the thorny issue of antisemitism. Born in 1914 in the town of Cernauti, when it was still an Austro-Hungarian territory in transition to Romanian control following the Austro-Hungarian collapse, von Rezzori left us several masterful literary works, the fruit of his cosmopolitan, traveled, curious spirit, constantly searching for meaning—if there is one—in a life marked by the changes in a turbulent, hectic, and intense Europe.
Thus, in that world, which he later captured in some of his works, such as the anthological Memoirs of an Antisemite, the author moves, as if in the hallway of his own home, between Eastern and Western Europe, between his multiethnic Bukovina roots and the German language in which he always wrote. Von Rezzori represents a kind of hybridization, a meeting of the Jewish, Germanic, and Balkan worlds, of vestiges of a vanished aristocratic world... and recovered in his pages.
Finally, this list cannot be missing one of the great writers of Bukovina, Norman Manea, author of world-famous works such as The Fifth Impossibility, The Exiled Shadow, The Return of the Huligan, Clowns, The Black Envelope and many more that would go beyond the scope of this brief review. Norman Manea was born in the small town of Burdujem, in Bukovina, Romania, in 1936. He was deported as a child, along with his family, of Jewish origin, to one of the concentration camps opened by Romanian collaborators in Transnistria, present-day Ukraine, from which he returned in 1945. An engineer by training, he became known as a writer in communist Romania during the 1986s. Having distanced himself from the regime, in XNUMX he accepted a scholarship to study in West Berlin and the following year settled in the United States. He currently lives in New York and combines his literary activity with teaching at Bard College in that North American city.