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SPECIAL REPORT
The Ghosts
of Berdychiv
Fifteenth-century Berdychiv, the birthplace of Soviet-era writer Vassily Grossman, was a
Church of Santa Barbara. Balzac paid close attention to
Volyn, the Russian province that is now part of Ukraine.
According to an 1861 census, Berdychiv was a midsized city that boasted the second largest Jewish community in Russia after the port city of Odessa. It represented
the de facto capital Russian Jewry. At its height, Jews composed 80 percent of its population and the city contained
some 80 synagogues. It was also the only city in the
Ukraine where court hearings were held in Yiddish.
Though the Grossman personal fortune didn’t match
that of the legendary financier Israel Brodsky, a sugar
baron responsible for putting up a number of major synagogues as well as erecting the Bessarabka outdoor market in Kiev, the family nonetheless had strong guild and
merchants root, which originated in Reni, now part of
prominent Russian Jewish city that once riveled Black Sea Odessa in commercial reach and
spiritual importance.
.
But a World War II Nazi slaughter decimated its Jewish population,
overturning a noble legacy and pushing it
into Soviet grey.
.
Now a Ukrainian city,
it struggles to reclaim its past.
text and photo by Massimiliano
.
bout that time, which coincided with Jews being
granted greater autonomy by reformist Tsar
Alexander II (1856-1881) and finally being allowed to move beyond so-called “obligatory residence areas” set up in 1791 by Catherine the Great, Grossman’s
paternal grandparents began to establish their financial
status in the city.
A
Di Pasquale
ear Mom, I learned of your death in the winter of
1944. I arrived at Berdychiv, I entered the house
where you had lived with Aunt Anjuta, Uncle David and Natasha, and I realized that you were dead. Yet
as early as September 1941 I had felt in my heart that you
were gone. While I was at the front, I once had a dream: I
walked into a room, it could have been yours, and I saw
one empty seat. I knew instantly that you’d gone to sleep.
I took the shawl from the armchair that you used to cover
your legs. I had been staring at the empty chair for some
time, and when I woke up I knew you were dead. I did not
know you had suffered a terrible death. That I found out
only after reaching Berdychiv, and after asking what
anyone knew of the massacre of September 15, 1941.”
With this moving letter dated Sept. 15, 1950 and addressed to his mother as if she were still alive, Vasily
Grossman, author of “Life and Fate,” considered the most
important Soviet-era novel, openly mourned his mother’s death for the first time and began to come to terms
with his Jewish roots. Though correspondent Grossman
had worked for the Red Army newspaper “Krasnaya
Zvezda” throughout World War II, he had never before
written about his mother’s death.
During his student days in Moscow, he had instead s-
“
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nubbed Berdychiv as “disgusting” city (a word he used
in a 1925 letter to his father), regretting that his mother
was still forced to live in what he called “that terrible
place” (Grossman’s parents were separated).
But in the winter of 1944 Grossman began a process of
inner reflection that eventually led him to see Berdychiv
not only as the locus of his family tragedy, but as the symbol of the more general plight facing Soviet Jews.
"The Holocaust,” wrote John and Carol Garrard in “The
Bones of Berdychiv: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman,” considered the most comprehensive biography of
the writer, “compelled him to re-evaluate his Jewish
roots, and to reckon with how to respond to the murder
of his mother and the slaughter of the Ukrainian Jews.”
French writer Honoré de Balzac, author of “La Comédie
humaine” (“The Human Comedy”) visited Berdychiv in
1850. “The place is completely Jewish,” he wrote in his
memoirs, “There are Jews everywhere.” An astute observer of human nature and a tireless traveler, Balzac was in
Berdychiv, known as was known as Berdyczów at the
time, to wed Polish Countess Eveline Hanska in the
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Moldova. Along with the Vitis family, which had emigrated generations ago from Lithuania to Odessa, the Grossman’s were affluent.
Grossman said as much to his daughter Katya:
“We were not like the poor Jews of the shtetl described
by Shalom Aleichem, the kind of people who lived in
huts and slept side-by-side on the floor, packed in like sardines. No, our family had a very different Jewish background. We had carriages and horses. Our women wore
diamonds. Our children were sent to study abroad.”
It may be the immaculate white façade or the brightness of immense glass entrance, but the bus station at
Berdychiv, which still smells of fresh paint, quickly
makes you put behind the 50 kilometers you’ve just traveled in an old, slow and smelly Soviet-era bus headed for
the city of Vynnyky
Getting to Grossman’s birthplace means putting Zhytomyr behind you and passing through the beet fields of
Polissya. This swampy marshland swelled with rivers
and forests is among the most evocative of all Ukrainian
regions. After Berdychiv come the cultivated fields of
Podyllya. The green and silver colors that dominate Polissya yield to bright blue skies and golden yellow wheat
fields, the colors of the Ukrainian flag.
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ooking at the modern “avtovokzal,” or bus station, makes you pause to reflect on what Ukraine
might be like if broken free from the control of Europe’s predatory oligarchies, which are now back in
vogue since the election of pro-Russian President Viktor
Yanukovych. The processes of political and economic reforms remain little more than a promise by the now-faded Orange Revolution of 2004.
The adjacent railway station, a “constructivist”-era
building bathed in white and ocher tones, has a flaky with
the inevitable rising sun, suggesting a bright future, a
heavy and tangible vestige of a Soviet legacy that still
bears down on more than just the country’s iconography.
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Berdychiv is a composite of still-life images. I see
women sell mushrooms and fruits by the roadside. Stray
dogs run loose. There are huge barrels “kvass,” the popular bread drink. Brezhnev-era buildings line Karalipnika, the artery that runs from the train station to the city
center. There’s a factory with a sign that reads “Progress:
Mechanical Factory of Berdychiv.”
Seeing all this through the window of a “marshrutka,”
my minibus cab, it’s hard to believe that less than a century ago sleepy Berdychiv, population 90,000, was among
the most important centers of Hasidic culture in Eastern
Europe. The ubiquitous socialist-era monuments and
buildings that crop up before reaching Soborny Maidan,
a park and square where the urban landscape changes
dramatically, give the city an archetypal Soviet look, one
that young Grossman, still dazzled by the Bolshevik propaganda, praised in 1929.
In "Berdychiv Taken Seriously,” a piece published in
the youth weekly “Ogonek,” Grossman defended the Jewish community’s contribution to the Communist revolutionary triumph and spoke of his home town as a vital
commercial center — not for its Jewish community, but
because it lay between two rivers and along major roads.
This is the same Grossman, who, far later on, in a spiritual testament titled “Everything Flows,” denounced
Lenin’s systematic breach of human, social and personal
freedoms in the building up of the Soviet world.
The green and blue domes of the Orthodox church of
St. Nicolai offer a striking image of the city up. The
church itself is an elegant Liberty-style building that overlooks Maidan Soborny.
In common with many cities in western Ukraine,
Berdychiv evidences a distinct dichotomy between its ex-
panses of gray Soviet-era suburbs and vivid historical
centers that date mostly from the Polish-Lithuanian period or the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Walking northwest across the park, the impressive
Carmelite monastery becomes visible. It’s a classic example of the Polish Baroque, a style common to the beautiful churches of “old town” Krakow and Vilnius.
uilt in 1627 by a group of Carmelite monks who
designed walls and defensive towers in keeping
with that of a fortress, the building has remained
fully intact despite the turbulence that beset the city over
the centuries
Inside the monastery, on Nov. 23, 1857, Carmelite friar, baptized the only son of Apollo Korzeniowski’s in a
private ceremony. The child was the offspring of Korzeniowski, a writer, translator and fervent Polish patriot, Eva Bobrowska. They named their boy Jozef Teodor
Konrad Korzeniowski. He would later move to England,
travel the world, and meet with extraordinary success
while writing under an anglicized name, Joseph Conrad.
“Our bus drove to the entrance to the vault of the
Carmelite convent. But we found it covered in scaffolding and were not able to enter. We know from documents
B
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that it consisted of a stone cellar that could accommodate
hundreds of people. There were no doors or windows.
This is the place where 400 Jewish professionals and their
families were kept to be used by the occupying Germans
...” - John Carroll and Garrard.
On a hot and muggy day in May 1994, John Garrard, a
professor of Russian literature at the University of Arizona and his wife Carrol, along with a group of JewishAmericans, visited the places where 53 years earlier some
39,000 Jews were massacred as a result of Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s ill-fated June-to-September invasion of the Soviet Union. Invading German troops set
up a ghetto and an “extermination” unit in July 1941.
he memories of Epelfeld Naum, among the few
survivors of the local massacre that cost the life
of Ekaterina Savelevna, Grossman’s mother, have
been essential to the reconstruction of the period leading
up to the genocide as well as the killing itself. Esfira
Markovna Blank, who studied French with Grossman’s
mother in the 1930s, remembered her as a “charming and
intelligent woman with a fine sense of humor.”
Epelfeld, then a teenager, said the raid took began in the
Jatki ghetto at dawn on Sept. 15, 1941. She said it was carried out by Gestapo troops with the help of the Ukrainian
Polizei, police units that collaborated with the Nazis. The
round-up was followed by systematic shootings. In all,
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PICTURES AND A STORY
OMNIA COMUNICAZIONE
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hotojournalist Di Pasquale has published an Italianlanguage photo album titled “In Ucraina, immagini
per un diario” (“Ukraine, Diary Images”). Combining photos and text, the book documents freelancer Di Pasquale’s seven years of work the country between 2004, when
the tumultuous days of the Orange Revolution captured
the imagination of the world, and 2010.
It also contains an introduction by Oxana Pachlovska,
who teaches Ukrainian studies at the University of Rome
(La Sapienza).
Divided into three sections — landscape, buildings and
people — the book attempts to lay out a comprehensive
portrait of the country as it is today, including the faces of
the elderly and sprawling crowds of young people on Black
Sea beaches; Orthodox rite priests and flower venders.
The photos, writes Pachlovska, represent a “virtual
palimpsest full of promise,” which keeps government and
propagandistic images at arm’s length. For information
on the book, write to [email protected]
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some 20,000 people were slain in the first two days.
A commemorative monument was erected in 1987,
when first public ceremony to honor the victims was also held. But the monument contains no reference to the
fact that those murdered and dumped in mass graves
were Jews. Official Soviet policy also bypassed the word
genocide.
Leaving behind the Carmelite Monastery I take a cab to
the Jewish cemetery, which is on the outskirts of the city
along the road to Zhytomyr. Just as when the Garrards visited in 1994, the oldest tombs lie abandoned like the cumulative ruins of some lost civilization.
The spooky cemetery is thick with vegetation that strangled most of the tombstones, on which black crows
perch in droves. Near a mausoleum dedicated to Rabbi
Levi Yitzchok, among Eastern Europe’s leading 18th century Hasidic leaders, I’m startled by group of Jewish beggars, three men and three women, who approach me for
money.
I give them what few coins I have, after which a Russian-speaking rabbi takes me under his wing and ushers
me into the mausoleum. When I come out it’s five o’clock
on a sunny afternoon. But the crows seem oblivious to the
sunny cheer. Instead, they continue with their grim gravehopping as I leave.
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