In the middle of the seventeenth century, Bohdan Khmelnytsky was the legendary Cossack general who organized a rebellion that liberated the Eastern Ukraine from Polish rule. Consequently, he has been memorialized in the Ukraine as a God-given nation builder, cut in the model of George Washington. But in this campaign, the massacre of thousands of Jews perceived as Polish intermediaries was the collateral damage, and in order to secure the tentative independence, Khmelnytsky signed a treaty with Moscow, ultimately ceding the territory to the Russian tsar. So, was he a liberator or a villain? This volume examines drastically different narratives, from Ukrainian, Jewish, Russian, and Polish literature, that have sought to animate, deify, and vilify the seventeenth-century Cossack. Khmelnytsky's legacy, either as nation builder or as antagonist, has inhibited inter-ethnic and political rapprochement at key moments throughout history and, as we see in recent conflicts, continues to affect Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, and Russian national identity.
In the middle of the seventeenth century, Bohdan Khmelnytsky was the legendary Cossack general who organized a rebellion that liberated the Eastern Ukraine from Polish rule. Consequently, he has been memorialized in the Ukraine as a God-given nation builder, cut in the model of George Washington. But in this campaign, the massacre of thousands of Jews perceived as Polish intermediaries was the collateral damage, and in order to secure the tentative independence, Khmelnytsky signed a treaty with Moscow, ultimately ceding the territory to the Russian tsar. So, was he a liberator or a villain? This volume examines drastically different narratives, from Ukrainian, Jewish, Russian, and Polish literature, that have sought to animate, deify, and vilify the seventeenth-century Cossack. Khmelnytsky's legacy, either as nation builder or as antagonist, has inhibited inter-ethnic and political rapprochement at key moments throughout history and, as we see in recent conflicts, continues to affect Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, and Russian national identity.
Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising
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In the middle of the seventeenth century, Bohdan Khmelnytsky was the legendary Cossack general who organized a rebellion that liberated the Eastern Ukraine from Polish rule. Consequently, he has been memorialized in the Ukraine as a God-given nation builder, cut in the model of George Washington. But in this campaign, the massacre of thousands of Jews perceived as Polish intermediaries was the collateral damage, and in order to secure the tentative independence, Khmelnytsky signed a treaty with Moscow, ultimately ceding the territory to the Russian tsar. So, was he a liberator or a villain? This volume examines drastically different narratives, from Ukrainian, Jewish, Russian, and Polish literature, that have sought to animate, deify, and vilify the seventeenth-century Cossack. Khmelnytsky's legacy, either as nation builder or as antagonist, has inhibited inter-ethnic and political rapprochement at key moments throughout history and, as we see in recent conflicts, continues to affect Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, and Russian national identity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804794961 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/19/2015 |
| Series: | Stanford Studies on Central and Eastern Europe |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
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Stories of Khmelnytsky
Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising
By Amelia M. Glaser
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9496-1
CHAPTER 1
A Portrait in Ambivalence
The Case of Natan Hanover and His Chronicle, Yeven metsulah
Adam Teller
IN 1994, YO'EL RABA, a Polish-born Israeli scholar, wrote a comprehensive survey of the historiography surrounding the Jews' fate during the Khmelnytsky uprising, which he called Between Remembrance and Denial. Though written in the State of Israel at the end of the twentieth century, this work of monumental scholarship was firmly in a Jewish historiographical tradition whose roots go back at least to the Middle Ages, because it focused very narrowly on issues of Jewish martyrology. Raba's goal was to see how the fate of the Jews massacred in the uprising was reflected in historical depictions of the events from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. His analysis was given a clearly twentieth-century aspect by his decision to use a nationalist framework to analyze his sources: these were largely divided into Jewish, Polish, or Ukrainian writings, setting up not just comparisons but confrontations between the three.
In fact, Raba framed his whole work around the question of Holocaust denial — dedicating the book "To the memory of the victims of the Holocaust which is denied while the survivors are still alive." In this highly emotive context, what Raba saw as the downplaying of Jewish suffering in writings on the seventeenth century became subsumed in the category of Holocaust denial.
Though contemporary reviews were quick to critique Raba's work for this, new approaches to understanding the events were neither suggested nor developed. It is my goal here to reconsider how the Jews' part in the uprising — and particularly their attitude toward it — developed. In order to do this, I shall look beyond the vivid descriptions of death and destruction in the Jewish historical chronicles composed in the 1650s to the portrayal of Ukrainians, Cossacks, and particularly Bohdan Khmelnytsky himself.
Five short Hebrew chronicles and one "historical song" in Yiddish were published in these years. One other remained in manuscript, to be published only at the end of the nineteenth century. For the most part, these were extremely short texts, focusing almost entirely on the sufferings of the Jews and paying little or no attention to the broader historical context in which they occurred. Two of them — Tsok ha-'itim by Meir of Szczebrzeszyn and Petah teshuvah by Gavriel Schussberg of Rzeszów — contained a certain degree of detail that could shed some light on the larger picture. Only one, however, Yeven metsulah by Natan Neta Hanover of Zaslaw, paid significant attention to the developments in the non-Jewish world that led up to the outbreak of the uprising and shaped its course. I shall, therefore, focus most of my discussion on this text.
Hanover, the author, who fled his hometown in the face of the Cossack assault of summer 1648, joined the stream of Jewish refugees spreading across Europe, passing through the Holy Roman Empire and Amsterdam, and ending up in Italy in 1652. He eventually reached Venice, where he published his chronicle. He was a talented writer, having previously made his living as a preacher, and he put his literary skills to excellent use in his historical chronicle. After completing the text, Hanover seems to have received rabbinical ordination in Italy, since he took up the post of rabbi first in Jassy in 1660, and subsequently in Ungarisch Brod, where he was killed during the Ottoman push to Vienna in 1683.
Yeven metsulah is written in limpid Hebrew prose, eschewing the flowery language beloved of the rabbinic authors of his generation. Though the book quotes from the classical sources of Jewish culture to add depth to its narrative, it refers much more to the Bible, well known from the weekly synagogue readings, than to the complex Talmudic text. As a result, though uneducated Jews who did not know any Hebrew would not have been able to read Yeven metsulah, it was not necessary to be a full-blown Talmudic scholar in order to understand it. This undoubtedly led to its popularity with a relatively wide audience and to as many as four editions before 1800.
Hanover's skill as a writer meant that his prose was of such deceptive simplicity that many generations of historians have taken it as a wholly credible firsthand testimony of events. It is only recently that more critical readings have begun to reveal the levels of artifice in the text, and the literary means he employed to get his messages across.
The book itself is quite short. After an author's foreword, the text is divided into three sections. It opens with an historical introduction, which discusses the political, religious, economic, and military background to the events, starting from the accession of Zygmunt III in 1593. The body of the book focuses largely on the massacres of the Jews in various towns. Structured episodically, descriptions of the strategic and political maneuvering of the Polish and Ukrainian camps are used to connect the various sections, providing some explanation of how the events unfolded. The third and final section of the text consists of an encomium to the Polish-Jewish society supposedly destroyed in the uprising.
This tripartite structure, as well as the wealth of detail — particularly of events in the non-Jewish world — marked Hanover's text out from the chronicles that preceded it. The extent to which Hanover had read the Jewish texts published before his own is not entirely clear. He had certainly read Tsok ha-'itim, for he lifted phrases and even sections directly from it. As far as the other works go, it is simply impossible to tell. However, even a cursory comparison reveals that Hanover's was a highly original work, written in its own way and taking an independent line in describing and explaining events.
This is abundantly clear even in the foreword he appended to his text. In it, he claimed that the events of the uprising had been foreseen by no less a prophet than King David, who had written a series of allusions to them into the book of Psalms. He did so with numerology: by substituting a number for each letter of the verses he quoted, Hanover could add them up and then show how other phrases directly linked to the uprising had letters that made the same arithmetical total. Although his math was often quite shaky, many of the phrases he used featured the name of Khmelnytsky quite prominently. For example, he showed that the verse "I am sunk in the deep mire" (Psalms 69:3) had the same value as the phrase "Khmel and the Tatars joined together with the Orthodox Christians." Thus, in Hanover's presentation, Khmelnytsky was playing a crucial — and Divinely ordained — role in the events. Of course, this did not endear Khmelnytsky to Hanover, who heaped traditional Jewish invective on him, calling him "the oppressor Khmel, may his name be blotted out, [and] may God send a curse upon him."
One remarkable thing about this portrayal is that Hanover's was the only published text to give Khmelnytsky such a central role. Most of the others mentioned him, but it was generally only in passing as hetman of the Cossack forces, often without invective. In fact, the popular chronicle Megilat 'efah did not mention Khmelnytsky at all! Thus, the fact that in the Jewish communal memory Khmelnytsky came to be identified not just as the leader of the Cossacks but as an archetypal and murderous enemy of the Jews should be seen as a direct result of Hanover's writing.
This being so, it might have been expected that Hanover would present Khmelnytsky and the Ukrainians in an unsympathetic light throughout his chronicle. Such was not the case. Though hostile, Hanover's portrayal was multifaceted, and in one or two places even ambivalent, suggesting a much more complex attitude toward the man and especially his cause.
This can be seen in the historical introduction to the book. There, Hanover explained the motivations of both the Cossacks and the Ukrainian masses in joining the uprising. In this discussion, the Jews, though they appeared, were not central. Hanover identified three major causes of the unrest: the Counter-Reformation policy of Zygmunt III and his successors, which discriminated against the Orthodox Church in Ukraine; the economic exploitation of the peasants as part of the Polish colonization of the region; and the Cossacks' struggle to improve their status and conditions of service. His descriptions emphasized the degradation caused to the Ukrainian peasants: "the Orthodox people became gradually impoverished. They were looked upon as lowly and inferior beings and became the slaves and the handmaids of the Polish people and of the Jews."
His descriptions of an earlier rebellion might even be said to have evinced a measure of sympathy for the Ukrainians: "there arose an Orthodox priest, named Nalevaiko, to avenge the cruel treatment accorded his people, whom he exhorted in the following words, 'How long will you keep silent at the cruelties perpetrated by the Polish people'." Another rebel, Pavluk, whose 1637 uprising was the first to target Jews, was also described as avenging the wrong done to his people. For Hanover, then, these rebellions were, in fact, responses to genuine wrongs inflicted on the Ukrainian population. He understood the complexity of these events and was not willing to ignore it even when Jews had been attacked.
On the issue of economic exploitation too, which formed a major part of the Jews' income in Ukraine, Hanover's attitude toward the peasants was quite sympathetic. He described their situation, using a verse from Exodus (1:14): "Their lives [i.e., those of the Ukrainian peasants] were made bitter by hard labor, in mortar and bricks, and in all manner of services in the house and the fields." He continued: "So wretched and lowly had they become that all classes of people, even the lowliest among them [i.e., the Jews. — A.T.], became their overlords." In this short section, Hanover displayed a highly relativist stance, which allowed him to identify with the suffering Ukrainians and speak, as it were, in their voice as they described the Jews as "the lowliest of people." It was a highly unusual tactic in premodern Jewish writing, enabling him to give voice to the religious humiliation felt by the Orthodox in the face of Jewish empowerment during the Polish colonization of Ukraine. Beyond this, however, it actually recast relations between the Jews and their neighbors in a new light: in this reading, the Ukrainian peasants had become the suffering Children of Israel and the Jews the cruel Egyptians!
Hanover was not the only one to notice this reversal. Joel Sirkes, the leading rabbinical authority of the previous generation, who had served as rabbi in a number of Ukrainian communities before taking on the prestigious Kraków rabbinate, wrote, "Cries of oppression are emanating from gentiles in most areas, that the Jews are lording it over them and controlling them like kings and noblemen." Sirkes's teacher, Rabbi Feyvish of Kraków, also expressed himself on this point. Criticizing the Jewish arendarze who leased entire noble estates, and kept them at work on the Sabbath day, he wrote: "when the Jews were enslaved in Egypt, they took care not to work on the Sabbath. How much the more so now when we are not the slaves but the masters, should we take care to keep the Sabbath day holy." Once again, the rabbi was describing the reversal of the Egyptian slavery: the Jews had become the Egyptian masters, the Ukrainian peasants the Israelite slaves.
These texts seem to show that Jewish leaders were aware that the Jews' role in settling the Ukraine on behalf of the Polish Crown had brought them great power, which was arousing serious antagonisms among the Ukrainian peasantry. More than that, however, the texts that cast the Ukrainians as the Children of Israel being ruled over by the Egyptians/Jews might seem to have been expressing some identification or sympathy with the peasants' plight. It seems reasonable, therefore, to suggest that among the Jews of mid-seventeenth-century Ukraine there were those who did not view their participation in the colonization as a wholly positive thing, and who identified with the plight of the local population.
Hanover himself seems to have suggested such a possibility in the next section of his chronicle. Before he plunged into the bloody descriptions of the Jewish massacres, he gave his own take on the background to Khmelnytsky's decision to embark on the uprising. He did so by telling the complex story of the future hetman's relations with the magnate Koniecpolski family, which owned the estates on which he lived. Though it did not agree in every detail with the picture arising from other sources, Hanover's story certainly had much in common with them. It described Khmelnytsky's difficult relations with the aged Stanislaw Koniecpolski and their continuation with his son, Aleksander, and his wife Joanna Barbara Zamoyska. Khmelnytsky's betrayal of the Koniecpolski campaign against the Tatars was described, as was the subsequent confiscation of Khmelnytsky's property, his imprisonment, pardon, and finally flight.
There was, however, one way in which Hanover's story departed dramatically from all the other sources: the roles that he ascribed to Jewish actors were unique to his narrative. Hanover mentioned two Jews who were instrumental in the events. The first was Zechariah Sobilenki, who worked in the Koniecpolski administration as the arendarz (and so governor) of Khmelnytsky's hometown of Chyhyryn. When Zechariah heard Khmelnytsky boast of his betrayal of Koniecpolski's Tatar campaign, he informed his noble lord, who had the Cossack imprisoned. The second Jewish figure was called Jacob Sobilenki, the same surname as the first. Jacob was one of Khmelnytsky's confidants and helped him secure his release from prison by accusing the first Sobilenki of lying. Once free, Khmelnytsky fled to the Cossack homeland of Zaporozhia, where, in Hanover's narrative, he soon became hetman of the Cossack forces and embarked on the uprising.
At first glance, the point of this story is quite unclear: apart from giving Jews a role in events, it did not really explain Khmelnytsky's hostility toward them, since after all, though he was betrayed by one Jew, he was saved by another. The issue of the name is also intriguing: Sobilenki was by no means a common Jewish name. Why would both characters have had the same, rather strange name? Though there will probably never be a satisfactory explanation for this, one point does seem to be clear. One of the Sobilenkis in the story had an obvious pro-Polish orientation as a faithful servant of the Koniecpolski family, while the other had a pro-Ukrainian orientation, helping Khmelnytsky evade the harsh fate that the Polish magnate had in store for him. This story, then, seems to tell the reader that in the period leading up to the uprising, some Ukrainian Jews supported the Polish colonizers while others sympathized with Khmelnytsky and the Ukrainian cause.
Within a short time, of course, the Jews' sufferings at the hands of the Cossacks — and particularly the Ukrainian masses — put an end to those sympathetic voices. In the text, Hanover explained this with a story. Once he had become hetman, Khmelnytsky "sent secret messages to all the provinces, and to every place where groups of the Ukrainian people lived to be prepared for the appointed time, to gather together and stand for their lives; to destroy, slay, and kill all the Jews, and all the Polish army which would attack them." The conspiracy could not be kept secret, however, because "When this became known to the Jews through their friendly Ukrainian neighbors, and also through their own spies ... they notified their lords, the nobles ... who befriended the Jews exceedingly and became united with them in one band."
This version of events, as retold by Hanover, finds support in a non-Jewish source, the chronicle of Samuel Gradzki, a Polish chronicler, who seems to have written his text in the 1670s (though it was only published more than a century later): "On his return from the Tatars, however, Khmelnytsky did not cease doing what had to be done [acting] prudently and completely silently. However, on the basis of what others did, those Jews trusted by the Cossacks, as well as others of them, [who were their] enemies ... soon began to report back to the terrestrial nobles, from whom they obtained almost all the taverns by means of arenda." Here, Gradzki notes not only the divided Jewish opinion toward the Cossacks (some were confidants, others enemies) but also the fact that as the preparations for the uprising began to gather steam, the Jews felt that they had to throw in their lot with the ruling Polish regime, which provided their livelihood.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Stories of Khmelnytsky by Amelia M. Glaser. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents and AbstractsIntroduction: Bohdan Khmelnytsky as Protagonist: Between Hero and Villain Amelia M. Glaser chapter abstractThis introduction provides an overview of the 1648 Cossack uprising, and discusses the contested legacy of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky. It takes as an example Mikeshin's statue of Khmelnytsky, unveiled in Kyiv in 1888 to commemorate the Baptism of Rus', to present the central problem of memorializing a charismatic figure like Khmelnytsky, who has been remembered as a hero or villain depending on the national context and the regime in power. The introductory chapter also offers a discussion of the literature in Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish that has memorialized Khmelnytsky and the Cossack uprising from 1648 to the present, focusing on the early modern period, Romanticism, Modernism, and the twentieth century.
1A Portrait in Ambivalence: The Case of Natan Hanover and His Chronicle, Yeven metsulah Adam Teller chapter abstractIn Jewish communal memory, Bohdan Khmelnytskyi is reviled as the mass-murderer of thousands of Jews in Ukraine. However, this memory preserves little detail about the man himself. This can be traced back to the contemporary Jewish chronicles that describe him in only the briefest terms. However, the most sophisticated and detailed chronicle, Yeven metsulah, by Natan Neta Hanover (Venice 1653), presents a multifaceted portrait of Khmelnytsky. Hanover uses his literary skills to explore the factors leading the Cossack hetman not only to rebel against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but also to turn his anger on the Jews. Though Jews' pro-Polish orientation during the rebellion was clear, Hanover presents the little known, but highly significant, ambivalence felt by some Jews towards Khmelnytsky in the years before the uprising. This chapter contextualizes Hanover's portrayal of Khmelnytsky, reflecting on the sources of Hanover's outlook and its significance for later generations.
2"A Man Worthy of the Name Hetman": The Fashioning of Khmelnytsky as a Hero in the Hrabianka Chronicle Frank E. Sysyn chapter abstractThe most widely disseminated historical-literary work of eighteenth-century Ukraine, the Hrabianka Chronicle, exists in short and long redactions in scores of manuscripts. Yet, there is no academic edition or a thorough examination of its sources. Even Hryhorii Hrabianka's authorship is in question. The text is viewed as exemplary of the founding myths of the Hetmanate at the turn of the eighteenth century. Mykhailo Hrushevsky saw it as a product of the milieu of the chancellors of the Hetmanate. Source studies such as Mykola Petrovsky's questioned the authenticity of documents in the Chronicle. Early twentieth-century scholars such as Ivan Franko and Mykola Zerov cast it as one of the major prose works of early modern Ukrainian literature. This chapter examines the depiction of Khmelnytsky as a hero in the Chronicle. It also treats that image's impact on subsequent Ukrainian historiography and literature.
3A Reevaluation of the "Khmelnytsky Factor": The Case of the Seventeenth-Century Sabbatean Movement Ada Rapoport-Albert chapter abstractThe Khmelnytsky uprising and its violent aftermath devastated many Jewish communities in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, especially the Ukraine. This chapter considers whether, or to what extent, these catastrophic events may have triggered the emergence of what, by the mid-1660s, had become the mass messianic movement of Shabetai Tsevi—an Ottoman Jew who first proclaimed his messianic vocation in 1648.
4Apotheosis, Rejection, and Transference: Bohdan Khmelnytsky in Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian Romantic Literature George G. Grabowicz chapter abstractPolish, Russian, and Ukrainian pre-Romanticism and Romanticism provide a comparative basis for examining the figure of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Each of these literatures, while variously interacting with the others, articulates its own perspective. This is particularly true in the Ukrainian case which witnessed a belated, rapid development of a national literature. The topos of national leader was applied regularly to Khmelnytsky, as reflected in Polish dramas by Niemcewicz (1817) and Zaborowski (1823), as well as in Decembrist writings by Glinka and Ryleev. The Ukrainian Istoriia rusov (written ca. 1800-1820s, published in 1846) culminates in the Hetmanate's "official" perspective, which apotheosizes Khmelnytsky. The historicism in the early part of the century is supplanted by an emphasis on the folk, the national cause, and the structures of mythical thought. Khmelnytsky becomes marginal or absent from depictions of the Cossack past (for example for Gogol/Hohol). Shevchenko in large measure rejected his legacy.
5Heroes and Villains in the Historical Imagination: The Elusive Khmelnytsky Taras Koznarsky chapter abstractThis chapter examines the stock repertory of heroic qualities assigned to Khmelnytsky in Ukrainian historical narratives of the first decades of the nineteenth century. It argues that the cult of Khmelnytsky served as the most important element in the mobilization and self-promotion of the Ukrainian elites in the Russian empire, and hence, as the foundation for the legitimacy of the Ukrainian historical narrative itself. The chapter suggests that Khmelnytsky functioned as an antidote to the stigma of Mazepa the traitor, ingrained in the self-perception of Ukrainian elites as well as in the Russian popular imagination. It reveals the mirrorlike connection between Khmelnytsky the hero and Mazepa the villain at the level of the structure of their biographies, attributes, and agencies in Ukrainian historical narratives.
6The Image of Bohdan Khmelnytsky in Polish Romanticism and Its Post-Romantic Reflex Roman Koropeckyj chapter abstractIn contrast to the image of the haidamak, the figure of Khmelnytsky barely registers in Polish romantic literature. This is a function of the open-ended nature of the Polish-Cossack conflict and the ambiguous nature of the hetman himself. When he appears, it is most often in a melodramatic fashion, as an indignant but proud Cossack bent on avenging the seizure of his estate and the abduction of his wife by the Polish gentryman Czapliński. This image draws heavily on Polish romantic historians' attempt to explain the causes of the 1648 rebellion. This episode is also the basis of the fullest treatment of Khmelnytsky in Polish literature, Henryk Sienkiewicz's novel With Fire and Sword, where it is reconfigured as the story of Bohun and Helena. The reconfiguration and ostensible resolution of this subplot allows Polish literature to finally narrate the Khmelnystky uprising as a comforting allegory.
7The Heirs of Tulchyn: A Modernist Reappraisal of Historical Narrative Amelia M. Glaser chapter abstractThis chapter examines Minskii's retelling of the massacre at Tulchyn in his Russian-language play in verse, "Osada Tulchina" (The Siege of Tulchyn), which appeared in the St. Petersburg Jewish literary journal Voskhod in 1888 (the same year Mikeshin's monument was unveiled in Kyiv's St. Sophia Square for the nine-hundred-year anniversary of the baptism of Rus'). Minskii emphasizes Jewish resistance to the Cossacks, and creates a heroic Jewish figure, a Marrano named Josif de Kastro, who flouts Ashkenazi passivity to fight the Cossacks. Avrom Reisin translated this play into Yiddish in 1905. Many aspects of Minskii's version of the Tulchyn episode would reappear in twentieth-century Jewish narratives about 1648, including Sholem Asch's 1919 Kiddush ha-Shem, which describes the uprising as a test of Jewish protagonists, revealing unexpected acts of bravery and heroism in the face of destruction.
8Hanukkah Cossack Style: Zaporozhian Warriors and Zionist Popular Culture (1904-1918) Israel Bartal chapter abstractThis chapter addresses positive images of the Ukrainian struggle for independence (as well as the 1648 uprising) as depicted in the writings of several Jewish radical Zionists at the beginning of the twentieth century. These images found their way to Palestine and had considerable influence on the emerging Israeli popular culture. The Cossack warrior served as a model for the "regeneration" of a "New Jew," claimed by members of Labor Zionism in Palestine. The Eastern European "other"—the horrifying enemy of the shtetl Jew— had transformed in the minds of some of the "second Aliyah" pioneers (1904-1918) who settled in Palestine into an ideal example of heroism, simple rural life, and unlimited national commitment. Furthermore, they tended to apply some of the supposedly Cossack traits to the Middle-Eastern Bedouin.
9The Cult of Strength: Khmelnytsky in the Literature of Ukrainian Nationalists During the 1930s and 1940s Myroslav Shkandrij chapter abstractUkrainian literature written outside the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s found itself within a force field in which three political currents competed: the national democratic, the authoritarian (as promoted by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists), and the Dontsovian. The portrayal of Khmelnytsky is compared in three novels by popular writers of the period: Semen Ordivsky (Hryhorii Luzhnytsky), Yurii Lypa, and Yurii Kosach. Although in each case the literary portrait emphasizes Khmelnytsky's strong leadership and "masculine" virtues, there are also significant differences in the way the ruler is presented. Each novelist implicitly challenges tenets of authoritarianism, particularly the version promulgated by Dmytro Dontsov.
10Jews and Soviet Remythologization of the Ukrainian Hetman: The Case of the Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky Gennady Estraikh chapter abstractIn October 1943, the importance of Ukrainian Cossackdom as a constituent of the usable past was recognized by introducing the Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the only Soviet military order named after a non-Russian historical personality. At the same time, the town of Pereiaslav, where in 1654 the Pereiaslav Agreement between the Russian Tsar Aleksei I and the Ukrainian Cossacks led by Khmelnytsky had laid the foundation for Ukraine's integration into the Russian state, was renamed Pereiaslav-Khmelnytsky. This chapter analyzes the reaction of Soviet and non-Soviet Jews to Khmelnytsky's elevated position in the official hierarchy of national heroes.
11On the Other Side of Despair: Cossacks and Jews in Yurii Kosach's The Day of Rage Yohanan Petrovsky-Shterm chapter abstractThis chapter contextualizes Yuri Kosach's two-volume historical novel Den' hnivu (The Day of Rage, 1947) against the backdrop of Ukrainian twentieth-century literary reconstructions of the 1648 Cossack rebellion. Unlike his ethnocentric contemporaries in Soviet Ukraine and in the Diaspora, Kosach creates a highly unusual multiethnic version of the events, capitalizing on multiculturalism and heteroglossia. Natan Neta Hanover, a celebrated Jewish chronicler, appears in his novel as a Jewish sage sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause, while Hanover's disciple Berakha joins the Cossack troops. Although written by a Ukrainian nationalist, Kosach's alternative conceptualization of the 1648-49 events moves beyond the established Ukrainian literary patterns and paves the way for new ways to imagine Ukraine as a complex multiethnic and multicultural geopolitical phenomenon in the center of Europe.
12Khmelnytsky in Motion: The Case of Soviet, Polish, and Ukrainian Film Izabela Kalinowska and Marta Kondratyuk chapter abstractIn pictorial art, Khmelnytsky towers above those around him. Likewise, in monuments scattered throughout the post-Soviet space, he appears as a strong and determined figure. This uniformity reflects the predominantly positive interpretation of Khmelnytsky within imperial Russian and Soviet state ideologies. This chapter examines and compares the constituent elements of the cinematic Khmelnytsky in three film productions from different national and political contexts: Igor Savchenko's Bohdan Kmelnytsky (1941), Jerzy Hoffman's With Fire and Sword (1999), and Mykola Mashchenko's Bohdan-Zinovii Khmelnytsky (2007). It analyzes the historical and cultural ramifications of Khmelnytsky's image in the three films. In each, the hetman's world reflects the ideological circumstances of the film's making. Yet Khmelnytsky himself emerges as a positive character in all three pictures. Thus, the question is how Khmelnytsky, a controversial and divisive historical figure, becomes a hero not only for the Ukrainians, but also for the Russians and the Poles.
Afterword Judith Deutsch Kornblatt chapter abstractThe Afterword examines the image of Khmelnytsky and his fellow Cossacks as boundary jumpers who provide subsequent readers, viewers, and listeners with ample material to use in the construction of their own ambiguous and contradictory identities.