When Mountains Meet: Essays in Ukrainian-Israeli Folklore Studies - Cuando las montañas se encuentran: Ensayos en folklore ucraniano-israelí

Fialkova, Larisa. 2007. Fialkova, Larisa. Koly Hory Shkodiat’sia: Narysy z Ukrains’ko-izrail’s’kykh Fol’klornykh Vzaemyn (When Mountains Meet: Essays in Ukrainian-Israeli Folklore). (In Ukrainian with summery in English) - Cuando las montañas se encuentran: Ensayos en folklore ucraniano-israelí). Kyiv: Instytut Mystetstvoznavstva, Fol’klorystyky ta Etnologii, Ukrains’koi Akademii Nauk (Institute of Art Studies, Folklore and Ethnology, Ukrainian Academy of Sciences - Instituto de Estudios de Arte, Folklore y Etnología, Academia Ucraniana de Ciencias). – 176 c. (In Ukrainian with summary in English - En ucraniano con resumen en inglés).


Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………….2
Introduction………………………………………………………………………3
Part I. The Image of Jerusalem in Ukrainian Folklore………………………….11
Part II. Folklore from Ukraine in Israel…………………………………………27
Oleksa Dovbush in Jewish Culture……………………………………………….27
Mysterious Ukraine: Ghost Stories and Stories of Buried Treasures….…………54
Nuclear Humor……………………………………………………………………97
Part III. Incipient Ukrainian Diaspora in Israel………………………………….137
Afterward: Confession of a Former Kyiv Dweller………………………..215

Summary
Ukrainians and Jews have been neighbors and co-citizens for a long time. They live together nowadays as well. But the circumstances of their co-existence have changed. Both nations have acquired their nation-states, where having changed their status from a minority to a majority group they confront problems they never knew before. But Jews continue to live in Ukraine as a minority, and many Ukrainians for their part have immigrated to Israel as relatives of Jews or Arabs and have got Israeli citizenship. Immigrants from Ukraine (Jews, Ukrainians, and Russians) constitute at the very least one third part of the great wave of the immigration of the 1990s to Israel from the former Soviet Union, and are usually perceived as part of the so-called “Russian Israel”. This book is the first attempt to question this tendency. Does Ukrainian culture affect the identity of the immigrants from Ukraine? What languages do they speak? What stories do they tell? Do they form a distinct group? These are the problems addressed in this book which is based on fieldwork and research by the author between 1992 and 2006.
In the introduction readers are given a short survey of the sparse studies in Jewish-Ukrainian comparative folklore by Israeli folklorists, both professional and amateur. A large collection of songs, including so-called multi-lingual (macaronic) songs, was collected by Meir Noy who published a paper of limited circulation on this issue. This collection is housed in the National library in Jerusalem. Moshe Hoch in his M.A. thesis produced another study on comparative Jewish-Ukrainian musical folklore not published in a monograph form. Amateur research on the Israeli variants of Slavic songs is being conducted by Uri Yakubovich and Ilia Dobosarskii, who have never published the results of their activities. Two collections of Yiddish proverbs from Ukraine, collected respectively by Baruch Hirga, an immigrant from Lviv, and Lev Kirtsman, an immigrant from Khmil’nyts’kii, are stored in the archives of proverbs at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, while narrative folklore is housed in the Israel Folktales Archives (IFA) named in honor of its founder Prof. Dov Noy. It was he who began the investigation of the Jewish-Ukrainian parallels in prosaic folklore, concentrating on Hucul folklore and paying primary attention to the image of Dovbush in Jewish folklore. Until recently all the stories from Ukraine were dispersed in the IFA among four different card indexes: Russia, Poland, Rumania and Hungary. It was only the author of the current book who formed a separate card index for Ukraine in 1992 (now it contains more than 800 texts) and embarked on systematic research into the life of folklore from Ukraine in Israel.
The first part of the book considers how Palestinian geography is reflected in Ukrainian folklore. Real geography is transformed into a legendary locus where Jerusalem is situated on the banks of the river Jordan. It is full of cedars (folk etymology of the toponym Kidron – kedr (cedar) in Ukrainian and Russian – or transformed memory about the Jewish Temple, built of cedars of Lebanon). Palestine’s geography is linked to or even identified with that of Ukraine: Kyiv is perceived as Jerusalem and the Dnieper as the river Jordan. Historical time is transformed into legendary: Samson the Hero is described as the son of King David (along with Solomon and Joseph) and is perceived as the destroyer of Jerusalem. This city is connected to Ukraine through caves and underground tunnels, and sometimes is seen as the land of the dead. The image of Jerusalem which is formed in Slavic folklore, mainly Russian and Ukrainian, influences the city’s perception by recent immigrants to Israel.
The second part of the book consists of three essays. The opening essay is devoted to Oleksa Dovbush (Dobush), an 18th -century Ukrainian national hero (1700-1745), a leader of opryshki – an anti-feudal and anti-Polish movement, and a Ukrainian Robin Hood. Following Dov Noy’s discovery of his image in Jewish Hasidic legends about the founder of the movement, the Ba’al Shem Tov (Ha-Besht), the author presents newly found Jewish sources on Dovbush as well as a Ukrainian version of his meeting with the Ba’al Shem Tov and a Ukrainian legend of a Jewish girl’s affection for the dying hero. Of special importance is an original poetic translation from Hebrew of Shimshon Meltzer’s ballad “Dobush and Ba’al Shem Tov”. The Jews considered Dovbush (Dobush) a repentant robber, while for the Ukrainians he is first of all an epic hero. Jewish folklore and fiction present an alternative biography of Dovbush, different from the versions known in Ukrainian culture. According to elements found in various sources, Dovbush was born to a widow, fed by the dog, and named by a Jew (the name Dovbush derives in this version from dov – (Hebrew for bear: the baby, being hairy, brought this animal to mind). In his maturity he was impressed by a Jewish saint (the Ba’al Shem Tov or Rabbi Arye), repented, and died in solitude. In still another version Dovbush perished because did not believe the saintly man’s warning. The migration of the Dovbush tradition to Jewish culture goes hand in hand with its adaptation to the new norms and the censorship of the elements that cannot be accepted by the new audience. The second essay is devoted to tales of ghosts and buried treasure (both legends and personal narratives) recorded by the author from a recent immigrant from Odessa, Oleksandr Stanovs’kyi. The narrator is a secular Jew married to a Ukrainian woman, they have a daughter. The couple speak Russian among themselves and at least partly Hebrew with the child. Although all the stories were told in Russian they undoubtedly originated from Ukraine. The stories and their versions from the Internet are analyzed in the context of Odessa regional studies, personal narrative research and comparative folklore about ghosts in mines and caves and about buried treasure. The material illustrates the living belief and narrative tradition imported from Ukraine to Israel. The last essay is devoted to the vernacular commentary on the Chornobyl disaster. Though folklorists have long known Chornobyl as a small Ukrainian town with diverse traditional cultures, from April 26, 1986 it became the symbol of nuclear disaster. Today “Chornobyl’s folklore” is defined exclusively in terms of those narrative forms that developed following the event. These forms include rumors, personal narratives, children’s games, jocular verses and jokes. Previous scholars have largely considered this material from the perspective of individual collections; this essay compares and analyzes comparative material collected in different countries (Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Israel) and in different languages, including material recorded in Israel from the immigrants from Ukraine by the current author. Chornobyl’s folklore is also compared with the humor that spread after the Middletown nuclear disaster in 1979, and the typological resemblance between the two has been traced. Particular attention is paid to the Hasidic element in Chornobyl folklore, where the explosion is perceived as a punishment for the desecration of a Jewish cemetery. The Chornobyl disaster proved to be one of the reasons for emigration from Ukraine to Israel.
The third part of the book discusses an incipient Ukrainian diaspora in Israel. It is based on the material of unfocused interviews with 44 immigrants and focused interviews with 12 immigrants from Ukraine (some interviews in Russian others in Ukrainian) and on participant observation of the functioning of Ukrainian language and culture in Israel. In the last few years Ukrainian has sometimes been heard on the streets of Israel, spoken by adults and children alike; Ukrainian actors visit Israel, and immigrants’ Ukrainian artistic groups are being created. Ukrainian can be seen on posters and billboards, and even in the press. In 2005 Sobornist’, an Israeli literary magazine in Ukrainian was launched. In sum, there are diverse signs of diaspora trends but they are not strong enough to produce positive results. Although many immigrants know Ukrainian to some extent, only a minority perceive it as their native language. Fewer still are ready to invest in its preservation. Others, including those nostalgically attached to Ukrainian cities, food, songs, and dances, feel no symbolic ties with the language itself and form part of the Russian-language Israeli community. In the absence of social and financial investment of the Ukrainian aspect the outlook for the rise of a distinct Ukrainian cultural diaspora in Israel is bleak.
In the afterword the author, a former Kyiv dweller and a Russian-speaking Israeli, confesses the reasons for her emigration from her native and highly cherished city, and reveals her personal way to Ukrainian studies in Israel.

Dr. Fialkova graduated from Kiev State Pedagogical Institute (Ukraine) and got her Ph.D. from the University of Tartu (Estonia). Dr. Larisa Fialkova has lived in Israel since 1991. She is a Senior Researcher in the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa, where she teaches various courses in Russian literature, Slavic and contemporary folklore. Among them are Folklore and Immigration, Folklore in the Era of High-tech, The Image of the Other in Folklore, and so on. She has written articles on Russian literature, as well as on Russian and Ukrainian folklore in English, Hebrew, Russian and Ukrainian. Her book “When Mountains Meet: Essays in Ukrainian-Israeli Folklore Studies” has been published by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 2007. In collaboration with M. Yelenevskaya she has written 18 essays and the book Ex-Soviets in Israel: From Personal Narratives to a Group Portrait published in 2007 by the Wayne State University Press, U.S.A. The extended Russian version of this book The Russian Street in the Jewish State: Investigation into the Folklore of Immigrants of the 1990s to Israel was published by the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2005 in Moscow.