Last week an acquaintance shared this interview with Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky, published in The Daily Princetonian. It’s a worthwhile read for a variety of reasons. In the precise, evocative language for which he is well known, Kaminsky traverses the terrain of deaf culture, language and the senses, belonging, citizenship and resistance and, perhaps most pointedly, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Kaminsky was, of course, born in Ukraine, in Odessa—a place that becomes important in the telling because Kaminsky is also Jewish, and because Odessa was where, in October 1941, approximately 30,000 Jews were massacred by Nazis and their Romanian collaborators. [At the time Odessa, like other parts of what is now Ukraine, including much of the former Bessarabia and Bukovina regions, was somewhat briefly under the control of Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu’s fascist regime, a reward for Antonescu’s alliance with Nazi Germany.] During the Holocaust a million or more Jews were murdered within the present-day borders of Ukraine, and significant numbers of Ukrainians contributed to the persecution and killings of Jews during the war.
One of the set-pieces of Russian propaganda hauled out to justify Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is the claim that Ukraine—nearly 80 years after the end of the Second World War—has a Nazi or Nazi-influenced government. In Canada, Russian propagandists (and their willing accomplices on the far right and among the ultra-left) have been very interested in targeting Deputy Prime Minster Chrystia Freeland, who is reportedly one of the masterminds coordinating sanctions against Russia -- but whose grandfather was also a Nazi collaborator in WWII-era Ukraine.
Here's the thing: a great many non-Jews of Ukrainian heritage have anti-Semites in their genealogical closet. This is the case in Ukraine, and Poland, and Romania, and in the former Austro-Hungarian empire, and in all the other European regions with a long history of Jewish settlement. Long before the Holocaust the soil of Eastern Europe was already awash in the blood of Jews murdered by the thousands in pogroms, even in the Pale of Settlement, that repeated with horrifying and yet tedious regularity for centuries. In this respect Chrystia Freeland is not remotely unique. What does make her unique is that, as a Ukrainian-Canadian who happens to be an expert on Russia and international finance, and who is also Deputy PM, she is ideally positioned to support western allies in their defense of Ukraine—and this is the reason she is targeted by pro-Putin puppets.
At the same time, after Germans, Ukrainians have done more to unseat anti-Semitism than any other region in Europe. Most of this, remarkably, and tellingly, has been accomplished since the collapse of the Soviet Union—which identified educated Jews as political enemies, repressed Jewish culture and religion, and drove many to emigrate (including Kaminsky’s family). Anyone who researches Jewish genealogy in present-day Ukraine, as I do, will share story after story of Ukrainians and Ukrainian communities who have helped restore graveyards, preserve historical documents, share information, provide translations -- this despite the uncomfortable reality that many of the cities non-Jewish Ukrainians now live in were, until 1941, centres of Jewish culture and identity. With the support of local Ukrainians, many Ukrainian cities—including Odessa, currently being bombed into ruins by Russia—have reestablished active Jewish communities that are again centres of identity and learning in cosmopolitan contemporary Ukraine. Or were until Putin invaded.
It is of course noteworthy that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish, and the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. [He is also reportedly the grandson of a high ranking WWII Soviet military officer, a fun fact Putin’s propagandists don’t seem interested in bringing up.] But his election in 2019 was not a surprise or fluke. A very large and wide-ranging Pew research study conducted in 2015-2016 found that out of all of Eastern Europe, Ukraine has the lowest level of ingrained anti-Semitism, at only 5%—far less than in Russia, where one in every six people polled told researchers they would refuse to accept Jews as fellow citizens. This is not to say that anti-Semitism does not exist in Ukraine—but it is Russia, not Ukraine, that has a problem with anti-Semitism, just as it is Russia, not Ukraine, that has invaded a sovereign country and is bombing hospitals and crushing civilians under its tanks.
Back to Ukrainian-American poet Kaminsky, who urges his interlocutor and readers to appreciate Ukraine for its beauty, complexity and openness:
[R]ight now on TV, everybody sees the images of violence and panic. And that is true, that is the reality of this moment. But Ukraine is also a beautiful country. [….] Just this morning, I’ve been in touch with somebody in Odessa. The person told me that they were afraid, but they also said it was a really quiet, sunlit morning for a moment. And there’s a lyric perception in that. And I don’t want to downplay it and just focus on the violence that Putin wants us to see. Because violence is the language that power wants us to see.
Kaminsky goes on to add, more pointedly:
[T]he project of the empires is to dull the senses. That’s why Putin is sending tanks to Ukraine. Ukraine is free; they question their own government, they have conversations. I’m not saying Ukraine is an easy country. It is not. But it is open. Putin is afraid of that. Same with the dictator in Belarus, Lukashenko, who is Putin’s ally. He’s very uncomfortable with Ukraine because it inspires his own people to protest. Ukraine is full of colors, full of senses, full of willingness to ask uncomfortable questions. Empire wants to dull the senses, but the purpose of a poet is to wake them up.
As a geographer, I am of course drawn to spatial metaphors. And the reality that Putin’s invasion is an attempt to close an open country, to shut down and destroy the very things that make Ukraine, well, Ukraine, leads me almost immediately to think of the work of geographer Robert Sack. In a remarkable, influential book called A Geographical Guide to the Real and the Good (Routledge, 2003), Sack advances a geographic theory of morality based on two principal insights:
The first intrinsic geographic judgment, based on the goodness of being more rather than less aware of reality, takes the form of encouraging us to create and value places that heighten our awareness of the real and that share this awareness openly and publicly. [….] the second intrinsic geographic judgment, based on the goodness of a reality that is complex and varied over one that is simple and monotonous, takes the form of encouraging us to create and value places that increase the variety and complexity of the real. [2003: 24]
Sack’s argument, grounded in the language of moral philosophy, is complex, but it can be applied in a straightforward manner to evaluate almost any experience of place. Most places, as Sack notes, are morally mixed, but some places can clearly and unequivocally be called evil. Evil places, Sack argues, narrow and obscure our vision (Sack suggests this defines places dominated by secrecy and coercion, that cut themselves off from the rest of the world; e.g., North Korea); diminish the variety and complexity of place; assert control over other places; and transgress both instrumental and intrinsic ways of valuing place.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is meant to accomplish all of these things—not only to cut Ukraine off from the west but to deny Ukrainians their very existence as Ukrainians; and to reduce Ukraine to a mere appendage of his wished-for empire, the one he believes was lost when the Soviet Union collapsed, brought down by its internal contradictions and the will of its subjugated satellites—including and perhaps especially Ukraine—to be free. [Addendum: Last night while flipping through newsfeeds I heard a Russian expert argue persuasively that Putin is actually seeking a return not so much to the Soviet borders but more particularly to Tsarist Russia’s Rusyfikatsiya Ukrainy rubric—another subject his western propagandists on the far left seem to avoid, given how it contradicts narratives of class struggle and the rise of the heroic Soviet Union of which Putin is merely the latter-day guardian, etc. etc.]
But the invasion of Ukraine is not only about Ukraine. In many ways it is about the future of the west. It is very telling that Putin’s propagandists are engaged in a campaign not so much against Ukraine—no one in Ukraine is remotely interested in Russian propaganda, and few in the west believe Putin’s claims that he is “denazifying” or “liberating” Ukraine—but against the foundations of western liberal democracy itself.
Barraged for years by conspiracy claims, misinformation campaigns and ideological warfare conducted mainly via social media—much of it originating with Russia-backed troll farms—westerners, particularly in North America, have lost faith in some of the institutions of liberal democracy. It doesn’t help that print newspapers—vital sources of information and perspective—have been in decline for two decades, nor that broadcast news has been taken over increasingly by ideologically committed pundits too busy tilting at each other to care very much about informing the viewing public. There is so much noise that it overwhelms the signal, and so many of us have stopped bothering to listen at all.
However, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine—praised exultantly by voices on the far right and ultra-left until criticism forced most either to double down or equivocate—may have been a bridge too far. People in the west have not entirely lost our capacity for critical thought, it seems, and an invader prepared to deny a country its sovereignty, and to bomb nuclear power plants and kill fleeing families with mortar rounds is still identifiable as an enemy acting against humanity.
Are we awake now? Have we remembered how to listen?
To answer this question it seems relevant to turn again to Kaminsky, whose books Dancing in Odessa (Tulepo Press, 2004) and Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019), have won wide acclaim and numerous awards. Both books are notable for their deft use of language to evoke multisensory experiences connected, at every turn of phrase, to shared and referential meaning—unusual in an era when poetry has given itself over increasingly to onanistic levels of insularity, performances of identity and fetishistic fixations with form. Reviewers and media commentators have made much of Kaminsky’s near deafness (Kaminsky is in fact an advocate of deaf culture), but in focusing on his deafness (or Jewishness, or experiences as an immigrant) for their significance as mediators of Kaminsky’s particular identity, as if his poetry is mainly about being deaf (or Jewish, or an immigrant), commentators have in many cases missed the point.
In Deaf Republic, occupying soldiers shoot a deaf boy to death during a puppet show and his Eastern European village responds by adopting deafness as a collective identity and form of resistance. What they ultimately achieve remains uncertain, or at least incomplete, when first there is so much horror and then so much forgetting and when finally the distractions of what eventually seems like peace impose their own forms of silence. Later in the book he writes,
Our country has surrendered.
Years later, some will say none of this happened; the shops were open, we were happy and went to see puppet shows in the park.
And yet—even despite the salving amnesia of forgetting—once awakened, once alert, it becomes impossible to return entirely or easily to sleep. Resistance begets resistance; something persists—some trace of memory, some desire to remember, a bulwark against forgetting:
And yet, on some nights, townspeople dim the lights and teach their children to sign. Our country is the stage: when patrols march, we sit on our hands. Don’t be afraid, a child signs to a tree, a door.
When patrols march, the avenues empty. Air empties, but for the squeaks of strings and the tap tap of wooden fists against the walls.
“What is silence,” Kaminsky’s narrator asks, and answers: “Something of the sky in us.”
Deaf Republic is bookended by paired poems referencing western—particularly American—forgetting. One of them, “We Lived Happily during the War,” made the rounds on social media the day of the invasion, where it seemed to serve as an acceptable samokritika requiring little of the reader other than to hand-wring a little and click out a retweet. But Deaf Republic, as a whole, is about the agency that events force upon us, the urgency that pushes its way into our complacency and our culpability: at some point we—and we in the west in particular—need to remember all the ways there are to hear.