At Home Abroad: New York to Chernivtsi
The longer I call Chernivtsi home, the more secrets it reveals to me.
I recently came across archival photos of Karl I of Austria-Hungary visiting Chernivtsi in August 1917. Back then, it was known as Czernowitz, one of the most diverse provinces in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ukrainians, Germans, Jews, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Armenians, and numerous other ethnic groups called it home and, by most accounts, lived together in relative harmony. The emperor’s visit was significant, as it occurred only a few days after the Russian imperial army had been driven out of the city. In the photos, the streets of the Central Square are packed with locals cheering him with bouquets of flowers. However, the celebration was short-lived. The Russian army would come to Chernivtsi for the third time, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire would collapse, leading to a tug-of-war over the historical lands of Bukovyna between the Kingdom of Romania and, later, the Soviets. Ever since the start of the 2022 Russian invasion, I became morbidly fascinated by this particular period of Chernivti’s history. As I watched the news of the horrors unfolding in other cities across Ukraine, I worried that we would be next, and that perhaps history could teach me what to expect.
There is one story from the imperial Russian army’s occupation of Chernivtsi that has always particularly stuck out to me. A sculpture of a double-headed eagle, the symbol of Austria’s power, stood in the Chernivtsi town hall. Even though Russian statehood has long been represented by the very same symbol, the Russian soldiers ordered local firemen to have it removed. However, the firemen refused. They came up with many excuses, some of them more mundane than others, such as the weather conditions being unsuitable for work. Fed up, the Russians did it themselves, temporarily placing the statue in the local police headquarters. Naturally, the clever firemen of Czernowitz resolved to steal it. They arrived at the police station in the dark of night, snatched up their beloved Austrian eagle, and hid it for safekeeping. When Austrian forces returned to the city, the fireman gleefully unveiled the statue and recounted all they had done to keep it out of Russian hands. The people of Czernowitz were, by all accounts I’ve read, baffled and amused by the Russian soldiers’ repeated attempts to take the city and present themselves as liberators.
When the Russians occupied Chernivtsi for the third time, they took the statue and sent it back to Russia, along with other priceless artifacts. I wonder if that Austrian eagle of Czernowitz still exists today. Is it sitting neglected in some town hall in Russia’s far east, where the people know nothing of its origins? Is it a town where Russian soldiers now send back laundry machines, women’s underwear, and other items they looted from the homes of people in Ukraine?
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My husband’s great-great-grandfather, Vasyl, was a revolutionary.
This is what his distant relative S. proudly told me at a family gathering shortly after the start of the invasion. Vasyl had been training to be a priest at the start of the twentieth century when the political upheavals unfolding around him transformed his religious devotion into a revolutionary fire. Even before that, I was fascinated by Vasyl, because this Ukrainian revolutionary had a Hungarian wife. They met in the twilight years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, fell in love, and moved to Bukovyna. Ágnes, otherwise known as “Anya,” learned Ukrainian (their common language prior to that had been German) and remained in Chernivtsi with their son Ivan even after Vasyl disappeared. I must confess that I don’t recall if it was during the time when the Romanians or the Russians were in power. Vasyl apparently had a strong disdain for both countries, given that they cemented their rule over the Chernivtsi region with violence, although it was said that he hated Russians more. Either way, we can say that his disappearance, along with many other Ukrainian revolutionaries during that time, points to murder.
Anya was already a very old woman when S., back then a curious child, knew her. She told me that even in old age, Anya spoke Ukrainian with a heavy Hungarian accent and often made humorous mistakes. But she loved Ukraine and called it home until the end of her days. My husband’s father’s line of the family became even more diverse, a living testament to fever dreams of a bygone era.
At the beginning of my relationship, I found myself having to prove to my husband’s family that the country of my birth wouldn’t be an obstacle to living a happy life together and had no impact on my choice of home. I had been living in Ukraine for only a year, and barely spoke the language. I was working as an English teacher, and not many foreigners live in Chernivtsi–especially not Americans–so everyone communicated with me in English because they wanted to improve their speaking skills. I’d allowed myself to become complacent. Working in Ukraine’s IT sphere, my husband spoke perfect English, but his family worried that our cultural differences meant we could never truly understand each other. I broke down in tears when I first learned about this, although my boss at the time pulled me aside and said, “You’ll understand once you become a mother.” My husband, who proclaimed that he didn’t care if I was from Planet Mars, let alone America, told me that he had no doubts about my ability to immerse myself in the culture. If I wanted to live in Ukraine, then I was going to become more Ukrainian. Why get upset about something that was so simple? They were all right, of course, each and every one of them. But learning about his great-great grandmother Anya’s existence offered me a source of comfort. I was not the first outsider to call Ukraine home–but here was someone in my husband’s own family! Whenever I became frustrated by challenges on the path to cultural assimilation, I told myself: if Anya could do it, so can you.
These days I try not to compare my husband and me to Vasyl and Anya too much. We are planning to start a family, God willing, and the fear of raising a child on my own, as Anya did, will persist for as long as Russian boots occupy Ukrainian soil. It cuts so deeply at my soul that I fear if, God forbid, it were ever to materialize, I would never be whole again. I want our story to have a happy ending.
*
There is still hope, nearly a year into the Russian invasion, that Chernivtsi will be spared the trials of centuries prior. The city has been left relatively unscathed, partly thanks to an absence of strategic military objects and its close proximity to the European Union. At the start of the invasion, more than a hundred thousand refugees from across Ukraine fled to Chernivtsi for safety. Even the most remote hotels were fully booked, and residents welcomed total strangers into their homes. The number of refugees in Chernivtsi has since dwindled, although quite a few remain. The rest have continued their journey westward into the European Union or returned to their homes in Central and East Ukraine, despite the dangers of going back. When asked why, the latter usually respond that they are afraid their sealed-up homes will be robbed, or they cannot find employment elsewhere. For example, the parents of the Kharkiv refugees who lived in my apartment now rent a place in Poltava and commute to Kharkiv , to work shifts at the local polyclinic where they practice medicine.
Chernivtsi, meanwhile, lives with a much different reality than Kharkiv, Kyiv, or even Lviv. It’s often as if war isn’t even happening here. Only when you glimpse clusters of military enlistment officers stopping men on the streets and asking for their documents or get interrupted by the shrill wail of an air raid siren is the illusion of peace shattered. To a certain extent, I sympathized with the elderly woman sitting a few rows in front of me at a poetry reading when she cried out, “Stop talking about the war! Please, stop talking about the war! I came to hear poems!” to the writer on stage. We are all struggling with survivor’s guilt on some level or other, wondering if we’re doing enough to help others get by. Is it wrong not to devote every waking moment of your life to the cause of Ukraine’s victory? Or does the fact that life carries on throughout the country serve as a testament to that? I am struggling with the answer myself, and cannot judge others too harshly. Yet that semblance of peace which hangs over Chernivtsi and elsewhere comes at a terrible price on the front–a price that many men and women from Chernivtsi are also paying when they volunteer to defend their home, unsure if they will ever have the chance to return.
In this past year, I’ve heard Chernivtsi’s air defense system at work only once. It was a muffled sound, one that I easily could have missed. More than half a year into the invasion, I, like most people in Chernivtsi, stopped seeking immediate shelter upon hearing the alarm. It was a stubborn act of defiance, after losing too many hours to dark and damp basements, only to reemerge drained of energy and annoyed. So instead of going to the basement, I was reading a book (Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, if memory serves me correctly) in bed, my cat Murka curled up next to me. I put down the book to check the time and read several notifications dating minutes prior from local Telegram channels: missiles were headed in the direction of the Chernivtsi region. Before I had the chance to process what I’d read, the blessed air defense system did its work, propelling Murka and me out of bed. With that sound also comes the reminder that the Transnistria, the breakaway region of Moldova long under Russian military occupation, is a stone’s throw away from Chernivtsi. Even though Odesa would likely be the main “prize” for the Russians, it is still possible to shell Chernivtsi–not to mention Chișinău, the Moldovan capital–from Tirasopol. If the past ten months have taught me anything, nothing is out of the question when it comes to Russian cruelty. Just when you think it couldn’t get worse, they prove you wrong.
*
Because of the war, many Russian-speaking Ukrainians decided to make the switch to communicating more or even exclusively in Ukrainian Contrary to common assumptions, a number of these Russian-speakers reside in the western part of the country. There are obvious reasons behind this linguistic idiosyncrasy. The Soviet Union claimed to be for diversity and the rights of all people, but their policy of assimilation through the Russian language and culture was achieved through periods of state-sponsored violence. Numerous minority groups within the territory of the Soviet Union, including Crimean Tatars, Koreans, and Chechens were treated as second-class citizens. Teachers of languages like Ukrainian were paid less than Russian teachers. These languages survived primarily in the villages surrounding cities, and were portrayed by the Soviets as provincial and backward in comparison to Russian. Anyone who wanted to “get ahead” in the Soviet Union had to aspire to become Russian. This complex continued to manifest in many people who came of age in the Soviet Union even long after Ukrainian independence.
I married into a family of Russian-speakers. Of course, they've always been able to speak Ukrainian–as I’m told by many people, my husband does so beautifully–but that was a language spoken at school and government offices, never at home. That didn’t mean I saw my husband or his family as any less Ukrainian than my friends in the literature world who long refused to have anything to do with the Russian language and culture. My husband has always been among the most patriotic Ukrainians I’ve ever met, telling me that he could never live anywhere else in the world, because Ukraine–and Chernivtsi in particular–is paradise on Earth.
War changed the way we look at a lot of things. When another country invades your home, denies the existence of your culture and heritage, and declares its intention to erase them from history, language suddenly becomes a weapon. Late one night, both my husband and I agreed that we would speak Ukrainian more often, and exclusively when we someday had children. It came after sitting at the dinner table in stunned silence following the news of the Bucha massacre and repeatedly seeing the image of that murdered woman’s perfectly manicured hand lying motionless on the ground, her set of keys with the European Union keychain cast off to the side. How could Russians call Ukrainians their “brothers” and commit such horrible atrocities against them? How could people claim this was only “Putin’s war” when it was ordinary men, wives and families waiting for them at home, who raped Ukrainian women in front of their children, tied up Ukrainian men and shot them in the back of the head? Who could blame anyone trying to distance themselves from that?
Chernivtsi has always been that city where you can walk down the street and hear several languages at once, sometimes in the same conversation. One year into the invasion you can still hear people speak Russian, but now less frequently. A language cannot disappear overnight, nor can decent people ban it. But many Russian-speaking Ukrainians are making the conscious choice to move closer to the Ukrainian language to finally separate themselves from Russia once and for all, to feel safe. These Russian-speaking Ukrainians do not want to be “saved” by the Russian army, nor do they want to be mistaken as Russians by anyone. They may not have seen any greater implications in continuing to speak Russian following Ukrainian independence, but the Russians did. And so this war showed many Russian-speaking Ukrainians that although they may not be interested in the so-called “Russian world,” it most certainly is interested in them.
No matter what, Chernivtsi was always and will always be a great city. The Soviet dissident, broadcaster, and Chernivtsi native Ihor Pomerantsev once told me he thought it was because of the people who called it home. Ernst Neubauer, the nineteenth-century Austrian poet was an example: following a failed revolutionary uprising against the empire, the young poet was sent to live and work in Chernivtsi as punishment. Neubauer referred to it as a “pedagogical penal colony,” Still, once there, he started Chernivtsi’s first German-language literary supplement and taught students of all backgrounds in the local schools. Among his students were a young Mihai Eminescu, who would go on to become the poet to modernize the Romanian language much like Taras Shevchenko did for the Ukrainian. Poet and folklorist Yuri Fedkovich praised Neubauer as his “intellectual master.” People like Neubauer embodied the spirit of this city, this borderland, where cultures meet but do not clash, and radical ideas are compelled into being.
This is why people like Pomerantsev, growing up in the Soviet Union, told me that the impressive nineteenth-century architecture of the city acted as a “vaccine” of sorts against the Soviets’ authoritarian way of thinking. While in 1945 the Red Army liberated Chernivtsi from the Axis Forces, Soviet control did not guarantee long term peace and prosperity for its residents. In 1947, Soviet authorities launched Operation West, deporting nearly 80,000 Ukrainians – mostly women, children, and the elderly – from across western Ukraine to Siberia, having accused them of “nationalist proclivities.” Countless families were ripped from the only home they’d known and forced to live in cold, distant lands, performing hard labor in unforgiving conditions. Many died along the way. Around 1,500 were from the Chernivtsi region. Many ethnic Romanians and Germans were also sent westward, and the Soviets began to rewrite the cultural code of the region. Chernivtsi became a mere shadow of its former self; still, there were always people who remembered what the city was, and what it had represented.
Those who are familiar with the history walk to the Theater Square and recall, with a grimace, that in the Second World War the Nazis decapitated the statue of Lenin and hung the flag of the Third Reich for all to see. Chernivtsi, once known to many as “Jerusalem on the Prut,” became a shadow of its former self. In Chernivtsi alone, some 100,000 Jews were sent to the camps by the Axis-allied Romanian authorities. But Traian Popovici, the Romanian mayor of the city, managed to save 20,000 Jews from deportation at great risk to his own life. Today, he is a hero of that everyone knows by name. People in Chernivtsi are also rediscovering the work of the great twentieth-century Jewish poet Paul Celan, who work is so deeply tied to his birthplace and what he witnessed here. This city–this borderland–has lost so much, but there is always someone who holds this history within them, and the knowledge that people here did incredible things. That means, despite the challenges Chernivtsi faces today, that not all hope is lost.
Today, Chernivtsi is a Ukrainian city with diverse roots. When I hear the Ukrainian language spoken so widely and openly on the streets during wartime, knowing everything that happened here in previous centuries, I think of it as a sort of cosmic justice. There will always be many languages spoken in Chernivtsi, but Ukrainians will not have to pay the ultimate price for preserving their culture–and people like my husband’s great-great grandfather did not die in vain.
*
In the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion, the US government encouraged all US citizens to leave Ukraine. A few Americans I know even said they received phone calls directly from the embassy in Kyiv. I had gone to the embassy once before, to renew my passport, so am pretty sure they had my phone number. But for some reason they didn’t call me. I waited and waited, thinking about what I would tell them. After a while I understood that they would never call, so I joked I was no longer seen as an expat but an honorary Ukrainian.
For all my worries, the thought of leaving had in fact never crossed my mind. I’ve called Ukraine my home for the past five years. What message would leaving have sent? When the war finally broke out, I decided to focus on the resources I had at my fingertips and aid Ukraine on the cultural front. I wrote articles highlighting the richness of Ukrainian culture, connected with editors at major magazines, and helped Ukrainian authors publish their passionate appeals to the world. But as frightening as it was during those first few weeks, I told myself that I had to do everything necessary to protect my home–that what was useful today might not be tomorrow and helping Ukraine could eventually mean having to take up arms.
Before moving to Ukraine, I met my fair share of Americans who lived in Eastern Europe in the nineties but never called it home. They were always intending to return from this place of adventure, a parallel universe of sorts where people looked similar to us but acted completely differently. Their tales were interesting, but I never wanted to be like them. The US may have been the country of my birth, but I spent most of my life feeling adrift and unhappy. I suppose that’s what drew me to foreign languages in the first place–studying French, Italian, then Russian, and finally, Ukrainian.
I’m always slightly embarrassed to admit that I’m from the United States, especially in Chernivtsi, where small-town gossip can lead to the wrong kind of public perception. A lot of expats I’ve encountered over the years practically wrap themselves in the American flag and expect to be treated accordingly. My feelings about where I come from were always more twisted and complicated. What is an American? Where does America begin and, more importantly, where does it end? I found a partial answer to this question lying in a Chernivtsi hospital bed before a minor surgical procedure. Being told by the doctor that I wasn’t Ukrainian, a nurse responded with a horrified look: “But I don’t speak Romanian!”
The American Dream is alive and well in Ukraine–many Ukrainians dream of moving there, or at least visiting. It might sound like a cliché, but I truly would be a rich woman if I had a dollar every time someone told me, “Ukrainians dream of moving to America…and an American chose to live here…?” It’s an open question that is always laced with confusion, doubt, and sometimes suspicion. I used to get so frustrated by this question that I would launch into a tirade against the United States, denouncing it as the so-called promised land for all its mass shootings, the debt-inducing medical and university systems, police brutality against minorities, unwarranted invasions of Middle Eastern countries, and a slew of other issues. These days I am a bit calmer because I understand that America means many different things to many different people. I also understand their skepticism on some level, because being an American does come with certain privileges that Ukrainians don’t have. To suggest otherwise would be insulting to them. For all its problems, America is a great place to live–it just isn’t my place. This dynamic between the United States and Ukraine has, of course, reached a new level since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion. Not only is America the country where Ukrainians dream of taking a cross-country road trip or making it big someday–it is also the country for which many are eternally grateful. Without America's efforts to rally the world and assist Ukraine in defending itself against Russia, our situation could have been much worse. When I returned to America for the first time in four years in December 2022 and saw how many Ukrainian flags were in the windows of New York City homes and businesses, even I became sentimental.
The longer I live in Ukraine, and the more I contribute to making my home a better place to live, the more Ukrainians’ skepticism in my choice has resided. Despite the hardships of life in Ukraine, people realize that it’s a place they’re proud to call home, too. A lot of Ukrainians, especially during wartime, tell me how much it means to them that someone who was born in America feels the same way. The greatest compliment for me these days is to be told that I have a “Ukrainian soul.”
Kate TSURKAN is an American writer, editor, and translator based in Ukraine. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Literary Hub and elsewhere. She is the founding editor of Apofenie Magazine.