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In the Textual World of Twenty-First-Century Holocaust Literature

The Multidirectional Turn in the Literature about Holocaust in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine (On the Material of Sofia Andrukhovych’s Amadoka)

Yuliya Ilchuk
p. 125–142

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The contested historical memory of the Second World War in Ukraine has exposed an uneasy transition from an ethnolinguistic type of national identity to the idea of Ukraine as a political nation, expedited with the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. Many Ukrainian writers of non-Jewish origin began to write about the fate of Ukrainian Jews during the Holocaust. If a previous generation of post-Soviet Ukrainian writers have embedded Jewish characters and subplots about the Holocaust into their historical novels about colonization by the Soviet Union and the national struggle for independence during the war, the new generation of writers reveals a shift from the idea of a homogeneous “national memory” to an idea of the “multidirectional” memory of the Second World War which had a profound traumatic impact on all actors involved in it. The growing interest among non-Jewish Ukrainian writers in the contested history of the Holocaust has been shaped by the unexpected affinity seen between the suffering of Ukrainians at present and of Jews in the past, which unifies them in collective victimhood. This paper examines the contested memory of the Holocaust in Sofia Andrukhovych’s novel Amadoka (2020). The writer develops a complex narrative structure that captures the traumatic memory of Second World War from the perspective of different actors, showing that the extermination of Jews in Buczacz was a communal tragedy that can be represented only through a polyphonic act of remembrance taking place on a shared if uneven terrain. Employing two concepts from memory studies – dismemory and Postmemory – the analysis of the narrative construction of traumatic memory in Amadoka aims to show how literary narrative can capture trauma, on the one hand, and how trauma can shape identity, on the other.

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DOI: 10.18318/td.2024.en.1.8

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  • 1 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Group, 2006), 803.
  • 2 This issue has been studied by Tarik Cyril Amar, “A Disturbed Silence: Discourse on the Holocaust i (...)
  • 3 George Schopflin, The Dilemmas of Identity (Tallinn: Tallinn University Press, 2010), 102.
  • 4 Anatoly Kuznetsov, “Babi Yar. Roman-dokument,” Iunost 8–9 (1996).
  • 5 Aleksandra Ubertowska, “’Spectral Stories:’ Fictional Re-Inventions of the Holocaust in Polish Lite (...)
  • 6 John-Paul Himka, “Obstacles to the Integration of the Holocaust into Post-Communist East European H (...)
  • 7 The Ukrainian sociologist Anna Chebotarova has conducted an in-depth qualitative survey of the memo (...)
  • 8 Towards the end of The Drowned and The Saved, Primo Levi introduces the concept of a “grey zone,” w (...)

1Holocaust remembrance has become a “contemporary entry ticket” for the recent East European members to the European Union, with Ukraine being no exception.1 Although Jewish Studies programs, research institutions, and Holocaust memorial centers have been created in Ukraine since 1991, the development of the Holocaust studies have proceeded relatively slowly due to the phenomenon of competing victimhood, which treats the Ukrainian victims by Bolsheviks and Jewish victims by Nazis as rivals.2 The official discourse of the national memory in post-Soviet Ukraine before 2014 followed the one established in Poland and Baltic countries: it portrayed Ukraine as a victim of both totalitarian regimes, Nazi and communist. Only recently scholars have emphasized that when studying the history of the Holocaust and Communism in Eastern Europe, one needs to avoid putting them into the framework of a symmetry theory or of comparative martyrology. “Victimhood locks the identity in question into a discourse that focuses on past suffering, on a unique suffering, but offers a clarity of identity by delimiting it very emphatically from others in the same political or territorial space, by attempting to transcend both.”3 While the Holocaust has found its way in Ukraine’s public memory after the publication of Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel (1966),4 it remained marginalized in a way that does not undermine the image of the suffering Ukrainian people.5 Scholars have also pointed to the objective factors in Eastern Europe’s, and in particular, in Ukraine’s relative disinterest in the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka has noted the almost complete absence of Jews across Eastern Europe.6 The “shield memory” of the Holocaust was mostly the product of the Soviet policy of silencing the fact of Jews mass murders. Furthermore, because most of the witnesses died, emigrated, or given up on telling what they knew, in the public memory of Ukraine, the Holocaust remains a distant event that happened to people who are vanished from the national memory.7 It could be said that the memory of the Holocaust in Ukraine still exists in what Primo Levi defined as the “grey zone” of extreme moral ambiguity.8 Although Levi used this idea to describe the moral concession of Jews in concentration and extermination camps, the “grey zone” can be applied to any decisions that an occupied populace is forced to make in order to survive. For Western Ukrainians, the price exacted was collaboration with the SS, including the killing of their Jewish neighbors. Just as the Jewish revolt of 1943 was obscured from the Polish national memory by the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1944, so the Buczacz massacre of the Jews in which elements of the local populace a played key role was obscured by the national-liberation struggle against both Nazis and Soviets.

  • 9 Olha Duchyminska, Eti (Lviv: Vilna Ukraїna, 1945).
  • 10 Dokia Humenna, Khreshchatyi yar: roman-khronika (New York: Slovo, 1956).
  • 11 Although the OUN’s ideology did not advocate antisemitism and racism, many of the OUN members who i (...)

2Ukrainian prose fiction about the Holocaust has had a long and troubled history because of the Soviet policy of silencing the tragedy of Ukrainian Jews. One of the first fictional narratives – Olha Duchyminska’s novella Eti (1945)9 – depicted the fate of a Jewish woman hiding out in a Ukrainian village after the 1941 pogrom in Lviv. The novel was condemned by Soviet critics and never reprinted in the USSR; its author was falsely accused and sentenced to 25 years in a labor camp. The next novel to appear, Khreshchatyi yar: roman-khronika (Khreshchatyk Ravine: Novel-Chronicle, 1941–1943)10 by Dokia Humenna, was published in the United States in 1956 and remained unknown to the Soviet audience until the 1990s. The novel chronicled 788 days in the life of Marianna (an alter ego of the author) in occupied Kyiv, providing an idiosyncratic account of changing attitudes among locals towards the Nazis. The novel presented subjective opinions and rumors of the residents relayed by the protagonist-narrator. Being both anti-Soviet and anti-Nazi simultaneously, Humenna rejected the narrow conception of the nation and criticized the nationalist ideology of the OUN during the war.11 She captured the tragic fate of the Kyivan Jews as unique and, for the first time, mentioned the role of Ukrainians as witnesses, bystanders, and perpetrators of the crimes against Jews. Only with the publication of Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar in 1966 (although with significant editorial cuts), the Soviet audience learned about the history of the Holocaust in Kyiv. Despite a few positive initial reviews, the novel was viciously attacked by the critics who discerned in it a deliberate singling out of Jewish victims over other Soviet people during Second World War. This attitude was symptomatic during the 1960s, given the late Stalinist campaign against “cosmopolitanism” (that was overtly anti-Semitic) and the revival of the Russian nationalist discourse concerning the Great Patriotic War which glorified the suffering of Russians in the war and thus denied the Jewish character of Babyn Yar.

  • 12 In contemporary Ukrainian literature, the theme of the Holocaust is especially popular among women (...)
  • 13 Anna Chebotarova, “Mediating a Dissonant Past: Holocaust in Post-Soviet Fiction in Ukraine.” A pape (...)
  • 14 Marianna Kiyanovs’ka, Babyn Iar. Holosamy (Kyiv: Dukh i Litera, 2017).
  • 15 The poet speaks about this experience in her interview “Holosy Babynoho Iaru ozhyly u poeziї Mar’ia (...)

3During the late Soviet period, the topic of the Holocaust remained underrepresented due to the Communist party’s directive to avoid national particularism. Only after 1991 with the opening of KGB archives and relaxing of the censorship Ukrainian authors began researching and writing about the Jewish tragedy. In post-Soviet Ukrainian literature, the Jewish theme gradually entered a literary discourse preoccupied with issues of otherness, diversity, national identity, and trauma. Ukrainian women writers have included events of the Holocaust in the form of the stories of rescuing Jews in their historical novels.12 Overall, in the Ukrainian prose fiction published between 1991 and 2021 the topic of the Holocaust has appeared in about one-third of the historical fiction about the war.13 As the number of the historical novels has doubled since the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, the ratio of the Holocaust literature has proportionally increased too. After 2014, literary methods and plots dealing with the Holocaust has become more inclusive, ambivalent, and multidirectional, demonstrating the transition of the Ukrainian society from the ethno-linguistic concept of nationhood to the idea of Ukraine as a political. This change can be partially attributed to the literary development of the Holocaust literature by non-Jewish Ukrainian writers, who discovered an unexpected affinity between the suffering of Ukrainians during the ongoing war with Russia and that of Jews during WWII. For example, Marianna Kiyanovs’ka has called among the reasons for writing her cycle of poetry The Voices of Babyn Yar (2017)14 her own engagement in volunteer activities in East Ukraine during 2014–2016 and her near-death experience on the front line.15 Apparently, life under the signs of loss and destruction during Second World War resonates acutely with the current losses during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with the displacement of refugees, with collaborationism of the local population with the Russian authorities in occupied territory; and with stigmatization of those who stay in occupied territory as “enemies.” Obviously, the war not only dismembers the nation but also unites it around a common project directed toward creating the usable past for the future project of restoration of the society after the war. Similar survival tactics under the Polish, Nazi, and Soviet regimes had united the community in Ukraine during Second World War. The acknowledgment of traumas experienced by all members of the community involved in multi-sided military conflicts has shaped the memory landscapes in Ukraine, enabling the artists to revise the traditional division of the community into “victims,” “perpetrators,” and “participants” from the position of the implicated subject. Thus, in the contemporary Ukrainian literature about the Holocaust the diachronic (historical) dimension of the national memory has intersected with synchronic (contemporary) structure of identity-formation of Ukrainians as a political nation, divesting the previously polar opposition of “victim” vs. “perpetrator” of its categorical meaning and challenging the moral universalism prevalent in the Holocaust studies.

  • 16 Sofia Andrukhovych, Amadoka (Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo Staroho Leva, 2020).
  • 17 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization ( (...)
  • 18 Omer Bartov, Anatomy of Genocide: The Life and Death of Town Called Buczacz (New York: Simon and Sc (...)
  • 19 Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (New York: (...)
  • 20 Hanna Krall, The Woman from Hamburg: and Other True Stories, trans. Madeline G. Levine (New York: O (...)
  • 21 Winfried Georg Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library / Random House, 200 (...)
  • 22 Imre Kertész, Sorstalanság (Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, 1975)
  • 23 Sofia Andrukhovych, “Koly liudyna povertae sobi spohady, vona povertae sobi sebe” [When a person re (...)
  • 24 Omer Bartov, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton, NJ: Prin (...)
  • 25 Omer Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (New York: Simon & (...)

4This paper examines the memory work in Sofia Andrukhovych’s novel Amadoka (2020),16 exhibited in a kaleidoscopic narrative world with both victims’, passers-by, and perpetrators’ points of view intertwining in an “implicated subject” position. My reading of Andrukhovych’s novel is informed by Michael Rothberg’s concepts of the “implicated subject” and “multidirectional memory” which capture the interference, overlap, and mutual constitution of the seemingly distinct collective memories.17 The model of multidirectional memory presented in Amadoka marks a drastic break from the nationally centered idea of the historical memory of the Second World War, by creating a more complex dynamics of remembrance and forgetting. The novel unfolds the tragedy of Jews during the massacre in Buczacz as communal, which can be represented only through a polyphonic act of remembrance happening on a shared, but uneven terrain. Sofia Andrukhovych’s approach to the history of the Holocaust was shaped by several sources: Omer Bartov’s monograph Anatomy of Genocide: The Life and Death of Town Called Buczacz (2018)18; Philippe Sands’s historical memoir East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (2017)19; essays about the Holocaust in Poland written by the Polish journalist Hanna Krall20; W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz (2001),21 and Imre Kertész’s novel Fatelessness (1975)22. Of these diverse sources, Bartov’s microhistory study of the Holocaust in Buczacz influenced Andrukhovych’s23 multiperspective narration in the novel the most. Bartov’s earlier monograph Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (2007)24 has been received very critically by most historians both in Ukraine and in the West. In his recent monograph Anatomy of a Genocide, Bartov has revised his approach from singling out the unsystematic cases of Ukrainians’ collaborationism with Nazis to giving voice to various agents of the tragic event. Delving into the history of interwar tension between Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians; of Polish and Ukrainian nationalism; of the successive Soviet deportations of Poles and Jews; and of the Nazis’ “Final Solution,” the scholar shows how in a tightly knit community the “intimacy of friendships” was quickly transformed into the “intimacy of violence.”25 In Buczacz, according to Bartov, the genocide of the Jews was not only organized by the central perpetrator forces, Nazis, but also happened spontaneously, on the spot, performed by the Jews’ long-time Polish and Ukrainian neighbors. Bartov discerns some random patterns of rescuing Jews after the organized extermination, when “protectors” could become abusers or perpetrators – rescuers, depending on life-threatening circumstances. Thus, Bartov significantly altered the conclusions of his first book on the genocide in Buczacz by foregrounding the ambivalence of goodness. One of the most important contributions of Bartov’s works to the study of the Holocaust is his examination of the mechanisms how the collective trauma of the war selectively repressed dark episodes of Jews’ genocide. The arbitrary remembering and selective forgetting of the past by passers-by and witnesses, according to Bartov, binds them in a certain mnemonic community and ensures the continuity of social memory.

5 In Amadoka, the writer gives voice to all parties involved in the Buczacz tragedy – perpetrators, victims, local participants, and eyewitnesses. But as a novelist, Andrukhovych also uses a range of artistic devices and narrative strategies to capture the tragedy from the bottom-up way: Biblical metaphors and hidden literary subtexts, alternating focalization, dispersion of narrative authority among multiple narrative voices, unreliable narration, and photographic ekphrasis. In the literary representation of the communal trauma in Amadoka, two concepts from memory studies – dismemory and postmemory – work hand in hand. The former describes the ability of people involved on opposite sides of deadly violence to forget; the latter captures the urge of the communities to remember. In the process of communities’ recovering from a traumatic experience the role of storytelling in facilitating both forgetting and remembering is crucial. As Andrukhovych has commented on the function of storytelling:

  • 26 Mark Livin, “Pam’iat’ i zabuttia. Pro shcho nova velyka knyha Sofiї Andrukhovych – poiasniuie avtor (...)

Amadoka is a novel not so much about historical events as about telling stories. What is important here is not historical facts, not their authenticity, but an attempt to clarify how we treat our own and other people’s memories of events and experiences. Storytelling is one of the mechanisms of protecting a weak, fragile, and sensitive person torn apart by circumstances, by the power of other people, and by his/her own weaknesses. Creating a story is weaving one’s own version of the world, fractured as much as the weaver himself/herself. A human being seeks his/her own integrity by creating a myth. A myth about oneself, about one’s loves and sins, about one’s guilt and virtue, about the world and its laws. And this verbal weaving has so many meanings, so many reasons for its appearance: it softens and protects, explains and fills in, evens sharp edges, hides the destructive truth, and communicates the truth in a way that may finally be accepted [by society], in a way that makes it less destructive… Storytelling unites people, connects the subjects of history, near and far, the narrator and the audience. Storytelling is an expression of love. Amadoka is a novel about how everyone needs and seeks love, and about how confusing the path of the search can be.26

  • 27 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 53.
  • 28 Cathy Caruth and Geoffrey Hartman, “An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman,” Studies in Romanticism 35( (...)
  • 29 Hartman’s use of the Greek myth of Philomela perfectly illustrates the power of artistic imagery in (...)

6The writer understands storytelling not so much as a fictional representation of the past, but as a powerful tool of intergenerational communication. The process of remembering becomes a process of communicating through the medium of storytelling, which establishes what Homi Bhabha called “the pact of interpretation” which “is never simply an act of communication between the I and the You,” but a way of telling for and through oneself.27 Literary discourse has a special ability to communicate trauma that non-literary language does not. “Direct” representation of trauma in historically objective accounts cannot fully capture trauma’s effect on human psyche; it deadens us to survivors’ horrifying experiences.28 The historians (Hartman, LaCapra, Hilberg) agree that although nonliterary accounts can record traumatic experience with detailed accuracy, they cannot directly communicate trauma. But literature can evoke loss even if that loss is inarticulable and muted.29

7In a complex interwoven narrative that comprises first-person accounts of eyewitnesses, third-person intradiegetic narration, verbal photography, and docufiction, Andrukhovych tests the limits of the narrative representation of trauma. One aspect of this involves showing the actual violence of the event and its rippling traumatic effect, another – revealing the epistemic violence that often structures the way the traumatic event is represented, or suppressed, by official narrative. The writer shifts the focus from the ethics and limits of representation to the constitutive role of imagination in representing the Holocaust to the communities that did not retain memory of it.

Narrative and Structure

  • 30 Amadoka appears on the maps created by Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD, but not as the la (...)

8The title of the novel – Amadoka – refers to the biggest lake in Europe, that presumably existed on European maps until the seventeenth century. It was located in the lower estuary of the Dniester River, that is, in Podolia, where the events of Part Two of the novel take place.30 The legend of the vanished lake is introduced in the beginning of the novel by the Jewish boy Pinchas Birnbaum to his Ukrainian friend Uliana Frasuliak, the protagonists of Part Two. Pinchas genuinely believes that the lake existed in reality and that it either ran dry or sank into the earth during the neotectonic shifts that shaped the terrain of Podolia. In the symbolic system of the whole novel, the evaporated lake signifies simultaneously the vanished Jewish community of Buczacz, the destroyed culture of Ukrainian Modernism (which constitutes the plotline of Part Three), and the Ukrainians’ loss of statehood in the 1920s. The motif of vanished, unreliable memory or memory-phantom runs through the entire novel resulting in the mythologization of the war as an event lost somewhere in the mists of time. Memory slips and gaps, like the vanished lake Amadoka, erase the collective responsibility for the crimes committed during the war, so only through the individual act of remembering the past can be restored and evaluated by the contemporary subject. The search for the truth of the family past by the contemporary protagonist “Bohdan,” suffering from dissociative amnesia, structures the intricate plot of the novel. The novel comprises two temporal planes. The first plotline (Parts One and Three) takes place in post-Euromaidan Ukraine and centers on the loss and recovery of memory of the wounded soldier deemed “Bohdan” through the storytelling of his “wife” Romana. The second plotline (Part Two) captures “Bohdan’s” family history living through the war and the Holocaust in Buczacz; and the third plotline (the middle part of Part Three), written in the genre of docufiction, is dedicated to the different fates of Ukrainian modernist writers – Mykola Zerov and Victor Petrov/Domontovych – married to the same women Sofia. Connected by many recurring motifs and images, the three parts feature three protagonists dealing with the aftereffects of trauma on their memory and identity. The protagonist of the first plotline, “Bohdan,” survived the combat during the war in Donbas, but lost his memory. The protagonist of the second plotline, Bohdan’s grandmother Uliana, survived Second World War but murdered her beloved Pinchas – a fact which she wants to erase from her memory. The protagonist of the third plotline, Sofia Zerova, has survived the death of her son and execution of her husband.

9All the events in the first and second plotlines are narrated by the fictitious character-narrator Romana. As an archivist librarian, she deals with fragments of the historical documents gathering them into a coherent past, but she herself does not have a past, because, as her name suggests, she is the discourse itself. One day a man with the suitcases full of family papers and photo albums shows up in the archive. He is an archaeologist, Bohdan Kryvodiak, who wants to donate these materials to the archive before going to the war in Eastern Ukraine. Out of these photographs and letters Romana fabricates the family history of the Frasuliaks-Kryvodiaks and presents it to the amnesiac “Bohdan,” whom she accidentally finds in the hospital and misrepresents to the authorities as her husband. The real Bohdan appears in the novel twice – in the beginning and briefly in the end – only to verify that the wounded warrior is not the real Bohdan. Thus, all the stories about Bohdan’s family and Buczacz’s tragedy are invented by Romana and recounted in her own words. By composing and arranging the events of “Bohdan’s” past she replaces his lost episodic memory with a coherent narrative memory, which aimed to collect his Ukrainian identity from scratch, but in the end, it generated anamnesis and reconstructed his pro-Soviet identity. By restoring a connection to the past narrative memory evidently changes the present. The failure to invent “Bohdan’s” memory in the act of storytelling underlines not only the whimsical working of memory but also the fact that preservation of the past is always already a reworking of what has been stored there. Viewed within the broader concept of social memory, the reconstruction of the Holocaust events in the historical consciousness is always an unfinished process. This process at work is realized in the novel through a shifting focalization from one character to another in Part Two of the novel.

10Each section of Part Two is presented by about twenty identifiable focalizers: Jewish victims (Pinchas, his parents, and sister) and their Ukrainian neighbors-witnesses (the Frasuliaks), Ukrainian policemen, nurses, fighters of the UPA, and so on. The exposition to the Buczacz chapters of Part Two is told from the perspective and through the voice of Romana. She questions her narrative authority with phrases like “probably,” “it seems to me,” “I can tell you very little about your parents…,” yet asserts control over the historical truth by narrative means. First, she openly acknowledges the limits of her own knowledge of the past, which creates an impression of self-reflexivity and prompts the reader into treating her story as reliable. Introducing the family photos to “Bohdan,” Romana follows a reverse chronological order: from the funeral of his grandmother Uliana back to her childhood during the pre-war and wartime periods. Thus, Romana establishes narrative authority by freely moving from more recent and verifiable events to more distant and obliterated from the family memory. Then, with the shifts in focalization to other actors of the Buczacz tragedy, Romana’s narrative authority is constantly challenged, which is projected further to show the fallibility of both the participants’ and perpetrators’ accounts of the Holocaust.

  • 31 Sofia Andrukhovych, Amadoka (Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo Staroho Leva, 2020), 239.

11Unlike a historical account, the medium of literature can offer both an observation and reflection on the observing process. Amadoka offers a self- and meta-reflexive engagement with memory, both individual and historical. Readers must constantly connect some insignificant detail or event mentioned in the beginning of the novel with their occurrence later to understand the “butterfly effect.” Although proven as wrong in quantum physics, the butterfly effect is used in sociology to show that even the slightest change in a starting point can lead to greatly different results or outcomes. This effect appears in the episodes in with the knives used by Pinchas’s father Avel: in the beginning of Part Two as the tools for slaughtering cows so that they go through minimal suffering, and in the end of Part Two as a weapon which Uliana uses to immolate Pinchas. The “butterfly effect” is also evident in the motif of the forbidden love (from the point of view of a traditional patriarchal society) between a Jewish boy and a Ukrainian girl that causes a disruption of the social fabric in the local community and eventually leads to the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust. The unspoken rules of a centuries-long co-existence of Jews and Christians are taught to Uliana by Avel earlier in Part Two: “The Universe is ordered, and it is ordered, fortunately, not by people. If you preserve the order as it is, a man can live happily and quietly to his own and others’ happiness. There are things which have no harm at first sight, but which are impossible, one cannot let them happen. There are paths that can never intersect. There are worlds that can only exist apart from each other.”31 From Uliana’s perspective, then, her murder of Pinchas signifies the restoration of a broken world order and a rescue of the community from further deaths of Jews.

12The aporia between different versions of the truth is used as a mode of ethical representation of the historical tragedy of the Holocaust and Uliana’s personal tragedy. The inconsistency of traumatic memory results from the rift between personal and historical truth. “Knowing” and “not-knowing” acquire different meanings in the novel depending on the temporal distance to the past. Uliana’s father Vasyl Frasuliak served in the auxiliary police in Buczacz during Second World War, assisting Nazis in their mass killing of Jews. Based on Uliana’s memory, her father could not kill Jews, he rescued them. His service in the police is presented by her as a forced act of compliance: he was only involved in digging the ravine and escorting Jews to the site. His neighbors, however, present a different perspective on his collaboration with the Nazis: some remember him rescuing Jews, but nobody witnessed his good deeds first-hand. It appears that the unknown, unnarratable personal truth could only have been revealed by the presence of a witness to the event, and since there is no survived witnesses to Frasuliak’s crimes or to his rescue of Jews, the justification of his past behavior resides only in readers’ acceptance of personal truth as a historical truth. In contrast to the witnesses of Vasyl Frasuliak’s alleged good deeds and crimes, the only witnesses to the crime committed by Uliana are ones who are distanced from the actual event: the contemporary narrator Romana, her amnesiac husband “Bohdan,” and readers. Uliana blames “war, hardship and the alien regime” for the atrocities, but never the concrete individuals. Following the logic that wartime depravity was fueled by politically motivated anger, the narrator writes from Uliana’s perspective:

  • 32 Ibid., 261. All translations of Amadoka are mine.

She did not believe that they could exterminate each other. She did not believe that [Jews – author’s note] were intentionally and viciously denounced. “No,” she said, “on the contrary, they hid [Jews – Y. I.] in their houses, fed and helped them.” She did not believe the fact that her Ukrainian teacher ran into the house of the Jewish neighbors with an axe. She said, “My Jewish friend said that she recognized her, that she saw her through the wood boards in the barn where she was hiding. But I did not believe her. She was a good teacher, madam Lesia. She loved to sing.” And she also did not believe that Mikhas’ Kasivchak enlisted himself in the SS Galizien division to take revenge on the German teacher who failed him three times. “He was not stupid, just had a very strong accent. Mrs. Fink did not like this.” […] She did not believe that Ukrainians together with Jews helped Bolsheviks to deport Poles. “Quite contrary,” she said, “you see that many of those who were sent to Siberia – although they were separated from their children and starved to death – survived [the Holocaust –Y. I.]. And not only Poles and Ukrainians, but many Jews managed to survive [in Siberia –Y. I.]. If they had not been deported there, they would have been lying in the Fedora pit… She did not believe that our guys, who served in the police, most willingly carried out Nazis’ orders against Jews. That after each raid peasants rushed to the city to loot Jews’ homes. That they hid fugitives for money, and then turned them in to the police. They had to go to the police because they had to survive somehow. But they did not do any harm [to Jews – Y. I.]. Sometimes they even defended them when they could. Rescued them.32

  • 33 See Chebotarova, “Collective Memory of the Holocaust in Post-Soviet Ukraine.”

13In a series of statements of disbelief in her neighbors’ crimes she seeks excuses for their behavior. The repetition of “She did not believe that…” exposes the popular disbelief in the community’s responsibility for the Holocaust. It is based on a recurrent pattern in the actual responses of Ukrainian eyewitnesses during their interviews, who emphasized tolerating and rescuing Jews “no matter” what.33 Uliana’s memory account presents a clever balance between recognizing the fact of Ukrainians’ collaboration with Nazis because of the fatal danger of not doing it and denying their deliberate intent in reporting on Jews and killing them. Uliana negated whatever did not fit in the pattern of traditional perception of relationships among Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. The above passage demonstrates how societies imagine themselves and their “ways of acting,” according to the norms and manners of the traditional behavior. Family-transmitted memory of living under supposedly more cultured people, Austrians before First World War and Germans during Second World War, has tainted Uliana’s memory of the Holocaust, in which the uncomfortable topic of Jews’ “disappearance” from the community is shielded with a more comfortable version of the past that does not threaten the positive image of the community.

14Written in the genre of Generationenromane, Amadoka shows the long-lasting effect of guilt experienced by post-generation for the misdeeds of their ancestors and activates the process of understanding, delineating, or mitigating a sense of inherited responsibility. This guilt comprises both complicity in the mass extermination of the Jews during the Holocaust and collaboration with the Soviet NKVD against Ukrainian Insurgent Army after the war. The three sisters of the Frasuliak family – Uliana, Nusia, and Khrystia – successfully repress any feeling of guilt for their father’s or their own collaborationism with either Nazis or NKVD. The interrogation of the past by the contemporary narrative voice exposes the uneasiness of the transfer of the past between generations, in which the “post-rememberer” bears active witness in preserving and transmitting the truth to others.

15In the scene of his execution, Pinchas’s father, Avel, is described as a martyr, while Vasyl Frasuliak, on the contrary, emerges in a more ambiguous position of a middleman. In a series of rhetorical questions, one can see a shift from Avel’s last thoughts about the role Vasyl played in the Holocaust to a contemporary reader’s judgement. The passage starts with the victim’s perspective on approaching death: “Life and death are locked onto each other in an infinite circle. It is a pity that there is no shohet who could ask him for forgiveness and read a prayer before killing, although Vasyl Frasulyak was nearby all the time – a mediator and police guard, his Saturday assistant, and a worthless man.” Gradually, Avel’s focalization is blurred and replaced by the contemporary reader’s ethical questioning of Vasyl’s responsibility as a witness/perpetrator:

  • 34 Ibid., 289.

Did Avel notice him? Did he despise him? Did he think that Vasyl deserved the opportunity to witness how Avel would die? Or, on the contrary, was it the greatest injustice, the gravest savagery: to be humiliated, mutilated, and killed in front of Frasuliak? And was Vasyl just a witness or also a perpetrator? And is a witness something less than a perpetrator? And is to witness not the same as to perform? And does it matter that when you are being murdered, you can see a familiar face nearby? Does it alleviate the pain or make it worse? Do you hate him or find solace in him?34

16Challenging the possibility of reading Vasyl Frasuliak in either/or categories, the writer raises the question of empathy toward the figure of a perpetrator and questions the tendency to universalize a victim’s identity that makes it harder to identify with the perpetrator.

17Although the memory of the first generation appears malleable, it is malleable only within certain limits circumscribed by the material objects that preserve the past and reveal additional truth about the Frasuliaks’ involvement in the Holocaust. All the photographs that organize the narrative of Part Two were taken with the trophy camera “Goerz” which used to belong to a Jewish photographer and which Vasyl Frasuliak pillaged from the local photo shop. When Uliana tries to persuade Bohdan that his great-grandfather was a decent man, he casts a glance at the Goerz and asks:

  • 35 Ibid., 274.

“Where did the great grandpa find this camera?” – “It was left after the photographer from ‘Nimand’. – “Was the photographer a Jew?” They did not answer all of his questions. They did not want to be responsible [vidpovidaty in Ukrainian means both to “be responsible” and “to answer” – J. Y.]. And you thought all the time how much they really forgot because they could not remember, how much they did not see because they were not able to see, and how many recollections they replaced with others in which they believed so strongly that for a while by interrupting each other and fighting, they enumerated details and nitty-gritty circumstances. You knew that for the most part they did not lie. They truly believed what they told you. They invented things that they believed in.35

  • 36 Ibid., 275.

18With the publication of new historical data about the participation of local Ukrainians in the genocide of Jews, the third generation Bohdan began to look at Buczacz residents differently. He understood that these were completely different people who moved to the city after the war, but in their faces, he saw the previous owners of the houses and apartments. He “began to hear their anxious voices in his dreams, the echo of their footsteps in the night silence, the barking of the dogs, shots, screams, cries, squealing, the sounds of a shovel biting into the ground, the rustling of lumps of soil.” He looked at the passers-by trying to figure out: “could this one hide them? And could this one turn them in? Could this one kill? Could these ones say ‘it is bad that the Germans came, but it is good what they did to the Jews?’.”36 Bohdan is tormented over his great grandfather’s collaborationism with the Nazis, pondering his responsibility in assisting the Nazis and offering a variety of explanations from which the reader could choose:

  • 37 Ibid., 276.

Your grandfather was there… You couldn’t know why he joined the auxiliary police unit: maybe because he was promised a reward? A guarantee of his safety? Because of the threats to his family? Was he worried for his daughters? [Because – Y.I.] he believed that only in this way he could really change everything for himself, for his family, for all people? Because he wanted to experience power? Was he under someone’s influence? [Because – Y. I.] he thought that this was the only way a conscious man could act? Did he hate Bolsheviks? Was he angry with his wife? Did he respect Germans? Insulted Jews? Respected a particular Jew? Insulted himself? Did he think that in this way he could help someone, rescue someone?37

  • 38 Ibid., 277.

19Bohdan tries to justify his great grandfather’s actions, looking for the answer in his personal circumstances, temporary insanity, and survival instinct, and experiences the same dilemma as his grandmother Uliana. His moral compass crashes: “the arrow began to twitch and spin angrily, as if under the influence of black magic. You no longer knew what baseness is, what loyalty is, what convictions are, and what is mercy.”38

20In Bohdan’s reassessment of the family past, in his persistent attempt to edit the past in order to rehabilitate his ancestors, one can see the concept of postmemory at work. It inscribes the first-generation testimony into a third-generation reality, packaged in images and senses that stimulate the memory of an amnesiac subject. Mediated memory, or memory of memory, reveals not only differing conceptions of the past but also the indeterminacy of the meaning of the literary text itself. Once we realize that Romana is an unreliable memory holder, we stop worrying about the accuracy of her presentation of history and focus on the narrative itself and its power to reconcile and settle the past. When the unreliable autodiegetic narrator reveals factual and epistemological unreliability, we, as readers, ask ourselves how the unreliability of narration relates to the unreliability of memory itself.

21The constant emphasis on memory’s fallibility produces an indeterminacy of interpretation, making readers return to the text and revise its interpretation. In relationship to the contested past this reinterpretation hinges upon the ideological position of the reader. For understanding the connection between the unreliability of the narrative and the fallibility of memory it is important that the story of the Jews’ extermination in Buczacz is told twice in Part Two: the first time through a perspective of Uliana Frasuliak, whose father Vasyl worked in the axillary police assisting the Nazis in murdering Jews; and the second time from the perspective of a survivor, the Jewish boy Pinchas. Because both versions of the Buczacz tragedy are framed by the third-generation narrator Romana, who shares the Ukrainian community’s view of what had happened during the tragedy, having Bohdan questioning her interpretation allows readers to confront the ethically contested issue of collaborationism.

  • 39 Rothberg, Michael, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators, 13.

22Thus, the tragedy of the Holocaust as seen and evaluated from varying perspectives collects several subjective recollections into multidirectional memory: each character adds their own view to a larger picture of the Holocaust, some with naivete and relativism, some seeking justification, others raising difficult moral questions. As if arguing with Theodor Adorno’s questioning of a possibility of creating art after Auschwitz, Andrukhovych shows that imaginative representation of the Holocaust can overcome community’s silencing and dismemory about the suffering of Jews. Imagination can lend the historical past a sense of urgency that speaks to and about the present. The Ukrainians’ treatment of the Holocaust in their country has a distinctive anti-redemptive coloration. In the process of overcoming the binary opposition between perpetrators and victims in the contested history of Second World War in Ukraine, Michael Rothberg’s concept of the implicated subject may offer an alternative way of writing about the Holocaust in Ukraine. “The implicated subject serves as an umbrella term that gathers a range of subject positions that sit uncomfortably in our familiar conceptual space of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders.”39 Implication, which derives from Latin stem implicāre, means “to entangle,” or “connect closely;” resonates with “complicity,” but unlike complicity does not have a strong sense of legal wrongdoing. Moving from a discourse of victims and perpetrators to one of impli­cated subjects may help scholars of the Holocaust open a broad terrain for thinking about social and political responsibility. Within that terrain one finds multiple implicated subject positions and multiple figures of implication. Complicity presupposes implication, but implication does not always involve complicity. This is the main message of Andrukhovych’s Amadoka.

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Przypisy

1 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Group, 2006), 803.

2 This issue has been studied by Tarik Cyril Amar, “A Disturbed Silence: Discourse on the Holocaust in the Soviet West as an Anti-site of Memory,” in The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses, Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist and Alexander M. Martin (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014); Sarah Fainberg, “Memory at the Margins: The Shoah in Ukraine,” in History, Memory and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe: Memory Games, ed. Georges Mink and Laure Neumayer (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Wilfried Jilge, “Competing Victimhoods – Post-Soviet Ukrainian Narratives on World War II,” in Shared History – Divided Memory: Jews and Others in Soviet-Occupied Poland, 1939–1941, ed. Elazar Barkan, Elizabeth A. Cole and Kai Struve (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2008); Anna Chebotarova, “Collective Memory of the Holocaust in Post-Soviet Ukraine,” in The Burden of the Past: History, Memory, and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine, ed. Anna Wylęgala and Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020).

3 George Schopflin, The Dilemmas of Identity (Tallinn: Tallinn University Press, 2010), 102.

4 Anatoly Kuznetsov, “Babi Yar. Roman-dokument,” Iunost 8–9 (1996).

5 Aleksandra Ubertowska, “’Spectral Stories:’ Fictional Re-Inventions of the Holocaust in Polish Literature,” After Memory:World War II in Contemporary Eastern European Literatures, ed. Matthias Schwartz, Nina Weller, and Heike Winkel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 372).

6 John-Paul Himka, “Obstacles to the Integration of the Holocaust into Post-Communist East European Historical Narratives,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 50 (3/4) (September-December 2008): 359–72.

7 The Ukrainian sociologist Anna Chebotarova has conducted an in-depth qualitative survey of the memory of the Holocaust on a national level and in local communities (Zolochiv, Vyzhnitsya, and Balta where the mass-killings of Jews took place) and come to conclusion that this memory has been “very eclectic and fragmented.” The scholar has defined this type of memory as a “shield memory,” which points at “the voids in awareness about Jewish history as well as uncomfortable topics” which “are overlaid or ‘shielded’ with the projection of people’s own biographical experiences and more comfortable versions of the past that do not threaten the positive image of a we-group from which Jews are still largely excluded.” (“Collective Memory of the Holocaust in Post-Soviet Ukraine,” 184–5)

8 Towards the end of The Drowned and The Saved, Primo Levi introduces the concept of a “grey zone,” which may symbolize the moral compromise that many desperate prisoners were forced to make to buy themselves more time. The price exacted was collaboration with the SS, up to and including the murder of their fellow prisoners.

9 Olha Duchyminska, Eti (Lviv: Vilna Ukraїna, 1945).

10 Dokia Humenna, Khreshchatyi yar: roman-khronika (New York: Slovo, 1956).

11 Although the OUN’s ideology did not advocate antisemitism and racism, many of the OUN members who infiltrated the German police were involved in clearing ghettos and helping the Germans to implement the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. For further reading see Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–1944 (New York: Palgrave, 2000); John-Paul Himka, Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA’s Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941–1944 (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2021).

12 In contemporary Ukrainian literature, the theme of the Holocaust is especially popular among women writers, such as Larysa Denysenko’s Vidlunnia: vid zahybloho dida do pomerloho (Kharkiv: Knyzhkovyi klub “Klub simeinoho dozvillia,” 2012); Maria Matios, Cherevychky Bozhoї Mariї (Kyiv: Piramida, 2013); Tetyana Pakhomova, Ia, ty i nash maliovannyi I nemalyovannyi Boh (Kharkiv: Knyzhkovyi klub “Klub simeinoho dozvillia,” 2016), Raisa Plotnikova, “V iaru zhasaiuchykh zirok” (Poltava: Tov ASMI, 2010); Oksana Zabuzhko, Museipokynutykh sekretiv (Kyiv: Komora, 2009).

13 Anna Chebotarova, “Mediating a Dissonant Past: Holocaust in Post-Soviet Fiction in Ukraine.” A paper presented at the ASN Convention, NYC, 2015.

14 Marianna Kiyanovs’ka, Babyn Iar. Holosamy (Kyiv: Dukh i Litera, 2017).

15 The poet speaks about this experience in her interview “Holosy Babynoho Iaru ozhyly u poeziї Mar’iany Kiyanovs'koї” on March 7, 2020, accessed May 2, 2024, https://www.radiosvoboda.org/a/30473973.html.

16 Sofia Andrukhovych, Amadoka (Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo Staroho Leva, 2020).

17 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 2009); Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 2019).

18 Omer Bartov, Anatomy of Genocide: The Life and Death of Town Called Buczacz (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018).

19 Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (New York: Vintage Books, 2017).

20 Hanna Krall, The Woman from Hamburg: and Other True Stories, trans. Madeline G. Levine (New York: Other Press, LLC, 2012).

21 Winfried Georg Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library / Random House, 2001).

22 Imre Kertész, Sorstalanság (Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, 1975)

23 Sofia Andrukhovych, “Koly liudyna povertae sobi spohady, vona povertae sobi sebe” [When a person recovers her memories, she restores her sense of self], accessed March 2, 2022, https://lb.ua/culture/2020/04/01/454180_sofiya_andruhovich_koli_lyudina.html.

24 Omer Bartov, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

25 Omer Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 95.

26 Mark Livin, “Pam’iat’ i zabuttia. Pro shcho nova velyka knyha Sofiї Andrukhovych – poiasniuie avtorka,” accessed May 2, 2024, https://www.the-village.com.ua/village/knowledge/book-of-the-week/295665-pro-scho-nova-velika-kniga-sofiyi-andruhovich-amadoka-poyasnyue-sama-avtorka.

27 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 53.

28 Cathy Caruth and Geoffrey Hartman, “An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman,” Studies in Romanticism 35(4) (1996): 647.

29 Hartman’s use of the Greek myth of Philomela perfectly illustrates the power of artistic imagery in the expression of trauma. In Greek mythology (notably as told by Ovid), Philomela, daughter of the legendary king of Athens Pandion, was raped by her brother-in-law Tereus. He cut out her tongue so that she could not tell others about the rape. Unable to speak, Philomela wove a tapestry depicting the violent act and asked an old woman to take it to her sister Procne who deciphered the story and rescued her.

30 Amadoka appears on the maps created by Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD, but not as the largest European lake but as marshland located in the lower course of the river Dnieper, and not in the estuary of the Dniester as depicted in the novel. Later cartographers debated the very existence of the lake (Vasilii Tatishchev, The History of Russia from the Very Ancient Times (Sanktpeterburg, 1768), 176) and proposed different versions of its “evaporation” among which the one that the lake was confused with either the Prypyat or Desna Rivers dominates. Some modern cartographers (Brown, Pogrebova) argue that the lake was situated in the lower course of the Dnieper – in Znamenskoe or Kamenskoe gorodishche, which was one of the earliest settlements of Scythians in the sixth century B.C. and the original location of the Zaporizhzhian Host in the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries. The shift eastward in the geographical location of the semi-legendary lake in the novel has more significance than the fact of its disappearance.

31 Sofia Andrukhovych, Amadoka (Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo Staroho Leva, 2020), 239.

32 Ibid., 261. All translations of Amadoka are mine.

33 See Chebotarova, “Collective Memory of the Holocaust in Post-Soviet Ukraine.”

34 Ibid., 289.

35 Ibid., 274.

36 Ibid., 275.

37 Ibid., 276.

38 Ibid., 277.

39 Rothberg, Michael, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators, 13.

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Jak cytować ten artykuł

Odwołanie bibliograficzne dla wydania papierowego

Yuliya Ilchuk, «The Multidirectional Turn in the Literature about Holocaust in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine (On the Material of Sofia Andrukhovych’s AmadokaTeksty Drugie, 1 | 2024, 125–142 .

Odwołania dla wydania elektronicznego

Yuliya Ilchuk, «The Multidirectional Turn in the Literature about Holocaust in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine (On the Material of Sofia Andrukhovych’s AmadokaTeksty Drugie [Online], 1 | 2024, Dostępny online od dnia: 01 juillet 2024, Ostatnio przedlądany w dniu 03 novembre 2024. URL: http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/td/22818

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O autorze

Yuliya Ilchuk

Stanford University
An Associate Professor of Slavic Literature and Culture at Stanford University. Her major research interests fall under the broad heading of cul­tural exchange, interaction, and borrowing between Russia and Ukraine. Her first book, Nikolai Gogol’s Hybrid Performance, (2021) revises Gogol’s identity and texts as ambivalent and hybrid. Ilchuk’s most recent book project, The Vanished: Memory, Temporal­ity, Identity in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine, revisits the major issues of memory studies – collective memory and trauma, post-mem­ory, remembrance, memorials, and reconciliation – and shifts the discussion to the social and cultural dimensions of forget­ting. Ilchuk has also published several translations of Ukrainian poetry and edited and translated articles of the very first anthology Ukrainian Literary Modernism: a Cultural Reader (forthcoming in Academic Studies Press, 2024). Email: jilchuk@gmail.com.

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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