The works of Yosyp Kunovych Burg are little-known in Ukraine. Meanwhile, his short stories and essays are read and translated in Germany, Austria, the US, and Israel. He is frequently invited to give lectures at prestigious universities, soirees are often held in his honor, while ambassadors accredited in Ukraine pay visits to the writer’s home in Chernivtsi (Bukovyna region).
Burg is a unique figure in literature. He was born in 1912 in the small Ukrainian Carpathian town of Vyzhnytsia into a family of a timber rafter and a housewife. When his mother asked the rabbi to bless her son, he said, “He has already been blessed!” At age five Yosyp was sent to a cheder, a traditional elementary Jewish school, where children were taught the Torah. By popular tradition, the boy began to earn a living at 13. Yosyp began to study the tailor’s trade (his family then moved from Vyzhnytsi to Chernivtsi) and in the evenings he attended high school courses for which he paid himself.
Eventually, Yosyp enrolled in the University of Vienna to do German studies. Those were the roaring 1930s, when Nazism was rearing its head in Europe. Later, the writer used his Vienna experiences in the plots of many of his works, including the short story “At Dusk,” which includes an episode that reveals Burg as an individual who never betrayed either himself or his people.
Yosyp recalls the first time he attended a soiree at the Jewish Students Society, where everybody spoke German. A student from Galicia recited the poem “A Prayer for Yiddish,” and the audience “roared loudly and contemptuously, expressing their objection to Yiddish.” When Burg was presenting his colloquium on the German language to his professor, a well- known German scholar, his teacher praised his excellent command of German.
“He asked me what my native language was and I said briefly, ‘Yiddish, sir’,” Burg reminisced. “I noticed that he was on the point of saying something — perhaps the usual thing, that Yiddish is a corrupt form of German. But he gave me another close look and said quite unexpectedly, in a clear, simple, and flawless way, ‘Young man, Yiddish is a separate language.’ I felt dizzy. A wave of heat suddenly came over me. Everything around me seemed to be singing, ‘Yiddish is a separate language! And I heard an eerie echo of the memorable Jewish Society soiree.”
When Burg published his first short story in 1934 in the newspaper Czernowitzer Blaetter and proudly showed it to his father, the elder Burg asked him why he wasn’t writing in German, because Yiddish was the language of craftsmen, not of writers. It is worth noting here that Chernivtsi was also the birthplace of Paul Celan and Rose Auslaender, poets without whom it is impossible to imagine 20th-century literature, especially its German-language branch.
Burg chose to write neither in German, a language that was very popular at the time in Bukovyna, which had been part of Austria- Hungary for 200 years, nor in Romanian, the official language of this region until 1941. He opted for the language of his people in spite of Europeans’ scornful attitude to Yiddish and the harsh persecution of so-called “cosmopolitanism” in the Stalin era, when the writer had to abandon his beloved job of university professor, an unfinished dissertation on the works of Heinrich Heine, and even the much- loved city where he lived. “The big stove was burning all day, but I couldn’t warm up. I felt more and more gripped by a terrible and all-penetrating cold. On the wall in the corner hung a large black plate. It was rabid with fury, spitting out mountains of malice and bile against the Jews, ‘They are poisoning the wells...’ And I was all ready to hit the road,” says the writer about the period portrayed in the short story “Ruth.”
The hard road lasted for more than a decade. In the early 1960s Burg and his wife Nina Obolenska and daughter Myra moved to Bukovyna. At first they stayed in the small town of Storozhynets and later moved to Chernivtsi. He learned that out of his whole family only his cousin had survived. The writer’s mother died a horrible death at the hands of the Nazis.
This was still the time of Khrushchev’s Thaw, and the first-ever Yiddish journal, Sovietische Heimland, had just been founded in Moscow. Burg, who until then had been writing “for his own pleasure,” received a new creative impetus. He became one of the most active participants of the Jewish literary renaissance. Yet, Burg was virtually unknown as a writer in his native Bukovyna: there were only a few older-generation Jews who still remembered their mother tongue and could read the journal, where his works were published from time to time.
Meanwhile, the younger generation was being fed a kind of literary ersatz in the shape of a novel about a factory in Chernivtsi, factory that had designed a machine to knit the fifth finger on gloves. This creation, by a local author who was a member of the Union of Writers of the USSR, was soon translated from Yiddish into Russian. In the midst of this provincial stagnation, as the critic Leonid Finkel wrote, “...in a small suburban apartment, lives another writer whose mailbox is filled almost every day with undesirable, to put it mildly, envelopes with overseas stamps. What is even stranger, every new short story by this writer is published by some dubious, from the official viewpoint, Polish, American, and Israeli journals.”
It was not until 1980 — 40 years after the publication of Burg’s first book Oifn Tschermusch (Above the Cheremosh River) — that Dos leben geit waiter (Life Continues) was published, while Iberuk fun tsajtn (The Times Call to Each Other) came out in 1983 (both in Yiddish). When Burg was finally admitted to the Union of Writers of the USSR, he was already 75 (he was first granted this honor in 1941, together with Olha Kobylianska, but his membership card was not issued, and when World War Two broke out, all the documents were lost).
The Russian version of the book Dos leben geit waiter was published in Moscow in 1987. His works were also translated and published in Germany, Austria, and Poland. And what about Ukraine, and Bukovyna, which the writer loves? He always described himself as “Bukovynian from head to toe.” Burg says that he has traveled a lot, but has not seen a better place than the Carpathians.
Bukovyna loves and respects Burg. The well-known translator Petro Rykhlo did a brilliant Ukrainian translation of some of his works. He writes in the preface to the book Flowers and Tears (Blumen und Traenen), “Sometimes it seems that he has been writing one never-ending book in which it is impossible to put the last period, as one cannot put it in life itself. We will not find hypocrisy or falseness in Yosyp Burg’s books. Instead, we will see that all his short stories and novels are woven out of reminiscences, tears and visions, lost illusions and hopes.”
Today Yosyp Burg is an honorary citizen of Chernivtsi and the winner of the Segal Prize, Israel’s prestigious international literary award. A street is named after him in his native Vyzhnytsia. But despite his European fame, Burg remains a cult Ukrainian Jewish writer. He feels very sad that in the West he is often called “the last writer on Europe’s eastern expanses to write in Yiddish,” because he has devoted his entire life to preserving and developing his native language.
Many of Burg’s works glorify man. “Maccabeus” is a story about a Ukrainian priest who saved Jews during the war. “Chavele” is a story of first love, while “The Rolling- Pins” and “My Little Forgotten Song” are accounts of his childhood. Readers are most enchanted by “The Wedding Ring.” This is a story about Juna Schifre, who marries a young lumberjack named Zunia. She is happy only for one day because the forest claims the life of her beloved husband. For two decades the lonely widow does the laundry for rich people. One day a neighboring villager, who is raising money for an orphan’s wedding, comes to her squalid house and sees Juna’s wedding ring, her only treasure. The widow gives the ring to the orphan girl. When she visits her husband’s grave, she asks him to forgive her. Juna seems to hear Zunia saying, “If I could, I would kiss every finger on your swollen hands.”
The works of Yosyp Burg, the patriarch of Yiddish literature, are a “wedding ring” that brings luck to his people.
The Day wishes the writer a happy birthday. May he be strong, healthy, and creative! We hope that as many people as possible in our country and abroad will read his books.
