Memory, Violence, and Political Identity: Competing Narratives in Ukrainian and Jewish History and Literature

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel will delve into competing narratives produced by and about Jewish and Ukrainian actors in episodes of mass violence in Ukraine during the first half of the 20th century. The presentations investigate the ways in which different activists characterized intra-Ruthenian/Ukrainian political violence in the 1907 Austrian Reichsrat elections in Galicia; jockeying evaluations of Maksym Ryl's'kyi's response to Stalinist repression through his poetry; the rise of competing Greek Catholic and Hasidic accounts of the Rebbe of Belz's sojourn in Peremyshliany during the Holocaust; and the development of distinct narratives on the nationalist radicalization of Ukrainian peasants in WWII. Through these case studies, the panel will shed light on the myriad ways in which individuals with different communal, ethnic and national loyalties organized their memories to cope with fifty years of bloody tumult in Ukraine.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Olha Khometa, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Papers

• Ruthenian Political Activism and Electoral Violence in a Galician Village, 1907–8 - Sydney Shiller, Princeton U

• Contested Memory: Reception of Pavlo Tychyna and His Legacy - Olha Khometa, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Who Rescued the Rebbe?: Competing Accounts of Aharon Rokach's Survival of the Holocaust - Danylo Leshchyshyn, Northwestern U

• Indifference or Radicalization?: Revisiting Ukrainian Peasants’ Role in Nationalist Violence During World War II - Anastasiya Novatorskaya, Northwestern U

Discussant

• Markian Dobczansky, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign