On the Journey Through Ukraine: Representations of the Holocaust in Friedrich Gorenstein’s Traveling Companions

For about three decades now, there has been an ongoing shift toward Geocritical literary analysis that recognises the high “degree to which the writer, the reader, and the text are part of a larger spatiotemporal ensemble that gives form to the literary experience as a whole” (Tally 2016, 3). Reading literature historically is now often supplemented by reading literature geographically, foregrounding the most significant political and natural features of the landscape (borders, big cities, villages, mountains, valleys, rivers, forests), as well as the mindset of the population and the major historical and cultural events associated with them. Looking at the representations of the Holocaust in Ukraine in Friedrich Gorenstein’s Traveling Companions (1989) through the lens of Geocritical interpretive frameworks allows for an innovative way to approach both its historical and literary reality. As the complex historical reality of the Holocaust in Ukraine, including its spatiality, becomes ever more removed from our present, its literary reality emerges as its own possible world open to mediation, reinterpretation, and memorialization.

The relationship between Friedrich Gorenstein (1932–2002) and the lands of Ukraine is complicated and often contentious.^[1] Born in Kiev right before the brutal collectivization of Ukraine, Gorenstein had a very unhappy childhood severely impacted by Stalinism: his father was arrested and executed in 1937.^[2] His mother, previously the principal of a school for juvenile delinquents, took her maiden name and went into hiding. On July 8, 1941, 17 days after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Gorenstein and his mother were evacuated from Berdichev. She later died in evacuation and Gorenstein spent most of his childhood in various orphanages, calling this experience of ultimate loneliness and alienation nedetstvo (non-childhood) (Polianskaya 2003, 139). The trauma of his orphanhood and homelessness that extended from Berdichev to Moscow and finally to Berlin had the most profound influence on his writing. As this essay addresses Gorenstein’s representations of the Holocaust using elements of Geocritical analysis, it argues that Gorenstein’s perspective on the Jewish experience in Ukraine – including his conceptualization of home and homelessness – is both unique and indispensable. Aiming at uncovering the erasures of Jewish presence, Traveling Companions leads us on a journey through Ukraine where the process of memorialization through storytelling is the destination. By reading Traveling Companions focusing on Jewish places with a meaningful and distinct cultural and topographic profile, in particular the cities of Kiev and Berdichev, this essay traces the ways Gorenstein’s characters experience the Holocaust through their relationships with places affected by multi-layered palimpsest. Despite the widespread belief that these places are now gone, through Gorenstein’s novel we are exposed to new ways of seeing what we thought we already knew as well as new ways of relating to questions of Jewish memory and identity.

Even after the demise of the Soviet Union, Gorenstein’s works had uneven reception in post-Soviet Russia: “Gorenstein’s writings touched raw nerves and forced readers to remember what many had pushed under the affordable rug of post-Soviet amnesia” (Shrayer 2018, 859). For Gorenstein, this amnesia is directly connected to the erasure of Soviet Jews, their religion, culture, community, and the memory of the Holocaust. The Holocaust is a persistent presence throughout Gorenstein’s works, but in his novel Traveling Companions, it acquires a particularly significant prominence. It is critical to point out that while Gorenstein was becoming a mature author in the 1960s, almost no specifically Jewish aspects of the Holocaust – unlike the Second World War and the heroism of the Soviet people – were part of the larger Soviet collective consciousness and public discourse as they were in Israel and the US. Even now, the presence of the Holocaust in Russian-Jewish literature is only beginning to be felt, often mentioned obliquely, sometimes an open secret, other times, an un-mourned trauma never addressed and never healed. In fact, the most significant postwar ideological development was the Cult of the Great Patriotic War. Memorials were built, novels written, and songs were composed to commemorate the sacrifice and courage of the Soviet people during the war. In this context, the discussion of the particular nature of the Jewish war experience – both the Holocaust and the participation of Jewish soldiers in the Red Army – was minimized. The mass murder of Jews on the Soviet territories and pervasive collaborationism were either silently ignored or presented as a small part of the larger context of the war and the German crimes against the Soviet people. According to Emil Draitser and other scholars, the total control of the Soviet government over all media, along with the greatly diminished Yiddish-language press and readership, allowed for the Soviet information policy, which Paul Ricoeur called “organized forgetting” (Draitser 2018, xv).

As one of the primary sources of legitimacy, the Great Patriotic War (as World War II was called in the Soviet Union) became as much a symbol and a propaganda resource as an object of honest historical inquiry. The central aspect of this symbolic function of the war memory was the display of honoring the dead through elaborate ceremonies, oversized memorials, and, of course, highly ideological literary productions. This version of the war memory did not include the Red Army’s defeats in the beginning of the war, the enormous waste of human life, or the brutality of political security forces toward their own people. Neither did it include any specifically Jewish themes: the destruction of the shtetlach, the mass murder of the Soviet Jews in the occupied territories by the Einsatzgruppen, and the collaboration with the Germans fueled by antisemitism as well as by anti-Soviet sentiments. The war cult and the manipulation of institutional and personal means of memorialization emptied most meaning out of people’s commemorative impulse while suppressing most mention of the Holocaust.^[3]

The human space of Jewish Ukraine that is Gorenstein’s primary focus no longer exists except in the writer’s mind. Despite his clear focus on the Holocaust, Gorenstein’s Jewish Ukraine has acquired a certain literary existence that has a complicated relationship with its referent, the region whose history has been manipulated so many times that even the memory of its places has undergone significant transformations. In Traveling Companions, literary Ukraine both diverges and overlaps with the “real” Ukraine. At any given moment, several layers may merge: pre-Holocaust Jewish environments could overlap with the wartime experiences of non-Jewish Ukrainians and with the present-day personal observations of the narrator, who may or may not be a representation of the author. As Bertrand Westphal argues, “Reading a place and perceiving a text, the perception of what is read in a place, the multiple interweavings between the page and the stone and the earth – any combination is possible.” (Westphal 2015, 158) Indeed, in the context of his portrayals of Ukraine, Gorenstein’s combinations of the real and the imaginary – along with the combination of the historical and the literary – are diverse, contentious, complementary, and contradictory, all at once.

In the context of Traveling Companions, it is especially helpful to consider the phenomenological analysis developed by Janet Donohoe, who investigates the role places play in our lives. She suggests that “Places serve not as the borders or containers of memory, but as a palimpsest, a Medieval manuscript in which various writings are visible beneath and through the newer writing upon a linen parchment. The image of the palimpsest works not just for places of memory but for memory itself. Places write themselves upon memory just as memory writes itself upon place” (Donohoe 2014, xi).^[4] Gorenstein, whom one of the most prominent Russian literary scholars Efim Etkind called a Master (Etkind 1979), writes in this palimpsest mode: he simultaneously works with multiple layers of memory, not all of it his own, inscribed onto particularly Jewish places that are imbued with dense layers of historical events, ideational developments, and living experiences – all within an intertextual dialogue with other authors. Gorenstein focuses specifically on the portrayals of the Holocaust and tracing the resulting disappearance of the Jewish presence and Jewish geographical markers from the post-Holocaust landscapes of small shtetlach as well as the large cities such as Kiev, Odessa, and Berdichev. He expands his Jewish literary geography by accessing it on multiple plains that overlap and intersect encompassing both the pre-war pre-revolutionary past and his Soviet present. He not only looks at specific geographical areas but explores how Jewish living experiences of place shape our consciousness of Jewish history and geography. These Jewish environments in Ukraine have undergone multiple phases of erasure and rewriting; thus, the narratives associated with these places have to build complex interconnections between layers of memory coexisting in the same place. Donohoe suggests that memory should be “reconceived as a multi-layered palimpsest of association in conjunction with a similarly multi-layered palimpsest of places upon which are written our history, traditions, experiences, and ideas” (Donohoe 2014, xii).

Gorenstein is not widely read in Russia and is more familiar to the general public in Europe than in the US. Nonetheless, there is some very insightful scholarly analysis by Mikhail Krutikov and Marat Grinberg, as well as by Russian critics such as Lev Anninskiy, Efim Etkind, and Dmitry Bykov. Grinberg borrows historian Timothy Snyder’s apt term, “bloodlands,” which “describes the confluence of Nazi and Soviet crimes, reflects starkly on the landscape of Gorenstein’s novels, where the Nazi and Stalinist methods are insolubly intertwined, making everyone residing in this post-war terrain a carrier of irredeemable evil,” stating that the goal of Traveling Companions more specifically “is to create a map of Bloodlands and produce an aesthetic statement on the nature of writing in the age of terror” (Grinberg 2020, 133). Gorenstein positions his literary Ukraine at the confluence of the history and geography of totalitarianism. Yet it is not entirely a political discussion. The form of the ‘bloodlands,’ according to Snyder, “arises not from the political geography of empires but from the human geography of victims. The bloodlands were no political territory, real or imagined; they are simply where Europe’s most murderous regimes did their most murderous work” (Snyder 2010, xviii). There is no question that murder is at the center of Gorenstein’s literary enterprise. I would further argue that our active engagement with Gorenstein’s complex interplay between the human condition and the spatiality of the ‘bloodlands’ in the context of the Holocaust is the key to his overall conceptualization of the notions of Jewish history, homeland, homelessness, marginality, and belonging.

A deeply historical novel, Traveling Companions is an exploration of the Jewish experience in Ukraine in the 20th century as viewed through the eyes of the two characters, the protagonist Alexander Chubinets, a non-Jewish Ukrainian from a small village, and his interlocutor and narrator Felix Zabrodsky, a Jewish writer from Moscow. While the first-person narrator looks out the window and sees anti-Jewish violence that permeates the environment of the ‘bloodlands,’ Gorenstein initiates a broader discussion of totalitarianism. While the present discussion focuses more narrowly on the Holocaust in Ukraine, the coercive control exercised by the State is palpable everywhere in Gorenstein’s literary world as it engulfs Jewish and non-Jewish characters alike. In fact, Gorenstein’s discussions of cannibalism during the Holodomor (1932–1933), a man-made famine during forced collectivization, and of the prison camps of the GULAG are emblematic of his vision of how the fate of the Jews is intrinsically tied to the fate of Ukraine. The trip thus becomes not only a journey to visit the ancestral places but also a voyage of mourning and commemoration. As most Soviet Jews did not have an opportunity to mourn or even publicly acknowledge those lost during the Holocaust, Gorenstein’s literary journey through Ukraine is an attempt to memorialize Jewish life in Jewish places, to contribute to collective memory, and to subvert the Soviet master narratives of the collectivization and the Great Patriotic War. His writing thus is an act of memory, and his text is a memorial.

Gorenstein’s narrative mode resonates with a Jewishly educated reader as it strongly resembles Sholem Aleichem’s The Railroad Stories. The trope of train storytelling has been celebrated by Sholem Aleichem: the narrator travels through the small towns of the Pale of the Settlement, encounters a variety of Jewish characters, and ends up listening to fascinating stories because “riding a train doesn’t have to be dull if you manage to fall in with good company” (Aleichem 1987, 166). Similar to Russian authors, Yiddish writers took to portraying railway travel with great enthusiasm. Indeed, the Russian railroad system was transformed by Yiddish writers from something Russian into something Jewish. Traveling by train gradually became part of the fabric of Jewish life in the Pale and one of the paradigmatic fictional tropes. As Leah Garrett observes, “Yiddish writers used [the] Judaization of the train car to make it an ideal setting for Jewish storytelling” (Garrett 2003, 91). While Yiddish authors associated the mobility provided by the trains with modernity and modernization, from Gorenstein’s novel, a question arises: what kind of travel can his characters experience in the fractured post-Holocaust world?

For Gorenstein, the train is not only a tool providing a directional axis for his literary space. It is also an existential situation in which Zabrodsky finds himself. The natural landscape, along with human history and geography associated with it, passes him by while he listens to another man’s story, highlighting the protagonist’s role in history and the reality of his relationship with place and space. Conceptualizing history as a linear movement in time is often divorced from the discussion of place, even though it is precisely the place that anchors our memories in the physical environment. Consequently, Donohoe argues that “so closely associating memory with the past and temporality, we frequently overlook the equally fundamental connection between memory and place … Experience is implaced, memory is likewise implaced” (Donohoe 2014, 1). Gorenstein’s novel is an example of a literary universe where Jewish memory, experience, and identity are not only implaced but where place becomes the key to the entire reading experience.

The novel opens with an ominous sentence “June 22, 1941, was the blackest day of my life” (Gorenstein 1991, 1). The immediate reaction elicited by this sentence is that it refers to the first day of the Great Patriotic War that resulted in the total devastation of the Jewish and non-Jewish population of Ukraine. Gorenstein subverts the expectations by saying that a Moscow theater rejected a yet-unnamed character’s play. In fact, the novel ends up being both about the theater and World War II, the life of one person, and the fate of the entire people. The first encounter between the two characters on the night train number 27 “Kiev-Zdolbunov,” which runs through the Pale^[5] and whose stops serve as the familiar markers of Yiddishland: “Once Fastov is behind you, the local electric service becomes infrequent or nonexistent in the evening, and the night train slows down to streetcar pace, delivering mail and passengers to all the villages and tiny townships in the Kiev, Zhitomir, Vinnitsa, and Rovno districts” (2). With this description of the train’s route, we enter the realm of the former Jewish Pale. Immediately, readers are intrigued – is it going to be about the Jews? Can you even tell a story of traveling through Ukraine without talking about the Jews? The introduction firmly places the plot in the spatiality of the Jewish past as the author attempts to write the Jews and Jewish places into the Soviet post-Holocaust landscape from which they are almost absent, yet their former presence is still palpable.

Gorenstein purposefully positions himself in a dialogue with Yiddish writers, specifically Sholem Aleichem.^[6] Not surprisingly, the literary space of his Jewish Ukraine overlaps with what is known as Yiddishland. As Jeffrey Shandler argues, “While not as turf-centered as political Zionism or Territorialism, Yiddishland nevertheless has delimited geographic and demographic implications … [it] remain[s] tied to some retrospective notion of folkhood rooted in Eastern Europe” (Shandler 2005, 39). Gorenstein’s literary geography of Ukraine builds on the layers of pre-existing imaginary geography of Yiddish writers, creating a universe that extends far beyond the referential. In the words of Israel Bartal, “the image of the shtetl in modern Jewish literature is quite different from the historical reality on which the authors drew. That historical reality is also very different from the image of the shtetl in modern Jewish collective memory” (Bartal 2007, 180). Similarly, Gorenstein’s shtetlach and big cities located in Yiddishland are literary creations developed with the elements of personal and collective memory(ies), elements of Jewish literary tradition, and the actual topography of these places. As an artist striving to articulate history in literature while mapping out the human spatiality of Jewish life in Ukraine, Gorenstein needed a vehicle to travel back in time and space through his imagination, reconfiguring different literary strata of Jewish places. His train journey through the Pale provided precisely this opportunity.

Gorenstein’s descriptions of Kiev reveal a particular sensitivity towards historically charged locales, primarily through his focus on the Holocaust. He uses every element of the landscape as a portal into the story of anti-Jewish violence in Ukraine. Gorenstein’s narrator Felix Zabrodsky is also so embedded in the landscape that he does not even have to look out the window in order to see it – his mental pictures are much more vivid than what gray Soviet reality has to offer. Gorenstein imbues his character with some of his own subjectivity while maintaining a certain leeway of fictionality in discussions of the history and geography of Jewish Ukraine and underscoring the “exploratory, hypothetical, indirectly referential quality of literature” (Pieto 2011, 19). Gorenstein is very direct about his literary goals. “The relation between an event and its telling is like the relation between rye and bread,” he points out, “Both are equally real and palpable. But if an event is not told, it has no value; it cannot be digested” (5). It is clear that Gorenstein’s intent is to make Jewish history in Ukraine – including the Holocaust – “digestible” through storytelling. And so we see Kiev through Zabrodsky’s eyes which are, first and foremost, the eyes of a Jew. As Zabrodsky looks at Kiev, he sees not only the ancient capital of Kievan Rus and the remnants of pre-Moscovite culture but also the signs of Jewish culture – both practically extinguished by the Holocaust and Sovietization. Gorenstein also notices the voids and disturbances created in the landscape due to the homogenizing erasure effected by the Soviet cultural policies. While describing the differences between the main railway ticket office, where one can buy tickets for the express trains and the Kiev suburban terminal where Zabrodsky intends to buy his ticket for the night train number 27, Gorenstein portrays the streets of Kiev he knows and loves. Yet as Saksagansy Street gives way to “dull modern Kiev,” Gorenstein bemoans the erasure of the old historic city “There is no greater disfigurement that beauty desecrated” (7). Childhood memories of Kiev come into contrast with contemporary reality when Gorenstein contemplates the nature of the Kiev landscape and its old beauty, some of which he knows but some of which he has to imagine. Gorenstein’s literary space is likewise stratified since the physical space of the real world is viewed both in terms of the pre-Holocaust Jewish past and the Soviet non-Jewish present that still manifests some of the markers of that past. As a result of the Second World War, much of Kiev was destroyed; some cultural monuments, however, were destroyed by the Soviet authorities even before the war. On his mental map, Gorenstein can see Kiev, which used to be a vibrant Jewish metropolis, but when he looks at it now, there is almost nothing left.

In Traveling Companions, there is a long passage that is beautifully written, masterfully rendering all the elements that are the focus of the present discussion. All the significant themes, reflections on history and geography, views of the urban and natural landscape, and the Jewish presence and spatiality converge in this passage. As his protagonist peers through the window of the train departing Kiev, Gorenstein’s story unfolds:

As the new apartment buildings on the bank of the Dnieper slipped by, I ate my supper without lifting my head. I could see them all in my mind’s eye, I knew them by heart: the lights of the Pechersk heights and in the valleys of Podol and Kuryonovka, and the twinkling street lamps amid the foliage of parks and squares.

Old Kiev used to be a city of contradictions, unusually showy but one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, whereas modern Kiev is a monotonous place that has no soul, only a facade. Looking through the window of the train in the twilight, I felt the spirit of old Kiev now lay at rest amid its sandy hills and at the bottom of its deep ravines. The landscape of the city and its surrounding countryside is extremely broken, with a multitude of hillocks, a geographical particularity that solved many problems for those whose business has been mass execution and mass burial (12).

Gorenstein puts particular emphasis on Kiev as an example of the complicated dynamics of home and homelessness: even though the records of Jewish settlement in Kiev date back to 1018, over the centuries, “the belief that the Jew was an injurious alien never completely disappeared from the culture of late-imperial Kiev” (Hamm 1993, 134) and survived into the Soviet times. Often seen as a transient and intrinsically foreign element, the Jews of Kiev have never become fully accepted; according to Gorenstein, the most noticeable and meaningful imprint they left on the physical terrain was their mass graves in the ravines. No ravine is named in the above passage, but the most famous Kiev ravine is Baby Yar, where thousands of Kiev Jews met their tragic end. Thus, viewed through the eyes of Gorenstein’s narrator, the landscape is “broken” both by its geographical features, specifically the deep ravines filled with thousands of Jews murdered in several massacres that took place at the end of September 1941, and by the efforts of various human beings, Party Chairmen as well as Nazi invaders. Podol is the name that resonates with anyone who knows the Jewish history in Kiev as a place of traditional Jewish residence. There are almost no Jews left, and those still around live in the new monotonous and stagnating Soviet Kiev. Zabrodsky searches for Jewish faces in the streets of Kiev, but the ambiguity of mixed heritage prevents him from recognizing them as Jewish. There is no organized Jewish community, and the traditional markers of Jewish identity have all but disappeared. Instead, both the real landscape and the literary space are dominated by the ravines that are the wounds left by the Holocaust.

This is the first but not the last instance when the Jews are referenced through the metaphor of the ravines. When Chubinets encounters the Jews imprisoned at the abandoned brickworks, he falls in love with a beautiful Jewish woman. It is apparent to him that the Jews are doomed. Starvation and dehumanizing conditions cause them to lose their dignity, and Chubinets compares them to animals. The beautiful Jewish woman is the only one who succeeds in preserving her humanity. When Chubinets attempts to find her again, he learns that all the Jews have been murdered: “So Popov Yar is the place where my grey-eyed beauty lies among the flock of crows shot down that night. Where I come from, we have plenty of good burial places. It is country broken by a multitude of ravines and gullies with many different varieties of soil – plenty of sandy hills where pines like to grow, spots that are nice and dry and suitable for digging graves” (87). In Gorenstein’s literary universe, Ukraine is one large Jewish cemetery whose topographical features are conducive to the burial and to the hiding of bodies of the victims of mass murder. While the big cities such as Kiev, Odessa, and Berdichev – as well as smaller shtetlach – are emptied of the Jews and their material and spiritual presence, the countryside is filled with graves, pits, and ravines. The landscape is broken because the entire country is broken as its history and geography converge in the ‘bloodlands.’

In Gorenstein’s discussions of the Holocaust in Ukraine, the landscape is not just a setting or a backdrop used to provide a bit of local color. Instead, the landscape is an integral participant in the larger literary process of creating a holistic reading experience. The way Gorenstein engages with the space provides an opportunity to engage with the Holocaust even though its referent, the “real” space of Ukraine, has undergone multiple modifications and erasures. To foreground the discussion of the mass murder of the Jews and their disappearance from the living spaces, Gorenstein persists in discussing of the cemeteries. While comparing Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish cemeteries in Berdichev, he emphasizes their differences:

When you travel by bus down the Kiev–Zhitomir Highway to Berdichev, the first thing you see upon entering the city are piles of course stones, a dreary field where nothing green grows. That’s the Jewish cemetery. No bushes for nightingales to sing in, no lilacs blooming, only the stink of the tannery. The Orthodox cemetery is much more pleasant to walk through. On a spring day or in summertime, you can look at beautiful tombstones and sit on soft, soft grass (184).

The Jewish cemetery is abandoned. The Jewish community has been murdered, and those who returned from the evacuation are unable to maintain it properly. In Gorenstein’s literary universe, death in the Jewish cemetery is “terminal” – no living things can be found there. No birds, no flowers, no green grass. There is no element of regeneration and rebirth, only abandonment and neglect.

When Gorenstein talks about the ravines, he implies the Holocaust; when he talks about the Ukrainians, he implies their anti-Semitism, widely known yet rarely publicly discussed:

I love Ukrainian songs, I love the features of old Ukrainian women, and I love an early-melting spring in the southwest, the long hot summer cooled by west winds, and the warm dry fall. But the Ukrainians themselves I do not love, though that is another matter. Why not? You ask. Please don’t make me explain. I think certain thoughts and feelings are murdered by explanation; they become banal or create misunderstandings (15).

This passage points to an intrinsically Jewish struggle with marginality and belonging: the narrator loves Ukrainian nature, feels greatly attached to the landscape, and considers Ukraine his home, but he does not like the Ukrainians themselves. As Marat Grinberg aptly points out, “to analyze Soviet Jewish cultural memory is to focus on traces of memory that were always fragmentary and commonly instinctual” (Grinberg 2018, 393). Despite the Soviet master narratives of World War II, Gorenstein does not need to explain that the Ukrainians were perhaps among the most brutal and trusted collaborators of the Nazis, nor that they perpetrated violence upon their Jewish neighbors from time immemorial. Yet he is also very direct in his language of violence and gore when he wants to convey his profound opposition to oppression and totalitarianism. Gorenstein wants to attract his readers’ attention to the Holocaust, hoping precisely that the shocking imagery and naturalistic language, as well as the “instinctual” memories of the deeply entrenched Ukrainian anti-Semitism, would help the readers “digest” his story.

As the story unfolds, we learn more about the life of Alexander Chubinets, Felix Zabrodsky’s traveling companion, about anti-Semitism, and about two cataclysmic events that shook Ukraine to its foundations – the Holocaust and Holodomor. With the revolution of 1917, Chubinets gradually tries to integrate himself into the new proletarian society. Several obstacles stand in his path: his disability, poverty, and lack of education, on the one hand, and the cruel limitations imposed by the regime, on the other. Having survived the horrors of collectivization in Ukraine, the mass famine, and cannibalism, Chubinets also survives World War II and bears witness to yet another wave of atrocities perpetrated in the ‘bloodlands.’ Through the presentation of Chubinets’ attitude towards the Jews, we learn that for Gorenstein, Ukrainian anti-Semitism is an evil pervasive in society as well as a vital component of his broader discussion of the human capacity for evil. He describes in detail how, during the first days of the war, Jewish shops and apartments were looted, while in Chubintsy (Alexander Chubinets’ native village), people looted Soviet property. What is essential for Gorenstein is that no matter how culture, religion, or political structures try to mold people’s behaviors over decades, centuries, or even millennia, people remain as prone as ever to all variations of violence and criminality.

For Gorenstein, people remain fundamentally evil and brutal creatures despite the culture’s attempts at amelioration of their nature. Given the opportunity, a person’s real character will emerge from under the thin veneer of civilization and morality. Nowhere is this belief more applicable than in the case of the Germans in Ukraine during the war. Chubinets compares the Germans he encountered during the occupation to the Ukrainians who were forced to turn to cannibalism during the forced collectivization that resulted in the Holodomor. His experiences with consuming human flesh give him a unique perspective on the extent to which a human being is capable of degrading himself. As Snyder points out, the loss of human dignity is one of the critical consequences of the Holodomor: “Starvation led not to rebellion but to amorality, to crime, to indifference, to madness, to paralysis, and finally to death. To die of starvation with some sort of dignity was beyond the reach of almost everyone” (Snyder 2010, 46–47). Grounded in his memories of cannibalism, one of the most salient sense memories of the Holocaust for Chubinets was “the stink of cooked human flesh.” Geocriticism put a particular emphasis on the polysensory approach given that “space revolves around the body, just as the body is located in space” (Westphal 2015, 64). This idea aligns well with Donohoe’s interest in “the bodily engagement in place,” primarily the experiential character of the place and bodily interactions with specific places (Donohoe 2014, xviii). Within the multi-layered palimpsestic readings of Jewish places in Ukraine, the smell of vomit and diarrhea, as well as the smell of burned bodies, functions as the connective tissue between the layers emphasizing the pervasive pollution brought by murder.

The theme of famine experienced by the Ukrainians during the Holodomor parallels the theme of forced starvation experienced by the Jews during the Holocaust. When Chubinets worked on a farm hoping to wait out the war, he was ordered to deliver a cartload of rotten cabbage and slimy beets to abandoned brickworks: “We drove in through the gates and got a whiff of something awful. Immediately, memories of collectivization came flooding back, visions of men dying in front of each other as routinely as, in normal times, they would have gone on living. I recalled the indescribable stink of black diarrhea and blood, and the pinkish color of mucusy vomit” (Gorenstein 1991, 69). Dmitry Bykov once mentioned that Gorenstein’s language is physiological (Bykov 2021, online). Indeed, Gorenstein uses a vast vocabulary of words naturalistically describing bodily functions and the gore associated with the treatment of the Jews during the Holocaust. Similarly, as Chubinets recalls his childhood starvation, he says, “So I realized that I would have to die. I was already vomiting and had diarrhea, although it was a puzzle where my body could find the raw materials for either. The diarrhea was not the kind a well-fed man gets from sour milk. It was black with red spots of blood in it. There was blood in my vomit too” (24). The Russian words ponos, rvota, krov’ are all repeated throughout the novel creating a linguistic thread connecting the starvation during the Holocaust and Holodomor and even further with the starvation Chubinets experienced in Siberian prison camps. Gorenstein’s linguistic and stylistic choices in Traveling Companions underscore the notion of the ‘bloodlands,’ portraying Ukraine during the Holocaust as a hotbed of brutality where barbarism reigns unrestricted by civilization. Given Gotenstein’s emphasis on the physiological and polysensory aspects of the Holocaust, his persistent descriptions of smell are not incidental. When the Germans burned the Jews alive, it was the smell that lingered the longest, affecting the environment on the most fundamental level no one could have imagined. The Holocaust assumes cosmic proportions when understood within the framework of the human capacity for evil and the human ambition to rule the universe. The language of the passage is deliberately crass, as it articulates the savagery of people and builds the parallelism between the Holocaust and Holodomor that occurred in the same geographical space. The spatiality of the Holocaust does not stand apart from the spatiality of other atrocities; instead, the layers of history and geography merge with one another.

As a strategic choice, Gorenstein positions Chubinets, who is not Jewish, to be the vehicle of Holocaust memories and provide a privileged view of a bystander looking at the atrocities unfolding before his eyes. Chubinets is particularly attuned to the smell, as it becomes apparent throughout his story. The trope of smell is further reinforced when Chubinets narrates the story of a former Soviet actor named Pasternakov, who is released from a concentration camp to work in the theater. His grave concern, however, is a deep wound on his arm that refuses to heal. When Chubinets inquires as to the origins of the wound, Pasternakov reveals that he had got it from some Jew or Jewess. He then proceeds to explain that in Odessa, all the Jews were ordered to come to the warehouses at an airfield to register.

German soldiers herded the Jews into the warehouses, then used pumps and hoses to spray everything with a fuel mixture and burn the people alive. The screams, the flames, and the horrible smell of burning bodies kept everyone awake that night, even those who lived some distance from the airfield. The screams were the first things to fade away, and then the flames, but the stench hung over the place for weeks. With these words, Pasternakov fell silent – or, rather, Chubinets fell silent. And in my role as Listener, I too was silent. We were traveling through the countryside on a mail train in the depths of the Ukrainian night, with a brilliant moonlit sky visible through the windows. The moon silvered everything it touched: the tracks, the objects along the embankment, the galvanized roofs of the sturdier houses, and from time to time the water in small lakes and streams. Everything glistened. On moonlit nights in the Ukraine, it’s unusually calm, reassuring, free of menace (72–73).

Here a new element is added to the discussion of smell: possibly for a shock effect or for a stark contrast, the description of the Holocaust of the Odessa Jews is collapsed with the description of the beauty of the moonlit Ukrainian night. All three layers of this story within a story – the framing narrative of Felix Zabrodsky, the narrative of Alexander Chubinets, and finally, the narrative of Pasternakov – are connected by the trope of smell as it permeates the layers of literary space and, presumably, the real space as well. They all take place in the same geographical location in Ukraine, yet within the literary space of the novel, these three different spatial plains are collapsed into one by the author, who unsubtly insists on his central claim that anti-Semitism, totalitarianism, and violence continue through the ages. The lovely Ukrainian landscape conceals layers of atrocities – the pogroms, World War I, World War II, Holodomor, and the Holocaust – underneath the veneer of natural beauty.

Unlike other authors who use nature imagery to reflect the inner world of their characters, Gorenstein often discusses the Ukrainian landscape as a philosophical concept that contains layers of human interactions and implaced experiences. Consequently, places absorb the negative energy of the evil deeds committed there. In his literary realm, the Ukrainian landscape is never free of menace. Moreover, behind the beauty hides the beast: the people of Ukraine. Gorenstein is unapologetic in his portrayals of Ukraine even though he is aware he might be seen as overly harsh and perhaps even offensive in his approach to non-Jews.^[7] Gorenstein’s vision of Ukraine is not tinted by nostalgia; instead, it is a passionate condemnation of the low points of humanity in the region of the ‘bloodlands.’ Not only is the very land of Ukraine polluted by murder, but the people receive a wound that can be seen symbolically as a brand forever burned into their flesh. As Pasternakov tells Chubinets, “For the whole month afterward, the corpses [of the Odessa Jews] smoldered. It was only later that they built special ovens, which were the last word in technology and had a good updrift. … Even after a month, not all the corpses had burned up; here and there, chunks of human coal still retained heat and continued to smolder” (75). Gorenstein’s portrayal of the Holocaust in Odessa is shocking both in its language and its casual tone. People seem so used to atrocities that they accept the presence of “chunks of human coal” as the new normal. Through the detailed descriptions of the Holocaust in Ukraine, Gorenstein crafted a literary universe where Ukraine’s traumas and nightmares are magnified a hundred-fold and will continue haunting its people despite multiple erasures of the Jewish presence.

The Holocaust thus affects both the land of Ukraine and the souls and bodies of its people. By giving voice to Chubinets, a deeply underprivileged disabled non-Jew, Gorenstein explores the ways in which his character’s relationship with the environment saturated with violence and terror shapes his consciousness. From the tragic events of the Holodomor through the discussion of the evils of Stalinism and the tragedy of the Holocaust, Gorenstein goes back to observing the stations his train passes by. One of the stations that attracts his attention is Kazatin, which is noisy and brightly lit and where West Ukrainians board the train eating their famous salted pork fat with garlic. The image of the Ukrainian salted pork fat adds vibrancy to Gorenstein’s portrayal of Ukraine. It is unabashedly a non-Jewish image, and as such, it reinforces the reality of Soviet Ukraine without the Jews, with its own culture, food, and religion. It is a country that makes a supreme effort to forget that the Jews have ever lived there. Nonetheless some Jews are still around, and the epitome of this Jewish presence is the city of Berdichev. In its heyday during the second half of the nineteenth century, Berdichev was 80% Jewish and an early home to such Jewish luminaries as Mendele Mocher Sforim. Drastically diminished during the Second World War, the Jewish population of Berdichev is still the butt of innumerable jokes (both Jewish and anti-Semitic), and the city itself is the undisputed capital of Jewish Ukraine.

One of Gorenstein’s close friends pointed out how attuned he was to the spiritual quality of places, “When it concerns a city in which poets lived and created, even if this city disappears, there will remain a spiritual substance, and a warm, light wind will rustle with poems. It is hard to discern the past in the present, to understand the language of the city, and to start a conversation with it” (Polianskaya 2003, 113). The city of Berdichev, where young Gorenstein spent his post-war years with his mother’s sisters, emerges in his writing as possessing this exceptional spiritual quality embedded in and inscribed onto its environment. Jewish life has occurred in the city for centuries, transforming its urban and natural landscape into a special place rich in multi-layered memory. The source of this phenomenon seems to be a high concentration of Jewish lived experience or the presence of Yiddishkeit, the civilizational fabric of which is inescapably connected to Gorenstein’s textuality. Consistent with his interest in the fate of little people abused by their country, history, and the State, Gorenstein’s portrayals of the city tend to be dark and depressing. As Mikhail Krutikov keenly observes, Gorenstein “singles out the least glorious landmarks” (Krutikov 1999, 110) as they perhaps reflect more of the city’s personality than others. The old glory of Jewish Berdichev is contrasted continuously with contemporary Soviet reality, while the Jewish influence on the landscape is compared to that of the Gentiles.

Cumulatively, in his works, Gorenstein mourns, documents, and commemorates the destruction of the Berdichev Jewish community as well as multiple transfigurations of its physical space, i.e., specifically Jewish neighborhoods, communal buildings, cemeteries, and other localities that are no longer part of its cityscape. In Traveling Companions specifically, parallel to the erasures and transformations of space, Gorenstein observes and uncovers the erasures and transformations of Jewish memories and Jewish narratives. Saying that the citizens of Berdichev love their much-maligned city and are proud of every bit of trivia associated with it, Gorenstein points out a number of topographical features, such as Avratyn Heights that are a “gently sloping rise between the Dnieper and the Pripyat” (182). There is only one true hill in that region, Lysaya Gora. Not everybody knows that the hill was the location of a notorious concentration camp that housed Jewish craftsmen who survived multiple mass murder operations. The rest of the Jews of Berdichev (approximately 17,000) were annihilated by June 1942 in pits near Berdichev airfield (Yad Vashem, online). While arguing that the present-day Jews of Berdichev are “just as likely as any anti-Semite to belch and be primevally stupid,” Gorenstein brings up a Jew named Hunzya, “incidentally, one of that handful of Jews, a couple of dozen out of 40 thousand, who survived the German occupation. His mother, brothers and sisters, grandfather and grandfather all died in that huge pit near the airfield” (162).

This description of the mass murder echoes the one in Chernaya Kniga (known in English as The Black Book of Soviet Jewry): “The entire day [September 15, 1941] lasted this monstrous slaughter of the innocent and helpless, blood was flowing the entire day. The pits were full of blood, clay ground would not absorb it, so the blood spilled over the edges and formed huge puddles on the ground and was flowing down in rivulets collecting in low areas” (Chernaya Kniga 1993, 29). Given the suppression of The Black Book in the Soviet Union, it is hard to tell whether Gorenstein had read it. Yet, even with this uncertainty, intertextual dialogue is essential as it combats the erasure of history and adds layers to the human experience of a certain place. Gorenstein’s writing adds his own layer to the palimpsest while addressing the interplay of the previous layers that bleed through one another. Gorenstein combines many sources of memory – his own childhood memories, his family stories, and the collective memory of the war – with the intertextual layers in dialogue with other authors who wrote about Ukraine specifically as a Jewish place. These interwoven layers of memory and representation are, in turn, intertwined with the layers of place. Given the multiple waves of destruction perpetrated during the pogroms, World War I, the Russian Civil war, the Holodomor, World War II, the Holocaust, and the post-war Soviet amnesia, the phenomenon of the multi-layered palimpsest of places is particularly compelling in Traveling Companions. Jewish places in Ukraine are the key elements of the integrated literary experience created by Gorenstein, and the city of Berdichev is the central, most meaningful example of a complex Jewish place in Ukraine. Gorenstein’s spatiotemporal approach to representations of the Holocaust in Ukraine greatly enriches the relatively small corpus of Russian-language Holocaust literature. Its unique intertextual complexity, multi-layered spatiality, and emphasis on memory and identity make Traveling Companions an important contribution to not only Russian but worldwide discussions of Holocaust representation.

Through his narrator Zabrodsky, Gorenstein further advances his discussion of the particular nature of the city of Berdichev and its centrality to the Russian-Jewish identity. As Eric Pieto argues, the relationship between humans and their environment is foundational for their identity: “This may indeed be one of the main lessons to draw from the resurgence of interest in spatial studies: no matter what the starting point – whether psychological, social, identitarian, political, or environmental – and no matter how much of a tendency we have to forget this basic fact, human identity, indeed the very ability to be the kind of creature who has an identity … is inextricably bound up with the places in which we find ourselves and through which we move” (Pieto 2011, 18). Indeed, the narrator cannot hide the emotions that overwhelm him on the approach to Berdichev: “Can it be that this is my historical homeland?” Because Berdichev is the historical homeland of all Russian Jewry. All of us, even the old-time converts to Christianity, Saint Petersburg residents of long standing, seem to have some connection with it. And not only Russian Jews. In the tense year of 1967, his excellency Comrade Malik, then Soviet representative at the United Nations, was heard to shout at the representative of Israel: “This is not the Berdichev Bazaar!” (173) The urban environment of Berdichev – as well as its literary representations – is arguably the gateway to Gorenstein’s entire philosophy of Jewish identity. For him, the connection between place and identity is at the core of the human condition. The Holocaust turning Ukraine into a Jewish cemetery disrupts this connection and questions whether there is any future for the Jews in Ukraine.

This notion of Berdichev as the homeland of Russian Jewry is at the heart of Gorenstein’s overarching understanding of the concept of the nation. In his view, Jews are a separate nation, and only as a nation can they survive the trials and tribulations of their history. Anninskiy argues that Gorenstein’s perception of the nation is essentialist and even racial (Anninskiy 1993, 75). For Gorenstein, history, a sweeping stream of events, is basically chaos associated first and foremost with primeval violence. In the world of continuous antagonism, the nation seems to be the one constant, a milestone that helps navigate the chaos. The following paragraph is an excellent example of Gorenstein’s philosophy of nationhood:

Nations are like forests; as long as they are not totally chopped into firewood or burned to the last cinder, they go on reproducing themselves in their own disorganized fashion, dropping their seeds to the ground, which sprout into seedlings wherever they happen to fall. Each seed, a thinking seed, is subject to chance, to the vicissitudes of moisture and sunlight, food and shelter. Some fall far from the original roots, far from the nation-thicket. The Jewish seed has always felt cramped in the Russian forest, hemmed in. It is too intelligent, too impatient with idiots. For the Russian seed, it is just the opposite: Ivan the Idiot is seated in the place of honor. This makes the Russians a tightly knit nation, and they amuse themselves by allowing a phantom city to arise in Berdichev, a foreign city within Russia’s walls (176).

For Gorenstein, certain geographical locations (not political constructs like nation-states) are nation-thickets where the concentration of national character runs high. Berdichev is an example of a Jewish nation-thicket within the forest of another nation. Always a part of somebody else’s forest, Jews are nonetheless an essential partner in the ecosystem. Neither Russians nor Ukrainians seem to share this view as they repeatedly attempt to root out the Jewish weed. From the examination of Gorenstein’s naturalist imagery, which he uses to describe the Jewish roots in Eastern Europe, it becomes clear that he sees the land itself as a contested space where several species struggle for survival and compete for scarce resources. The question is which one is the native species and which one has the right to live on the land. Gorenstein’s poetics of homelessness and marginality, which is a strong leitmotif in his entire corpus, is foregrounded in Traveling Companions. Where is the home of the Jews, and where do they belong? Do the “native” oaks have the right to trample the Jewish plants, and who has the authority to determine whether a plant is a weed? All these questions are critical to Gorenstein as he grapples with the notion of specifically Jewish spaces within non-Jewish lands and the implications of this situation for Jewish fate.

The city is the epitome of Gorenstein’s Jewish Ukraine, home to us all, that turns our familiar notions of the Diaspora upside down. All the Russian Jews, including those who are now Israelis and represent the state of Israel on the world arena, are connected to Berdichev, which functions as the center of the Jewish map of Ukraine as well as the center of Gorenstein’s literary territory. Only toward the final chapters of the novel does the reader realize that this train journey is really an opportunity to memorialize Jewish Ukraine and reflect on the destruction the Holocaust brought to the Jewish thicket. Gorenstein’s literary territory is structured along the railroad track that leads from one Jewish shtetl to another. At both ends of the journey, however, are located two large Jewish cities, Kiev and Berdichev. They are different from the shtetlach, and yet they are an integral part of that vanished Jewish Ukraine, small remnants of which animate Gorenstein’s imagination. He further underscores the centrality of Berdichev for his literary realm as he explains:

Berdichev is less a place than a state of mind; it is a symbolic city spread across the country and around the world. A man can be mocked for being from Berdichev even though his feet never touched its streets, whether he’s a Moscow professor, a New York lawyer, or a Parisian artist. On the other hand, there are Berdichev residents – say, of the squat old houses on Makhnovsky Street or the smart Party buildings along the boulevard – who have absolutely nothing to do with that Berdichev. Berdichev, then, is both a ghost and a living thing. But the ghost has more life than the living thing. Some flesh, even when pink, is dead (174).

Gorenstein’s Jewish Ukraine is complex and intriguing. His kaleidoscopic literary techniques span the Jewish past in the old Ukrainian nation-thicket and the erasures of memory and identity perpetrated by the alienating non-Jewish present. Gorenstein’s perspective is both unique and troubling as his writing focuses on violence, brutality, and the ugliest, most horrific human behaviors. “Always a staunch opponent of all forms of totalitarianism and antisemitism” (Krutikov 2002, online), Gorenstein focused on the ‘bloodlands’ and the transformative influence of the Holocaust on the real and literary space of Ukraine. Traveling Companions is thus both an attempt at building upon memory and intertextuality of the Holocaust and negotiating the concepts of home and homelessness through the palimpsest of multi-faceted Jewish places in Ukraine.