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This book explores the Jewish contribution to, and integration with, Ukrainian culture, focusing on five writers and poets of Jewish descent whose literary activities span the 1880s to the 1990s. Unlike their East European contemporaries—who disparaged the culture of Ukraine as second-rate, stateless, and colonial—these individuals embraced the Russian- and Soviet-dominated Ukrainian community, incorporating their Jewish concerns in their Ukrainian-language writings. The author argues that the marginality of these literati as Jews fuelled their sympathy toward Ukrainians and their national cause. Providing extensive historical background, biographical detail, and analysis of each writer's poetry and prose, he shows how a Ukrainian-Jewish literary tradition emerged. Along the way, the author challenges assumptions about modern Jewish acculturation and Ukrainian–Jewish relations.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1595-1657), the Ukrainian Cossack leader who led the 1648 rebellion against Polish magnates, has been memorialized in Ukraine as a national hero and as the author of a fatal compromise. In Russia he has been viewed as a dangerous but important ally. He is seen as an enemy to Polish Catholics, and among Jews, as the perpetrator of a horrific massacre. Stories of Khmelnytsky juxtaposes literary accounts of Khmelnytsky that appeared in Ukrainian, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and Hebrew. The twelve chapters in this edited volume of literary studies collectively illustrate how a figure can simultaneously remain a hero, traitor and villain, from the event’s immediate aftermath to the twenty-first century. The book is divided into four parts: the first treats the century following the Cossack uprising, including chronicles written in Hebrew, Yiddish and Ukrainian, and the relationship between the uprising and the trans-continental Sabbatean Movement in Judaism. The second section explores the figure of Khmelnytsky in Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian Romanticism, as well as post-Romanticism. A section on the reinvention of national traditions explores the figure of Khmelnytsky in Jewish and Ukrainian Modernist literature, as well as the role of the Cossacks in turn-of the twentieth-century national revivals, including Ukrainian nationalism and Zionism. The final section discusses the figure of Khmelnytsky in the twentieth century, including the image of the Hetman in the Red Army, and the role of Khmelnytsky in twentieth-century East European literature and film.