Our Others. Olesya Yaremchuk

      1 Hrushvytsia Persha, Czechs and Slovaks

      2 Vasiukivka, Meskhetian Turks

      3 Zmiivka, Swedes

      4 Hertza, Romanians

      5 Mali Selmentsi, Hungarians

      6 Toretsk, Roma

      7 Brody, Jews

      8 Velykyi Bereznyi, Liptaks

      9 Vynohradivka, Gagauzes

      10 Pavshyno, Germans

      11 Obava, Vlachs

      12 Dovbysh, Poles

      13 Novooleksiyivka, Crimean Tatars

      14 Kuty, Armenians

FOREWORD

      The Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes in his Postmodernity and Its Discontents, “There are, however, things for which the ‘right place’ has not been reserved in any fragment of man-made order. They are ‘out of place’ everywhere.”

      An ill-chosen birthday gift, a picture left on the wall by previous tenants—there’s no using such things, but there’s no throwing them away either. They’re jarring; they don’t match the decor; they belong to some other aesthetic that we don’t want to have anything to do with. The simplest thing would be to stash them in a dark corner and forget about them, and that’s what we typically do.

      But what if this happens with people? A new landlord enters the “room of society” with his “designers,” who are carrying skillfully drafted blueprints for a new world scheme. Order reigns on these pages. Everything is modern and utilitarian and formulated in accordance with a unified conceptualization. There are no old framed photographs: Faces from the past aren’t needed here. Who are these people? Where did they come from? What language do they speak? It doesn’t matter. If they reject their preassigned roles on the stage of the “new society,” they belong in the closet or even the trash bin. A yearning for definitive solutions has been a fundamental trait of modern “human resource managers.” That’s what these people are called nowadays, no?

      One of the journeys described in this book leads us to the village of Dovbysh in the Zhytomyr Oblast, where a small Polish community lives, mostly descendants of the “returnees” who managed to survive in Stalin-era settlements in Kazakhstan. These people, who live here in Ukraine on account of the survivors, gather every Sunday at a Polish Roman Catholic church to celebrate mass together and then once more dissolve among the “Soviet buildings [that] obscure everything with their awkward bulk.”

      Such is our Ukraine, this “middle land” through which waves of both voluntary and forced migrations rolled for centuries, leaving behind little islands of diverse cultural communities. Then eventually, in the twentieth century, something else rolled through: a steamroller of planned homogenization of language, culture, religion (or rather, its absence), domesticity, and worldview (because what else is there to call it?). This is what this Ukraine of ours looks like today; this is its scale model, so to speak: a gray hodge-podge of typical Soviet construction amid which only the most attentive eye will discern something other, left intact in this new and “ordered” landscape either by someone’s negligence or willful stubbornness. A small Polish Catholic church where the congregation sings in another language; a traditional dish that has been prepared for ages in a few or a few dozen houses in the neighborhood, possibly the only memento of a long journey from snow-capped mountains once undertaken by ancestors; a craft brought over from a faraway land; a handful of words in another language heard in childhood that neighbors don’t understand.

      Yes, these islands are small, at times so tiny that you wouldn’t spot them without a jeweler’s loupe: like a gem inlay on a more or less smooth surface that, fascinating as it is, is made infinitely richer by these little crystals of otherness. This book is precisely such a magnifying glass—a moving, accurate, and love-filled lens that reveals places where “what is Ukrainian” suddenly expands, opens up to all four corners of the world, and overcomes the absurd boundaries of ethnic nationalism as naturally as a fish crosses different countries’ territorial waters.

      It is indisputably a sign of one’s wisdom and maturity to be able to say: our Armenians and Jews; our Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks; our Roma; our Germans; our Gagauzes; our Vlachs and Albanians. Only then, and not sooner, will they all stop being homeless. Yes, they’re homeless, and it’s our fault, the fault of the so-called “social majority”—because so long as they remain foreigners, they will be denied a place: A foreigner is one who is denied a place in space, who always belongs more comfortably “elsewhere.” These people—the ones who have borne the brunt of Stalin’s deportations and sometimes post-Soviet nationalisms as well—know full well what this means. They’re not surprised by it. Often, they don’t expect anything from us anymore. Typically, they fall silent and disappear. They move away, they assimilate once and for all, they die.

      “I’m afraid.”

      “Of whom?”

      “Of everyone.”

      “Why?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “Will you tell me about it?”

      “No.”

      This dialogue is from the story of the last Armenian woman in the Carpathian village of Kuty, who remains the only living memory of a once large and vibrant community. Yes, they often kept silent. Their biographies, their ancestry and names, and their language were all often deemed criminal enough. But why are they silent still?

      That is the question we need to be asking ourselves time and again. There are few things in this world as dangerous as an aspiration to linguistic and cultural homogeneity, and there are few things as sad as an unwillingness to unwind this process and examine what survived under the steamroller of history: all those scattered crystals, keepsakes, and “little secrets.” But first and foremost, these are people—our living compatriots—to whose existence we’re often completely oblivious. Let’s be honest: Do we know much about our Meskhetian Turks? About our Swedes? Yet without this knowledge, any noble endeavors to build a “political Ukrainian nation” will be merely futile gesticulation, a shout into the void. It’s impossible to invite an Other into a dialogue not knowing his or her name.

      Therefore, read this book. Read it carefully.

      And one more thing: You will never and in no way predict at precisely which moment and by which