The Nation That Would Not Bow

A conversation with Ukrainian-American writer Askold Melnyczuk on Ukraine’s bloody history, his family’s journey from war-torn Europe to the U.S., and why Ukrainians will never accept permanent exile.

By Michael Judge

The first time I had the pleasure of hearing the Ukrainian-American writer Askold Melnyczuk read was a few weeks ago. And while he wasn’t reading his own work, it was, by far, one of the most moving readings I’ve ever attended. Organized with the help of Melnyczuk and hosted by the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, the reading was “for Ukraine,” but in a very profound sense it was really for the world—for those of us outside Ukraine so that we may better understand the courage and resolve of the Ukrainian people.

I woke early the next morning and wrote this piece for TFP, “Because We Aren’t Powerless,” hoping to draw still more attention to the brave Ukrainian writers who shared their work—from Kyiv, Lviv and other Ukrainian towns and villages—in the dead of night. The title comes from Melnyczuk’s portion of the reading, in which he said, with great urgency and eloquence, the following:

“One of the side-effects of a war is that its shadow makes so much normal activity appear absurd. Reading, writing—what can these do against missiles and tanks? But these are not the right questions. With Russia making its intentions so breathtakingly explicit, the only question that remains, the one we need to ask ourselves, is: What can each of us do to make sure the phrase “never again” is more than a rhetorical flourish? Because we aren’t powerless. Our voices and our actions in the aggregate can still prevent the worst from happening. Nothing is certain; nothing is promised; nothing is foreordained.”

After hearing those words, I knew I had to interview Melnyczuk, a man whose parents, Edward Melnyczuk and Olena Zahajkewycz Melnyczuk, were Ukrainian refugees who fled Poland in 1944, along with his grandfather, Bohdan Zahajkewycz, and spent five years in a refugee camp in Germany before immigrating to New Jersey, where he was born in 1954.

Like Virgil’s Aeneas, Melnyczuk’s parents carried Ukraine’s culture with them to their new home in America, teaching their children to speak Ukrainian before English and cherish their native country’s poetry, stories and music. But unlike Troy in the Aeneid, Ukraine was not wiped off the map, neither by Hitler’s Germany nor Stalin’s Russia, and eventually, as the Soviet Union collapsed, earned its independence in 1991. This independence, while only three decades old, is fierce and runs through the veins of all Ukrainians, as Russia’s murderous dictator and invading soldiers have learned.

“People feel hunted in Ukraine, because they are. For Russians like Putin, Ukrainians should not exist. They’re somehow an insult to him. It’s a typical imperial attitude.” 

Like many writers, Melnyczuk—whose accomplishments include four award-winning novels, several collections of short stories, most recently last year’s The Man Who Would Not Bow, the translation and publishing of Ukrainian writers, as well as founding the literary journal AGNI and Arrowsmith Press—is more comfortable in the role of interviewer than interviewee. When I reach him by phone at his home outside Boston, where he teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts, he asks about my family, where I was raised, and how I started The First Person. Eventually, however, we settle into a conversation about Ukraine’s bloody history, his family’s journey from war-torn Europe to the U.S., and why Ukrainians, unlike Aeneas, will never accept permanent exile.

MJ: I confess. I’ve been avoiding the news for a few days—I just couldn’t take it anymore. But today it looks as if Putin’s assault on the east of Ukraine, after his blitzkrieg approach and attempts to take Kyiv failed miserably, is in full swing. He also said that Russia had tested a new long-range missile system capable of carrying nuclear warheads in a clear threat to the U.S. and our NATO allies.

AM: Sure. This is the kind of bullshit that bullies always do. What’s that line from The Maltese Falcon? “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.”

You know many writers and other ordinary citizens defending Ukraine. What hopes do they have of not just surviving, but winning this war, and how soon the fighting might end?

They’re determined not only to survive, but to win. And they will certainly win it in the end. The question is what the cost will be. Remember, the Russians could not take Afghanistan. And Ukraine is a much larger and stronger country, better equipped and more determined. So I don’t think there’s any chance of Putin winning in Ukraine. But the slaughter that will be committed, especially if this becomes a guerilla war, that’s a different question. But that doesn’t have to happen. I think, for all his bluster, Putin is scared to death of really inciting the West. Why else would he be threatening Sweden and Finland, should they dare to join NATO, if he weren’t so afraid of the power of a united West?

The problem is that the West is not united and hasn’t done nearly enough to cut this war short. They should ship more—and more advanced—weaponry immediately, as well as impose a no-fly zone. I don’t think Putin would risk the hammer blow that would come down on him if he violated that. When it comes to sanctions, I don’t know if you’ve followed the scandal at Yale regarding the hundreds of millions of dollars that various oligarchs from Putin’s inner circle have invested there over the years. To me, there’s nothing more contemptible than the collaboration of our Ivy League schools with dirty money. One certainly sees that at Harvard. It’s not only foreign dirty money. The ways in which people can whitewash and launder their funds in this country is breathtaking.

That’s why, in my opinion, one of the most important books published recently is On Corruption in America by Sarah Chayes. It’s a brilliant and beautifully written book published in 2020. It’s bold and fascinating and got buried by the many events of the last year. I’ve been hearing for years from Ukrainian friends, particularly from Oksana Zabuzhko, one of the country’s leading writers, how Russia and Putin had bought up a lot of politicians in Europe and were also supporting politicians in the U.S. Another revelatory book is Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom, published in 2018. He does a better job than [Robert] Mueller did in establishing the connections between Trump and the Russians, which go back many more decades than I had realized, into the 1980s.

I was fascinated by the news that President Zelensky’s government recently recaptured Viktor Medvedchuk, a close ally of Putin’s and longtime Trump associate, on charges of “treason and terrorism financing.” It’s astonishing. I read a piece recently in New Eastern Europe, published back in June 2017, all about the connections between Medvedchuk and Trump.

Those connections are deep and obscene. That so many of our politicians have either turned a blind eye to them, or have simply decided to step right up and support Trump, suggests that the only thing to which they pay any kind of fealty is money. Again, in terms of sanctions, it’s not popular in all quarters, but I don't quite understand how it is that we can so quietly, so readily, allow the families of these various oligarchs’ free passage. I do not want to hurt them, but I would certainly be supportive of returning them back to Russia where they can huddle with the man who is so glibly decimating tens of millions of lives. There are 10 million displaced people in the country; more than five million have already left the country. We’re talking about 30% of a country that has been upended in a matter of weeks because of the will of one man and his inner circle. I think imposing a little discomfort on the extended world of that inner circle might help drive home to them that there are real consequences to their behavior.

There’s a cynical nexus between flat-out Putin apologists and so-called realists on the right who say that Ukraine is simply more important to Putin than it is to the West. What do you say to them?

The realpolitik thing, man … I don’t think that there’s anyone with a weaker track record than the realpolitik mouthpieces, from Henry Kissinger to John Mearsheimer to, I don’t know, name your so-called realist and let’s look at their track record of the last 30 years. That to me is simply an unethical position that some people assume to justify unethical behavior.

I wanted to talk about the reading for Ukraine you took part in earlier this month in collaboration with the International Writing Program. I was moved by so many of the readers in Ukraine, especially the poet Pavlo Korobchuk, whose poems were stunningly beautiful.

I agree.

One woman reading said that the Russians had taken a local librarian away and her children. Not because she was fighting, but because she was a Russian speaker who was opposed to the invasion. There really is a kind of ethnic cleansing taking place. I was so shocked. I had the feeling that these people, reading to us under cover of night, were being hunted.

That’s pretty much, of course, the way they feel. Over the last couple of centuries, Russia has several times forbidden the use of Ukrainian in anything it printed. Ukrainian books have been proscribed. The language has been proscribed. I’m actually working on a piece called “The Dangerous Tongue,” because I’m simply trying to sort out what it is that people might find so threatening about an indigenous language. Ukrainian is the indigenous language of the people in that area and has been for hundreds of years. But it would not become a widely published written language until the early 19th century. And that was when Russia began to clamp down on it, because it was a language of the serfs in Ukraine, who were the slaves in plantations of Russian, Polish and Ukrainian magnates, as they were known. Who wants to hear what your slaves have to say to you? I think that is an attitude that has remained a dominant one in Russia. It’s quite shocking actually, when you think about how little dialogue has taken place, even in the West, between Russian intellectuals and scholars and Ukrainian intellectuals and scholars. There is a kind of incredible arrogance on the part of native Russian speakers toward the language itself. People feel hunted in Ukraine, because they are. For Russians like Putin, Ukrainians should not exist. They’re somehow an insult to him. It’s a typical imperial attitude. 

But I think along with that comes a great deal of guilt that’s never been addressed or processed—that sense that you have both oppressed and slaughtered a people for a couple of centuries, had them under your boot heel, and you don’t really want to face that history. It's very comparable to the resentment and fear some in this country have when it comes to facing up to the legacy of slavery and racism in this country. It’s the same kind of psychological dynamic. You don't want to think that your grandparents were cruel or evil or ruthless. So let’s not look in that direction at all. Let’s silence those who are urging us to face our history and face ourselves.

It also reminds me of the genocide of native Americans, their forced removal from their lands, the Trail of Tears, which I spoke with U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo about recently.

Absolutely.

I wanted to ask you about your grandfather taking in a Jewish family in Poland during the Holocaust. I was struck by a horrifying detail, how they escaped by hiding in a wagonload of corpses?

Yes. These are the stories that haunted my youth. My grandfather was a high-school teacher in Peremyshl, which is in Poland. It was a city with a sizable Ukrainian population, a sizable Jewish population, and a dominant Polish population. My grandfather had really good and long-lasting relationships with the Jewish community in Peremyshl. My mother would tell me that for a while, they were actually the only goy family living in a Jewish neighborhood, before they moved near the center of town. When the Germans arrived, the city wound up being divided, with half of it controlled by the Germans and half of it controlled by the Soviets. The Germans created a ghetto and kept the entire Jewish population there. In 1943, they began to liquidate that ghetto.

One evening, as the story goes, there was a knock on the door late at night. When they opened the door Edward Sheffler, whom they knew quite well, and his young bride were at the door. They had escaped the ghetto by hiding on a wagonload of corpses. They asked to be taken in. My grandfather consulted with his kids, because he knew, by doing so, he’d be risking the lives of my mother, my uncle, and his six- or seven-year-old daughter, Christine, at the time. They quickly agreed that of course they would do it. So the Shefflers moved in. My uncle built a false room behind a pantry, and they spent the next nine months there with them.

The stories from that time are crazy. There was a gestapo guy, known as Captain Violin, who liked to come over to my grandfather’s apartment to play the violin while my mother played the piano. They were also living right across the street from the Ukrainian police station. But the captain of the police station had been a student of my grandfather. Mrs. Sheffler taught my father to dance. They would come out in the evening and they would socialize. Apparently, the captain at the police station was aware of that and told my grandfather to keep it down and be sure to pull the shades. That was the way they lived for a number of months. 

And then, when the Russians pushed the Germans out, my grandfather found out he was on their hit list. They had to split and they left the Shefflers at the apartment, who eventually made it to what was then Palestine. They stayed in touch and reunited in Israel at Yad Vashem in the 1980s after my family was designated “righteous among gentiles” and invited to plant a tree there.

What an amazing family. It’s worth remembering that Ukrainians didn’t get their independence until 1991, after living through centuries of occupation and oppression, including the mass murder and starvation of the Holodomor under Stalin. It’s only been three decades that they’ve had this chance to have their own nation and they’re fighting like hell to hold onto it.

That’s right. I think that’s very much what we’re seeing. They really have had a sense of what it means to forge your own destiny, to create yourselves rather than to be recreated by someone else, according to their preferences and desires and aims for you. That taste of freedom has transformed them. I’ve known several generations of Ukrainian writers now. Most of the people who read at the Iowa event are the second or third generation of writers I’ve known. They’re the first to come of age in an independent country. They’ve also traveled beyond the borders of Ukraine. They’ve been to Europe. They’ve been to the U.S. They’ve been to Asia, to Tibet, Nepal. And that sense of freedom is something that they know their parents never had. Damned if they’re going to let that go.

As with all TFP conversations, this conversation was edited for length and clarity.

For more information about Askold Melnyczuk’s work and a complete list of his novels, memoirs, essays, collections of short stories and translations, including From Three Worlds: New Writing from Ukraine, please visit his author’s site here.