Hryts’ko Kernerenko

Hryts’ko Kernerenko (Ukrainian: Грицько Кернеренко, born Grigorii Borisovich Kerner, 1863–1941[1][2]) was a Jewish-Ukrainian poet.[3] He may have been the first poet of Jewish descent to write in Ukrainian, and was the first to write on the topic of Jewish-Ukrainian identity.[3][4]

Biography

Kernerenko was born into a wealthy Russian-speaking family in Huliaipole.[3][5] He began publishing poems in Literaturno-Naukovyi Vistnyk ("Literary Scientific Herald," the most important Ukrainian periodical of the time) and other magazines in the 1880s.[5] His poems were widely anthologized.[6]

Kernerenko published four books of poetry, as well as short stories and plays.[1] He also translated works by Sholem Aleichem, Shimen Frug, Semyon Nadson, Heinrich Heine, and Alexander Pushkin into Ukrainian.[1]

Many of Kernerenko's poems center on feelings of love and loneliness but he also wrote on Ukrainian national themes.[6] After 1900 he began writing poems with Jewish subject matter and expressing support for Zionism.[4]

He married Rebecca Gordskoff and had three sons: Yakov, Victor, and Emile.[1] Records are scarce, but the family appears to have left Ukraine for Turkey after the Russian Revolution, subsequently moving on to France.[1] Kernerenko died in Paris in 1941.[1]


References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Frolov, Mykhaylo and Serhii Zvilinsky. In search of Hrytsko Kernerenko, person without a profession: A genealogical mystery. Ukrainian Jewish Encounter. September 7, 2021
  2. ↑ Zayarnyuk, Andriy and Ostap Sereda. The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Ukraine: The Nineteenth Century. Taylor & Francis, 2022.
  3. 1 2 3 Petrovsky-Shtern, Yohanan. "Ukrainian Literature." The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe
  4. 1 2 Shkandrij 71
  5. 1 2 Shandrij 69
  6. 1 2 Shkandrij 70

Sources

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