For me it was a fall into the unreal. I could no longer trust my senses. The city before me had been built stone by stone in duplication of my legendary Czernopol. But its overwhelming here-and-nowness was devoid of any soul; in some strange way, it was removed from its global time. Not that it had been arrested in its evolution, but rather that it had been backdated, as it were, beyond it. This present-day Chernovtsy was a repudiation both of the interwar Cernăuţi and of the imperial Austrian Czernowitz. In its unaltered surface permanence it had reverted to an abstract, provincially idyllic Belle Époque, a founders’-era dream of itself, but without spirit and life. It was the stage setting of a play that had never been produced, a contradiction in itself: a cleanup, spit-and-polish, lacquered and antiseptic city. Nothing could be felt of its once demonic nature. What could endow this cunning model of a provincial town, as the Chernovtsy of 1989 presented itself, with the wide-awake perceptiveness, the bright resourcefulness, the sharp powers of observation, the delight in ridiculing others and the biting wit of — well, precisely of Czernowitz? Nothing could be detected now of the restlessly vivacious, cynically bold and melancholically skeptical spirit that had distinguished the children of this town and made them known and famous throughout the world as Czernowitzers. And yet the city before me was an undeniable reality, and it was more persuasive than the myth, which was merely my own assertion.
It has been claimed that the spirit of Czernowitz was due to the unique propinquity and juxtaposition of the Bukovina’s multiplicity of populations and to their furiously fermenting compression in its capital, their reciprocal insemination and abrasion, the challenging, constant need to react quickly and adapt shrewdly, a need that had been vital especially for the Czernowitz Jews. All of this seemed invalidated in the here and now of Chernovtsy. The motley ethnic variegation had been replaced by a homogeneous breed of people. Of those wretched avatars, issued from folksy patriotism and fatal nationalism, which had produced Walpurgis Night-like excesses here too, hardly more than allegorical traces remained visible. On the façades of the former Deutsches Haus, Dom Polski, Romanian Casa Poporului and Ukrainian Narodni Dim could still be discerned, though faded by the strongly contrasting local weather, the frescoes of imposing female figures with bared bosoms and all kinds of symbolic appurtenances — sword, book, lyre, wheat sheaves, eagles, throttled snakes — meant to epitomize in Art Nouveau style the spirit of every nationality, each but a single component among the many of the spiritus loci of Czernowitz.
But the primary base element of Czernowitz had always been a cynically healthy derision for all types of lofty conviction. Any true Czernowitzer watched an exhibition of overflowing nationalistic sentiment with no greater personal involvement than that which he reserved for the Purim masquerades put on by street urchins.
Still, it was anything but shoulder-shrugging imperturbability that was responsible for letting these strongholds of conceited, chauvinistically overheated pettiness remain standing just as they had been built and decorated a century ago in the heyday of patriotic romanticism. Among all the spooky, soullessly preserved testimonies to a turbulent past, these were the only ones that appeared dilapidated. I had the impression that behind their now shabby façades these buildings were nothing but empty shells, like houses after a ruthlessly extinguished conflagration, when the firemen have done more damage than the flames — as if, at one time, the aggression they harbored had flared too violently and the people who then exterminated the spreading infection had proceeded so drastically that they also annihilated all the productive antagonisms, all the color and vivid tension that had characterized the city’s contiguous admixture of a dozen nationalities.
In this connection I tried to reconstruct a scene from the past in my legendary Czernopoclass="underline" a youth from the Junimea, the Romanian Youth Movement, steps from the Casa Poporului wearing the well-known costume of short, sleeveless and colorfully embroidered sheepskin jacket, and coarse linen shirt over linen trousers tightly belted in blue-yellow-and-red; there’s a suggestion of a whiff of pine needles from the Carpathian forests in his hair and his eyes shine with the pride of the Dacians (whom Trajan’s cohorts could never subdue, though they managed to overcome them in battle). As chance will have it, a German student passes by, a member of the folk-German fraternity Arminia, in its usual uniform: stiff collar, kepi worn at a snappy angle, fraternity colors displayed across the chest on a broad ribbon. At the sight of the Romanian he snorts contemptuously through the adhesive plaster covering a recent saber cut — an unambiguous signal that he considers the Romanian a lumpish yokel and potential adversary, even though both sit in the same lecture halls at the university. Such an encounter might all too easily lead to blows. But this time both are distracted by the appearance of a Hasidic rabbi in black caftan, with the pale skin of a bookworm and long corkscrew side-locks under a fox-pelt hat, an apparition that forthwith unites the former opponents in the happy recognition that the newcomer is the natural target of their aggression. For the time being, they content themselves with jeers and taunts, obscene gestures and curses. For the time being — I was writing of the year 1930. The great signal had not yet been given that would produce all its evil consequences.
In the Chernovtsy of 1989 such a scene is unimaginable. It haunts my mind but not those neatly kept streets. What now moved through the streets before my confused and astonished eyes was utterly uniform and obviously homogeneous, nothing provoking any particularizing pride. People strolled about at all hours of the day like a mass of workers streaming from factories at the end of their shift. Despite the occasional colorful getup, the ready-to-wear mass clothing seemed mostly to be a uniform gray. The faces were — as the saying goes — all of the same stamp: of Slavic broadness and angularity with coarse skin and light-colored hair. These were Ukrainians. In the old days we called them Ruthenians, one of the many minorities in a place where there was no majority. In all the Bukovina they did not make up more than a third of the population, in the Czernowitz of old Austria even less, and a smaller proportion still in the Romanian Cernăuţi. Now they were the only ones left, those people’s comrades of the Soviet Republic of the Ukraine, which, as the former “Little Russia” enlarged by the annexation of Galicia and the northern Bukovina, now accounts for more than half the European territory of the Soviet Union. Nor were these people different from other Russians. The women were almost without exception plump, the men stocky and puffy, a people of cabbage eaters, not in dire want, not dissatisfied but inclined to submit resignedly to God’s will, serious and well behaved. Very well behaved, it seemed. Femininity found its expression solely and ostentatiously in a petit-bourgeois motherliness — and perhaps also in a fatal predilection for dyed fire-red hair. Only very young girls wore slacks; and only a few teenagers made weak attempts to imitate Elvis Presley hairdos. But this was mere modishness and not an expression of a sociopolitical essence.