Why the word ‘zhyd’ stirs fighting in Ukraine

I would like to tell a personal story about why the word “zhyd,” a derogatory [?] reference to Jews, stirs so much emotion in Ukraine. The reason I am doing this is discussion around a recent comment by my former university mate-turned-member of parliament from Svoboda Party, Ihor Miroshnychenko. He called the Hollywood actress of Ukrainian descent Mila Kunis is a “zhydivka.”  [Demonization of Svoboda and Mr. Miroshnychenko?]

My great-grandfather's name was Efim Abramovich Kalishevsky. The name is telling, but in Soviet days people used to hide very carefully the Jewish roots of one’s relatives. Actually, my great-grandfather was a christened Jew, and some years ago he married my [great-]grandmother Varvara Radzievska. They had two daughters, the elder Susanna and younger Agnessa, my grandmother.

In the 1930s, my great-grandfather was a bishop of the Ukrainian Autocephalous [Orthodox] Church. In 1937, he was shot in the dungeons of the October Palace for membership in counter-revolutionary church-based nationalistic organization. I only found out about it in 1990.  [Was not "The UAOC in Ukraine was dissolved following the Bolshevik occupation and annexation of eastern and central Ukraine in the 1920s" ? Were not the vast majority of the Christian clergy banished to the Gulags? Were the Jewish rabbis also banished to the Gulags?   As a hierarch in the UAOC, Rev. Kalishevsky must have spoken in Ukrainian and supported Ukraine's independence. Did he also speak Russian? Yiddish?]

Our big happy family lived in a semi-communal apartment on 24/7 Instytutska Street in the very heart of Kyiv. The reason I say it was semi-communal was that three of the vast rooms in this flat were taken up by my family, while the other one was used by the authorities for lodging various underclass [?] folks, with whom we had to share our everyday existence and the mailing address. [Did this big happy family speak Ukrainian? Russian? Yiddish? Did/do they support Ukraine's independence? Do they support the Ukrainian language?]

My grandmother's name was Agnessa Efimovna, and this Jewish name she also used to hide. For her colleagues and the rest of the people around her she was Alla. Until the age of five, I used to know her as “Granny Alla,” until one day I picked up the phone when her close friend was calling.

The friend asked to talk to Agnessa, and I was scared and said that Agnessa doesn't live here. I told this story to my parents and they explained to me that my granny, who headed a lab in one of Kyiv's infectious hospitals, wore shoes by Chanel at the age of 60, used bright red lipstick and smoked Belomor cigarettes, had two names. This is how my granny turned from Alla Efimovna to Agnessa Efimovna. 

Our underclass [?] neighbors also knew my granny's real name. In the late 1980s, the fourth room in our flat was taken over by Uncle Yura, his wife and two little daughters. Uncle Yura was a militiaman from Fastov, I think [a suburb town outside Kyiv]. It is because of his job that he was lodged in a room of a flat in the very center of Kyiv.

Uncle Yura had a tough job, so he got drunk rather frequently. A few times he got very drunk and called me “little zhydovka” because my granny's real name haunted him. One day my father heard him say it, and he simply smashed his face in our communal kitchen. [Was Uncle Yura speaking Russian or Ukrainian?]

So, when Svoboda, in an attempt to whitewash their party member Miroshnychenko, says that the word zhyd, or Jew, is a Ukrainian literary archaism, and the rest of their blah-blah-blah, I am not buying it. I know everything about it, and I know that the way this particular word is used in our country is unfortunately offensive. [Why does she find it offensive?]

The rest of my story has little to do with my main point, but nevertheless it's interesting and relevant. My fraternal grandfather, the husband of my favorite granny Agnessa Efimovna, was called Taras Hryhorovych Diachenko. He was a distant relative of another great Ukrainian, Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko, through artist Fotiy Krasitskiy, the grandson of Shevchenko's elder sister Kateryna.

The fact of distant kinship with the great Ukrainian poet, who used the archaic [?] word zhyd (Jew) in his literary work, did not prevent my grandpa from marrying the daughter of an enemy of people [Jews were not considered an "enemy of the people", people promoting Ukraine's independence were.] with a disreputable name and surname.  And he never used the word about my granny. My father was born in this complicated family, and so was I.

None of the people mentioned in this family story are living any more. Mila Kunis has probably not heard the words of my ex-university mate Miroshnychenko, but I did and it stirred a lot of emotions.

I don't mean to moralize. This is just my personal family story that demonstrates the complex connections. And it also shows why I am still ready to smash the face of anyone who calls someone a zhyd in my presence. I also think that people should avoid the word to make sure people don't start hiding who they are and what their real name is.

Yulia McGuffie is the chief editor of www.korrespondent.net, one of Ukraine's biggest [Russian language] online news portals.

Growing up in Saskatchewan in the 1940-50s, my parents and all Ukrainian and Polish acquaintances exclusively used the term Zhyd and never the term Yevrei. While on a PDF scholarship in Germany, I had occasion to drive through Ukraine in late August 1969 with a German friend enroute to a plasma physics conference in Bucharest, Romania. On our first evening at the "campgrounds" in Lviv, we were approached by a very inquisitive girl asking everything about the West, about the latest scientific developments, etc. (She probably reported to the KGB, since we later saw her carrying a radio -- or radio transmitter? -- as she walked between tents.) As the conversation somehow brought up the subject of Jews and I automatically used the term "Zhyd ", she interrupted me to say that the term now used in Ukraine was "Yevrei". I told her that nobody in the West used that term.

Years later in the 1980-90s, I had occasion to discuss the term with co-choir member of Ste. Sophie Orthodox Cathedral in Montreal, Walter Zymovetz from Eastern Ukraine. (After WWII, he barely avoided being forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union by diving out the window of a moving train.) He told me that the Jewish influence in Ukraine was so strong that using the term Zhyd was punishable by imprisonment for six months and the term "parkhatiy Zhyd" (lousy Jew) by a two-year sentence in the Gulags.

It is my understanding, that Ukrainians developed a split categorization of the two terms: "Zhydy" were the people who had lived for centuries amongst them; "Yevreii" were the Russified Jews sent or recruited by Moscow to subjugate Ukrainians to Muscovite rule. (Perhaps a similar dichotomy exists for the distinction between Russian and Muscovite.) Is it any wonder that patriotic Ukrainians resent being forced to use the Russian term Yevrei and are penalized/demonized for using the age-old Ukrainian term Zhyd? Why not use Zhyd when speaking Ukrainian, and Yevrei when speaking Russian? In my opinion, for a Ukrainian to use the term Yevrei is to show disrespect toward the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian independence. To use the term Yevrei is to condone the anti-Ukrainian and Russification policies imposed by Moscow for so many years.]