Fifth installment this week of Israel upon Danube, Guy Konopnicki’s uchronistic novel imagining the creation of a state for Jews in the heart of Europe, in Austria. After recounting the tensions that emerged among the victors of the Second World War, he looks this week at the growing hostility and military threat that the Soviet Union poses to the new Jewish Republic. Is Stalin planning to drop an atomic bomb on Vienna?
Each weekly episode of our summer novel comes with a series of four articles, already published in our pages, but gathered around a few key themes. This week, a series features some of the many articles on Ukraine that have appeared in K. since Russia’s war of aggression began in February 2022. In “A short trip to Ukraine: The Converts of Munkács“, Yeshaya Dalsace, French rabbi of the Massorti community, recounts his journey to Munkács (“Moukatchevo” in Ukrainian), in Transcarpathia, a few dozen kilometers from the Polish, Hungarian, Slovakian and Romanian borders – and his meeting with some fifteen people who went there to complete their process of conversion to Judaism. In “The Shoah as a keystone for Ukraine’s entry into the European Community“, Boris Czerny looks back at the place given to the Holocaust in Ukraine and asks what it means in the debate surrounding the prospect of its eventual integration into the European Union. In “Memories of Ukraine: the conflict of libraries”, Ivan Segré explores Celan’s poetry referring to the Ukraine and “the widest of rivers”, the long history of antisemitic crime that links the history of pogroms to the Holocaust. He uses it as a starting point to discuss the memory of the Ukraine. In “Russian and Ukrainian Jews in the war. Interview with the former Chief Rabbi of Moscow“, Pinchas Goldschmidt, a native of Zurich who moved to Moscow in 1988 to work on re-establishing Jewish life at the time of perestroika, talks about the thirty years he spent in his “new home”, about his departure from Russia, as did many Russian Jews, and about the future of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe struck by the war.
