Description

A harbinger of Ukrainian revivalism, Kulyk was a steadfast Bolshevik. Born in Uman, Ukraine, he worked in Pennsylvania coal mines, edited a Marxist newspaper in New York, organized literary groups in the post-revolutionary Ukraine, taught Ukrainian culture in Montreal, and enriched Ukrainian poetry with the rhythms of jazz and samba. Explore how a shtetl-born Jew made himself into a Ukrainian Bolshevik and how he failed reconcile his class and national minority values.

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern teaches Early Modern, Modern, and East European Jewish history and culture, Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah, and Slavic-Jewish Literatures at Northwestern University where he also serves as the Director of the Crown Family Center of Jewish Studies. He published more than a hundred articles in history and comparative literature and authored three books, “Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917: Drafted into Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), “The Anti-Imperial Choice: the Making of the Ukrainian Jew” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), and “Lenin’s Jewish Question” (forthcoming with Yale University Press, Spring, 2010). At present he is working on a book “Shtetl as it Was, 1790-1830” reconstructing and contextualizing the material culture of an East European trading town.