The Vanished Province: Remembering Bukovina

In my parents’ drawer lay an airmail envelope postmarked Chernivtsi. This paper emissary from western Ukraine had crossed the Iron Curtain to our Seattle home. Bordered in blue and red, the envelope bore a hammer and sickle and a sixteen-kopeck stamp.

I grew up hearing the names Czernowitz and Bukovina without knowing where to place them. As a boy, I heard about my parents’ trips to the Soviet Union, posing as tourists, their suitcases packed with contraband: Hebrew books, Passover haggadahs, cassette tapes of Israeli songs. Only later did I learn what that meant: that in 1974, newly married, they had joined an underground network smuggling Jewish ritual and language behind the Iron Curtain, helping to keep alive the spark that totalitarianism had all but extinguished.

On their first of several trips, they went to Chernivtsi, once known as Czernowitz, capital of Bukovina, where they were shadowed by Intourist handlers. On Simchat Torah, they found their way to a small synagogue—“a jammed crowd of sixty souls,” they later wrote.

The name Bukovina itself seemed too musical for its cartographic fate: a crescent of foothills between the Carpathians and the Dniester, a borderland annexed by every empire that touched it. Yet for nearly a century, it embodied a paradoxical order—a lattice of interwoven loyalties sustained less by fraternity than by forms. Fragile as it was, the province produced one of modern Europe’s most incandescent cultures. Its bureaucracy yielded an improbable notion: that civility might be legislated, that tolerance might be administered.

Cristina Florea’s Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland offers the most scrupulous study yet of that experiment and its undoing. Florea reanimates the province’s choreography of peoples—Romanians, Ukrainians (then called Ruthenians), Jews, Germans—and charts how Bukovina made the Habsburg idea local.

Florea begins in 1775, when the Habsburgs annexed Bukovina from the Ottomans and turned this wooded borderland into what administrators called a Lehrwerkstatt—a pedagogical workshop for enlightened rule. Joseph II’s reforms brought toleration, compulsory schooling, cadastral surveys, the whole secular machinery of governance. The project had a programmatic grandeur; as the Galician chronicler Karl Emil Franzos put it, the “inspired idea to make out of Austria a German Culturstaat was achieved only in Bukovina.” Bukovina became less a frontier than a zone of translation, where law, language, and faith overlapped and where bureaucracy served as the medium of pluralism.

What might seem, in retrospect, mere paperwork and pomp served a greater goal. After 1867, when the dual monarchy recognized Jews as equal citizens and guaranteed all peoples (Volksstämme) the right to preserve their languages, the administrative imagination made coexistence legible and—at least for a time—livable. Czernowitz (Cernăuți in Romanian, Chernivtsi in Ukrainian) was the experiment’s proudest offspring.

By the fin de siècle, the city’s nodal position—arteries open to Vienna, Lemberg, and Odessa—had turned a remote governorate into a switchboard of cultures. A provincial capital with metropolitan habits, it published newspapers in several languages. Socialist pamphleteers hawked Yiddish tracts on the Rathausplatz. The pious passed through on their way to the province’s Hasidic courts—Sadagura, Vizhnitz, Boyan—where Wunderrebbes presided from gilded chairs. Czernowitz acquired nicknames—“Jerusalem on the Prut,” “Vienna of the East”—and a mythology. Franzos called it the “antechamber to the German paradise”; another admirer joked that even the hens scratched lines from Hölderlin into the dust.

The most conspicuous beneficiaries—and soon enough, the uneasy conscience—of this order were the Jews. By 1900, they formed roughly a third of the city’s population (and in some Bukovinian towns, an outright majority). They founded banks, sawmills, and breweries; edited the leading newspapers (including the Czernowitzer Tagblatt and the Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung); held political office; and supplied rectors and deans to the empire’s easternmost German-language university. In drawing rooms and schoolrooms alike, the Habsburg ideal of Bildung—self-fashioning through high German culture—sat beside the intimacy of Yiddishkeit. That tension between assimilation and assertion became Bukovina’s creative impulse.

During World War I, Russian and Austrian armies took and retook the province, each occupation leaving devastation in its wake. The Russian forces were particularly brutal toward Jews, who were accused of espionage for Austria. Florea cites a 1915 report from a village near Czernowitz where Cossacks abducted “four bearded Jews, drove them across the frozen river, tied their beards together, forcing one of them to play the fiddle and the other one to dance.” As the playwright and folklorist S. An-sky observed, Jews went from “enjoying civil rights under Austrian rule to being ruthlessly murdered.”

When the empire fell in 1918, so did the order capacious enough to contain its contradictions. The Romanian annexation of Bukovina after the war marked the end of Habsburg pluralism. The new “Greater Romania” stitched together provinces that had belonged to rival empires—Transylvania and Bukovina from the Habsburgs, Bessarabia from the Russians. The imperial corridors that had bound Vienna to Czernowitz and Czernowitz to Lemberg were cut. Czernowitz became a border town.

The polyglot province of Bukovina found itself abruptly translated—literally—into another idiom of power. The statue of Schiller was replaced by a monument depicting a bison trampling the Habsburg eagle. Hauptstrasse became King Ferdinand Street; Herrengasse became Iancu Flondor Street, honoring the politician who had championed union with Romania. German lost its status as an official language, and Romanian became the compulsory medium of schooling, law, and administration. Visiting Cernăuți in 1922, the young nationalist Mircea Eliade wrote that “only 2 percent of its Romanians know Romanian.” “Romanian officials and nationalists in Bukovina,” Florea writes, “believed that Jews presented the most serious obstacle to the province’s Romanianization.” Jewish schools were tolerated only if they submitted to Romanian oversight, hired Romanian-certified teachers, and taught Romanian civics in Romanian.

Jewish professors at the university were dismissed or pressured to resign, Jewish civil servants were purged, and Jewish landowners lost their estates to agrarian reform. The National Christian Defense League urged boycotts of Jewish shops. By the mid-1920s, the university imposed a numerus clausus capping Jewish admissions. Bureaucratic neutrality curdled into a new arithmetic of belonging.

Yet the same policies that stripped minorities of civic standing also galvanized cultural self-assertion. Forced out of the grammar of imperial citizenship, communities began to speak in self-defense, each sustaining itself in its own idiom. For Bukovina’s Jews, that language was increasingly Yiddish. That story is recovered by Yiddish Culture in Greater Romania (1918–1940), a collaborative volume by Romanian scholars Camelia Crăciun, Irina Nastasă-Matei, Valentin Săndulescu, and Francisca Solomon.

If Florea’s book gives us the architecture of pluralism, Crăciun and her colleagues restore the acoustics, the sound of Yiddish modernity reverberating within and beyond Bukovina’s borders. Read together, the two books capture the same moment from different vantage points: Florea makes plain how Romanianization fractured the older polyglot order; Crăciun and her colleagues show how, after that fracture, Jewish teachers, writers, and actors refused to be silenced.

Nastasă-Matei reconstructs from scattered archives the grassroots institutions that kept Yiddish culture public in the new Romania, including school associations, reading circles, cultural leagues, and workers’ clubs. In Bukovina, Jewish teachers trained under the Habsburgs regrouped almost immediately after annexation to form the Tshernovitser Yidisher Shulfareyn in 1919, led by Jacob Pistiner and the fabulist Eliezer Shteynbarg. The Shulfareyn funded Yiddish schools in Czernowitz and Bukovinian towns, devised secular curricula, and trained teachers. Libraries, patched together from donated shelves, opened in small towns; itinerant troupes performed in makeshift theaters; choirs and literary evenings multiplied. Its leaders fought—in petitions, minutes, and endless negotiations with suspicious inspectors—for the right to teach arithmetic and history in the language of the street, not only in the language of Bucharest. They ran holiday camps, adult classes, and lecture circles for workers. Yiddish, long dismissed as the tongue of the poor, was reimagined as a modern language of instruction and dignity. In an era when Bukovina’s Jews were being told they no longer belonged to the state, they responded by constructing a cultural sphere of their own.

As Solomon shows in her contribution to the volume, editors and writers—graduates of Czernowitz cafés and Galician printshops—gravitated toward Bucharest. Among them was the Czernowitz-born poet Itzik Manger, whose ballads bent the Hebrew Bible into a Bukovinian idiom. In a poem about tailors sewing a uniform for Haman, for example, he writes:

So he said to her, “Esther, my dear,

Let’s elope to Vienna, my queen.

We’ll pawn what we own and we’ll buy

A Singer sewing machine.”

Meanwhile, from Iași—where Abraham Goldfaden had founded the world’s first professional Yiddish troupe—to Bucharest’s summer gardens and Czernowitz’s modest halls, the Yiddish stage became a nightly rehearsal of Manger’s “we.” Crăciun’s chapter tells of actors performing Molière and Peretz, Shakespeare and Sholem Aleichem, sometimes in the same week. The Yiddish stage became a national institution without a nation.

Seen together, the two books show that the long dusk between the fall of empire and the onset of extermination was briefly, but incandescently, lit.

By the 1930s, the pluralism that once made Bukovina luminous had begun to flicker out. The trams still clattered past the same facades, the cafés still served Viennese cakes, but beneath the polish, the social contract was being rewritten.

After Hitler’s rise in 1933, Meier Teich, a Bukovinian Zionist, lamented:

We no longer want to be German Kulturträger [culture bearers]. Politically and culturally we leaned too much toward Germany. The head and the heart have to unlearn. It’s our tragedy that many of us still have to say this in the German language.

His confession captured a collective bewilderment. Arguments flared between Hasidim, Marxists, and Zionists—a quarrel of futures conducted under a narrowing sky.

What began in the 1920s as “Romanianization” now curdled into open persecution. Under successive right-wing governments—including the brief Goga-Cuza regime of 1937–38 and the royal dictatorship that followed—laws were rewritten to unmake Jews as citizens. Businesses were seized, newspapers shuttered, Jewish lawyers disbarred. As the decade wore on, fascist movements—the Legion of the Archangel Michael and its military wing, the Iron Guard—fused Orthodox mysticism with racial paranoia: “The Jews have made our towns unclean; they must be removed for the salvation of the nation.” By mid-decade, a legion paper could sneer that the province “looks like a Jewish colony into which a few Romanians have strayed.”

The philosopher Emil Cioran—like Eliade, then a young nationalist firebrand—wrote that “the democratic regime of Romania had no other mission than to defend the Jews and Judeo-Romanian capitalists.” And when Octavian Goga became Romania’s first fascist prime minister at the end of 1937, he announced that the nation’s task was to “cleanse” towns in Bukovina, Bessarabia, and Moldavia of “tens of thousands of Yids with eyes filled with sickness.” His rule lasted only weeks, but its venom endured.

In the summer of 1940, Soviet tanks crossed the Dniester and occupied Bukovina’s northern half, delivering Jews from the Nazi advance. The Soviet occupation lasted scarcely a year, long enough to pulverize what social trust remained. Between 1940 and 1941, some ninety-six thousand ethnic Germans of Bukovina—the Volksdeutschen—were resettled to the Reich under the Heim ins Reich program, a prelude to ethnic unmixing. When, in June 1941, Romanian and German forces reentered Bukovina as part of Operation Barbarossa, they were greeted with church bells, flags, and a frenzy of revenge against the supposedly Bolshevized elements of the population—which, in the eyes of their neighbors, meant the Jews.

Within days, pogroms erupted across the province. In Milie, Ukrainian partisans stripped Jewish women and whipped them to death in the streets; in Bănila pe Siret, villagers murdered fifteen Jews and greased their wagon axles with their blood; in Ciudei, Romanian soldiers massacred five hundred; in Radautz (Rădăuți), Torah scrolls were shredded to pad the soles of boots. The violence was so disorderly that German officers complained. “The Einsatzkommando has enjoined the Romanian police,” read one report, “to be more orderly in that regard.”

In Czernowitz itself, the destruction was methodical. Where registrars had tallied students, clerks now listed those to be removed. On a single damp October day in 1941, fifty thousand Jews were herded into a ghetto fenced with barbed wire. The city’s mayor recalled:

Those singled out for deportation were collected in groups of two thousand, marched through the mud to the access ramps at the railway station, and shipped to the banks of the Dniester.

Many were shot as they were ferried back and forth across the river. “We went to the Dniester to drink,” one survivor remembered. “The water was red with blood.”

The mass deportations that followed—roughly seventy-four thousand Bukovinian Jews between October 1941 and the summer of 1942—turned the census ledger into the transport manifest. The ink of administration had become the ink of extermination. Trains and forced marches took them to Transnistria, “the land beyond the Dniester.” Aharon Appelfeld, who later would transform the forests of Bukovina into Hebrew fiction, was deported as a boy to one of the makeshift camps there. “Children who were playing ‘five stones’ on the cement floor at night,” he later wrote, “were found frozen to death the next morning.” Typhus, dysentery, and starvation finished what the soldiers began. Even the Nazi overseers were exasperated. Adolf Eichmann, Florea notes, “warned the Romanian authorities that their disorderly expulsions . . . threatened to disrupt the overall flow of deportations across Europe.”

By 1943, the Jewish presence that once defined Bukovina’s urban life had been almost extinguished. Of the province’s prewar Jewish population of a hundred thousand, only a third survived. Even then, writes Florea, “so strong was the attachment of Cernăuţi’s Jews to German culture that they could not conceive that what had befallen them had been initiated by the Germans.” “I cannot hate the Germans,” said a survivor named Severin Schrajer, “even though they exterminated everyone, I cannot hate them, because that would mean hating myself.”

When the Red Army returned in 1944, it found a city of ghosts: the great synagogue converted into a warehouse, the cemeteries desecrated. Survivors—perhaps nine thousand—drifted back from Transnistria to find their homes occupied and their neighbors silent.

After the war, the Soviets erased “Bukovina” from official usage; the region became the “Chernivtsi oblast.” The campaign of erasure was relentless. The synagogue was converted into a cinema, “a place where people watch movies, gamble, and play billiards,” Appelfeld noted. “Perhaps it’s better that way,” he added. “No counterfeit sentimentality.” The Jewish National House, that neoclassical monument to the city’s prewar self-confidence, became a textile workers’ club. German-language books were pulped as “fascist residues.” Monuments multiplied: obelisk after obelisk to Red Army heroes. The Jewish dead, the deported, the vanished were given no marker of their own. Commemoration itself became a form of state-managed forgetting.

Division deepened the forgetfulness. Northern Bukovina was absorbed into Soviet Ukraine; southern Bukovina remained under Romanian communism. Each regime devised its own alibis. In Romania, official history celebrated a myth of “centuries-old tolerance,” even as it suppressed mention of the deportations to Transnistria. In the Soviet Union, the same atrocities were blamed on “foreign fascists.” History became a morality play in which Jews had no lines.

When a Romanian-authored two-volume Encyclopedia of Bukovina appeared in 2000, its thousands of entries barely mentioned Jews at all. In 2008, a Jewish museum opened on the ground floor of Chernivtsi’s former Jewish National House building. Its inaugural exhibit, devoted to “cultural coexistence,” mentioned the Shoah only in passing.

Today, as Ukraine defends its sovereignty against a resurgent empire, the ghosts of Bukovina stir again. “Young Ukrainian residents,” Florea notes, “look to Chernivtsi’s Habsburg imperial past to distance themselves from Russia.” Its Austrian facades and trilingual inscriptions have become shorthand for another Europe: plural, polyglot, porous. The annual Meridian Czernowitz literary festival, founded in 2010, gathers poets from across Europe. Its very name, reinstating the city’s German title, signals both homage and defiance—but also “imperial nostalgia.” Memory, when detached from moral reckoning, risks romanticizing the past into decor.

Florea’s Bukovina joins that rare company of books—Claudio Magris tracing the Danube, Timothy Snyder mapping the Bloodlands—that turn geography into moral argument. Her Bukovina is Europe in microcosm: its order and its disorder, its ironies and its ideals, all compressed into a single landscape.

Returning in the 1960s to find her childhood home gone, the poet Rose Ausländer wrote:

My fatherland is dead

they buried it

in fire

I live

in my motherland

Word

Ausländer in Düsseldorf, Celan in Paris, Appelfeld in Jerusalem, Manea in New York—all carried Bukovina into exile. Their sentences became acts of restitution, rebuilding in syntax what history had razed.