Literary Fundraiser For Ukraine Offers A Cry From The Heart

At Best Video on Wednesday night, Michelle Zacks read in a clear voice: ​“When the city was destroyed, / they started fighting over the cemetery. / It was right before Easter / and wooden crosses over the freshly dug graves / put out their paper blossoms— / red, blue, yellow, / neon green, orange, raspberry pink. / Joyful relatives poured vodka for themselves / and for the dead — straight into their graves. / And the dead asked for more, and more, and more / and the relatives just kept pouring.”

Zacks is an accomplished poet in her own right, and is associate director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. But the words weren’t hers; they were the words of contemporary Ukrainian poet, screenwriter, and journalist Lyuba Yakimchuk. The reading was part of ​“Words Against the Whirlwind,” a night of readings of works by several contemporary Ukrainian poets at Best Video that doubled as a fundraiser for the United Ukrainian American Relief Committee, which is providing humanitarian aid to Ukraine during the Russian invasion. In reading these works, Zacks and fellow readers Allan Appel (who is a reporter for the Independent) and Stephen Kobasa bore witness — and allowed an audience of about 30 to bear witness with them — to the way the current conflict reflects Ukraine’s longer history of struggle against Russian occupation, the depth of Ukrainian culture, and the way the losses felt by emigrants from Ukraine to the United States across the generations continue to reverberate today.

The reading and fundraiser was Appel’s idea. ​“I wanted to do something besides writing a check,” Appel said. ​“It just occurred to me that we could raise a buck or two, and even if not, to keep those folks alive over here through our reading of their literature. It was just visceral.” (The event raised $618.)

Poetry, to Appel, ​“is the place you go to tap into language and thought that’s hard to express. And I think we’re at a point, just looking at the horrors on the TV screen every day, where we’re beyond words to express what’s going on. It’s like a global nightmare that we’re all caught up in. The train is speeding down the track, racing to the end of the cliff, and we can’t get off. So tonight was a bit of a refuge. Just stalling the train a bit.”

If it was a refuge, then to its credit it wasn’t an escape. The selected poems, by contemporary poets, brought Ukraine to vivid life, encouraging listeners to reach past the terrible images streaming in from Ukraine and connect, with deeper empathy, to the people themselves. Yakimchuk’s poems, read by Zacks, were short, sharp shocks, dispatches from what felt like the headlines, even though they were written a few years ago. 

Kobasa read from Ukrainian-American poet Carolyn Forché, who wrote from the perspective of an exile, even if she was born in the United States. ​“So yes, you remember, this is the city you lost,” Kobasa said, ​“city of smugglers and violinists, chess players and monkeys, / an opera house, a madhouse, a ghost church with wind for its choir … If you return now, it will not be as a being visible to others, and when / you walk past, it will not be as if a man had passed, but rather as if / someone had remembered something long forgotten and wondered why.” (Read the full poem here.)

He also read Boris Khersonsky’s ​“Missa in tempore belli” (Mass in a time of war), a dark riff on the Christian liturgy written during Russian first incursion into Ukraine that served as a cry of outrage, for history, for that invasion — and for the much larger invasion happening now. ​“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth — bodies flail, / arms flung wide. People’s will is evil. / Thus it has been and always will. / We praise you, soldier, slender of neck, sharp of throat. / We bless you, soldier, who on bayonet raise up the foe, / We lift on high your long dying groan. / God is cruel at times, but still better than earthly thrones,” Kolbasa read. ​“Lamb of God, little lamb lain on the altar, / a time of war has come. Cinders rise from the earth. / Grant us peace, we are sated with eternal fire. / They say, ​“We’re starting a war again.” / Dona nobis pacem. Amen.” (Read the full poem here.) The poem’s barely contained anger pulled gasps from the audience.

A highlight among Appel’s readings was one of his own poems, ​“Ukrainian Dream,” in which he described an encounter with his mother, who was from Ukraine. Like many of the other poems, Appel’s poem dove into the region’s torturous history and the fractures of immigration and exile. He also addressed the region’s long history of anti-Semitism, and the way that Ukraine currently having a Jewish former comedian as president might have struck his mother as the thickest of ironies. (Hear the full poem in the video above.) ​“Set us down, mother, before the land begins to quake,” he concluded. ​“Let us out, mother, the both of us; let us wake.”

The atmosphere in the room was somber from start to finish, to the point that there was no applause in between poems; perhaps it seemed inappropriate for material channeling so much pain. As Kobasa began concluding words, however, an audience member spoke up.

“I don’t think any Ukrainian poetry reading would be complete without a poem from Taras Shevchenko, the greatest Ukrainain poet, and I am glad to read one,” she said. Her statement wasn’t a challenge. Through his writings, Shevchenko, who died in 1861, is considered uncontroversially to be the father of modern Ukrainian literature. with his voice even shaping modern Ukrainian as it is spoken today. Shevchenko’s effect on literature is mirrored in his political activites. He lived ​“in a time of serfdom,” as the audience member put it, and was a champion for Ukrainian independence at a time when it was firmly under the yoke of the Russian Empire. He is the sort of figure who has statues erected of him, and streets and parks named after him.

Zacks, Appel, and Kobasa gladly yielded the floor, and the audience member, voice shaking, read Shevchenko’s classic ​“Testament,” from 1845.

When I die,

let me rest, let me lie

amidst Ukraine’s broad steppes.

Let me see

the endless fields and steep slopes

I hold so dear.

Let me hear

the Dnipro’s great roar.

And when the blood

of Ukraine’s foes flows

into the blue waters of the sea,

that’s when I’ll forget

the fields and hills

and leave it all

and pray to God.

Until then, I know no God.

So bury me, rise up,

and break your chains.

Water your freedom

with the blood of oppressors.

And then remember me

with gentle whispers

and kind words

in the great family

of the newly free

Even for those already familiar with Shevchenko’s work (this reporter, who has Ukrainian ancestry, among them), it was a jolt to revisit his words in the current context. They felt suddenly as current and as vital as the contemporary works, reminding everyone that today’s conflict may be the result of one invasion-minded Russian leader and the fractious nature of today’s geopolitics, but it’s also the latest chapter in a long, terrible history. The audience member then read the poem in its original Ukrainian. With the meaning already imparted, we could all hear the resonance in the language, and the sonorous way Shevchenko used it. Her voice had faltered while reading the English, but it gained strength in Ukrainian. She finished, and the room burst into applause.