Hryts’ko Kernerenko (Ukrainian: Грицько Кернеренко, born Grigorii Borisovich Kerner, 1863–1941[1][2]) was a Jewish-Ukrainian poet.[3] He may have been the first poet of Jewish descent to write in Ukrainian, and was the first to write on the topic of Jewish-Ukrainian identity.[3][4]
Biography
Kernerenko was born into a wealthy Russian-speaking family in Huliaipole.[3][5] Due to the quota then in place in the Russian Empire limiting restricting the number of Jews able to attend university, Kernerenko was instead sent to study agronomy at a polytechnic college in Munich.[6] He apparently traveled through Europe and visited Austria and Italy in 1883, and upon finishing his studies returned to Huliaipole to become a manager of his own estate.[6]
He began publishing poems in Literaturno-Naukovyi Vistnyk ("Literary Scientific Herald," the most important Ukrainian periodical of the time) and other magazines in the 1880s.[5] His poems were widely anthologized.[7]
Kernerenko published four books of poetry, as well as short stories and plays.[1] He also translated works by Sholem Aleichem, Shimen Frug, Semyon Nadson, Heinrich Heine, and Alexander Pushkin into Ukrainian.[1]
Many of Kernerenko's poems center on feelings of love and loneliness but he also wrote on Ukrainian national themes.[7] After 1900 he began writing poems with Jewish subject matter and expressing support for Zionism.[4]
He married Rebecca Gordskoff and had three sons: Yakov, Victor, and Emile.[1] Records are scarce, but the family appears to have left Ukraine for Turkey after the Russian Revolution, subsequently moving on to France.[1] Kernerenko died in Paris in 1941.[1]
References
Sources
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