Hryts'ko Kernerenko

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]

Hryts’ko Kernerenko

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 [uk] ("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]