In this video essay, Roman Veretelnyk reflects on how Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine has reshaped our understanding of history, memory, and cultural trauma. Through the lens of American literary works about the Holocaust in Ukraine, he demonstrates how contemporary events encourage new interpretations of the past while bringing Ukrainian historical experience to international audiences.

The essay focuses on Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated and Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann's autobiographical play Something That Belongs to You. Examining these works, Roman Veretelnyk explores the themes of the Holocaust, family memory, intergenerational trauma, moral choice, and responsibility, showing how literature helps us engage with complex historical experiences without reducing them to simple judgments.

Roman Veretelnyk concludes that literature is not only a record of the past but also a space where different memories and perspectives can enter into dialogue. By bringing together the works of Jonathan Safran Foer and Roald Hoffmann, the video essay offers new perspectives on the relationship between memory, identity, trauma, and history, while highlighting the importance of translating and promoting such works in Ukraine.

This video essay was produced and published within the project «Jewish Heritage in Ukraine: interdisciplinary reflections through the lens of archival documents, culture, history and literature», implemented by the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy with the support of UNESCO and the European Union. All publications within the project are produced with the financial support of the European Union. Their content is the sole responsibility of the partner and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.

In this video essay, Olena Peleshenko examines the representation of Jews in Ukrainian apocryphal texts devoted to Pontius Pilate. Drawing on Ukrainian manuscripts, including the Gospel of Nicodemus, translated Passion narratives, and texts from the Pilate cycle, she explores how the image of Pilate became intertwined with the construction of Jews as the religious and ethnic Other.

The video essay pays particular attention to the Ukrainian reception of these narratives. Although Ukrainian scribes inherited texts shaped by anti-Jewish polemics, they often softened their most radical elements and generally avoided portraying Pilate as the stereotypical religious enemy. This tendency is reflected not only in the manuscripts themselves but also in the Ukrainian iconographic tradition.

Olena Peleshenko concludes that the Ukrainian manuscript tradition selectively adapted inherited European apocryphal narratives, preserving their literary plots while significantly reducing their anti-Jewish rhetoric. Her analysis offers new perspectives on the distinctive place of the Ukrainian tradition within the broader history of European apocryphal literature.

This video essay was produced and published within the project «Jewish Heritage in Ukraine: interdisciplinary reflections through the lens of archival documents, culture, history and literature», implemented by the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy with the support of UNESCO and the European Union. All publications within the project are produced with the financial support of the European Union. Their content is the sole responsibility of the partner and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.

In this video essay, Oleksandr Boron examines the representation of Jews and the so-called "Jewish question" in the life and works of Taras Shevchenko. He argues that this topic has long been shaped by ideological interpretations and instead proposes a historically grounded reading that distinguishes between the biographical author and the narrative voices within his literary works.

Drawing on memoirs by Shevchenko's contemporaries, literary scholarship, and close readings of Haidamaky, The Convict, The Musician, and In Vilna City, Famed in Glory..., Boron examines both biographical evidence and literary representations related to Jewish themes. He argues that Jewish characters should be understood within the literary conventions, folklore, and historical imagination of the nineteenth century rather than as direct expressions of Shevchenko's personal beliefs.

Oleksandr Boron concludes that Jewish themes occupy only a marginal place in Shevchenko's oeuvre, yet a careful contextual reading offers a deeper understanding of both the writer and the cultural environment of his time. Such an approach provides new perspectives on historical memory, literary representation, and the ethics of reading canonical authors across historical and cultural contexts.

This video essay was produced and published within the project «Jewish Heritage in Ukraine: interdisciplinary reflections through the lens of archival documents, culture, history and literature», implemented by the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy with the support of UNESCO and the European Union. All publications within the project are produced with the financial support of the European Union. Their content is the sole responsibility of the partner and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.

In her video essay, Vira Aheieva talks about Jeremiah (Ieremia) Aizenshtock, one of the most prominent researchers of Ukrainian literature in the 1920s. A student of Professor Oleksandr Biletskyi, Aizenshtock studied and popularized the works of Oleksandr Potebnia, as well as formalist approaches to literary studies that offered an alternative to Marxist methodologies. He discovered and analyzed a number of important texts by Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Kotliarevskyi, Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko and other Ukrainian writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. He made a conscious choice in favor of Ukrainian language – and this is a question of identity change that many Ukrainians face acutely today. Thanks to Aizenshtock’s efforts, the Taras Shevchenko Institute was established in Kharkiv. During 1930s and later in the post-war years, Jeremiah (Ieremia) Aizenshtock endured persecution; nevertheless, despite being effectively forbidden from living in Kyiv, he continued to maintain ties with Ukrainian literary figures, including Maksym Rylskyi.

This video essay was produced and published within the project «Jewish Heritage in Ukraine: interdisciplinary reflections through the lens of archival documents, culture, history and literature», implemented by the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy with the support of UNESCO and the European Union. All publications within the project are produced with the financial support of the European Union. Their content is the sole responsibility of the partner and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.

Rostyslav Semkiv’s video essay interprets one of the most intriguing texts of American literature from the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries – Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel «Everything is illuminated» - which describes the journey of the author’s namesake protagonist through Ukraine in the late 1990s in search of traces of his relatives who were exterminated during Holocaust. A significant portion of the text consists of the history of a small Jewish town (shtetl) in Ukraine from the 18th century until its destruction by Hitler’s Nazis. The novel also demonstrates an American’s perspective on Ukrainians in the late 1990s. At the same time, Foer’s text is a striking example of metamodern writing, which combines the irony and even grotesque inherent in postmodern poetics with a search for a serious tone, the configuration of post-memory and attempts to speak about trauma to an audience distant from it in time. Semkiv concludes that this aspect of Foer’s writing is highly relevant to contemporary Ukrainian culture.

This video essay was produced and published within the project «Jewish Heritage in Ukraine: interdisciplinary reflections through the lens of archival documents, culture, history and literature», implemented by the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy with the support of UNESCO and the European Union. All publications within the project are produced with the financial support of the European Union. Their content is the sole responsibility of the partner and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.