Seven years ago Svitlana Frunchak, then a graduate student from
Toronto, introduced herself to this list (
http://goo.gl/ytxsAI) and
later posted few more times. Last year she successfully defended her
PhD thesis entitled "The Making of Soviet Chernivtsi: National
"Reunification", World War II, and the Fate of Jewish Czernowitz in
Postwar Ukraine". As far as I know this is the first doctoral
dissertation ever, which is focused on a period in the Czernowitz
Jewish history (there is a plenty of dissertations on various
Czernowitz literary and other celebrities and events, but this is the
first one about Jews of Czernowitz as a subject). The dissertation
presents a well written description of an extensive research on
demographic and sociocultural changes in the mid-20th century
Chernovtsy, but it also covers periods before and after that. The work
has some shortcomings (notably, the sources in Yiddish seem to be left
completely out of consideration, which for this topic presents a major
problem), but overall Svitlana Frunchak ought to be congratulated on
the completion of her important and well done project.
Our list is featured fairly prominently in the dissertation (this is
the fifth dissertation in the last three years where the Czernowitz
List is mentioned multiple times). Svitlana Frunchak writes: "A rich
source of information about pre-Soviet Chernivtsi and memory about it
can be found on
http://czernowitz.ehpes.com/ which has become a venue
of communication between those who identify themselves with Jewish
Czernowitz (rather than contemporary Chernivtsi) and, as such, a site
of a virtual existence of the image of the prewar city." Among other
things from the list she mentions some personal memoirs, cemetery
preservation efforts, and Chernivtsi Jewish Museum. The dissertation
contains an extensive (more than half-page) quotation from Hardy
Breier, accompanied by a note: "This citation is from a post on the
listserv Czernowitz-L, a virtual space of communication between "old
Czernowitzers," most of whom are Jews. For more information, see
http://czernowitz.ehpes.com/ (I preserved original spelling and
grammar). Hardy Breier is one of the most dedicated contributors to
the internet-based myth of Czernowitz that acquired a life of its
own." So, congratulations to Hardy too on earning a nice place in the
annals of academic czernowitzology!
A couple of weeks ago the dissertation was positively reviewed by a
Lithuanian historian Jolanta Mickute (
http://goo.gl/P79ya8). I hope
that Svitlana Frunchak would eventually rework her dissertation into a
book, but for now, those of us who are not patient enough to wait for
a book, can read the dissertation itself(
https://goo.gl/YcnbKY).
Iosif
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Received on 2015-05-09 21:29:29