The Empire has gone. But in what used to be the "Ferdinand Platz" there now stands a life-size statue of Kaiser Franz Joseph. It is not only the Jews who remember. Cornel.
-----Original Message-----
From: bounce-119473497-8441035_at_list.cornell.edu [mailto:bounce-119473497-8441035_at_list.cornell.edu] On Behalf Of Jim Wald
Sent: Thursday, July 23, 2015 2:59 AM
To: Lloyd Marksamer; Czernowitz Discussion Group
Subject: Re: [Cz-L] Spelling issue
[The Romanian spelling with accents probably won't come through for most folks unless they have the appropriate fonts installed -- 'Cernauti' will usually suffice.
--moderator J]
Czernowitz is the proper, historical, German-language term--from the era with which we all most closely identify (through WW I). See below.
(Chernowitz is neither fish nor fowl--a corruption of the above)
Cernăuţi was the Romanian spelling.
Chernivtsi is the current (Ukrainian) spelling.
One of the things that is so fascinating is that we all identify with the historical city and its German name. No one is nostalgic about Cernăuţi. We are nostalgic for Czernowitz. And the bizarre thing is that even those of us who were born long after that name, or who have never even visited, dream about that city with its German name.
As Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer say in _Ghosts of Home_:
"This is a book about a place that cannot be found in any contemporary atlas, and about a community for whom it remained alive “like a wonderful gift” and “relentless curse” long after its disappearance. It is a historical account of a German-Jewish Eastern European culture that flourished from the mid nineteenth century until its shattering and dispersal in the era of the Second World War. But it is also a family and communal memoir spanning three generations that explores the afterlife, in history and memory, of the city of Czernowitz.
"Nowadays, of course, Czernowitz is nowhere. As a political entity, it ceased to exist long ago, with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire in 1918. Its name now is Chernivtsi—a city located in the southwestern region of the Republic of the Ukraine, east of the Carpathian Mountains, on the River Pruth, some fifty kilometers north of the present-day border of Romania. After the First World War, when it fell under Romanian authority and became part of Greater Romania, it was called Cernăuţi. Subsequently, under Soviet rule after the Second World War, it was renamed Chernovtsy.
"But for many of the surviving Jews who lived there in the decade before the First World War and in the interwar years—now “scattered,” as Appelfeld notes, “through the world”—the place forever remained Czernowitz, capital of the outlying Austrian-Habsburg imperial province of the Bukowina, the “Vienna of the East,” a city in which (in the words of its most famous poet, Paul Celan) “human beings and books used to live.”
Jim
On 22/07/2015 17:02, Lloyd Marksamer wrote:
> Can anybody explain the importance of spelling the city name correctly?
> I've seen various spellings here.
> Is it Czernowitz?
> Chernowitz? or
> Chernivtsi, all of the above or something else?
> And why the variations?
>
> Lloyd Marksamer a/k/a Merksamer
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Received on 2015-07-23 07:09:35