[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 2015-07-22 19:30:32