Gerhard:
Apologies: no offense was intended, of course. It's just that the
question dealt mainly with Czernowitz-Chernivtsi. (I almost included the
Russian version, but since Hirsch-Spitzer referred to it, I figured that
was sufficient.)
Anyway, great anecdote! Especially interesting to me because, as I
mentioned a while back, the State Dept. had no such compunctions when
issuing my father's US passport: it always described his birthplace as
USSR, which both irritated and amused him.
I will add your story to my collection.
Jim
On 23/07/2015 20:05, GERHARDRODICA_at_aol.com wrote:
> With all due respect, under the Soviet regime, it was called in
> Russian,Tchernovitsy and Tchernovitskaya Oblast etc. Although part of
> the Ukrainian SSR, the lingua franca was Russian, and the various
> authorities, like obkom etc. used it. Gerhard Schreiber.
> For what it's worth I have a funny anecdote. In 1962, we (my wife and
> I) were granted an American Visa, for legal immigration, based on my
> entering on the "Russian" quota, because I was born in Cz. The
> US Justice Dept. at the time, considered Cz. as part of Russia. We
> took a leisurely trip on the "Queen Mary" from Cherbourg. After a very
> tempestuous crossing (it was January 1963), we finally saw the Statue
> of Liberty. US Immigration boarded the ship before we dropped anchor,
> and when our turn came, the surprise.
> The fellow who interviewed us, said our visa was invalid because the
> US State Dept. has never recognized the forced incorporation of
> Northern Bukovina into the Soviet Union. He gave us a pass for 48
> hours, with the obligation to report to immigration the next day to
> get our deportation papers to be returned to France.
> Having spent a few months there, we said to ourselves, it ain't so
> bad, since we were both fluent in French, and loads of our friends
> from Bucharest, had opted to remain in France.
> Next day, a higher Immigration officer, excused himself saying that
> once the Justice Dept. gave us the visa, it is final, he handed us our
> green cards and wished us well in our new homeland.
> In a message dated 7/22/2015 10:30:22 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
> jwald_at_hampshire.edu writes:
>
> [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
>
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Received on 2015-07-23 18:58:41