A Place in Biography for Oneself

Abstract

I WAS SURPRISED WHEN THE EDITOR of the AHR contacted me about contributing an essay on biography for this roundtable. The biography I wrote hardly qualifies as a biography in the usual sense of the word. A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland does not describe a life, or even the life of a community, but a territory, loosely defined with no political or administrative boundaries. It was just a named by locals and hazily circumscribed by the reach of a certain sandy soil that yielded little in the way of cash crops. Instead, locals gathered berries, mushrooms, fish, and game in forests of soft pine and birch amid streams and rivers that tended to swamp. This place, the northern forest belt of today's central Ukraine, in A Biography of No Place lacks the absolute boundaries of a human body in space and a human life in time. Why, then, did I conceive of this history as a biography? Initially, the frame of biography suggested itself to me because of the funereal quality of the landscape. This palpable insinuation of decay caught me by surprise when I first arrived in right-bank Ukraine. There I visited villages of mostly elderly. Some were living in homes of people who had been expelled before, during, or just after World War II. They pulled out old chests to show me possessions left behind, stored carefully for fifty years in case the exiled family returned. Inevitably someone would take me, unbidden, to burial mounds, to the place where our Jews were killed. I stumped across weed-weary Polish cemeteries, stepping lightly over cracked headstones, and stood at the thresholds of caved-in Lutheran churches. These sites sounded out loss in cacophony, echoing across the terrain like an obituary. The fact that I made these travels in the mid-1990s-when the economy of Ukraine was in an extended nosedive, when the young and educated were seeking to leave Ukraine for Russia, America, Israel, Europe, anywhere else, when the intercity buses no longer ran, and when the city of Zhitomir, where I lived, reduced heat and electricity to a few hours a day, and then at times to nothing-all suggested endings, closings, failure.