Commemorating Eastern European Jewish Past through Landscapes: Zuzanna Ginczanka and the Ukrainian Context of “Little City”

The author examines the relationships between a poet, geography and local memory in the case of the iconic Polish poet of Jewish descent, Zuzanna Ginczanka (1917–1944), and her native region, today’s Rivne Oblast in Ukraine. The geography of Zuzanna’s life encompasses the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv where she was born, Rivne and surroundings where she grew up, and Lviv where she hid from the Nazis, as well as the Polish cities of Warsaw where she studied and Kraków where she died at the hands of the Gestapo in 1944. Poised between the real and the imagined as well as the private and the cultural, the article proposes to focus on the locality of Rivne and its understudied importance for Ginczanka’s work. Through the lens of her poetic concept of the “Little City,” the article looks at the connection between the real cityscapes and their imaginary portrayal offered by Ginczanka’s poetry, in order to analyze the correlation between her image of the “Little City” and the modern idea of Rivne. By introducing a term “memory agent”, the author explores how poetry and the poet’s personality may inform and affect local memory of Jewish heritage and the Holocaust and, at the same time, the present city’s self-perception. The paper argues that the rediscovery of the histories of non-Ukrainian personalities who were once connected to places in Ukraine will enrich these communities’ historical and cultural understanding, strengthening their sustainability and resilience amid the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war and the struggle against post-Soviet colonial and totalitarian trauma.