The dearth of scholarship on a city that was a major center for both Ukrainians and Jews is striking. . . and suggestive. Certainly in collective memory, and perhaps even in the scholarly worlds of Ukrainian and Jewish Studies, it is the hinterland rather than the metropole that has been the preferred subject of study: for Jews, the mythical shtetl and its "traditional" Yiddish culture; for Ukrainians, the village and peasant folkways. And one of the intriguing aspects of Kiev as a multiethnic city is the different imagined hinterlands the city could claim as its own. In the imperial geography, Kiev was the capital of the "southwest region," a somewhat artificial construct made up of Kiev, Volhyn, and Podol provinces, corresponding roughly to Right-Bank Ukraine. Paradoxically, Ukrainophiles viewed it as the principal city of Little Russia, which corresponded to Left-Bank Ukraine—previously ruled by the Hetmanate; but of course those taking an expansive view of an entity called "Ukraina" would see Kiev as the natural capital of both banks of the River Dnepr/Dnipro. The situation became no less complicated when it came to Kiev and the Jews. Here, Kiev could be viewed as a natural metropolis for the great hinterland of the Pale of Settlement—starting with the three southwest provinces and neighboring Chernigov province and extending to Polesie and the southern provinces of the "northwest" (i. e., Belorussia) as well as to New Russia in the south. But it could just as well be seen as a gaping hole in the geographic fabric of the Pale, for legally it was off-limits to Jewish settlement and thus not an obvious "center" for the surrounding Jewish "periphery."
Although Kiev is not an obvious "border town"—officially, it held that status for less than a century after it fell under Muscovite rule in 1686, straddling the frontier between Muscovy and Poland—I would argue that it remained a metaphorical border town for many centuries after the "reunification" of Left - and Right-Bank Ukraine.22 If one imagines the Russian southwest, the Left and Right Banks of Ukraine, and the Pale of Settlement (and even the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) placed one over the other on a map, Kiev is somewhere near the center of the resulting geographical amalgam—and its symbolic importance then becomes clear. The seat of the Metropolitan of Kiev, the city was claimed by the Orthodox faithful (both Russian and Ukrainian) as a historic center of Eastern Christianity, but through the centuries prelates in Kiev representing both the Uniate (Greek Catholic) and Orthodox churches battled over the leadership of the Ukrainian Church.23
Indeed, another problem we shall confront in the pages that follow is the definition of center versus periphery, for it is not always clear now, as it was not then, which was which.24 For all intents and purposes the booming city seemed to be the hub toward which all things—people, intellect, capital— gravitated, but as the forces of acculturation became ever stronger some Jews, most notably the Jewish intelligenty of Kiev (and many other cities), began to wonder if perhaps the shtetl was not, after all, the true center of Jewish life. Thus Sholem Aleichem's many stories set in the shtetl, Sh. An-sky's expeditions to record Jewish folkways, and Simon Dubnow's quest to collect pinkasim (communal record books) and other invaluable documents.25 Ukrainian intellectuals, too, have invariably sought "authentic" Ukrainian culture in the countryside, not in the city.
World History
