Din the trenches of Stalingrad – The Hometown – Diaries of an onlooker from Vicktor Nekrassov (1954), one can read a dialogue that sums up the astonishing subject of this book devoted to the New York of the Ukraine. When Nikolai asks Cherevichniy if he was indeed born in New York, the latter does not budge. “Don’t be silly,” Nikolai told him; but the other insists. Yes Yes. He was born in this working-class village in the district of Dzerzhinsky, Ukraine, named, in truth, like the big apple.
This city of around 10,000 inhabitants “stranded since 2014 on the side of a terrible combat zone” was surveyed by photographer Niels Ackermann and journalist Sébastien Gobert, two enthusiasts of this corner of the world towards which today all eyes, which draw the book New York, Ukraine. “All this story about the lost Donbass, this place without its own history or precise identity, always remains for me a private and personal affair”, writes Sehrij Jadan, poet and singer of Ukrainian rock in the preface to this walk full of curiosities, an invitation to travel in this Ukrainian New York. A book as steeped in everyday life as it is in painful history.
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A book in the form of an inventory
Colony founded between 1777 and 1859, developed at the beginning of the XIXe by Russian aristocrats and Mennonite settlers who came from the German states at the invitation of the Russian tsars, this town in the industrial east of Ukraine, on the edge of the steppe, can be discovered with its “smashed sidewalks and decrepit facades”, but also in the smile of a service station called New York.
“We don’t know where its name comes from,” explains Tatiana Krasko, coordinator of the cultural center and local association manager who is one of the guides to this book, which is nourished by testimonies from the inhabitants. If the link can be made with America, it is in the mixing of cultures and the alliance of “Germanic pragmatism, Cossack freedom and Slavic inventiveness”.
The city’s main employer is the phenol factory, and in this poignant book, built like an inventory, objects of memory, such as fragments of shells and rockets, and escaped scenes from the life of the inhabitants are side by side. to the dance floor of a nightclub, since the authors are keen to show life despite everything, signing a real travel guide, with its chapters with titles on the verge of irony: where to eat the best pizza, where to go out, where to sleep…
In 1951, New York in the Ukraine was renamed Novhorodske, literally “new city”, and it was the civic struggle of its inhabitants who, on 1is July 2021, finally allowed the city to regain its original name. For local New Yorkers, it is quite a symbol, that of a possible future, of a new future…
READ ALSOSix essential novels to understand the Ukrainian crisis
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