"Voci dal viottolo d'ortiche. Vieni, sulle mani, fino a noi": Czernowitz tra realtà e scrittura

«Voci dal viottolo d’ortiche. Vieni, sulle mani, fino a noi»: Czernowitz between reality and literature. «A land where people and books used to live»: this is Paul Celan’s description of Czernowitz. A plural space par excellence, which bears witness of diversity in its many names, Czernowitz is an accretion of stories in itself. The components which, simultaneously or alternatively, build its identity are manifold. Ukrainians, Romanians, Poles, Jews, Romani people, Germans are the tesserae of the mosaic. Especially in the Austro-Hungarian years, Czernowitz is a place where languages and cultures meet, where the various constituents – the German, the Jewish, the Yiddish, the Ukrainian, the Romenian one – turn the town into a mirror of Austro-Hungarian multiculturalism. The various definitions of Czernowitz as “little Vienna” “Babel of south-eastern Europe”, “Jerusalem upon the river Pruth”, “European Alexandria” date back to these years. The article begins with an introduction on the spatial dimension of the town, within the borders of the region Bukovina. This first section is followed by a description of its most relevant component: the Jewish-German group. The city is constituted by a large Jewish population and by a flourishing Jewish-German culture and literary production, besides being a famous center of Zionism, of Jewish socialism and of Hasidism. It is furthermore the place where the famous Konferenz für die jiddische Sprache was held in 1908, the forum where the supporters of yiddish as a national language and those of Hebrew confronted each other. Last the town was one of the backgrounds againts which Jewish extermination took place. After describing the physical and symbolic space of Cernowitz, the article moves on to analyze the literary testimonies of the kaleidoscope Czernowitz was. Among the many voices of Jewish-German intellectuality, consideration is given to the images of the town in the works of Karl Emil Franzos, Rose Ausländer, Alfred Margul-Sperber and finally in the public speeches given by Paul Celan.