Hryts'ko Kernerenko



Hryts’ko Kernerenko (Ukrainian: Грицько Кернеренко, born Grigorii Borisovich Kerner, 1863–1941 ) was a Jewish-Ukrainian poet. He may have been the first poet of Jewish descent to write in Ukrainian, and was the first to write on the topic of Jewish-Ukrainian identity.

Biography
Kernerenko was born into a wealthy Russian-speaking family in Huliaipole. He began publishing poems in Literaturno-Naukovyi Vistnyk ("Literary Scientific Herald," the most important Ukrainian periodical of the time) and other magazines in the 1880s. His poems were widely anthologized.

Kernerenko published four books of poetry, as well as short stories and plays. He also translated works by Sholem Aleichem, Shimen Frug, Semyon Nadson, Heinrich Heine, and Alexander Pushkin into Ukrainian.

Many of Kernerenko's poems center on feelings of love and loneliness but he also wrote on Ukrainian national themes. After 1900 he began writing poems with Jewish subject matter and expressing support for Zionism.

He married Rebecca Gordskoff and had three sons: Yakov, Victor, and Emile. Records are scarce, but the family appears to have left Ukraine for Turkey after the Russian Revolution, subsequently moving on to France. Kernerenko died in Paris in 1941.