Centropa Stories: Season 3 A Ukrainian Jewish Century

Welcome to a podcast series unlike anything you've heard before. As you will hear, Edward Serotta introduces this series while on the night train from the Black Sea port cityof Odesa to Ukraine's capital, Kyiv. Edward will set the stage for you, and our actors will take over in each of the following episodes

The actor Steve Furst reads an excerpt from Sholem Aleichem’s autobiography, From the Fair. This most famous of all Yiddish writers describes what it was like arriving in Kyiv in the late 1880s. As he says about the big city, “If you’re afraid of wolves, don’t go into the forest.”

narrated by
Stephen Greif

In this short episode, we learn about growing up in a shtetl, fleeing a pogrom, and what it was like living on a collective farm.

narrated by
Jeni Barnett

One of our most colorful storytellers, Sophie tells us how one day, when her mother was walking on the street in Kamenets Podolskii, a handsome young man, an actor, asked for directions.

narrated by
Janet Suzman

Perhaps as many as 4 million Ukrainians starved to death during Stalin’s enforced famine of 1832/1933. Sarah Kaplan tells us how, even though she was but 16 years old, her mother married her off to a cousin from Moscow, just to get her out of Ukraine.

narrated by
Shelley Blond

Edward Serotta introduces our wartime stories while walking through Babyn Yar, where tens of thousands of Jews were murdered by German soldiers in September 1941. The actor Shelley Blond reads an excerpt from a remarkable memoir. When Petrowskaja asked her father what his grandmother’s name was, he shrugs and tells her he was but four years old. “Maybe Esther,” he says. And Maybe Esther walked to the edge of the ravine in Babyn Yar.

narrated by
David Horovitch

Aron’s father was sure the Germans and the Romanians would never take Odesa. And he went off to enlist to help make sure they wouldn’t. Meanwhile, 16-year-old Aron insisted to his mother they flee on one of the last ships out. The rest of the family remained.

narrated by
Sara Kestelman

A story with the wallop of a 19th century novel. When the Germans were closing in on Kyiv, Sasha Goldberg took his fiancé, Hana Gehtman, and her sister Dora, to a train headed east. As winter set in, Hana became sick and died. Sasha kept writing her from the front line, and Dora answered, pretending to be Hana.

narrated by
Allan Corduner

Before he was 20 years old, Hertz Rogovoy had fought in three of the war’s major battles: the defense of Moscow, in Stalingrad, and at Orel, where a sniper shot him. Twice. After a year in the hospital, Hertz decided he, too, would become a doctor. And he practiced well into his 80s.

narrated by
Henry Goodman

Peter Rabtsevich describes what it was like for Jews in Kyiv, and in the Soviet Union, in the decades after the Second World War. Thousands would stand in front of Kyiv’s only synagogue on the High Holidays. “They came to remember their heritage, to remember their murdered families, and to remember that they were Jews.”

narrated by
Jane Bertish

Jakob Shapiro was a highly decorated Army officer who railed against Jews leaving their motherland for Israel. A construction engineer, he worked on building sites until he was 86. In his final years, Jakob Shapiro mused, “I’ll bet I would have done well there,” he said. “Guess I should have gone, too.”

narrated by
Jan Goodman

Lilya Finberg paints a picture of postwar Jewish life in Kyiv, from the days of the ‘anti- cosmopolitan campaign’ to the infamous doctor’s plot. But Lilya watched society change, especially after Ukraine’s independence in 1991, and was thrilled when her son Leonid became one of Ukraine’s leading Jewish intellectuals.

narrated by
Jason Isaacs

In this episode, we take a drive out of Kyiv. Our destination is the village of Kozary, 82 kilometers to the north. This is where, in October 1943, the reporter Vasily Grossman wrote his searing essay, Ukraine Without Jews. From the English translation by Polly Zavadivker
 

narrated by
Edward Serotta

That is what Maks Levin said when he went off to cover the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014. Once the Russians invaded in February, 2022, Maks had but 17 days to live. He was embedded with Ukrainian fighting units and covered the war on the front. On 11 March, his drone went down near the Hostomel airport. Maks went to retrieve it. The Russians were already there.