Hryts’ko Kernerenko (Ukrainian: Грицько Кернеренко, born Grigorii Borisovich Kerner, 1863–1941 [1] [2]) was a Jewish-Ukrainian poet. [3] 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. [3] [4]
Kernerenko was born into a wealthy Russian-speaking family in Huliaipole. [3] [5] 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. [5] His poems were widely anthologized. [6]
Kernerenko published four books of poetry, as well as short stories and plays. [1] He also translated works by Sholem Aleichem, Shimen Frug, Semyon Nadson, Heinrich Heine, and Alexander Pushkin into Ukrainian. [1]
Many of Kernerenko's poems center on feelings of love and loneliness but he also wrote on Ukrainian national themes. [6] After 1900 he began writing poems with Jewish subject matter and expressing support for Zionism. [4]
He married Rebecca Gordskoff and had three sons: Yakov, Victor, and Emile. [1] Records are scarce, but the family appears to have left Ukraine for Turkey after the Russian Revolution, subsequently moving on to France. [1] Kernerenko died in Paris in 1941. [1]