- October 5, 2025
- 5:30 pm
- Ukraine
In October 2025, the name of the laureate of the “Zustrich” literary award will be announced — a unique project that for the fifth consecutive year recognizes books that strengthen the Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue. While the jury prepares for the final decision, UJE — Ukrainian Jewish Encounter introduces the finalists — works where the voices of the past and present are heard, where Ukraine and the Jewish world speak the same language again.
The “Zustrich” Award: When Literature Becomes a Bridge
This award is not just a competition. It is a platform where two cultures meet, which for centuries lived side by side, argued, loved, and lost each other. The organizer is the Canadian organization UJE (Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter) with the support of the Publishers’ Forum. Since its founding in 2008, UJE has been working to remind us that without the Jewish voice, Ukraine cannot understand itself.
This year, the shortlist includes five books — from new authors and forgotten classics. They are united by one thing: they return the polyphony stolen by wars and silence. And they show how important it is to hear the Jewish speech again, sounding alongside Ukrainian.
Yitzhok Leibush Peretz — “Hasidic”
Translated from Yiddish by Alexander Uralov and Sofia Korn. Publishing House “Dukh i Litera”, Kyiv, 2025. — 320 pages.
The name Sholem Aleichem has long become a symbol of Jewish Odessa, but alongside him lived and wrote other geniuses — Mendele Mocher Sforim and Yitzhok Peretz. The new translation brings us back to Peretz — a master of short stories, where the life of the shtetl turns into a philosophical parable.
Berdychiv, Talne, Vasylkiv — cities where the breath of Jewish courtyards, prayers, and jokes can be heard. These stories are filled with wisdom, folklore, and quiet irony. Peretz’s characters ask uncomfortable questions about faith, fate, God — and become strangers among their own. But it is in this madness that poetry is born.
In the translators’ notes, one can find echoes of Kabbalistic ideas, and in the texts themselves — that very mixture of pain and laughter from which life is woven. Once these stories were translated by Mykola Zerov; now they sound anew — lively and modern.
Sonia Kopinus — “White Rabbits”
Publishing House VD “Orlando”, 2025. — 242 pages.
This debut is like an old photograph, slightly faded but still smelling of the sea and salt. Before us is pre-revolutionary Odessa — a city where love coexists with anxiety, and the air is filled with a premonition of disaster.
The novel is written in the form of letters. The main character, Sonia, lives in Athens, expecting a child, and writes to her friend — about the past, about youth, about love for a doctor seventeen years her senior. Through her letters, the life of old Jewish Odessa emerges — before the pogroms, before the destruction of the world.
When Sonia is sent to study painting in Rome, she does not yet understand that everything she loved will remain there, in the house that smelled of oranges and where her father believed in the future. This novel is like a message from a lost century, where a woman’s voice stubbornly tries to preserve the memory of a home that has disappeared.
Kristina Semeryn — “A Century of Presence: The Jewish World in Ukrainian Prose 1880-1930s”
Publishing House “Dukh i Litera”, 2024. — 680 pages.
This anthology is like an archive, where between the pages are stored the smell of candles, cries at the market, and children’s laughter. Here are collected texts by Ivan Franko, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Modest Levytsky, and other authors for whom the Jewish world was nearby — behind the wall, on the next street, in the pharmacy, in the tavern.
This is not an ethnographic catalog. It is an attempt to listen. In these stories, there is no colonial distance — there is curiosity and respect. Franko and Kotsiubynsky show Jews not as “others,” but as part of everyday life. Levytsky, a doctor by profession, describes what is usually hidden from outsiders — the closed life of the shtetl.
The anthology returns an important layer of memory to Ukraine. Without it, we cannot understand our own history, for one of its threads has always sounded in Yiddish.
Eli Shekhtman — “Goyrl. Rings on the Soul”
Translated by Alma Shin. Publishing House “Apriori”, 2023. — 448 pages.
Shekhtman is a writer who survived everything a person of the 20th century can survive: revolutions, the Holocaust, Stalinist purges. Originally from Zhytomyr region, he traveled the path from a Ukrainian shtetl to emigration to Israel. His novel is not just an autobiography, but a chronicle of a people who survived.
The story is told by an old man who remembers himself as a boy — and a world that has disappeared. Here is the joy of the fall of the tsar, the hope that in the new Ukraine there will be a place for Jews, and the pain of the return of anti-Semitism.
Today, as Ukraine rethinks its past, this book sounds especially poignant. Without voices like Shekhtman’s, the picture of the 20th century remains incomplete.
Mia Marchenko and Kateryna Pekur — “Children of the Fiery Time”
Publishing House Readberry, 2024. — 640 pages.
The most unexpected book of the finale — a modern fantasy about Kyiv, where war and myth intertwine. The novel begins in 2022: the train station, crowds of people, panic. And then — Beyond the Station, an alternative city where the spirits of old Kyiv, golems, and forgotten names live.
Here appear Jewish characters, master Avichai, creating a golem, and a girl whose memory becomes part of the magical world. In this plot is a metaphor: as long as we remember our stories, our city lives. As long as we know where Yevbaz was, where our ancestors prayed and traded, — their world exists.
This is the Kyiv of memory, a city where reality is held by memories. And therefore, fantasy becomes a way not to forget.
About the Award and Its Mission
“Zustrich” is not just a literary award. It is a way to say: Ukrainian and Jewish histories are not parallel lines, but two strings of one instrument. When they sound together, truth is born. And perhaps, hope.
The project is implemented with the support of UJE — Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, existing since 2008, and is intended to remind us: without mutual listening, culture loses depth.
In October, the winner’s name will be announced. But the real winners have already been determined — those who return to us the voices of the past.
According to material by Tatyana Petrenko (Chytomo), specially adapted for NAnovosti, October 2025.
