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One of the highlights of my summer road trip through Central & Eastern Europe was the chance to visit the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi (Czernowitz/Cernăuți). Czernowitz, during the time of the Habsburg Empire, was the capital of the remote Austrian province of Bukovina, and when I lived in Vienna in the late-1980s and early-‘90s, the locals there still tended to see the city through nostalgic, sepia-toned glasses. I wanted to visit it for myself and see what many remembered as a remarkably cultured, multiethnic city on the fringes on the empire’s then-border with Russia. I had another reason for wanting to visit. Readers will know of my interest in the Holocaust, and in previous posts I’ve written about the tragedy of German-built Jewish ghettos in cities across Poland during World War II. Czernowitz, a long-standing center of Jewish culture, sadly had its own ghetto, but this one wasn’t run by Germans. It was mainly a Romanian affair, and that I wanted to see.
