March 9, 2022
The World Knows It as Kiev or Kyiv. To Jews, It’s Yehupetz.
The name is comical and magical at once, designating a city of broad boulevards and fancy shop windows known to Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the dairyman and others.
A city that most Americans couldn’t have found on a map a month ago, or even said what country it was the capital of, is now prayed for by everyone. Although the real battle for it has yet to be joined, it has already earned its place in the annals of heroism.
The world knows it as Kiev or Kyiv. To Jews, though, or at least to those familiar with the world of Sholem Aleichem, it also goes by the name of Yehupetz.
Yehupetz! The name is comical and magical at once. It designates a city of broad boulevards and fancy shop windows known to Tevye the dairyman and his cousin Menachem-Mendl the shlimazl; of the legendary Brodsky the sugar king and the magnificent Great Choral Synagogue with its lavishly paid cantors; of the rich Jews who live there in opulent mansions and the poor ones who are barred by tsarist law from spending a night there, so that if they visit it to peddle their wares or see the sights, they must be gone by sundown or face a police raid in the cheap hotel they stay in. For the Jews of the Ukrainian shtetlakh and derflakh (small villages), the Kasrilevkes and Anatevkas of Sholem Aleichem’s fiction, life in Yehupetz is a dream that is tantalizingly close yet out of reach.