Euroasian Jewish News

Mariana Maksymiak, Director of the Agnon Literary Center in Buchach, Ukraine and Ukrainian writer Yevheniya Senik at a discussion at Limmud Ukraine, 2 November 2018

‘The Key in the Pocket’: Stories of Buchach, Ukraine

The Key in the Pocket is a multi-edition collection of stories by three prominent Ukrainian writers — Sofia Andrukhovych, Andriy Lyubka, and Yevheniya Senik — who spent a week at a literary residence in Buchach, Ukraine, the birthplace of Nobel-prizing winner writer S.Y. Agnon.

Immersed in a landscape many ways unchanged since Agnon’s only visit to Buchach in August 1930 after moving to Ottoman-ruled Palestine in 1908, the Ukrainian writers penned nine stories of curiosity and longing. The results of their efforts were published in two separate editions of The Key in the Pocket. The volume’s first edition was comprised of stories in Ukrainian and English and published in 2017. A second edition, published this year, is the first of its kind — a trilingual book in Ukrainian, English and Hebrew. Agnon principally wrote in Hebrew and made the language into an art form.

Mariana Maksymiak, director of the Agnon Literary Center in Buchach, Ukraine, discussed the genesis of the literary residence and the separate editions of The Key in the Pocket at two events held in Lviv, Ukraine this fall. She and Senik appeared at the Limmud Ukraine conference in November. In September, Maksymiak and Ukrainian filmmaker Oleksandr Fraze-Frazenko spoke at the city’s 25th Book Forum. Their discussion included the screening of a short film shot by Fraze-Frazenko and produced by the Agnon Literary Center based on Agnon’s book A Guest for the Night.

UJE