1918: Europe is shaken by the First World War. The Communist Revolution has just begun in Russia, and the country is in turmoil, divided between supporters of change and those who wish to preserve the legacy of tradition. Then, as now, Ukraine is a land of conflict, of struggles between nationalists who desire an independent Ukrainian state and those who instead wish to remain tied to their great neighbor, Russia, which is transforming into a laboratory of Communist revolution. In this turbulent world, the many Jews who inhabit the regions of the former Tsarist empire are questioning their own destiny. Under Russian rule, Jewish communities have experienced discrimination, violence, and pogroms. What fate awaits the Jews with the change underway? Can we trust the promises of the Bolsheviks, or should we follow the path indicated by the Zionists, who aim to create a Jewish state in Palestine, in what has traditionally always been considered the Promised Land?
In that 1918, filled with uncertainty, but also with promise and expectation, the Jewish writer Kalman Zingman tried to imagine a different destiny for the Jewish people, but also for the other peoples who inhabited the Ukrainian lands. A destiny of peace, collaboration, acceptance, and sharing. A fatefully utopian destiny that found concrete expression in the short story "In the Future City of Edenia" (Bibliotheka, 2026, €14.00, 120 pages. Also available as an ebook), translated into Italian for the first time from Yiddish by Stefania Ragaù. Edenia is an imaginary and utopian city of the future, technologically advanced, equipped with skyscrapers and flying hovercrafts, with an artificially regulated climate depending on the seasons, so much so that one doesn't feel the heat in summer and doesn't even need coats in winter.
In the future imagined by the author, who set his story in 1943, the peoples of this imaginary land seem to have achieved perpetual and lasting peace, and even in Palestine, where this utopia has developed a vibrant, centuries-old Jewish civilization, Arabs and Jews live peacefully side by side. In short, perpetual peace reigns, and conflict is nonexistent. But how long will the utopia last? More importantly, is a utopia possible that not only becomes a reality, but endures over time?
We don't want to answer these questions, lest we reveal the decidedly surprising ending to Kalman Zingman's long story. We simply emphasize the relevance of In the Future City of Edenia, a text written over a century ago, yet incredibly relevant to our times in its denunciation of the dangers of nationalism, of the perennial conflict between individuals, peoples, and cultures. Faced with the difficulty of finding a synthesis that would prevent the rekindling of hatred and division, Zingman chose to take refuge in a futurist utopia that perhaps he felt was somehow desirable. But can we, men and women of a century later, still somehow hide within utopia? Probably not.
