Midnight in Lviv: The Story of Ukraine’s American Exiles
A «shared melody» instead of a «lost generation»
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“THE AMERICAN EXPATS in Lviv are, in one way or another, exhausted and disillusioned by the same thing Hemingway and his friends were: the carnage and the politics in our homeland,” writes Lauren Spohn, an American and Rhodes Scholar who visited Lviv in October. “But if 21st-century expats are searching Lviv for the same thing their 20th-century compatriots sought in Paris, they’ve found something different.
“More than stimulation—more than the wine and jazz and vogue ideas—they’ve found friends. They’ve become embedded in a community. They’re not a Lost Generation, so much as a found one.”
Here’s her essay:
“Midnight in Lviv: The Story of Ukraine’s American Expats
LV Café jazz club, Sunday, fifteen minutes to midnight, in Lviv, Ukraine. The red-walled room is crowded, full of people drinking wine, eating cake, and chattering in Ukrainian and English. The lights are dim except for the yellow beams lighting up the stage, where five musicians are grooving. The saxophone flashes in the spotlight. He tosses the melody to the piano, who passes it to the trumpet, who flings it to the guitar, who throws it back to the saxophone.
The drums swing out the beat. Some people in the crowd chatter under the music, others gossip, some discuss philosophy, others argue about politics – all heads bob in sync with the rhythm. Every few minutes, a couple leaps up from their seats to dance.
No one seems to worry about getting up in six hours, going to work, and making a living. They’re too busy living life.
Like Paris in the 1920s?
«What Paris was in the 1920s, Lviv is in the 2020s,» Joe Lindsley, the American Journalist [and editor of Lviv Now], told me the evening before over a bowl of borshch, a traditional Ukrainian meat and beet soup. Joe came to deliver a lecture at the Ukrainian Catholic University in February 2020 and was locked in the city after COVID-19 broke out. He never left.
Some might call it Stockholm Syndrome. But after spending a week with Joe and other American expats in the city in October 2021, I think it’s less a sickness than a cure. We might even call it Lviv Life: great wine, stellar jazz, free conversation, and most of all, good people. It tells you something about the United States that a North-Carolina-native, ex-Fox-News journalist would have to fly to a country war-torn by Nazis and Soviets – and describe it in a hundred-year-old metaphor – to find that combination in 2021.
As an English literature major, I have an idea of what Joe means by «Paris in the 1920s.» I think of the film Midnight in Paris, when Owen Wilson’s character, a washed-up writer in search of inspiration, time-travels to post-World-War-I Paris and hangs out in jazz clubs with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein. These were the stars of the «Lost Generation,» the group of expat artists who fled America to write some of the best American fiction of the century.
Hemingway and his friends were all more or less disillusioned by the First World War – the carnage, the hyper-nationalist politics, the people too blinded by the politics to care about the carnage. They sailed back to the Old World in search of new ideas. They found them, it seems, in the smoky backrooms of coffee salons and jazz clubs.
I imagine the scene was near-identical to the one in the Lviv jazz club that Sunday night …
Read the rest—and see photos and video—at Lviv Now …
Lviv Now, created by Ukrainian and American journalists, brings you the universal ideas of a vibrant city, a place of culture, freedom, and innovation. Join the conversation about how we can build better cities and democracies.
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About Us
Lviv Now: Showing How Strong a Community Can Be When Creating Quality Changes Together
LVIV NOW is a project of Tvoe Misto (“Your City”), Lviv’s solutions-focused media hub, working with American journalist Joe Lindsley.
Each week, the journalists of Tvoe Misto, led by editor-in-chief Svitlana Zhabiuk and publisher Taras Yatsenko, host problem-solving public forums, one topic at a time, to activate democracy for all citizens. Their newsroom provides daily reporting as part of their solutions-focused journalism. We welcome you to share this newsletter or individual stories with digital nomads, creative people, travelers, diplomats, researchers, entrepreneurs, the Ukrainian diaspora, and more!
“Through the Lviv Now project, we want to tell the English-speaking audience about Lviv as a lively and attractive city, with its unique architecture, history, and entrepreneurial initiatives. We seek to show how strong a community can be when creating quality changes together,” says the director of the media hub Tvoe Misto, Taras Yatsenko.
“We hope Lviv Now will be useful and interesting among the English-speaking audience of scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, journalists and tourists, as well as firmly establish Lviv on the global map of the world,” Yatsenko says. “Therefore, the slogan of our project is "Let's Open Lviv to the world!"
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