The Capital of the duchy of Bucovine which was Cernauti, Czernowitz, Tchernivtsy, and Chermivtsy: Capital Czernowitz of Bucovine resounds like that of a phantom in the European memory.
Leaned with the Eastern slope of the chain of Carpates, the city is today in Ukraine, very close to the septentrional bordered of Romania.Czernowitz is its German name that which one still uses by convenience. But for the Ukrainians it is Chermivtsy, for the Cernauti Roumanians and the Tchernivtsy Russians.
Before becoming Ukrainian in 1945, Czernowitz was the capital of the ex-duchy of Bucovine, and then it was yielded by the Othoman ex-empire to the ex-empire Austria-Hungarian.
In 1918, Bucovine, becomes province of ex-Large Romania, it is Ukrainian today after being annexed by the USSR pursuant to the pact germano-Soviet of 1939.
During nearly three quarter centuries, of the foundation of its university in 1875 to the Second World War, this city was a cultural hearth of a completely extraordinary intensity.
It is noted that the young person Mihai Eminovici will make studies of 1857 - 1862 in Cernauti. He will become the largest poet and Rumanian writer more known under the name of
Mihai Eminescu .The area is transferred to Moldavia, which was based meanwhile with Romania, independent since 1878.
Czernowitz becomes Cernauti and preserves its population interfered Jews (in majority), of Roumanians, Ruthènes and Germans.It preserved two official languages until 1924, German and Rumanian, then after this date, Rumanian alone.
The institutional network of the German-speaking culture was destroyed by the rupture of the umbilical cord with the metropolis Viennese.Despite everything, German remained the language of communication privileged in the families.
This maintenance, to the heart even of a country practising of all its forces the assimilation, was due of the miracle.
The linguistic choice of the families was often influenced by the mothers, whose worship for the German literature went up so far it had acquired force of tradition.
But in the popular districts and the suburbs, it was seldom the punished language which one heard but of the "Hochdeutsch. Those which did not speak Yiddish were expressed in dialectal German, with the multiple accents, the "Bukowinerisch", or "Bukowiner Deutsch".
Forsaking the orthodoxy of the family some had become tradesmen or managers of companies of import-export, trade or banks. They had remained however respectful of a certain tradition: the kitchen was casher, the traditional Shabbat, the principal celebrated Jewish festivals, in the same way which one read the Bible, Cabal and the accounts Hassidic.
In New York, in 1928, nearly 10.000 Bucoviniens this found in the "ghetto" Americano Bucoviniens, a large part of some Bucoviniens of the State of New York is gathered in at least ten associations of nationals of the duchy of Bucovine.