Ukraine
At the turn of the 20th century, my maternal grandparents were part of a large Jewish community in a city called Ekaterinoslav, named after Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, who reigned from 1762–1796. Catherine was an expansionist, enlarging Russian territory into Crimea, much of Poland, and a large part of what is now Ukraine. Jews were forbidden to live in much of Russia, but Catherine created the “Pale of Settlement,” allowing Jews to settle in these newly acquired territories. Within a few years, the Pale of Settlement became home to the largest population of Jews in the world.
My grandparents saw waves of pogroms in Ekaterinoslav during their childhoods in the late 1800s. Pogrom means “to wreak havoc” in Russian. My mother told my brothers and me her mother’s stories of running into the wheat fields to hide when drunken mobs poured into her neighborhood seeking Jews to rob, rape, and kill.
Violence against Jews had been a feature of life throughout Ukraine for centuries. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, a time of unrest and rebellion in the Russian empire, pogroms resurged. Historians debate whether these pogroms were spontaneous rekindlings of ancient hatreds during a time of disorder and discontent, or a deliberate Tzarist policy to deflect revolutionary fervor away from the Tzar and onto the Jews (Khiterer, V., 2015, The October 1905 pogroms and the Russian authorities. Nationalities Papers, 43(5), 788-803).
In 1899, the Russian government commissioned my grandfather, a newly graduated architect, to build the station for the Trans-Siberian Railroad in Tashkent, 1,735 miles away. In Tashkent he fell in love with my grandmother, the daughter of a subcontractor, and they married in 1905, with my great-grandparents in attendance. During their absence, an older daughter took care of four younger children, ages 8–17. That October, mobs stormed Ekaterinoslav, killing 120 Jews. Russian Christian neighbors sheltered those children, huddling in their basement for three terrifying days and nights.
My great-grandparents and grandparents rushed back, and the family decided to leave. With a cousin in Virginia, the choice was America. My grandparents sailed the SS Philadelphia to Ellis Island in 1906.
America
Supporting this large family in America was difficult, but a local cattle-buyer offered two pieces of advice. First, buy a couple of cows. One cow led to another, and soon a family dairy fed the family. Second, adopt an American name. The Depression a few years later brought hard times, despite an “American” name and dairy cows, so my grandparents and their children moved to New York, where my grandfather could find work.
Once a year, my parents would pack us into the family Chrysler for the drive from Pittsburgh to New York to visit our grandparents. Aunts, uncles, and cousins all lived near them in New York, and when my grandparents moved to Florida, they moved there, too. They were a family pack.
We were the outliers who moved away from the family for better jobs for my father and better schools for us. I was raised to believe that this was the American way. But this also disconnected me from family and from history.
After my grandfather died, my grandmother lived with us during the summer. She felt spectral, speaking only to my parents in Yiddish. What I remember most vividly is when she would bake strudel.
Her white hair neatly contained in an almost invisible hairnet and wearing a full body apron, my grandmother would mix the dough, divide it into five neat balls, and roll each ball into a cookie-sheet sized rectangle. Each layer had a different coating: cinnamon-sugar on one, apricot jam on another, chopped walnuts on a third, and finally, crushed canned pineapple, the top dusted with more cinnamon-sugar. Scored into one-inch squares, it baked until perfumed and golden.
That strudel, passed down across generations, embodies layers of family history. Just as during my mother’s childhood, my grandmother placed the strudel in a cabinet, and distributed it, one-inch square by one-inch square, at her discretion, over time.
Is Past Prologue?
Over the years, I didn’t think much about my family’s country of origin, but when Putin invaded Ukraine, I Googled Ekaterinoslav. I discovered that it is now a large industrial city renamed Dnipro, in Central-Eastern Ukraine. Dnipro is now in Putin’s line of sight, as he regroups his troops on the Eastern border.
I feel as though history has come full circle. The city from which my family fled violence more than 100 years ago is now the victim of violence. And yet the Ukraine of 100 years ago is not the Ukraine of today, especially for Jews. Jews have survived. Dnipro has a Jewish cultural center and Holocaust museum, and the Jewish community has been sheltering Jewish and non-Jewish refugees from Kharkiv and Mariupol (Ishchenko, O., The Revival of the Dnipropetrovsk and Dnipro Jewish Community in Ukraine, preprinted from Kuzio, T., Zhuk, S. and D’Anieru, eds, Ukraine’s Outpost: Dnipropetrovsk and the Russian-Ukrainin War, E-International Relations, 2022).
From 2014–2019, Volodymyr Groysman, a Jew, was prime minister of Ukraine. In 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, also Jewish, was elected president in a landslide. And now he is leading his country like David standing up to Goliath. I feel drawn into and overwhelmed by this catastrophe, and deeply personally connected.
In Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Antonio, trying to convince his accomplice, Sebastian, to murder Sebastian’s brother and claim the throne of Naples, asserts, “What’s past is prologue.” In other words, past violence justifies present violence. Yet this quote is also engraved on the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., meaning that history sets the context for understanding the present.
The question I ask myself is, in Ukraine, which past is prologue to which present? The descendants of my people’s assailants are now being assailed. That is one past. But so are the descendants of the family that sheltered my grandfather’s brothers and sisters. That is another past.
How do we direct the path of a history that doesn’t seem to want to change, where in Ukraine and elsewhere people fall victim to forces beyond their power to escape or alter, much less to comprehend; where, if they don’t have money or safety for a passage to somewhere else and a couple of cows, no one will let them in?
