Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet E-Book

Megan Buskey

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Ukrainian Voices
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 322

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

When Megan Buskey’s grandmother Anna dies in Cleveland in 2013, Megan is compelled in her grief to uncover and document her grandmother’s life as a native of Ukraine. A Ukrainian American, Buskey returns to her family’s homeland and enlists her relatives there to help her in her quest—and discovers much more than she expected. The result is an extraordinary journey that traces one woman’s story across Ukraine’s difficult twentieth century, from a Galician village emerging from serfdom, to the “bloodlands” of Eastern Europe during World War II, to the Siberian hinterlands where Anna spent almost two decades in exile before receiving the rare opportunity to emigrate from the Soviet Union in the 1960s. In the course of her research, Megan encounters essential and sometimes disturbing aspects of recent Ukrainian history, such as Nazi collaboration, the rise and persistence of Ukrainian nationalism, and the shattering impact of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Yet her wide-ranging inquiries keep leading her back to universal questions: What does family mean? How can you forge connections between generations that span different cultures, times, and places? And, perhaps most hauntingly, how can you best remember a complicated past that is at once foreign and personal? A painfully honest and carefully researched journey of a Ukrainian American into her family’s complicated and difficult past. Anchored in the catastrophe of the Second World War and the subsequent Stalinist repression of the Ukrainian peasantry, the story flows, unexpectedly to the author herself, into the unfolding drama of the current Russian invasion. Thoughtful and beautifully written." —Jan Gross, Princeton University, author of Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland This book is not only important, but captivating and instructive." —John-Paul Himka, University of Alberta Megan Buskey’s blend of tireless investigation with thoughtful analysis and careful prose make this book an exemplar of the best traditions in historical writing." —Wil S. Hylton, author of Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II

Leseprobe

ibidemPress, Stuttgart

Table of Contents

Prologue

1 Memory Traces

2 Borderland

3 Frail Like Straw

4 In Motion

5 War

6 Womanly Silence

7 Grandfather

8 A Place Unknown

9 In the Archives

10 “Unreliable”

11 Thorough and Brutal

12 A New Home

Epilogue

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Sources

For my family—

past, present, and future

Prologue

In February 2022, the omicron variant of COVID-19 had swept across the United States, shuttering all the places I frequented as an urban thirtysomething—restaurants, coffee shops, bars, music venues. People rarely ventured from their homes. I made myself walk along the Brooklyn waterfront every day so I could feel the sun on my skin rather than just the glare of the computer screen. The days had the agonizing slowness of previous COVID waves, but February felt particularly ominous. Pulsing beneath the stillness of this second pandemic winter was the drumbeat of possible war.

The news was full of the fact that Russia had amassed more than 100,000 troops along Ukraine’s borders. The U.S. government was warning with growing urgency that Russia intended to use this force to launch a full-scale attack on Ukraine. To me, a Ukrainian American with many family members in the country, the news was alarming, to put it mildly. Unthinkable. Bombs falling on the Kyiv neighborhood I had lived in when I was twenty-two? Rockets pounding the steppe that surrounded my grandmother’s native village? Russian warships firing at Odesa, where my aunt vacationed each summer with her grandchildren?

I nervously checked in with my family in Ukraine to see what they were thinking. My cousin Lida told me about civil defense groups that had sprung up in Lviv, the city in western Ukraine where she lived and worked as a human resources specialist. Average citizens—teachers, IT programmers, university students—were getting training on how to load guns, apply tourniquets, navigate around mines. “Deep inside, I believe an invasion won’t happen,” Lida said over Zoom from her apartment, where she was isolating with a suspected case of COVID. Other family members evinced the same belief. Yet each day the news suggested that we were drawing closer to a cataclysm beyond anyone’s imagining.

The third Monday of February, I made my morning cup of black tea and milk and checked my Twitter feed, as had become my ritual. The week before, an American magazine had reported that the Russians had drawn up “target and kill lists” of Ukrainians to imprison, torture, deport, and murder as part of their planned occupation. At the time, it had seemed farfetched. Now I read that a senior U.S. government official had described Russia’s plans for Ukraine as “extremely violent” and confirmed the accuracy of the magazine’s report. “This will not be some conventional war between two armies,” the official warned. “It will be waged by Russia on the Ukrainian people—to repress them, crush them, to harm them.”

The official’s characterization lit a fear in me that none of the previous coverage had. The faces of family members, friends, and former colleagues who might be on the Russians’ lists flashed through my mind. They were all people who worked hard, devoted their talents to just causes, had hopes and dreams and flaws and families. The thought that their life’s work might be destroyed, that they might be deprived of their freedom, perhaps even their lives, lodged a rock in my stomach.

What made that feeling even more wrenching was that, like many of their countrymen, my own family had been persecuted for being Ukrainian. When I thought of people I knew who could be at risk, their faces merged with the image I had of my grandmother at twenty-five, her face smudged with coal dust from working in the mines after the Soviets exiled her to Siberia for the offense of being related to a Ukrainian nationalist. That such a parallel could occur today shook me far past the point of tears, and I cried hard that morning.

I would cry more in the weeks to come, but that was the moment when I started to grasp the horror of what lay ahead.

By the time Russian president Vladimir Putin gave a lengthy address on the Ukraine “matter” later that day, my tears had dried. Numbness had set in. I scowled at my computer screen as Putin held forth like a drunk, belligerent uncle at Thanksgiving dinner, slouching in his chair, waving his hand imperiously.

Putin’s rhetoric was all over the place. He was concerned about the Donbas, a coal-rich region of eastern Ukraine coveted by Moscow. Ukraine was indistinguishable from Russia, its existence a strategic error committed by Lenin. It was now time to correct Lenin’s mistake, to “decommunize” Ukraine for real. Kyiv had stolen gas from Russia. Ukraine was being run as an American puppet state. Russian-language speakers were being suppressed. Ukraine was going to develop nuclear weapons. NATO was going to use Ukraine to attack Russia. Aggressive nationalism and neo-Nazism had been “elevated in Ukraine to the rank of national policy.”

This was not the first time Putin had trotted out this motley set of arguments. In fact, he had been making these claims for years. In 2014 he had condemned the pro-European protestors on Kyiv’s central square, Maidan Nezalezhnosti, as “nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and anti-Semites.” They had “resorted to terror, murder, and riots” to seize power, Putin said. “These ideological heirs of Bandera, Hitler’s accomplice during World War II…flaunt slogans about Ukraine’s greatness, but they are the ones who did everything to divide the nation. Today’s civil standoff is entirely on their conscience.”

In the years that followed, he returned to these points again and again. Putin was clearly preoccupied, if not obsessed, with Ukraine’s existence as an independent state. Twisting the country’s complex history to his own ends, he settled on the message that Ukraine needed to be “de-Nazified.”

The claim was preposterous. For starters, the country was now led by Volodymyr Zelensky, one of the world’s few Jewish heads of state. Still, I understood, on some level, how that history could still be felt to be pressing on the present. My family’s fraught history in Ukraine featured many of the same factors—Nazi influence, Ukrainian nationalism, Moscow’s imperialism—that Putin was invoking to justify the invasion. I knew that their interplay was complicated.

When Russian missiles began to rain down on Ukraine on February 24, that nuance was buried under the rubble and carnage, like many other aspects of Ukrainian life before the invasion. Russia’s war on Ukraine was the most shocking and devastating geopolitical act in Europe in more than a generation. And it would bring me closer to my family story than I ever thought possible.

1Memory Traces

Throughout my childhood, my brothers and I would periodically gather some of our clothes to put in the packages my grandmother sent to Ukraine. After we completed the first pass, my mother would redo our efforts, getting on her knees so she could get at the overstuffed bottom drawers at the far reaches of our closets. A middle-class family in a Rust Belt suburb, we had no shortage of things. We were especially flush with clothes—they multiplied quickly over the course of a summer, with a new shirt for each sports team and cheap cotton pullovers amassed like puddles in the living room in the aftermath of a birthday party. My mother would take the most undersized and neglected of these garments to my grandmother’s house, and my grandmother would add them to the large cardboard box she was preparing to send.

These belongings passed out of my mind quickly. But occasionally they surfaced later, when, out of boredom, I would study photographs of my Ukrainian relatives at my grandmother’s house. As I looked at the images of these poker-faced strangers and tried to recall their names and their relation to me, I would feel sparks of recognition: That was my sweater with the rainbow stripes! That was my sweatshirt with the neon-pink bows!

And who would be wearing them but some unsmiling young girl with straight blonde hair and green eyes, like me.

My youthful interest in the photos did not extend beyond these momentary flashes of the uncanny. After all, I was living my childhood at some remove from the culture my mother had come from. I was aware that she was Ukrainian and that she had been born and raised in what we knew as Russia. I knew those places were different, but if anyone had asked me, I would have struggled to explain how. Only well into my adolescence did the matter start to become clear: Siberia was where my mother spent her childhood because my grandmother had been exiled there from her village in Ukraine during the Second World War.

Still, the details were fuzzy. I demurred freshman year when a college classmate asked me whether my grandmother’s exile had been under the auspices of the gulag system; the gulag was, like many things at the time, something about which I was not only unschooled but unaware. I did not know that my family was one of the millions in the former Soviet Union who found themselves at the mercy of that system in the twentieth century; I did not know that while conditions in exile had improved over the years, and reached a meager stability by 1954, the year my mother was born, they were as bleak and punishing as the worst of the gulag’s labor camps had been when my grandmother arrived there seven years earlier. I had no idea of the complex factors that had led to my family being shunted into that system. And I did not know that the packages that we sent our family in Ukraine were not a thoughtful habit of my grandmother but a long-standing family practice—in place before my grandmother came to the United States, before she was exiled to Siberia, before she was born, in all likelihood.

A constant presence in our lives, our grandmother could have told me all about our family’s past, but the differences in our languages and cultural referents made this knowledge almost impossible for her to relay. By the time I was in the thick of grade school, she had retired from her job as a factory worker and was spending two afternoons a week studying the Cleveland Plain Dealer at our kitchen table, keeping an eye on us while our mother did her rounds as a physical therapist.

My youngest brother, Mike, was still a toddler then, and my grandmother often spent the early afternoon hours with him at the local park, helping him throw stale bread crusts at the ducks that ambled around its algae-laden pond. For me and my other brother, Alex, four years my junior, my grandmother prepared little crepes ahead of time and brought them over in clear plastic produce bags from the grocery store that bubbled up with steam from the cooked dough. When Alex and I returned from school, we ate the crepes with Aunt Jemima’s, then turned our attention to the television. If she hadn’t had time to make us a snack beforehand, my grandmother would offer to buckle all of us into her navy Oldsmobile and drive us a mile to the nearest McDonald’s. Alex or I ordered because she didn’t like to speak English in public.

To do more than that was difficult because she was locked away from us, and us from her, by her limited command of English and the vast distance separating her from the culture that informed our daily lives.

My brothers and I lived in the America my father was born in and my mother had embraced upon arriving from Siberia at the age of twelve—an America that was as sterile as it was in thrall to the popular, and devoid, it seemed, of much history of any kind. Our father, a podiatrist, had been raised by a single mother in a blue-collar neighborhood in the city and, like my mother, wanted a better life for his kids. In our suburb west of Cleveland, the land was cheap, the houses new, the strip malls plentiful, and the culture emphatically incurious. The passage of years could be measured by how much of the area’s thick tangle of brown forest had been razed to make way for new roads and subdivisions. The houses in these subdivisions were increasingly large and elaborately windowed, and sat on treeless lots, unshielded from the weak Ohio sun.

Yet there was some gift in the blandness. Sometimes I would walk our dog to the soccer field at the end of our street at night. Even though the field was abutted by roads and whizzing cars on two sides, it was edged on the other sides by a thin stand of trees. The smell of the grass and the melodic hush of the wavering branches had a pleasing, almost magic quality. In other words, there was enough space there—physical and mental—for a kid to dream.

Our mother was foreign, we knew—our grandmother had a normal name, Anna, but our mother’s name, Nadia, had an exotic tinge, and then there was her accent warming and rounding her speech. There were her prominent eyes, heart-shaped face, and full lips, which matched the features of the Russian figure skaters we watched on TV. Even though my mother had spent her formative years outside the United States, she was as much a partisan of American culture as my brothers and I were. Perhaps that’s because my mom and Olga, her older sister by two years, had been in the midst of adolescence when they arrived in the United States—old enough to sense the precariousness of their position while young enough to be molded by other people’s ideas about how they could assure their security. In the working-class neighborhood in Cleveland where they settled, they were old enough, too, to focus on hard work, saving for when the other shoe dropped. If you did what everyone else was doing, the belief was, you would be okay, and accordingly my mother became a devoted student of American values, culture, and style in their most popular forms.

In all the important ways—language, religion, culture—my grandmother’s life didn’t depart much from that of the Old Country. Even in appearance, she channeled a different time and land. She carefully draped a sheer babushka over her short, thick white hair and tied it beneath her chin with crooked fingers; wore a thick cross around her neck, its gold tinged with red; attired herself formally in understated dresses and sharply-pressed slacks. Her posture was straight and her shoulders unrounded, as if she were walking on a never-ending tightrope. My mom always referred to her in English as Mother, never Mom. Later, I would observe that she used the formal form of you when addressing her in Ukrainian—vy.

It was to please and honor my grandmother that my mother had us participate in an array of Ukrainian customs. My brothers and I resented these efforts for the simple reason that they departed sharply from what we knew and had been conditioned to want. I attended Ukrainian school every Saturday morning for a few years, where I learned to print my name in Cyrillic and listlessly name a few common household objects in Ukrainian, but I disliked the time in the church hall basement, disliked the faint smell of sauerkraut and the accents of some of the other kids, which reminded me of old people. Eventually, my mother gave in and withdrew me. She didn’t even try with my brothers.

We sighed heavily when our mother plunked the familiar plate of my grandmother’s pierogis and stuffed cabbage on the kitchen table. We gamely kept our Christmas tree up through January 7, the day our Orthodox church celebrated Christmas, though by then it had a bare, even mournful look, because my brothers and I had long ripped open and made off with the colorful presents once arrayed invitingly around it.

What we dreaded the most, though, was church. One Sunday morning a month, my mother would appear at our bedroom doors at an unfriendly hour and unsympathetically tell us to get up. We whined and dawdled. The shower was in the bathroom off my parents' bedroom, and my mom would frogmarch us there herself if she had to, urging us to move more quickly with sharp knocks on the door. Even so, the hot water always ran out before the last of us had finished up. Then I had to struggle into a dress whose sleeves would invariably be too short for my long arms and put on tights that had a scratchy feeling I hated. My friends were all Catholic or mainline Protestant, and they got to wear whatever they wanted to church, even jeans.

Our church was in Parma, a city just over Cleveland’s western boundary. My grandmother lived there in a modest brick ranch that was about a twenty-minute drive from our house. The city’s name suggests that its early residents had Italian heritage, but by my grandmother’s time it was a melting pot of white ethnic minorities, and in her enclave Ukrainians and Poles were the most common. Once our mom got us in the van, I would lean my head against the window and look toward the sky as Casey Kasem’s Top 40 countdown blared from the radio. The view flickered from the green of tree branches to hazy smokestacks to spindly electrical wires suspended between wooden poles. I’d know my mother had taken the right exit off the freeway as soon as the flags for the used car lot appeared, along with the signs for a nearby cluster of mattress stores, and the hint of onion domes further down State Road that belonged to the area’s Serbian, Russian, and Ukrainian churches.

St. Vladimir’s held two services on Sundays—the first in English, at 9 a.m., and the second in Ukrainian, at 10:30. As a rule, we attended the Ukrainian service because it was later, even though only my mom could understand what was being said. We often arrived so late that we had to stand at the back wall for a while until we could inconspicuously scoot over to the second to last pew on the left, where my grandmother always stood. The sight of her head turning her head and smiling happily at us as we filed into the pew next to her is one of the most potent memories of my childhood.

The church had an exoticism and beauty that could impress even the grumpiest child. The sandstone building was topped with a copper onion dome that glinted on sunny mornings. The priest paced at the front of the church chanting the ancient liturgy, a smoking thurible of incense swinging from his grip. The voices of the choir thundered from an alcove above the pews. Saints with weirdly long, thin fingers peered down at us from paintings on the domed ceiling. The grand interior culminated in an ornate, multipaneled icon screen that separated the nave from the altar. The elevated, otherworldly feeling of the church was unlike anything else we experienced in our lives. Still, we were children, and the wonder that filled us upon entering the church had the lift of sugar, dissipating quickly, and soon my brothers and I, standing against the back wall or in a pew next to our grandmother, would be shifting our weight from one foot to the other, resentful that we were there at all.

After the lengthy service was over, we had to submit to one more protracted ritual: kissing the priest’s cross. For this we had to file out of the pews and into a line that moved slowly up the aisle to the front of the church. There, a priest proffered the silver cross that hung around his neck to our waiting lips. “Christ is risen,” the priest would say to me in English when I finally arrived at the front of the church. “Indeed, he has risen,” I would mumble back before I touched my lips against the cool metal of Christ’s body prostrate on the cross.

Three altar boys clad in golden robes waited at the end of the procession. Each held a wooden basket. One of the baskets contained small cubes of unleavened bread, and I would dip my fingers in and grab a few pieces. In our rush to get out the door in the morning we never had time for breakfast and it was always past noon when the service finally ended.

After the service, my grandmother’s small, hobbling friends would flock to her like pigeons spying a bread crust. We would wait for her in the church foyer, bundled up in our coats and staring at the rack of thin candles arrayed before a Mary icon as they burned down to their wicks.

Some of her friends looked at us and beamed, as if the sight of grandchildren unleashed a narcotic. Others regarded us with displeasure and told us to stand up straighter, uncross our arms, and stop leaning against the wall where our heads might unintentionally bump a mounted cross. At church, in sum, we were expected to be obedient, polite, and selfless, in keeping with a place that was supposed to be a temple of the best of human nature. It made sense to me that my grandmother made the church the center of her life and attended services without fail; she had a sense of righteousness. It was another thing about her that I never thought to ask about.

September 1987. I was five years old. It was a glorious fall day, the kind where the sun is shining but distant and you are comfortable outside in jeans and no coat. My mother had spent all morning making food for the guests who had come to celebrate my younger brother Alex’s first birthday. They sat on lawn chairs in our backyard holding paper plates in one hand and plastic forks in the other. Alex delighted the adults by taking his first steps at the party, stumbling in red OshKosh B’gosh overalls and a pacifier toward my mother’s outstretched arms.

Earlier in the afternoon, I had earned praise for helping my brother open his presents, though I did so in part to eye the choicest of his gifts for myself. A pudgy and jubilant Alex quickly took to one of them: a plastic hammer that he started slamming on a wooden block with the regularity of a heartbeat.

“Who got him that thing?” one of the guests asked, then laughed.

I felt a hotness rise in my chest. My grandmother, the giver of the present, was now fussing in the kitchen, probably trying to get the saltiness of the mashed potatoes right. I imagined her anxiously weighing the worthiness of the gift in the aisle of Toys “R” Us. There was no way I was going to let these people sit in our lawn chairs and laugh at her. My time as helper, it turned out, was not over.

“My grandma did,” I announced, and gave the tittering guests the evil eye. “He really likes it.”

That reaction occasioned another ripple of laughter. It hung in the air for a moment before fading away.

In fact, my mom had purchased the gift and wrapped it, signing the “from” label with my grandmother’s name. She kept this going for years at Christmases and birthdays, as my grandmother had simply no idea what to buy us. And as middle-class American children, it would have been inconceivable to us not to receive a gift from her.

A desire to protect is just another way of loving, I think, and my brothers and I loved my grandmother intuitively, almost without knowing. Despite her foreignness, she had a gentle, inoffensive quality about her. Her voice was soft, her breath milky, her frame thin. She was eminently dependable, not just in how she cared for us but in her needs and expectations. That made it easy to take her for granted.

Still, I understood early that she was vulnerable. She had something tragic about her, a quality that puzzled me. She was extremely frugal, for one. She worked zealously. She had no interest in fun as I understood it, like going to a baseball game, watching a movie, or getting a milkshake and walking around the mall.

She was also the only person in my family I ever saw cry. Cry about something much sadder than anything I had known—losing her brother, who had died as a young man. Something about this loss pulled at me—I recognized the power of having a brother. A brother was someone whose teeth you watched inch from his gums, whose ear canal you knew the feel of from when you gave him a wet willy. How strange and gutting it would be for this imperative creature to suddenly be gone.

My grandmother had a framed photo of this brother that she displayed in her house. It drew me like a magnet. The black-and-white photo had been taken in a studio. Her brother, Stefan, was wearing a suit, and his hair was combed back. His handsome face was fixed in a solemn expression, one that conveyed a sense of duty and order. He didn’t look like the kind of person who would die tragically. How could this have happened?

When we visited my grandmother, I often looked for the photo—she rearranged her mementos periodically, and sometimes she put the photo in a different room. When I found it, I would outline with my finger the sharp corners of her brother’s pressed suit and shirt collars, trace the crimp in his hair, and study his deep-set blue eyes, which I knew well from my grandmother’s face. He seemed to possess answers to questions that I was just beginning to put into words, like how my grandmother had ever been young enough to have an older brother of his age, what it felt like to die. For a moment, I would feel the power of these questions in the company of his image, and then I would move on. The lure of the photo was strong but indecipherable. I tiptoed into my grandmother’s world, only to draw back into my own.

When my grandmother was in her mid-sixties, she married a widower fourteen years her senior who sang baritone in the church choir. He spoke English as haltingly as she did, and at meals, after a few highballs, he would look off into the distance and break out into Ukrainian songs.

Having him in our family was an adjustment. Our grandmother had been single our whole lives. No explanation was given for the absence of her previous husband, my grandfather. My aunt, Olga, urged us to call this short, sharp-kneed replacement Grandpa. We refused. Even now, years since he passed, we refer to him as Mr. Sorochak. There was precedence for this resistance, as my grandmother had pleaded with us to refer to her as Baba, though the Ukrainian word felt wrong in our mouths and we continued to call her Grandma.

Together they took church-sponsored bus trips to Niagara Falls, went to retirement barbecues, funeral receptions, and bingo, and rose before dawn to help make pierogis the church sold as a fundraiser. Like my grandmother, Mr. Sorochak had been an industrious factory worker with modest tastes, at a time when strong unions promised an old age with few worries apart from deciphering Medicare statements. He and my grandmother generously spent their savings on her progeny, particularly us grandchildren and our exorbitant college educations—educations, of course, that they never dreamt of for themselves.

Together they lived in my grandmother’s one-story, solid brick house a few blocks from St. Vlad’s. The garage was unattached. The grout between the bathroom tiles had become, over time, dark lines of black. There was no automatic disposal or dishwasher, and in good weather my grandmother dried her linens on a thin rope she hung between the back wall of the house and a tree in the middle of the small backyard. Mr. Sorochak carefully maintained the lawn, and cultivated a suite of roses under the bedroom window.

In the summer, my grandmother grew tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, and zucchini in the rows of dirt along the perimeter of the backyard, and when she visited us, she brought us sacks of them along with whatever she had baked recently—cookies with the density of rocks, challah bread, lemon cake. We received these items so frequently that we lost any taste for them, yet she continued to bring them, stacking our refrigerator with foil-topped cake sheets that several days later my mother would reluctantly put in the trash.

“She wants to be sure that we have enough to eat,” my mother said to account for my grandmother’s prodigious cooking. As an explanation, that rang hollow. Hunger didn’t exist in our world. If anything, we had more food than we knew what to do with. Our pantry overflowed with boxes of cereal, jars of spices, unopened bottles of different kinds of oils and vinegars, and bags of so many types of flour that my mother had to line them up on the pantry floor. Our freezer was stacked with frozen Stouffer’s lasagna and macaroni and cheese. Our refrigerator was a maze of milk cartons, cups of yogurt and sour cream, and heads of lettuce, cabbage, and cauliflower. In spite of this overwhelming evidence, my grandmother still seemed to worry that we might starve. The concern was yet another reminder of her strangeness and singularity, that she had come from a different place altogether, one governed by different rules.

November 1989. I am seven years old and watching television with my father. On the screen is a broadcast from Berlin. It is nighttime there, and masses of people in winter coats are pushing against a tall metal gate. The gate breaks open and the people stream through the gap, their faces ecstatic.

The broadcast cuts to a scene in a different part of town. There, people are standing on a thick, tall concrete wall. Some are holding sparklers; the neon-hued graffiti scrawled on the wall matches the color of some of the onlookers’ pants. A few men are striking at the wall with hammers and mallets, trying to chisel off a piece of the cement.

“I never thought I would see this in my lifetime,” my father marvels.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was shown the family photos at my grandmother’s house more purposefully. The hope was that now some of the people in these photographs would be able to come to the United States to visit.

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, that hope became a reality. In the summer of 1993, my mother’s sister Stefa came, bringing along her daughter Natalia, who at twenty-one was ten years my senior, and her uncle Ivan, my grandmother’s only surviving sibling. They had all stayed behind in the Soviet Union for reasons that were then obscure to me, and my grandmother hadn’t seen them for more than twenty-five years. She had never met Natalia, her granddaughter.

They knew no English and my brothers and I no Ukrainian, so we were divided from them as if by a thick glass. What I remember from the time is mainly sensory: how dark Stefa’s hair seemed against her pale face; how gently Natalia’s hands rested on my shoulders; how many fleshy moles bubbled up from Ivan’s skin; how a thick, musty smell emanated from the carved wooden boxes they gave to us as presents. I remember that my parents marveled that the three were dumbstruck when they visited our local grocery store, and that they spent hours examining the different items in the aisles. The joke was that Ivan had overestimated our access to the comforts of capitalism and asked my grandmother to buy him a car.

But we could sense the significance of their presence to our grandmother—how animated she became, how much more she laughed and joked. Then, too, there was the resemblance. We dimly understood that Stefa was my grandmother’s daughter by her first marriage (my mom and Olga the products of her second), and she bore little similarity to either of her half-sisters. Unlike my mom and Olga, Stefa had small eyes, thin lips, and dark brown hair, which she wore in page-boy style. Natalia had Stefa’s dark hair and eyes but she flushed more easily and her nose was rounder.

Ivan, however, was fairer and had the same striking blue eyes as my grandmother and Stefan, their brother in the photograph at my grandmother’s house. In fact, to look Ivan in the eyes was to feel a moment of confusion about who you were actually looking at, him or my grandmother, and their resemblance drove home for me as nothing else had that my grandmother had endured something terrible to have lived apart from her closest family for so long.

While they were visiting, we went out to dinner at Red Lobster. It was a step up from our usual fare, and so we donned our stiff church attire. The service at the restaurant was slow, and we spent a long time waiting in the lobby where a couple of lobsters loitered at the bottom of a murky tank, their pinchers bound. For once, our family was large enough to call for a long rectangular table, the head of which my grandmother refused to occupy. Instead, she took a seat in the middle, where she dominated the conversation all the same. I sat at one of the ends with my brothers and cousins, where bin after bin of salty cheddar biscuits was placed before us and summarily consumed.

The next day, our Ukrainian relatives were gone. In my room I found a delicate rose-colored heart ornament, plastic but cut to look like glass, hanging from a tack on my bulletin board—a gesture of warmth, a token of beauty, and a reminder not to forget.

2Borderland

“Nu, Megan, are you going to have another cup of tea?”

My grandmother’s large blue eyes peered at me expectantly through her thick-lensed glasses. We were sitting in her kitchen at a small table cluttered with opened envelopes, her address book, a bulky landline phone, and a plate of homemade kolacky laden with confectioners’ sugar, some of which had wafted onto the table itself. I nodded, and she handed me a packet of Lipton from the box sitting next to the cookies, its paper wrapper so old that it was foxed at the edges.

Afternoons like this were a normal occurrence in the late aughts and early 2010s whenever I visited Cleveland from the East Coast, where I had ended up in my mid-twenties. My relationship with my grandmother had changed a lot since I was a kid. I had left Cleveland at 18 to attend the University of Chicago, whose famed liberal arts curriculum had substantially expanded my horizons and, just as crucially, given me the audacity to believe that I could even go beyond them. No longer did my grandmother’s foreignness, her different values, her age, make her seem remote to me. Now those things made her fascinating, unique, and special.

Once I started to take notice, I discovered that it was a delight to spend time with her. While she didn’t seek to be the center of attention, she told stories well, with confidence and dramatic poise. She had a good sense of humor. She could be teased and laugh about it. She was extremely frugal, yes, but also admirably skeptical of the enduring value of material things.

It helped, of course, that I now had a working knowledge of Ukrainian. In college, I had thrown myself into learning the language, inspired as much by my university’s brazen intellectual spirit, where no learning endeavor was too obscure, as by the possibility of connecting more meaningfully to my heritage.

That meant that these afternoons of togetherness in my grandmother’s kitchen, or on the margins of family dinners, now took place in her native language. How she loved to talk: about carrying sacks of potatoes on her back to her family’s cellar to store them for the winter; learning Russian in Siberia by studying the newsprint wrapped around the piece of bread she was given each day at the mine; going to the banya each night after a shift to scrub off the dark paste of soot and sweat; caroling with other Ukrainians in the exile settlement around the winter holidays, just as they would have if they had still been in their native villages.

“How we caroled,” I remember her saying. “Every carol that we knew.”

My understanding of my grandmother grew by leaps and bounds during these talks. But my view of her character was not entirely rosy. I saw, for instance, how her temper could fracture under stress. Her main forms of communication with Mr. Sorochak were instructive mumbling and yelling, and she usually instigated the volley of shouts they could rack up over something as innocuous as what to have for lunch. As she got older, she took her weakening grasp of her affairs out on my mom and aunt Olga, who learned to gird themselves for invective when they suggested that she organize her medical bills in a binder rather than a pile of used envelopes or that, given that she had reached her mid-eighties, she allow a hired hand to shovel her driveway when it snowed.

I also was aware that she harbored some retrograde beliefs. Every so often she would make a comment that betrayed ugly attitudes about ethnic groups and minorities. The Russians were, in her estimation, the worst, followed closely by the Poles. A friend’s husband was nice—“for a Jew.” On a trip home after I had moved to the East Coast for my first job, I left her alone with a few distant relatives at a lunch. When I returned, they looked at me wide-eyed. “Your grandmother was telling us about the concerns she has about you living in New York,” one of them said.

“She sure is afraid of black people,” another added.

I shrugged these comments off. They caused no real harm, I told myself. They appeared only occasionally, and any old white lady with a limited education might say similar things from time to time.