The War in Ukraine: Thoughts from a Jewish Ex-Soviet

“Ukraine my native land,” thus spoke my maternal grandfather Aron (Arkady) Polyak, who was born and grew up in Kamenets-Podolsk (Kamianets-Podilskyi) and moved to Moscow in his youth to obliterate his “bourgeois” status and then to attend university. Prior to entering the gymnasium, my paternal grandfather, Peysakh (Pyotr) Shrayer, who also grew up in Kamianets, spoke Ukrainian not as well as he did Yiddish, but much better than Russian. As a young man in the 1920s he moved to Leningrad to become a member of the new Soviet intelligentsia. After a lifetime of living in Leningrad, Grandfather Pyotr never forgot his Ukrainian childhood—the high bank of the Smotrich, the “Turkish” bridge, the mills on the land our family rented from a Polish count.

Nyusya (Anna) Studnits, my maternal grandmother, was born in the town of Bar presently in the Vinnitsia Province. After graduating from the Kharkov (Kharkiv) Institute of Engineering and Economics, she settled in Moscow in the late 1930s and became a true Muscovite; she even spoke Russian with just a trace of a provincial accent and with the typical old Moscow singsong intonation. And yet Ukraine remained to her, a Jew and a longtime Moscow resident, the domain of youth and first love.

I experience emotional torment because the troops of Russia, the country of my native language and my beloved Russian culture, are massacring the land of Ukraine.

My mother was born and grew up in Moscow, my father—in Leningrad. In childhood and youth my parents visited the relatives who had survived and returned to Ukraine after World War 2 and the Shoah—in Kamianets, Kyiv, Vinnitsia, Odessa. During the twenty years that I spent in the former Soviet Union, I only once had occasion to visit Ukraine, in the summer of 1986, when I stayed briefly in the Luhansk Province. Already an American, a Jewish-Russian immigrant, I came to Kyiv for the first time in 2013 along with my older daughter, who was seven at the time.

And all these years I was dreaming about placing stones on the dilapidated ancestral graves in Podolia. But life made other arrangements.

When I visited Ukraine during the post-Soviet years, to lecture and do research, I would be overcome by mixed emotions. This was the land of both my grandfathers and my maternal grandmother (I’m a Litvak on the side of my paternal grandmother), and our family history was rooted in this land and its past. In this sense my experience betokens that of hundreds of thousands of former Soviet Jews, now predominantly living in Israel, the U.S., Germany and Canada. But I couldn’t think of Ukraine only as the place where my ancestors had been born, lived, went to shul, worked the land. I couldn’t not think of Ukraine as a place on the map of Europe, where in ditches and ravines lay our native bones—the bones of the murdered Jews.

I couldn’t not think of Ukraine as a place on the map of Europe, where in ditches and ravines lay our native bones—the bones of the murdered Jews.

Why am I writing about it now? I’m writing about it because last night, on 23 February 2022, all those mixed and contradictory feelings receded into the background. Now Ukraine has become my own native land, because enemies of peace and happiness have invaded it. Now Ukraine is a victim of Russia’s imperial aggression. A victim of a neocolonial war. A country with which I feel bonds of kinship and solidarity. And I experience emotional torment because the troops of Russia, the country of my native language and my beloved Russian culture, are massacring the land of Ukraine. I feel terrified and ashamed.

As I think of the war in Ukraine, I cannot but turn my thoughts to those who wear the Russian military uniform, and especially to the generals and admirals, to the officers of the Russian army, navy and air force. I say to them in this hour: Do not make Russia’s lads into statistics of an unjust war. Do not destroy what little remains of Russian culture and of Russia’s hopes for the future. Stop, Russia’s military commanders!

And cursed be you, who sent the Russian troops to kill and to die in Ukraine.

Maxim D. Shrayer is an author and a professor at Boston College. His recent books include “Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature” and “A Russian Immigrant: Three Novellas.” Shrayer’s newest book is “Of Politics and Pandemics.”