The Jewish section of the Berkovetske Cemetery in Kyiv, Ukraine, is relegated to the very back. The grass is tall and verdant; cobwebs and overgrown vines creep around the railings of
wrought iron grave enclosures, which protect my great paternal grandparents’ shared tombstone. When Meir and Shifra Rozman passed in 1963 and 1982 respectively, Kyiv was not yet an officially recognized capital. Ukraine as we know it did not exist until 1991, when the Iron Curtain fell and the Soviet Union was dissolved into nation states.
Closer to the front of the cemetery entrance—still resolutely positioned in the neglected but not forgotten Jewish section—is my grandfather Lev Solomonovich Brayman’s memorial. My father and uncle planted a birch tree here at his burial in 1976. Today, the tree still stands—slim, tall, and strong in an independent Ukraine fighting for its sovereignty.
Watching this war unfold from afar fills me with fear and uncertainty, immense sadness, and anger. Almost overnight, my little corner of the world—a place I have been visiting for decades to discover how intergenerational trauma impacted my identity—is now a global concern. It’s beautiful and strange to witness the world fall in love with Ukrainians. People everywhere are showing their support with hashtags, demonstrations, fundraisers, and by learning about the country’s unique European history. But I wish this wave of solidarity with Ukraine could’ve come about without violence.
In nearly three weeks of war, many of my family and friends made the difficult decision to leave Ukraine for the Polish or Hungarian borders. Others are hiding out in makeshift bomb shelters in Kyiv’s metro stations to escape Russian attacks. Women and children continue to run away from their homes in embattled cities like Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Mariupol, and Volnovakha as the men stay behind to defend their country. The growing refugee crisis—nearly three million people have fled Ukraine and more than an estimated two million are now internally displaced—has become the greatest displacement of Europeans since World War II. I also know people living in Luhansk, a city in eastern Ukraine in the breakaway Donbas region established by pro-Russian separatists in 2014, who welcome a Russian invasion. They seem to rely heavily on Russian state-owned television, which paints a one-sided, distorted view of the motives behind this war.
It should not have taken all of this—air raids and casualties, threats of nuclear attacks, and inflated gas prices—for the rest of the world to learn Ukraine’s location on a map.
The chaos continues elsewhere. As Western economic sanctions crash down on oligarchs and the Russian elite, innocent citizens are unjustly affected. My friend Nastassja fled from Moscow to Armenia days after war broke out. As she described it, Russian banks closed and accounts were rendered useless. Flights were canceled, social media access was restricted on Instagram and Facebook, protesters in major cities across Russia were being detained. When I asked her if the move was permanent, she couldn’t say: “For now, I need to figure out where to open a business and work. My savings are limited. I can’t sell diamonds like the Russian royalty did during the revolution because I don’t have any fucking diamonds. I’m not royalty, I’m an IT consultant.”
Nastassja doesn’t support the war, but like millions of Russians, she can’t utter such sentiments out loud. “Putin doesn’t need to liberate anyone; he needs to be institutionalized,” she wrote to me over a secure messaging app.
It should not have taken all of this—air raids and casualties, threats of nuclear attacks, and inflated gas prices—for the rest of the world to learn Ukraine’s location on a map.
To be clear, I’m not an ethnic Ukrainian. But my connection to the country still feels chasmic, making the political all too personal. I was the first of my family to be born in the States, but I’ve never been able to define myself as strictly American. Although my father grew up in Kyiv, he wasn’t considered Ukrainian by his fellow countrymen, either. That might partly explain why he emigrated as a refugee in 1979. If you looked at his passport, his ethnicity was listed as Jewish. I sang Russian nursery rhymes before I learned a word of English, but that doesn’t make me Russian. (The common language in the Soviet Union and under the Russian Empire before that was Russian.) On his tombstone, Lev’s name is written in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet. But my grandfather, his family, and generations before them probably spoke a mix of Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Russian.
I fell in love with Ukraine when I first visited in May 2005. I was living in St. Petersburg, Russia that year, working as an editor for a tourism company. The White Nights were beautiful, but I was constantly sick—stuck on a pull-out couch bed in my rented land lady’s living room with a debilitating fever. I had a hard time acclimating to St. Pete’s cold, damp winter. But then came spring, and I went traveling. In Kyiv, the sun was shining, the Ukrainian boys all smiled at me, and the buttery cherry-filled varenyky melted in my mouth. I discovered new stories about my ancestors and ate and drank all the blini, herring, and kvass I came across. I felt at home in this inexplicably familiar city with its domed cathedrals, Art Nouveau theaters, and wacky modernist buildings that look like flying saucers. My Russian improved from my time abroad but in subsequent trips to Ukraine after that, I found something even closer to home, despite speaking little Ukrainian.
In 2009, my dad and I went looking for my great-great-grandfather Zalman Rozman’s grave in Novi Veledniki, a small shtetl near Chernobyl dating back to 1545. Throughout the early 1900s, the village was attacked by local gangs in pogroms until the Germans occupied it in 1941. We never found Zalman’s tombstone, but we did find broken pieces of countless others. Some were nameless with simple, haunting epitaphs: “Killed by Fascists. 1941.” Like the Kyiv cemetery, the grass here was also tall and unruly with wildflowers in peak bloom.
Now Russian President Vladimir Putin claims that his current military operation is necessary and meant to “demilitarize and de-Nazify” Ukraine, freeing its people from genocide and oppression. This false narrative disrespectfully flies in the face of the Jewish cultural and ethnic connection to the entire region. While it’s true that Ukraine’s struggle for independence is plagued by a history with fascism (nationalists often fought against the Soviets, and during World War II, this meant aligning with Nazi Germany), Ukraine’s Jewish population suffered systemic discrimination and persecution under Stalin’s regime, as did Jews in Russia and other former-Soviet republics. This is Russia’s favorite propagandistic rhetoric. In 2014, Putin agitated ethnic differences in Ukraine’s Donbas region under the false pretext that Russians needed protection from Ukrainian nationalists (whom he also described as “Nazis”). Invoking Nazis is also a callback to the Soviet Union’s triumph in World War II, when the Soviets managed to push back Hitler’s forces on the Eastern Front, turning the tide of the war in the Allies’ favor. The victory is still a powerful memory and motivational force that the Kremlin uses to unite popular opinion with their military goals.
History has a way of repeating itself. That has been evident in the past three weeks of airstrikes and combat. But since Russia’s last wave of aggression against Ukraine, it is undeniable that Ukrainians are more united than ever before.
In 2019, an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians freely elected a Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky. With more than 70 percent of the vote, the former comedian and TV actor took on a political role no one thought possible for someone so inexperienced and so, well… Jewish. Today, Ukraine’s fragile democracy, the so-called “Nazis,” continue to rewrite their own historical narrative, all while struggling to take control of an uncertain future.
Ukrainians are showing admirable resolve despite being up against a stronger military and a dictator hell-bent on annihilating their right to exist. Many criticized Zelensky’s abilities to lead a nation, but when Russia invaded, he showed heroic character. Declining offers from the U.S. to evacuate him from the capital, his refusal is now a rallying cry: “I need ammunition, not a ride.” He’s willing to fight in the trenches along with civilians and soldiers alike and has become a universal symbol of resilience. For Jews with Ukrainian, Russian, or broader Soviet roots, for underdogs everywhere, this is the stuff of legend. Zelensky will go down in history not as the Jew who went up against Putin, but as the Jewish Ukrainian who didn’t stand down to arguably the most feared autocrat of the century.
The impressions of this war are far-reaching and heavier than any of my small anecdotes from Ukraine can illustrate. On Twitter, I’ve seen people discover their Ukrainian roots for the first time. People who considered themselves Russian Jews are now finding out that their ancestors were actually from Odessa or Lviv. “Russian Jew” has been a catch-all for Jews from the whole region. Some of my closest friends still refer to me as Russian when they introduce me to others. Sometimes I correct them with the label “Soviet Jew,” which seems closer to the whole story but still not quite all of it. (My mother is from the Caucasus, present-day Baku, Azerbaijan, but she’s not Azeri. In Soviet times, these geographic coordinates were just as “Russian” as my father’s Kyiv, although the ethnic diversity of the Caucasus is even more pronounced due to its proximity to Turkic and Persian civilizations.) Other times, it’s just easier to simplify a complicated past that involved ever-changing borders by identifying myself with a shared language and collective memory.
Language has the power to transcend politics. Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel Prize-winning poet, famously said that language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any form of social organization. A poet in his native Russian and, later in his life, in fluent English, Brodsky speaks from experience. Language can separate us or unite us despite borders or ethnic, political differences. I don’t think Brodsky is talking about the language we each consider our native tongue. My interpretation is that the words we use to communicate with one another, to express ourselves, are stronger than a line in the sand, a political affiliation, or the words people in power use to justify war.
I visited Crimea once before Russia’s illegal annexation of the territory in 2014. Back in 2010, it was still proudly in Ukraine, and as far as I could tell, everyone spoke the same language—an indistinct mix of tourist and local slang. I stole a napkin from the hotel where I stayed. It was embroidered in blue and yellow, the colors of the Ukrainian flag, which symbolize a typical agricultural landscape in Ukraine: crystal-clear blue skies atop golden wheat fields. I still have that napkin. It’s been pinned to a bulletin board above my desk for over a decade. It reminds me of Crimea’s tomatoes—the most delicious I’ve ever tasted.
I haven’t made it to Odessa yet, but its history has beckoned. Founded by Catherine the Great, the Ukrainian city was considered the “pearl of the Black Sea” and an indispensable commercial port in the Soviet era. Before all that, it was an ancient Greek settlement then a Tatar one. In the 19th century, it was home to one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe and influential writers like Nikolai Gogol and Isaac Babel. As I write this, the venerable beach town remains unscathed, but Ukrainians are busy welding barricades to stop Russian tanks.
I long to see Odessa one day. And I’d love to forage mushrooms in Ukraine’s Carpathian Mountains sometime soon, too. I can only hope that these cities and forests are still standing in an independent Ukraine by the time I make it back. Now that the world knows more about Ukraine, I hope everyone will get a chance to visit these places and discover for themselves the country’s unique beauty—poetry that will continue to flourish after the smoke clears. Even war, with its razed buildings and instability, cannot destroy underground roots. Sunflowers–Ukraine’s national flower and a recent symbol of resistance–will grow again in abundance. Or something new, resilient, and distinctly Ukrainian will peek through the soil. Maybe even another birch tree.
