My partner of almost 10 years moved to Canada from Ukraine when he was 14. His dad and many cousins still live there. I've been there 3 times, and loved every visit. Once in 2014 with the Khreschatik still a mess with tires and army tents after the Maidan protests. That trip showed me the strength, resilience, convictions and nationalism on these people. By some strange life circumstances, I've gone to a tiny Ukrainian sleep away camp since I was 7, singing the Ukrainian hymn twice a day and learning songs. That's actually where I met my current partner, when I came back as a young adult to be a camp counsellor. And where I met who I consider my best friend Vlad, amazing artist that we do fun build projects at the dacha with. The camp has been cancelled the past 2 years because of Covid, I don't know if we'll ever bring it back since it's all on our shoulders at the moment. I'm personally only tangentially Ukrainian, from my mom's mother's side - but we don't know very much about it since she was an orphan. My mom still has cousins there on the Belorussian border. Needless to say it's been a hard week, it's a people close and dear to my heart. War sucks, Putin Huilo, Slava Ukraini, Smert' Voroham 😡
One of my COVID discoveries was my great-grandmother's photo albums. The family legend was that she was the nasty woman who disowned her daughter for dating a goy; the real problem was she died, and then my grandfather's father died, and then my mother was born, and then WWII started, leaving my Jewish grandmother in an antisemitic hive with an estranged father, a brother at war and two young children. So she let my grandfather gaslight the kids into thinking it was the Jews who were racist. I'm a quarter Belarusian Jew. My mother is half Belarusian Jew. And a dead ringer for her grandmother; the resemblance is uncanny. There are, of course, very few Belarusian Jews left. They were expelled, exterminated or otherwise invited to leave; based on the documents my crew bailed on The Pale about 20 years prior to the (fictional) events of Fiddler on the Roof. My grandmother died 30 years ago. I wish I could have asked about... so many things. What I know is the gaslighting is so severe that my family simultaneously argues for my great-great grandfather's Judaism while simultaneously insisting he paid someone else for their name so that he could escape military service and emigrate. When I pointed out that military service at the time was mostly about exterminating jews, not putting them in uniform, I was met with stony silence. What I have? Is a proud history of Americans who ended up in Texas when they assed out of their Alabama plantation when their slaves were emancipated. A proud history of Americans who ended up in Boston when they were assed out of their New York manner home when their slaves were emancipated. I found out the other day that the Muscovite wife of a friend of mine went to college there because their degree program was better than Kiev's. That's as close as I have to a connection with Ukraine. Other than a family history that's nothing but photographs, letters, and a pieced-together history against everything I ever grew up with. But I know there were a handful of these in amongst the christmas decorations, my mother had no idea where they came from, and they all got thrown away before I turned ten.