Ukraine just wasn't there ...

As Ukraine has moved to the center of U.S. political concern over the last few years, I've noticed repeatedly that this huge country resided in a remote, dark, cloudy space in my consciousness, out there somewhere, but invisible. I suspect I am not alone about this among people in the U.S. of my generation who notice a wider world at all: unless we had eastern European roots, Soviet Russia and its satellites were a blank. Many of us learned a good deal about places where the U.S. went to war and sought active hegemony -- southeast Asia and Latin America. Africa escaped from colonialisms and was exciting. What we call the "Middle East" and also central Asia were other zones of imperial activity -- ours. And we may have learned a little. But eastern Europe, not so much so.

There are histories that admirably fill some of the blanks. I always recommend Bloodlands and Postwar.

But as Putin's invasion proceeds and I've doom scrolled about the internet, I still felt this blankness about who these people are who are so bravely facing the onslaught. The piece I read which somehow seemed to reach a bit into the blank was journalist Franklin Foer's It’s Not ‘The’ Ukraine in The Atlantic. His family's history -- the history of a small branch from a huge Jewish clan that implausibly survived Ukrainian anti-Semitism and Hitler's Holocaust -- made Ukraine come alive for him. Not surprisingly ...

When I first visited Ukraine, in 2002, I couldn’t see past its Soviet-era dinge or shake off the admittedly overwrought—if historically informed—suspicion that every person I met might wish me dead.

Much later, in 2010, he visited the tiny towns, now obliterated, where most of his forebears had been murdered. His grandmother survived the German killing pit by walking east, all the way to Kazakhstan, in 1942. His grandfather's survival may have been even more unlikely: he was hidden by Ukrainian neighbors in a hay barn throughout the occupation and war.

Foer writes:

History, which I had considered dead and buried, suddenly reached out of the grave and wrapped its arm around me. 

One Ukrainian had threatened to kill my grandmother; another had saved my grandfather in an act of heroism that never aspired to more than neighborly kindness. As we ate lunch, I realized that my existence owed itself, in a sense, to the big-heartedness of Ukrainians. History is as variegated as the woods where we went to recite a prayer at our family’s mass grave.

Foer's mother, Esther Safran Foer, tells the story of her quest for more truth about this family history in I Want You to Know We're Still Here: A Post-Holocaust Memoir. This is a wonderful little book. Finidng Ukrainians who remembered the lost world of the ancestral shtetl required years of persistence and negotiating the fraught terrain of evil memories which many wanted to repress. But eventually she found what could be found -- and people who brought her connections to that world alive. She writes:

... the connections we made on that trip continue to be part of our lives. I often wonder what my grandfather would make of Lesia Lishcuk, the great-granddaughter of his rescuer, Davyd, sleeping in the guest room of our house [in Washington, DC]. ... She still signs some of her emails "from your Ukrainian family," and I reciprocate by ending mine "from your American family."...

Putin's Ukrainian hell is going to be a long horror in a land that has seen too much horror, I fear. I try to bring to consciousness the people in the way ...