My Jewish family left an unwelcoming Ukraine, then Putin's war made me rethink my identity
Before the war, I never thought of myself as Ukrainian. As a Jewish American kid whose first language was Russian, making sense of my identity was hard enough.
On the night Vladimir Putin announced his special noninvasive operation, I did the only thing I could think to do: I called my dad.
Papa Reytblat, born in the small Ukrainian town of Korosten just after the Great Patriotic War, had been proclaiming for months that a Russian invasion was impossible. "Vladimir Putin is a lot of things, but he’s not a schlemiel," he had said in Russian with a shpritz of his native Yiddish.
As the first kindergarten-seeking missiles struck Ukraine, my dad was sure: "Putin doesn't know what's coming. He messed with the wrong people."
I never thought of myself as Ukrainian before the war, even though it's my ancestral home. For starters, no one here in the United States ever seemed to know where or what Ukraine was, which I'll admit was a bit embarrassing growing up. As a Jewish American kid whose first language was Russian, it was hard enough to fit in without trying to explain the complexities of nationality in my parents' bygone USSR. Russian or Jewish were easy identifiers for Americans to digest. The few times I opted for specificity prompted a question I got tired of answering: "Ukraine … that's in Russia, right?"
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For much of its history, like many of the red giant's neighboring nations, Ukraine was in Russia and Ukrainian independence movements were put down with brutal, chauvinistic fervor. During that time, my Ukrainian mishpucha, or family, lived in a community much like the ones described in the stories of "Fiddler on the Roof" progenitor Sholem Aleichem. They lived in shtetls, small Jewish towns in the Pale of Settlement, the lands of the Russian Empire beyond which Jews were forbidden to live. My grandparents and great-grandparents had names like Israel and Avram-Moishe. They spoke Yiddish around the dinner table, Hebrew at Torah study, and Russian at the only jobs they were allowed to work – all while trying to parry the occasional pogrom.
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In the past month, I've watched in horror as Putin revived the age-old Russian repression on an industrial scale. He bombed the Holocaust memorial in Babi Yar in my babushka's native Kyiv and schools in my dad’s hometown of Korosten, which now looks unrecognizable.
Hatred on display in day to day life
My family left in 1985 because they didn't always regard Ukraine as a welcoming place. This isn't to say there weren't welcoming Ukrainians – like the family who hid my great-great-grandmother in their attic for more than four years during the Holocaust – just that acts of antisemitism were a part of daily life.
At my dad's first wedding in Korosten, the local youths yelled the Russian equivalent of an antisemitic slur as they threw rocks through the windows at the reception. My family tried to avoid a repeat by holding the next wedding outside. The vandals adapted and set the wedding tent ablaze using firecrackers, though my family recalls making light of the situation and chasing the arsonists out with clubs of bologna.
Despite some close friendships and a shared way of life, my mishpucha never thought there could be a tent big enough for Ukrainians and Jews to coexist.
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I realize that to support Ukraine today is to cheer on some of the very people my parents once ran from. But it's the fact that the vast majority of Ukrainians would claim their Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, so wholly as their own that they would not just elect him with an overwhelming majority, but also would put their lives on the line to protect him, that fuels my faith in the righteousness of Ukraine's national identity – an identity I'm honored to embrace as part of my own.
My dad knew Ukrainians would rally
Ukrainians are demonstrating heroism, not Nazism, by uniting to valiantly defend the fundamental principles of democracy and self-determination. It's inspiring to see so many members of the Ukrainian diaspora, who also once called themselves Russian, affirming their own Ukrainian identity in solidarity.
It was in that initial call with my dad that I first heard about the now world-renowned will of the Ukrainian people. Amid my early feelings of fear and pessimism, my dad knew the resolve of his homeland better than any geopolitical expert I had read in the days prior. However, neither of us could have known the extent to which the Ukrainian people would rally around a member of our tribe.
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In his futile attempt to erase the existence of a national identity, Putin managed only to denazify my preconceived notions of Ukraine and make me prouder than ever to be a first-generation Ukrainian Russian Jewish American.
Ben Reytblat is a writer and filmmaker from Staten Island, New York. He was a writers' assistant for the Netflix show "Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj."