An open letter to President Zelenskyy

Dear President Zelenskyy,

I had a friend in high school who was Ukrainian American and involved in the local Ukrainian community. She was not a close friend, but I enjoyed learning about Ukrainian culture and hearing about her debutante ball, how she celebrated Christmas on January 6, and all the holidays and celebrations in-between. Growing up in central New Jersey, I had so many friends who were born or whose parents were born in other countries and I loved learning about the world through them.  Listening to Tamara was no different. What I never did—never even thought to do— was identify any connection to my own heritage or history. Ukraine was just a country on a map and the homeland of this acquaintance who hovered on the outer edge of my circle. 

For one thing, I was unaware at the time that one quarter of my family came from Kyiv. My great grandparents fled Kyiv with a wave of other Jews escaping violence and poverty. But their paperwork identified them as coming from Russia, and I was always told that my mother’s side of the family were Russian Jews (Austro-Hungarian/Polish and Romanian Jews on my father’s side). Ukraine was ruled by the Russian empire at the time. I’m not sure it mattered all that much to my family because their lives were precarious and marked by poverty and violence regardless of who was in charge.  

It was only a few years ago, in my mid-40’s, that I learned that none of my relatives actually hailed from Russia. My mother’s father came from Belarus, and her mother’s family, Kyiv. Still, I felt little connection to either country. After all, history in general, and my family’s oral history specifically, indicated that my family members were not really Ukrainian or Belarussian, but were instead treated as foreign and inferior, another race/nationality who happened to live within the physical boundaries of those countries, despised by the “real” Ukrainians and Belarussians. Before the Nazis invaded, there were home grown pogroms carried out by citizens. My grandfather escaped Belarus decades before the Holocaust, so traumatized that he could not discuss his childhood at all. When pushed too hard, he revealed only that he’d seen Jewish men hanging from trees. 

When I looked up the history of Jews in Kyiv, it stretches back 1,000 years. My people were in Ukraine before it was a nation-state, and far longer than anyone non-Indigenous has been in the land now referred to as the United States. But it was a millennium in which the local population repeatedly massacred Jews—pushing us off cliffs in planned mass murders, chopping off our limbs with scythes and machetes, dragging us out of urban apartments and shooting or hanging us, and, periodically, expelling us to infertile rural land where we lived in shtetls. This is the story I was told: “We were not them. We were not Russian, or Ukrainian, or Belarussian. They despised us, all of them. They chased us off their continent. They kept us impoverished, ghettoized and they massacred us. We have nothing left there to call the old country, to call home.” This is not only the story I was personally told, but it’s reflected in much of what can be found online or in books about the Jews of eastern Europe, including Ukraine. 

So, Ukraine and Kyiv were just place names to me, not a homeland, even after I learned that  that one fourth of my family may  have lived there for hundreds of years, possibly for a millennium. We still did not belong to that place, and there was no identification with the people who did.

But now, President Zelenskyy, I see you daily in videos, wearing fatigues and t-shirts, telling the people of Ukraine that you are still there, that you will die for their—your— collective freedom. That to you, freedom means life in an independent Ukraine, not fleeing to the U.S. or Israel or anywhere else. You are the Jewish president of Ukraine. You are inspiring the world as a Ukrainian, as the brave face of Ukraine. You understand yourself to be a protector of Ukraine and Ukrainian culture and spirit. You do not see yourself as stateless, part of a peripatetic group of people with no homeland. You identify with the other citizens of your country, on every level including national identity. And they identify with you. They elected you. They chose you, a Jew, to lead them. It’s not just the rest of the world that sees you now as the face of your nation. Your nation—Ukraine—and its majority non-Jewish population also sees you that way. And your bravery is astounding. 

As is your history. You lost family in the Holocaust and presumably in every wave of pogroms before that. Like I did, like my family did, like probably every Jewish family in Ukraine did. Ancestors of some of the countrymen for whom you are now risking your life likely killed your own ancestors. Their hate for your family, your ethnicity, was palpable and deadly. And yet that is not how you define your country now, or how you place yourself in its context. You understand the history and still feel utterly and completely Ukrainian. You view every Ukrainian, every last descendant of people who may have murdered your family, as your countrymen. 

Writing this, I’m struck by the privilege I have to be thinking of these matters in the way I do, to be pondering them as something new, this idea of being a citizen or descendant of a country that tried to kill my family, of identifying with it nevertheless, maybe even fighting for it. Of being able to put it to one side and say, “Still, here I am, I am one of you, and I will stand with you to protect what we’ve created.” Why is this a privilege, to consider this as a new idea? Because I haven’t experienced that kind of conflict in the United States. I don’t have the sense that my Jewish ethnicity and history conflicts in any way with my American citizenship or my devotion to this country and its ideals. But for many Americans their lived reality is a daily dose of cognitive dissonance. Black Americans have been here since before the founding of this country as a nation-state, have fought for this country, may not have any other sense of home. And yet they must square this identity of being a patriotic American with a history of other Americans acting genocidally against their ancestors, torturing and killing millions of people.  And it’s not just historical. Intentional ghettoization and economic inequality, and the continuous and persistent threat of racial violence killing their children, their spouses, themselves is a constant present-day reality. Figuring out how to belong to a country that has hated and dehumanized you is not a new problem or solely a Jewish one (and Jews of color may experience it in multiple ways at once). 

Black American intellectuals have been trying to tell us for years what it’s like to love a country that doesn’t love you back. From Douglas to Baldwin to Hughes to Hansberry, from King to Angelou to Hooks and West, to Coates—they and many more luminaries have been shouting about this from the mountaintops, writing about it in every genre possible, living it through every protest, every run for office, every attempt to perfect this union. Michelle Obama wrote in the preface to her autobiography that her parents helped her “see the value in our story, in my story, in the larger story of our country. Even when it’s not pretty or perfect. Even when it’s more real than you want it to be. Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.” Great minds in the country that I consider my own homeland, the country where I was born, have been telling us for decades, centuries even, that it takes all of one’s being, every ounce of grace, and the ability to forgive while not forgetting, to recognize a shared humanity even when the person standing before you does not. My whole life, I thought I was listening to this lesson. But was I? 

President Zelenskyy, I am not a religious Jew. I am not a Zionist. I have few Jewish friends and I married a WASP from Alabama whose family has been in this country for hundreds of years. But I am unmistakably Jewish by ethnicity and culture, Ashkenazi by genes and superstition, holidays and foods. By intergenerational trauma and the agony of memory, by the silence of my grandparents about the places they came from. And of all the stories I’ve told myself about where I come from and who I am, there are none where you fit in. Where a country full of the descendants of people who massacred and menaced my family would go to the polls and elect not only you to lead them, but also a Jewish prime minister. Where Ukrainian citizens would look to you for inspiration and bravery and succor. For protection. Where you are not only Ukrainian—you, descendant of the shtetls and pogroms! Ukrainian!— but also Jewish. You are not a Jew who happens to live in Ukraine. You are a Ukrainian who is Jewish. You famously do not want “a ride” out of there to Israel or the U.S., traditional havens for people who share our DNA. No, you want ammunition to defend your homeland. Not to use against your fellow countrymen in an act of vengeance. No. You want ammunition so that you can protect them. 

Why am I so surprised by this development? In part, because my intergenerational trauma, like that of many Jews, has become ahistorical. My understanding of Jews in Eastern Europe is frozen at the point of my grandparents’ departure, interrupted only by the later history of the Holocaust. It has never occurred to me that it could get better, or be different. Individuals experience Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder when trauma is stuck in their short-term memory rather than being moved to long-term memory, so that it becomes ahistorical and ever-present. The intergenerational trauma of an entire community can be the same.  Jews whose families escaped Eastern Europe are, as a culture, stuck in an ahistorical loop where our trauma seems frozen in time and continuously marks entire areas of the globe as uninhabitable in our psyches. It is impossible to heal without historicizing what happened to our families and placing it in specific times and contexts, and separating it from the present tense. 

So what have the intervening years been like for Jews in Ukraine? I’ve had to do research to find this out. It turns out that once Ukraine was free from Russian and Soviet rule, antisemitism decreased quickly and dramatically. A 2017 Pew Research poll found Ukraine to be more accepting of Jews than any other Eastern or Central European country, with only five percent of the population expressing any animus towards Jews or hesitation towards considering Jews full Ukrainian citizens. Since the Soviet Union’s fall, the Jewish population in Ukraine increased to more than 100,000. This, of course, is nowhere close to the population that existed before the Holocaust, when over a million Ukrainian Jews were murdered in the course of a few years. But the point is that it the population is growing, not receding, and Jews have become, and feel, full citizens of the independent Ukrainian state. 

This is not to say that Ukraine has salved all balms of discrimination and racial animus. We’ve all seen the newspaper stories of Black Ukrainians and African immigrants being treated horrifically as they try to escape the bombings. White Ukrainians are pushing them off buses and making them walk, keeping them from crossing borders to safety, saying “no Blacks on this bus.” I do not want to imply that an independent Ukraine is a haven from racism. It isn’t. There is a long way to go. But its internal shifts in the treatment and acceptance of Jews (perhaps I should instead say some Jews, since Jews of color likely experience the above-noted discrimination) has still been eye-opening for me, and a bit of a shock. 

President Zelenskyy, when I started this letter, I was not sure where it would end, what the moral of your story is, exactly what I’ve learned from you. I still don’t know. I know that I am brought to tears every time I see you, hear your voice, look at an image of you standing on the streets of Kyiv assuring Ukrainians that you are still there with them even as the Russians seek your head. Your Jewishness is not beside the point, but part of it. Putin accuses you and the rest of your government of being neo-Nazis, and it’s because you’re Jewish that this accusation can so easily be seen for what it is. Your Jewishness is not irrelevant to your ability to defend your country, or an impediment to it, but an integral part of it. It is part of how you say “I cannot be a neo-Nazi Ukrainian, because I am a Jewish Ukrainian, and marrying the two would be impossible.” You point out that being a Jewish Nazi would be an oxymoron. You never say that being a Jewish Ukrainian would be.

And perhaps that is part of the lesson. None of us are separate from each other. We all belong to the countries we come from, the countries we move to, the planet we call home. Sometimes we must flee, but sometimes we are called to stay with our neighbors and face down the barrels of the guns. And sometimes through this very act, the act of identifying with and serving our neighbors, of being willing to go down with their ship because we see it as our ship too, that we break down the prejudices and inequalities that have haunted us, that have made us fear each other. 

I cried when Barack Obama was elected President of the U.S. because I knew what it meant in the context of our country’s history to elect a Black president. What it meant that enough white Americans voted for him, agreed that he should be the person to represent the very idea of America. But you have made me realize, my emotional upheaval at that moment aside, that I did not fully understand the symbolic impact on the deepest visceral level. Because the moment seemed inevitable to me in some way. I was happy that it came when it did, but I had no doubt that it would come, that it was already too long in coming. It didn’t change my sense of belonging to this country, of feeling recognized in my own home. Barack Obama’s election as president did not raise questions for me. To the contrary, it seemed like an answer, and an obvious one.  

Your own election and what you have come to represent to Ukraine was not, for me, expected or inevitable. It has changed the way I view myself, my history, and where I belong, who and where I come from. It sends me back to my high school days listening to Tamara describing Three Kings Day. It brings me back to the meals I shared with friends at Vaselka Ukrainian restaurant in lower Manhattan. I return to these scenes now in my mind, and I want to say to Tamara, “You know, I’m part Ukrainian too!” I want to return to Vaselka and, instead of telling my friends that “this food is similar to what I grew up with,” I want to say “the Ukrainian side of my family made food like this.” 

I want to reach back even further, to my great-grandparents loading their family into the cattle holds below deck on that ship and tell them this: “I’m sorry you need to flee. I’m glad you’re moving to safety, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. But things will change. I know you can’t stay here, but this place is still a part of you, will always be part of you. It may not seem like it, but there is something there beneath and beside the horror, something universal of which you are a part. You may speak Yiddish rather than Ukrainian. Ukrainians may have tried to kill you. They may have succeeded in killing your neighbors. But that doesn’t mean you’re less Ukrainian than the people who committed the violence. You are both part of this country’s history. A millennium is a millennium. Two opposing things can be true at once.” 

So, thank you, President Zelenskyy. I know you did not set out to teach the world this lesson right now, that you are instead trying to save a country—your country—and the lives of your fellow citizens. But through your heroism and unabashed patriotism for a country in which your ancestors suffered so unspeakably, you are teaching me, and maybe other Jews, something else as well. You are teaching us how to become whole, and how to forgive, and how to love people in spite of their history, and in spite of our own. You are teaching us how to heal. 

Michelle Lerner