As the daughter of Soviet Jewish immigrants, I used to call myself ‘Russian’—but a trip to Kyiv offered me a new perspective, and a new language
It was our last day in Kyiv. Soon I would return to the life I had always known in New York before moving to Ukraine three months prior — but on that day, rather than seek respite from the smoldering heat, my partner and I were in the Jewish section of the city's municipal cemetery, navigating a small jungle of poison ivy in a last-ditch effort to find my great-grandparents' graves.