Letters from the past

By Samantha Shokin

My mother’s family immigrated to Brooklyn from Kyiv in the late 1970s, about a decade before I was born. Growing up, I had identified, like everyone else in our immigrant community, as a Russian Jew. That narrative started to shift, first slowly, following Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 — then quickly around 2016, when a group of friends first opened my eyes to Ukrainian language and culture. Until then, everything Ukrainian had been foreign to me. Everything about my own Ukrainian Jewish heritage — from the Yiddish dialect that my grandparents had spoken, down to the nuances of my grandmother’s cooking — had been obscured by the monolith that was Russian-speaking Soviet culture.

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