It’s warm now in Kiev for the first time since the waning days of September, and the population of my working-class neighborhood is shedding its winter coats. The crocuses are emerging, the stray cats are bolder than ever, and it is a perfect day to take a walk in the park: specifically, the one on the corner of Olena Talihi and Shusieva Streets—the one that also happens to contain the infamous ravine known as Babi Yar.



My neighborhood, colloquially known as “Dorohozhichi,” after the metro stop that bisects the Babi Yar memorial park, is not far from the center of Kiev. Take the subway two stops from Zoloti Vorota (the Golden Gate), on the city’s central hill, and you will arrive here, amid a cluster of food kiosks and beer tents. Yevgeny Yevtushenko once wrote that one can best get to know a city by studying its “coarse and sorrowing outskirts,” but life here is no more coarse or sorrowful than anywhere else in the city; the strains of Russian pop can be heard on the air, playing on teenagers’ cellphones, and on the corner you can buy wilting bouquets of green onions, strings of dried mushrooms, and 50-cent packs of Belomorye cigarettes.

A steady stream of people gets off at the Babi Yar bus stop, flocking to the kiosks, fumbling for their lighters. Mothers take their still-bundled children by the hand, and lead them over a rustling carpet of poplar leaves, just recently revealed by melting snow. And on the sunny concrete slope that forms the base of the Babi Yar monument, a middle-aged man is giving an impromptu drum lesson to a teenage student. This is the place where, 70 years ago, the largest single mass killing of the entire Nazi terror campaign took place, and the site of countless smaller massacres. And it’s where I live.



I never meant to live here. Although I came to Ukraine as a student of Jewish history, and ready to face the necessary hardships of life in the “Old Country,” I never imagined that I would be faced with the past so dramatically every day, on the way to the subway, the pub, and the grocery store. But, thanks to the vagaries of Kiev real estate—and the exhaustion that followed surveying weeks and weeks’ worth of grim, unfurnished apartments—my roommate and I moved in to a cozy two-bedroom flat with a little well in the courtyard, and an excellent stove … that just so happens to result in me giving “Babi Yar” as the primary navigational landmark for my house. 



Although an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 people were murdered here over the course of the Nazi occupation, the most infamous incident at Babi Yar was the murder of 33,771 Jews over two days in September 1941. I had heard of the events at Babi Yar long before I arrived in Ukraine for my Fulbright scholarship: Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem about the slaughters, a courageous and poignant expression of solidarity with the Jewish people, is justly one of the most famous Russian poems of the 20th century. And no study of the Holocaust is complete without detailing the incident, which arguably instilled the Einsatzgruppen with enough confidence to engage in their campaign of devastation without fear of repercussions for the remainder of their occupation of Eastern Europe.

There are few eyewitness accounts of the massacre at Babi Yar. One of them is the story of Dina Prochineva, a Kiev actress, recounted leaping into the ravine before she could be shot, then staying perfectly still as the Nazis finished off the wounded. That night, she clawed her way up out of the piles of bodies, up through the earth covering the mass grave, later to relate her experiences to the novelist Anatoly Kuznetsov. 



The park at Babi Yar is filled with monuments. The largest, standing at the lip of the ravine itself, was erected in 1976, 35 years after the massacre. It is dedicated to “Soviet Citizens and POWs,” testimony to the widespread reluctance of Soviet authorities to specifically reference the race or religion of those who perished during World War II. (Other Soviet memorials at massacre sites, even those whose victims were exclusively Jewish, also reference “Soviet citizens” exclusively.) Others, smaller and more modest, are nestled between trees or in small clearings around the lip of the ravine, as if ready to be discovered by chance. These memorials, built since the fall of the Soviet Union, pay testament to the international character of the violence at Babi Yar. A memorial plaque in dark marble commemorates the Roma of five gypsy camps liquidated at the ravine; an oak cross, dedicated to the 621 Ukrainian nationalists executed there, stands beside a small Jewish memorial, testament to the equalizing nature of indiscriminate violence. (The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, whose members are interred at Babi Yar, engaged in virulent anti-Semitic propaganda, and participated in widespread pogroms.) A children’s memorial features a girl with outstretched hands; beside her, a doll in jester’s clothing slumps down towards the earth.



How do you live in a bloodland, a place shaped, stained, by history? I came to Ukraine to better understand that question; living where I do has literalized it, and made it part of my daily life. My roommate, Lena, who works for the Jewish Agency in Kiev, says she’s begun to make jokes about our address: “Come visit me if you want to see some living Jews at Babi Yar!” We’ve talked about arranging a literary evening at the park, reading poems and engaging in discussion with our Kiev friends and acquaintances. But mostly we go to work, and back, and to the corner store. The Soviet-era TV tower that looms over the park blinks at us all night. In winter, the snowy ravine is cut throughout by sled-tracks, and the poplar alleys in the park bear the marks of cross-country skis. These days, people take their lunches from nearby offices, and sit in the sun; teenagers flirt over Zhigulovsky beers, and weary parents settle back against the ravine’s edge, watching their children play along its bottom. 



When Yevtushenko wrote his poem to Babi Yar, no monument had yet been built – “a steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone,” stood there. Still, he felt the trees and grasses “screaming silently.” These days, perhaps the most common sound at Babi Yar is laughter, or footsteps, the various small sounds of people passing through on their way home from work, or lingering in the grassy clearings. For those who come to visit Babi Yar to pay their respects—people from all over the world–it’s hard not to shudder at that laughter, or feel, at the sight of the people who come here to barbeque outdoors in May or roller-skate on the lumpy pavement, a sense of pure outrage. But for the inhabitants of Dorohozhichi, a landscape shaped as much by memory as by wind, or rain, or pavement, living at Babi Yar is just that—living.



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When I told people that I planned to spend the 2012-13 academic year in Ukraine, their most common response was: “Why?” (Followed closely by: “Is that safe?”) It seemed to me, at the time, that the most frequently asked questions are often also the hardest to answer. Although I came up with several canned responses—a craving for gritty post-Soviet adventures; a desire to get to know the country my grandparents came from better; to study Jewish history; because I lucked into a Fulbright scholarship to go there—I couldn’t help but feel that none of them sufficed, at least not alone. It could only be some combination of all of them that came together to make a kind of electric unease, a pull eastward that kept me sleepless before I boarded the plane to Kiev.

It’s been two months since I got here, and though I’m thrilled to see the Dnieper River through my window each morning, Ukraine is the kind of place that raises more questions than it answers. Though Ukraine’s contemporary Jewish community is thriving in Dniepropetrovsk, Odessa, and elsewhere, it’s far from the world my grandparents inhabited, changed by a century of Soviet atheism and mass emigration. Studying the culture of prewar Jewish Eastern Europe can sometimes feel like studying Ancient Rome; although only half a century has passed, the combative, complex, multilingual civilization that overran Kiev’s Podolia neighborhood and Odessa’s wharfs, the squares of Chernivtsi and Muncaksy and Lviv, is gone, its residents with it.

Part of that world lives on in the many novels and poems it inspired. Part of it lives on in my own Jewish upbringing and that of people like me—cold borscht and potatoes with sour cream on Pesach, Yiddish leaving its unmistakable footprints all over my English speech. And some things remain, even here in Ukraine. But you have to look for those signs, scour the streets, find the people who can still tell you about the past, though there are fewer every day. Being here for a year, through all the Jewish holidays—from Rosh Hashanah to Hanukkah to Pesach—I’ve been teaching myself to look and to listen, although it can be exhausting. But sometimes the past shows itself in unexpected, unlooked-for ways, and, for a wayward moment, a lost world of unimaginable richness comes alive again.

A few weeks ago, I took a trip to Lviv, a city once home to a world-famous Jewish community. Lviv is beautiful, in a delicate, markedly Western-European way that differs from other Ukrainian cities. My friends I went for a walk one late autumn afternoon, watching yellow sunlight fade over pastel houses. When we reached Federova Street, where the sellers of books and antiquities gather, we stopped to peruse their wares—cheap novels, schoolbooks, Soviet hatpins. And then I saw it: on the low table beside a vendor in his mid-30s—who glowered at us, crossing his arms—was a menorah.

Wrapped in brown paper, the menorah lay on its side on the table. The metal was oxidized green with age, but beneath the patina, the Hebrew words lehadlik ner Hanukkah could be made out—to light the Hanukkah candles, the blessing you make before lighting the candles. A lion—symbol of the city of Lviv—reared on spindly legs in its center, holding up the shamash, and a row of oil wells held the remains of charred, degraded wicks. The vendor set his jaw and prepared for a long haggle. I opened my wallet, but to my dismay, I only had a few bedraggled hryvnia (the Ukrainian currency) with me. I had to leave without the menorah—and by the time I managed to find an ATM, the market was closed, the tables packed away. I hadn’t even caught the vendor’s name.

I left the city that weekend feeling like I’d left a friend in captivity. Weeks after my return to Kiev, the menorah still haunted me. Who was it taken from? Who last lit it, and when? The spindly lion, the bent shamash, returned to me again and again. So when I returned to Lviv on a rainy weekend, I knew I had to try my hardest to find it. Hanukkah, after all, was less than a month away.

Federova Square is a sad sight in the rain—the book market is driven away in inclement weather, and it has a typically Ukrainian lack of backup plan. But my train was leaving the next day, and I couldn’t go back to Kiev empty-handed. So I set out on an unlikely quest. After asking a few passersby about the book market, I was directed to an antikvariat (antiques) store not far away. The street the shop was on was little better than a pit, and my shoes were soon covered in mud. I ducked into the shop—Lviv is full of antiques stores, because armies and vanished populations have left wave after wave of historical junk here—and asked whether they had any Jewish objects.

No dice in shop No. 1; he sent me further down the street to yet another antiques store. In shop No. 2, there was a Vilna-printed copy of Vayikra (Leviticus)—nestled next to a copy of Mein Kampf. In the third antiques store were only icons, flat-faced saints that stared at me from behind glass cabinets.

I was exhausted, and chilled to the bone. But the rain had abated and I wasn’t about to give up my search yet. There was one more place to check—the Vernisazh, Lviv’s bustling outdoor souvenir market. I passed piles of wet woolen mittens, wood rosaries, matrioshka dolls; the vendors were on the verge of packing up their things. I paused at the flap of a dim tent, my well-rehearsed query—Do you have any Jewish objects?—on the tip of my tongue, when I saw it. Nestled between a Soviet aviator cap and a pair of spectacles, there it was—the twin of my menorah, down to the green oxide speckling the base of the shamash. The lion grinned at me with bared teeth, his thin paw braced against the frame, and there were the Hebrew letters instructing me “to light the Hanukkah candles.”

When I indicated that I wanted it—and I was ready to pay his inflated price—the vendor dug a yellowed envelope out from under his riot of objects.

“This was sold to me by the same man,” he said, pressing a photograph into my hand. “I don’t know who they are—but they’re Jews, and this photo is from Lviv, before the war.”

In the photo, its image still crisp in black and white, a young boy in the familiar Eastern European keppele (cap) stood next to a bearded man in a broad-brimmed black hat. The two of them held hand-rolled cigarettes, and smoke curled out of their open mouths—the camera had caught them in the middle of a bout of laughter. There was no date on the photograph, no name, and the menorah’s creator hadn’t signed his handiwork. But the menorah was heavy and solid in my hand, the photograph was clear and whole; I could imagine the same hands that held those cigarettes lighting the wicks in the menorah’s wells, the same smoke curling up around the high-cheekboned faces, the blessing escaping from beneath the bushy beard.

I kept the menorah and the photograph in my lap all through the train ride back to Kiev. And as the days grow shorter, as snow begins to accumulate on the statues’ shoulders, I’m waiting for the day when I get to light these candles. I’ll look out over the little houses crowding Dnieper’s banks, over the dancing flames, and know that this is why I came—even if only for an hour, even if only in the privacy of my own room, being here has given me the chance to light up a piece of the past once more, and let it shine anew on the weary streets of this city.

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Rosh Hashanah is over, and it’s time to start acting on your new year’s resolutions. Although you might have decided to stop smoking under the heady influence of too much honey and/or red wine, the time has come to put down your final cigarette, throw out the pack, and start afresh. Of course, as we all know, this is easier said than done. How will you survive the next few weeks? My suggestion: Since every second you are not smoking will feel like a thousand years anyhow, why not look back through the ages for some Jewish motivation? Below are some reasons to quit smoking that draw on our Jewish heritage.

1. Feel close to the suffering of your forefathers. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are all about feeling the sting of sacrifice; as you sit in a semi-catatonic state and contemplate which of your fingers would be most painful to gnaw off (and therefore most distracting from the nicotine cravings), imagine what our forefather Isaac must have felt, about to be sacrificed like a goat. Then imagine you are the goat. See? Life could be worse!

2. Finally be able to sit through a holiday meal. At long last, you will be able to sit from gefilte fish to rugelach, without taking a suspiciously long “bathroom break” in the middle of an interminable holiday meal. However, even quitting smoking does not guarantee that you will be able to sit through another one of your Uncle Morris’ tirades on politics without feeling restless and irritable.

3. Save money. Yes, this plays into a lot of Jewish stereotypes, but our wandering people have certainly required fiscal responsibility to ensure that they would get through the tough times (and there have been a lot of tough times). Protect your wallet like a true member of the Chosen People. Plus, the money you save on cigarettes can buy a lot of kosher pizza and prayer books and things!

4. One less thing to make Yom Kippur torturous. ‘Nuff said.

5. You will no longer smell. Throughout Jewish history, anti-Semites have claimed that Jews smell; one Medieval writer even cautioned that you can “identify the Jew by his reek of garlic,” according to the Wikipedia page on anti-Semitism. While stopping smoking will have no effect on your garlic consumption (and in fact might increase it due to the compensatory munchies), you will no longer make strangers’ noses wrinkle up on the subway, or announce your entrance with an overwhelming stench of smoke.

6. Things will become slightly less awkward with your relatives. At family shivas, for example, your aunts and uncles will no longer glare at you and mutter, “You’ll be next if you keep smoking!” Your mother will stop worrying about your habit, although she will probably find other things to worry about (have you considered announcing your intent to stop smoking at your wedding? Oh, you’re not getting married this year? Why not?)

7. You will suddenly have new reasons to pray. Informal, meditative prayers are a great way to get through the ordeal of quitting smoking; plus, your interior monologue will already sound pretty close to the Book of Job at this point anyhow (“Dear God, help me get through this day without murdering anyone in cold blood.”) (“Dear God, was nicotine another one of your cruel jokes, like this pounding headache?”). When your prayers become indistinguishable from kvetching, rest assured that this is also a Jewish art, one that it definitely serves your interests to perfect. If you are considering joining a minyan to help break up your suddenly smoke-free days, remember to brush up on your pronunciation; it is “shema,” not “shemarlboro,” Yisrael; likewise, “camelluyah” is not the opening to any of the psukei d’zimra.

8. Food will taste and smell better. The Jewish culinary tradition is as vast and wide-ranging as our peripatetic history. Blast your newly sensitive taste buds with some Teimani jachnun or kibbeh, or stick close to Eastern European comfort food like cholent, and the ubiquitous chicken soup. Bonuses of cholent: if you eat enough of it, you will still be emitting clouds of gas like you did when you smoked!

9. Increase your lung capacity. While this is a general health benefit, it will also increase your ability to do all kinds of Jewish things, like blowing shofar (it’s well known that heavy smokers can produce only like three seconds of a tekiah gedola, which hardly counts) and, later on in the year, saying the names of all the sons of Haman in one breath.

10. Better your odds of living to 120. 120 is the age Moses lived to according to the Bible, and “may you live to 120” has been a traditional Jewish blessing ever since. While it’s a long shot for any of us, stopping smoking will certainly increase your chances of arriving at this august milestone; plus, you will live longer in general, and don’t you want to live long enough to spoil/guilt/annoy/smother/dandle/embarrass/tell stories to your many bouncing Jewish grandchildren?

(Image via Shutterstock)

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This is not one of the top questions you want to hear from a stranger on Russian public transportation.

I’m sitting on a sweltering trolley-car in Kazan, Russia, riding back to the center of town from the banks of the river. Amid this crowd of strangers, I’m alone in too-big bell-bottoms and I’m clutching a towel. Being a girl, bereft of those “funny little hats” my dad and boyfriend wear, I can only assume it’s the big nose or the sweaty corona of frizz or the matronly bosom that gave me away. Either way—I turn to the man beside me, squinting into his knowing leer, and after a long pause, I nod.

“I could tell,” he says. He leans in further.

“I’m Jewish too,” he says. I can smell herring on his breath, like this is some nightmare, alternate-reality Kiddush club. One of his teeth is missing. “But, you know what? I’m not circumcised.”

Naturally this catches me off guard—I had little interest in what lurked under his brightly colored Lycra shorts. But it’s not the first time someone has keyed in to my ultra-Semitic appearance. It’s hard to ignore, particularly my curly mane, which puffs up like a blowfish at the first hint of moisture in the air, like it’s warding off threats. Wherever I go, my hair gives me away, ungovernable as my stiff-necked people, and as treacherous as our enemies say we are—a fifth column of frizz.

In the past I’ve resorted to creative dyeing. On my gap year, I chopped it short and spiked it with electric purple, and since then, I’ve hidden it under an ever-shifting spectrum of reds, golds, and, once, an unfortunate sallow orange. But even so, it spills resolutely down my forehead—if not a Mark of Cain, then at least a Mark of Cohen. In rural Iceland, I was informed repeatedly that my hair would make “really great dreads.” (Anyone who looked at the rest of my face or body could tell you that this is a “really terrible idea.”) Once, on a bus to Providence, my nose buried in a Saul Bellow novel, I got tapped on the shoulder by the heavyset man sitting next to me. Closer inspection revealed that he’d been listening to Christian faith tapes for most of the journey.

“Are you of faith?” he asked, with a quirk of the eyebrow that suggested he already knew my answer.

“Uh, I guess,” I said. “I’m not Christian, though.”

He nodded, suspicions confirmed, and shot me a look full of saccharine, transcendental pity. “Well, where I’m from”—rural Missouri, as it happened—“a lot of people don’t like you folks. But me, I think that being good with money is a gift from God.”

I quickly protested that I was terrible with money (which is true). Banks laugh in the face of my credit card applications. I once accidentally took home a Spanish-language tax form, and didn’t realize until it was half-filled out. But Mr. Missouri was insistent upon my gifted status, my chosenness, plain as the bulbous nose on my face.

Short of shaving my scalp—something that only one Jew on earth can pull off, and her name is Natalie Portman—or blowing my nonexistent budget on expensive, temporary treatments, it seems that I’ll carry this mark of my Jewishness with me wherever I go. But unlike the mark of Cain, my Biblical forebear, this one seems to tell me that wherever I wander on the earth, part of me will always be right back home in Teaneck, NJ, treading the pavement between Sammy’s Bagels, Schnitzel Plus, and Glatt Express. And yet—something tells me that’s not so bad. If nothing else, it offers up interesting conversation on public transportation. And have you stopped in at Sammy’s? The lox is fantastic. Makes me proud to be a Jew.

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In pursuit of this nebulous goal, I’d cold-called dozens of organizations, staying up late to thwart the seven-hour time difference, until a “yes” came crackling at last through the speaker. By early May, I’d become a volunteer tour guide at the Odessa Museum of Jewish History. I bought a ticket, said a prayer to whatever god was listening, and set out, telling myself I’d find a place to live once I got there.

Stumbling out of the tiny, grimy airport, I faced the brightest sun I’d seen in two long days of travel. The crush of heat plastered my hair to the back of my neck, deflating any surviving curls. All I had with me was a suitcase full of too many books and two words of Ukrainian—“Yak spravi?” (what’s up?)—scrawled on the back of my hand, where they were fast turning into an illegible blotch of ink. I stood on the curb and squinted into the blaze that washed the linden trees with light, filled with trepidation.

Salvation came for me in a puke-brown 1977 Volga. Out of the car climbed the man I’d soon come to know as Vova Chaplin, blue-eyed museum tour guide and avid Ukrainian student of Jewish history. “Are you Talia?” he asked (in Russian—I wouldn’t hear English for another few months). “Yak spravi?,” he added mockingly, eyeing the still-legible words on my hand. “Welcome to Odessa.”



We drove over the highway into the city, bumped our way over the stony avenues, and, flashing past glimpses of the Black Sea, we arrived at our destination: 66 Nezhinskaya Street, a sooty apartment building barred by an iron gate. Glued demurely to the arch of the gate was a blue tile that read, “Odessa Jewish Museum-apartment.” The museum was in a converted communal apartment, most of its collection crammed into five small rooms. That afternoon I received my first tour from Misha, its dour, grizzled, chain-smoking director, an art historian who projected an air of perpetual gloom.

At first glance, the five rooms of the Odessa Jewish History Museum appear to be filled with a random scattering of junk. Over the course of a 45 minute museum tour, administered by Misha, Vova, or (for a short time only!) yours truly, the collection is revealed for what it really is: the detritus of centuries of Jewish presence in the city, each object with a story large or small.

A small sampling of the collection: A jolly, animatronic figure in peyes and a gartel, which was a department-store Santa before the museum staff converted him; the dilapidated bra of a Russian-Jewish army doctor captured by Germans during World War II; a haunting black-and-white portrait of the Odessa Cheka, later the KGB, made up for the most part of ardently Communist Jews; an Odessa night newspaper with a young Vladimir Jabotinsky’s byline; Isaac Babel’s parents’ china cabinet; a mortar and pestle, once used by the goodwives of Odessa to smash carp flesh into gefilte fish; a rusted set of mohel’s tools; a spoon from Café Franconi, once a hangout for the city’s many Jewish gangsters, stolen by a long-ago immigrant to America and mailed back by his penitent descendants; a portrait of the sole survivor of the Domanevka concentration camp; and so on, until the last exhibit—improbably, a collection of artifacts from the Jewish community of Odessa’s sister city, Baltimore, Md.

Each day I walked from the apartment I’d rented under the table just off Primorskiy Bulvar, the entrance nearly obscured by a shaggy grapevine. Vova and Misha and I waited for the occasional wanderer to find the museum despite its humble signage. Waiting, we smoked, watching the stray cats sun themselves in the courtyard and the neighbors’ kids get tangled in the clotheslines. A couple of leathery Israelis, some soft-spoken Germans, and a trio of chubby Brandeis students trickled through, and I walked backwards through the rooms, making slow sense of this riot of object history as I spoke.

On long, sunny afternoons, I wandered down the avenues, woozy with the scent of catalpa trees, watching the heavy ships steam into the industrial port. I bought batteries, jewel-toned strawberries, matrioshka dolls, and a wooden cigarette holder from under the long rows of umbrellas in the open-air bazaar. On weekends, I crept through the Odessa Catacombs, drank Lviv’ska beer, ate salt fish and rode the overnight train to Kyiv.

History peered out from cast-brass monuments and bas-reliefs, between Soviet apartments and dingy, once-glamorous homes from the nineteenth century. Wild grapes hung from every balcony. American and Russian pop music blared from the nightclubs on Ekaterinska Street, signaling, with its thumping newness, the immediacy of the present and the banishment of the past. But each day I came back to the museum on Nezhinskaya Street, wearing the sunwashed cobbles down still further, until the city once the roaming grounds of Hebrew poets and Jewish gangsters belonged, somehow, to me too.

Talia Lavin is a recent Harvard graduate and aspiring novelist. She will be starting a Fulbright grant in Ukraine this September, where she hopes to get used to pickled herring, pelmeni and pit toilets.

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