Before Billie and I got on the plane to Europe, a dear friend, a non-Jewish Ukrainian my age, who lives in Sydney but travels to Kiev at least once a year, rang me up to say she was worried about someone with my face going to Ukraine all alone, worse still with a prepubescent girl. She wanted to introduce me to some people, but she was worried about their reaction to me (must be that face again). She said the usual maternal things about not walking down unlit streets and the kind of care I needed to take while getting rides in other people’s cars. My friend is married to a Jewish guy, with a son half-Ukrainian and half-Jewish (the boy is both gorgeous and talented, oh those products of mixed marriages), so she is acutely sensitive to the traditional anti-Semitism of her country. (Her late and much-loved grandmother, a true bastion of tolerance, said about the choice of her husband, ‘So what he is a Jew, at least they are good family people.’) Now, she believed unequivocally that anti-Semitism was going from strength to strength in post-Soviet Ukraine, despite whatever ‘good news stories’ I may have gleaned from the media. And there was some ‘feel-good’ stuff out there – independent Ukraine’s first president, Leonid Kravchuk, officially apologising for the persecution of Jews in his country; the incumbent, Viktor Yushenko, describing Babi Yar on its sixty-fifth anniversary as ‘the tragedy of Ukraine with the shot Jewish heart’; Ukraine becoming the only country of the former Soviet Union where it was compulsory for the Holocaust to be included in history textbooks and State exams. Clearly, anti-Semitism was no longer practised by the State, but I had no illusions that it could be magically expunged from people’s thoughts and fears, especially when the economy was going badly and there was no stability. (I thought of the little ditty from my childhood – ‘If there is no water in your tap, kikes have drunk it all.’) Policy is powerless in the face of ingrained prejudice; all we have going for us is time.
So I did not come to Ukraine on the lookout for feel-good stories, nor did I want to find proof that ‘Ukrainians were the worst’ – a much-repeated refrain after the war and certainly the one still heard today. I wanted none of that. In truth, I just wanted to walk the streets of this country which was once my home, and for no one to care how I looked. I wanted to go inside a synagogue in Kiev’s centre, a synagogue no longer masquerading as a puppet theatre, with my back straight, Billie by my side and no need to look over my shoulder (which is exactly what happened). I wanted to see men and boys walking freely in the streets with their kipas on. I wanted small, ordinary things – to me they were miraculous in themselves – not the total and absolute death of anti-Semitism.
We meet Svetlana Kandeeva at McDonald’s near the girls-only Jewish school where she works. There is no other place for us to have a conversation, as the school is a long train ride from the city’s centre and, besides, we can only see each other after hours, after Svetlana has finished her teaching and all the other meetings scheduled for the day. This is our first face-to-face meeting. I have found Svetlana through two organisations she is involved with, the Ukrainian Centre for the Holocaust Studies and the Centre for Jewish Education of Ukraine. At McDonald’s, we buy Billie a sundae as a bribe and talk about things that at first sound utterly improbable to me – seminars about Jewish persecution for teachers at non-Jewish schools, projects that present Jewish and Ukrainian histories as inextricably linked, youth summer camps for kids of all ethnic backgrounds entitled ‘Sources of Tolerance’. She tells me of a new discipline, Ukrainojudaica, created by the late Professor Marten Feller. Svetlana travels across Ukraine, but also to most of the other parts of the former Soviet Union, conducting workshops and seminars. ‘If you manage to get to the teachers,’ she says, ‘then you have the kids.’
It takes me a while to understand that Svetlana is in fact neither Jewish nor Ukrainian. She is actually Russian, born in Siberia. ‘I was once introduced at an international conference, “Here is a strange Russian who lives in Ukraine, teaches in a religious Jewish lyceum and gives lectures to Tadzhiks in Uzbekistan and to Armenians in Tbilisi.” ‘
It is completely dark when Svetlana shows me and Billie the girls’ school where she works, one of four private Jewish schools of its kind in Kiev. To reach it, we walk through dvory, our path illuminated by the lights in people’s windows. For at least ten minutes, if not more, we bang on the school’s door. ‘Baba Nadya, Baba Nadya, open up,’ Svetlana shouts. When Baba Nadya finally appears, herself like a classical representation of an old Ukrainian woman wrapped up in layer after layer of clothing, she is apologetic. ‘Sorry, was in the toilet, didn’t hear you knock,’ she says to Svetlana and lets us come in. We enter a school in which the walls are plastered with Hebrew and Ukrainian posters, side by side – I never thought I would see these two languages alongside each other, especially in a Ukrainian school of all places.
I tell Svetlana of my friend in Sydney who is worried sick for me in Kiev, but Svetlana will have none of that. She is a teacher, a doer, a spreader of tolerance and, even though she never says it out loud, it strikes me that she is sick of people complaining that there is no cure to Ukrainian anti-Semitism. There is never a cure if you do not want to look for it. ‘People see what they want to see,’ she says. ‘It is the same with everything. I remember a conversation at an airport in Kazakhstan about the Kremlin. For the person I was speaking to, the Kremlin meant Stalin. But for me it means Aristotle Fioravanti [the fifteenth-century Italian architect of the Kremlin]. For me, Shostakovich is a musical genius. For another, a collaborator. Each one sees what they want to see.’
Svetlana is full of stories of non-Jews in Ukrainian provinces identifying mass graves and erecting stones or monuments, gathering documents and testimonies, creating memory books. (No, it doesn’t undo what happened to Jewish people there, but what possible good can come from us not acknowledging that this is happening too?) ‘Do you think that the knowledge and the legacy of your neighbours being exterminated in front of your eyes has simply evaporated from the mass consciousness?’ she asks me. Many people who saved Jews never told anyone about what they did. People capable of risking their lives for others do not tend to publicise their good deeds. Svetlana is a diehard optimist and refuses to be cynical. I suspect that the only way to stave off cynicism when it comes to something as complex, unsettling and endlessly disheartening as the relationship between Ukrainians and Jews is to do things. Of course, it would be a mistake to view people like Svetlana as representative of anyone but themselves, but the fact of their existence and the work that they manage to do is in itself a sign that things have changed, that not everything in Ukraine is permanently, inexorably ‘the same’.
September 2009 in Melbourne, another anniversary of Babi Yar. The media is full of reports about the hotel proposal. The proposal is followed by condemnation from the international Jewish community and, eventually, the mayor’s withdrawal of planning approval. (One of my dear friends sends me a link to the story with ‘Sorry to do this to you, but I thought you should know’ in the subject line.) As I read about the proposal, I come across another, much less reported story – a new monument has just been unveiled to commemorate the victims of Babi Yar. The newspapers report that it was funded by a businessman who chooses to remain anonymous but who funded the publication of Alexey Kuznetsov’s Ukrainian translation of Babi Yar a year earlier. I search for a photo of the monument, and there it is – a boy cast in bronze reads a sign on the wall of a building: All kikes of the city of Kiev and vicinity must appear by 8.00 a.m. on Monday, September 29 1941 etc., etc. I cannot quite believe my eyes. I read everything I can find about the monument; I watch podcasts of Ukrainian news just to make sure and, yes, I did get it right the first time. This is a monument both to Anatoly Kuznetsov, who so bravely wrote the story of Babi Yar, and to the young Kievan boy Tolya, Kuznetsov’s fictional alter ego. The monument depicts Tolya/Anatoly at the moment when he first read the edict and realised that Kiev’s Jews were to be separated from the rest of the population, their fate yet unknown. As Kuznetsov told it, ‘I re-read it twice and for some reason my skin went clammy and cold… It was somehow too cruel, words written with cold hatred. The day was cold and windy, the street was virtually empty. I could not go home so, shaken up, not quite knowing why, I wandered off to the market.’