Thread by @djrothkopf

I was reading up on Ukrainian history the other day. It's an extraordinary story that connects with every part of the world, to many of the world's peoples and religions. Ukraine, as much as Istanbul, is surely the crossroads of the world.

Its story is one not just of Slavs but of Vikings, Mongols, Khazars, Turks, Christians, Muslims & Jews. It is full of innovation, from the pre-historic domestication of horses to the flourishing of Kievan Rus. It has seen the horrific from brutal wars to the Holodomor.

Like any nation, it has seen evil and intolerance and also redemption and great creativity, been divided by tribalism and seized by empires. It also seemed quite remote to me until this week's events. But as I read, I realized that was a mistake.

It turns out, I discovered, that Jews were almost always part of its history. For a time at the end of the 19th Century, Odessa had the third largest Jewish population. There were also small shtetls across the country (and their relations with the locals were often very ugly.)

Since Catherine the Great's time, the Pale of Settlement, where Jews were allowed to live, covered much of present day Russia. The battles there between poor Jews and local cossacks came alive for many in "Fiddler on the Roof."

So naturally, I wondered how much of my past lay there and of course, the answer is much of it. I dug a little deeper and found that the small town in Poland near the Ukraine border in which my grandfather was born was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when he was born.

He lived in one of those shtetls. And so it came to pass that in the wake of World War I, he entered something called Ukrainian Galician Army and fought on the side of Ukraine in a border war with the Poles.

He was wounded and imprisoned. After the war, he made his way to Vienna and, when the Nazis came, he and his wife and my Dad escaped from there to the U.S. The residents of the little town in Galicia he was from, Grodzisko, were not so lucky.

241 of its Jews, the majority of its population, were gunned down & buried in a mass grave. 9 of them were named Rotkopf. My grandfather's sister who lived in nearby Oswiecim (Auschwitz) also met a similar fate as did three dozen other family members.

Those aren't pretty memories but they do make me feel a connection to the region and its history. They do remind me that this part of the world connects directly to ours. (Fortunately, I live in a diverse country where so many parts of the world do.)

But it also makes resonant the fact that despite the epithets hurled at Ukrainians by Russians, the grotesque lies that the country must be de-Nazified, Ukraine is today a country with a Jewish president and until recently had a Jewish prime minister.

President Zelensky lost many family members in the Holocaust. The country is today home to the third or fourth largest Jewish population in the world. It has pockets of intolerance but much of the past institutional anti-semitism in its past came from Russia or Germany.

Polls show it is actually, Russian lies ahead, one of the most tolerant countries in its region. And somehow, unlike some of its other neighbors, it has remained a home for Jews despite the efforts of so many over so long to eradicate them.

I'm not a religious person. I'm not heavily bound up in the stories of my family's past. But at this moment in time, watching the struggles of the people of Ukraine, seeing them being led so heroically by a Jewish guy, knowing the past makes me feel a sense of connection & pride.

And believe me, I know that prior to now Zelensky was not going to win any awards for great governance. But crises bring out the character of leaders and of entire peoples. And this one has made me proud to have any sort of ties at all to Ukraine's leader and people right now.