My Love-Hate Relationship with Russia and Ukraine

A Map of the Former Soviet Union. 

Ukraine is the yellow country on the far west.

The kind of person we are inside shows itself both in what we do and how we react.  I had a soul-revealing moment when I heard the news in 2014 of Russia invading Eastern Ukraine and taking Crimea. The summary of the thought that raced through my mind:  “You Go Vladimir (Putin)!”

Cheering for Russia in a military dispute with Ukraine is like cheering for the New York Yankees against a high school team.  Nevertheless I had a vivid moment, not of loving Russia, but hating Ukraine.

The face that came into my mind was my grandmother.  She and my grandfather escaped Ukraine, then part of Russia, at the turn of the 20th century when more than a million Jews were slaughtered in Ukraine in a series of attacks called pogroms. My grandparents had the double good fortune of making it all the way to America.  Many other Russian Jews fled to Eastern Europe.  Those who fled to Eastern Europe and their children were killed by the Nazis 40 years later.

The Holocaust in Ukraine

My grandparents would have described themselves as Russian Jews, not Ukrainian Jews.  For the last thousand years Ukraine has been Russia a lot more than it has been an independent country.  Mark Schauss covers the sad history of Ukraine and Russia in The Russian Rulers History Podcast, available on iTunes. 

While Russia, Poland and much of Eastern Europe has a long history of hating Jews, Ukraine is the most anti-semitic country in a very nasty region. 

Next August, when I ride across what my grandparents called Russia, my trip will begin in Odessa, Ukraine. I won’t be in Ukraine long, but I expect to have the same experience arriving in Odessa that I had when I first set foot in Germany:  “Can this beautiful place really be home to those who slaughtered so many of my people?”

I am re-reading Vassily Grossman’s “Life and Fate,” a haunting book that is “War and Peace” set in World War II, particularly in Stalingrad.  Currently I am reading the letter a Jewish mother in Ukraine is writing to her son in the Russian Army.  The Germans just took over her town.  The Jews are being rounded up, robbed and will soon be killed.  Most of the neighbors are happy and cheer the Germans on, taking the possessions and houses of the Jews.  The mother writing the letter describes women who were friendly for 50 years suddenly turning on her with venom. The neighbor thinks the Jews are getting what they deserve. 

My love-hate relationship with Ukraine and Russia extends through my whole life.  My first military job was live-fire testing of the US Air Force missile inventory, everything from the Sidewinder wing rocket to the Minuteman multi-stage nuclear missile, the main weapon delivery system in the US Cold War arsenal.  Then I was a tank commander on the East-West German Border waiting for World War III to start. 

When I went to college after the Army, the literature of Russia and the literature of Florence, Italy, became lifelong passions.  Chekov, Dostoevsky, Lermontov, Pushkin, Tolstoy and later Solzhenitsyn wrote the books I loved most, along with C.S. Lewis, Dante and Machiavelli.  Now I am studying the Russian language so I can read the authors I love most in their language.  Russia is currently home to many brilliant authors, but who knows when they will be forced underground. 

From my grandparents persecution, to my Cold War childhood and military life, through finding the beauty of Russian literature in college, to my current plans to travel across Russia and neighboring countries, I continue to intensify my love-hate relationship with Russia and all of its sad and brilliant history.  At this age, my love-hate relationship with Russia and Ukraine is a permanent part of my life.

My People: Real Americans, Refugees Running from Killers

Millions of Americans came here from around the globe running from torment and death. They came here as my grandparents did, running from persecution and wanting a place where they could live and raise kids without being suddenly murdered in God's name or the Tsar's name.

My grandparents, Hyman and Esther Gussman, came to America from Odessa, Russia, in about 1900, coming ashore in Boston.  The picture above is one of the big reasons they left--pogroms by the Cossacks that killed at least a million Russian Jews.

It is clear when you look at other countries around the world that America does a better job of assimilation, of making immigrants into Americans, than any other country.

The reason, I believe, is that we have a common culture that is easy to understand and easy to adopt.

For good or for ill, the common culture of America is success and money.  To become American is to leave extremism and make money.  It used to be called making good.

In a cruel parody of faith, America even assimilated Christianity.  We lead the world in millionaire preachers.  Hellfire has almost disappeared from our pulpits.  Now the most popular Churches preach some version of health, wealth and success.  These Churches love celebrities and millionaires, and set them up as the Blessed, replacing the martyrs of the suffering Church.

My grandparents went from being oppressed Jews in Russia to being Americans.  In Russia a million Jews were killed for being Jews.  America takes people suffering under radicals of all kinds and gives them the possibility of health and wealth.

My father was the fourth if six boys born to Esther and Hyman Gussman.  In the names of the six boys you see assimilation. Beginning with the oldest they are Abraham, Emmanuel, Ralph, George, Lewis and Harold.  Every time my father spoke of his oldest brothers they were Abe and Manny.  The Gussmans lived on Blue Hill Avenue, a street known as Jew Hill Avenue at the beginning of the 20th Century.  In the 1920s, the Gussmans had 14 cars, trucks and motorcycles parked somewhere in the vicinity of the family home.  Hyman had a successful fruit business.  And his one return trip to the old country turned into two years of being hunted by the Russian Army.  He never left Boston again.

Although all of my uncles married Jewish women, none of my relatives were particularly religious. My mother was not Jewish.  Growing up we had a small tinsel tree Dad called a Channukah Bush.   My father stayed home from work on some Jewish holidays because the warehouse where he worked was owned by Jews from the old neighborhood.  But we never went to Synagogue.  We went out to eat.

My father's family are real Americans.  They went from a place where religion meant death, and they embraced life in America.  Grandpa ran a successful business most of his life.  My uncle Lewis went into the same business and became a millionaire when that was a lot of money.  Lewis, like my grandmother Esther, lived to be 100. All of the the other brothers had houses in the suburbs and families.

Of all the uncles and cousins in the Gussman clan, only my father and I ever served in the Army.  We both were very old soldiers.  The rest of the family, like nearly all well off families in the northeast, did not join the military.  I enlisted partly because I had heard my Dad's stories from World War 2 all the time I was growing up and it was clear they were the best years of his life.  I also enlisted because my favorite uncle, Jack, my mother's half brother, was on his third tour in Viet Nam when I graduated high school.  Jack was the coolest guy in our family by far.

My aversion to Fundamentalism in any form, to religious extremism especially in politics, and to religion masquerading as science comes from my upbringing.  Because my family has kids later than most, I am just one generation away from people who escaped the Pogroms of Tsarist Russia.

My people run away from religious radicals.

When real Americans see fanatics, they change the channel.