By Living Room Realty, March 30, 2022
My great great Aunt Pearl wrote my father a letter in 1981, explaining how she and my grandmother escaped Mariupol, Ukraine in 1921.
The letter was written in her messy long hand and my sister transcribed it as best she could into a word doc when she was in college in the 1990s. I remember when the letter arrived, and my dad wept as he read the harrowing saga of the 11 year old girl who snuck onto trains with money and silver sewn into her dress for bribes as she traveled up and down the country looking for her brothers. She was instructed not to come home until she found them.
After four months, she found one brother – the other was dead.
They returned home and found the family waiting, already packed. Ukraine was not a great place for Jews.
They paid a neighbor to take them out of town on a horse and buggy. The wagon flipped over on the trip, but no one was seriously hurt. They eventually made it to Poland and finally Cherbourg, France, where they took a steam ship to New York.
In America, the country was not entirely welcoming to these poor immigrants, but the women knew how to sew and the men didn’t mind working with their hands.
Nursing school and university brought the family closer to a middle class existence.
I read about Mariupol and its destruction and I fear for the people living there, but I don’t feel anything extra because my grandmother was born there. I look at what is happening in Ukraine now and I don’t see my family’s ancestral home.
It beaks my heart to see so many people’s lives turned upside down. Chances are they don’t have the fortune to land at a place like America in the 1920s. However, the lives of the people living in Ukraine are no more important than those living in Somalia or Yemen; North Korea or Syria.
Of course it’s disturbing to see the name of the city I’ve only known as “Bubbie’s birthplace” in the news, but I want to make sure to look at every person with equal humanity – not just the ones that look like me.
