In December 2008 I traveled to the south of Ukraine for a report with the American company A Foreign Affair, which organizes honeymoons (they still exist) for western men looking for brides in countries such as Peru, Colombia, Russia and therefore Ukraine.
We visited the cities of Odessa, Mykolayiv and Kherson. About Kherson I wrote: “Those who have experienced Kherson in the winter know that alcoholism can seem like a wise decision.”
When I read about the demonstration in Kherson against the occupying forces, I was reminded of the women I had met there in 2008: Nastya, Masha and their translator Larisa. They studied at the agricultural university. ‘Love conquers all’, they said, but even more than love they hoped for an American, German or Dutch passport through love.
Later I thought of my grandparents on my father’s side. My grandmother Menie Parnes Goldberg was born in 1879 in Brachówka, a village near Lviv. My grandfather was born in 1871 in the town of Krystynopol in Galicia, called Chervonohrad in Ukrainian, also nearby. Lviv was then called Lemberg, capital of Galicia, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a world power that ended up in the dustbins of history thanks to the First World War.
Not far from Lviv is the small town of Brody, where Joseph Roth was born, one of the best writers of the last century, who wrote excellently about the returning soldier who seems to have no place in society anymore.
In the spring of 2009 I visited Brody. In the neglected Jewish cemetery, which could hardly be called a cemetery anymore, some skinny goats and sheep grazed. That day I decided that I want to be buried there.
I love New York, but I’d like to be eaten by the worms in what was once called Mitteleuropa.