From the “new non-fiction” shelf of the Boulder Public Libary, I borrowed On Being Jewish Now (2024). It’s an anthology of a hundred or so short pieces written in response to the savagery of October 7, 2023. The essay are repetitively, predictably sorrowful, indignant and nationalistic. I skimmed my way through three hundred emotional pages. I understand the hurt.
I did not anticipate novelty or new learning, so I was stunned when I came upon the entry by one Danny Grossman, who, while serving as a U S diplomat in 1985, paid a visit his and my ancestral Ukrainian village, Starokonstantinov. A way-off -the-track village, not on any tourist’s must-see list.
Starokonstantinov seemed to Mr Grossman a impossibly dreary place, consisting of “low slung uninspired buildings, each one the same bleached out color of dirty sand. A “godforsaken area.” Looking for traces of its Jewish population, he visited a cemetery that had “very obviously been violated. Tombstones were in pieces. Hebrew words inscribed on their fragments were scattered across the field. Grossman reminds us that Starokonstantinov’s Jewish population (including many members of my family, “were slaughtered, both by ordinary Ukrainians who became lawless and hungry to scapegoat their neighbors and by German soldiers ‘just doing their job.’” Starokonstantinov is a place of ghosts.
Grossman’s visit was forty years ago. I doubt it’s any better now.
I follow the horrid Russian invasion of Ukraine closely enough that I would know if Starokonstantinov has been droned or bombed . So far, it’s not been mentioned, which is just as well. It’s not a place that needs more trouble.
A few of my Irish and Italian friends, curious about their ancestry, have made pilgrimages to the villages from which their ancestors migrated to Boston or New York. I will not be making such a trip. There’s nothing for me in Starokonstantinov: not a building, not a transmitted memory or anecdote. Nothing for me to return to — not even a graveyard
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