Zhanna Slor - At the End of the World, Turn Left

“We’ll talk about you studying abroad, but you’re not going to Ukraine by yourself. Or Russia,” my dad says. Then he looks at my mom with an expression I am all too familiar with, because of my curfew-breaking, punk-loving sister: one of total vexation, like what did they do to deserve such an incendiary child. My mother has the exact same look on her face. As if I’m telling them I want to go on an unsupervised African safari, or drop out of school and join the circus, not simply travel abroad like a million other college students have done.

“Your sister speaks perfect Russian,” my grandma complains.

“My sister lives in Israel, where half the population is Russian,” I explain, a little bit stung. My entire life she has always compared me to older cousins who have had more successes, because duh, they are older ; this is the first time she’s pitted me against Masha, though. I have always gotten better grades than her, plus I stayed in the country, so there was never any need to. “We live here . If you guys wanted us to speak Russian so much maybe someone should have taught me better.”

Of course, I can’t blame her for being annoyed. I’m annoyed at myself. This is part of why I have spent years fantasizing about a return home. So many Russian immigrants got the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan skyline lit up by an endless stream of lights, they’d gotten the Russian dolls and pilmeni of Brighton Beach, they got Holocaust survivors playing chess in the parks of Queens, but not us. The only Soviet immigrants I’d met in Milwaukee were directly related to me, and most of them lived in the same government-subsidized apartment building as my grandparents and their siblings. New York transplants got to keep their culture and inherit the new world at the same time. We, on the other hand, had to choose.

And what had my family chosen? Wisconsin.

The car comes to an abrupt stop. I turn to see we’re back at my grandparents’ apartment building.

“Oh, we’re home already,” my grandma Mila says, looking at me with a surprised laugh. She laughs at everything lately, I don’t know why. It’s like a nervous tic or something; I don’t think I’ve ever seen her sincerely amused by something in my entire life. She says something to me in Yiddish, then laughs again. My heart surges with love and sadness in equal parts.

“What’s that Babushka?” I ask her, helping her out of the car. Her white, fluffy hair is somewhat matted on one side of her head, and her eyes appear tiny without her glasses on, possibly a side effect of her glaucoma. This is probably not nice to say, but I always thought she looked a little bit like a hobbit. A cute Hobbit, but still a Hobbit. She even has enough whiskers on her chin to qualify as a small beard.

“She doesn’t speak Yiddish!” my grandpa yells in Russian from the other side. “Bozhe moy!”

“It’s okay, Dedushka, you don’t need to yell,” I tell him as I help them to the door. I find the two of them so adorable when I see how much they still adore each other, especially when I am tipsy. They hold hands all the way through the vestibule and across the doorway and into the elevator, where they disappear from view. Part of me wishes to follow them, to bask once more in their uncomplicated affection instead of returning to the car. But it’s late, and they need to go to bed—so do I.

“Anyway, Anastasia. I’m not trying to be mean. I’ve looked into going back to visit Chernovtsy a few times,” my dad says, immediately jumping back into our conversation after I’ve finished helping my grandparents inside. He starts driving towards my house, which makes me relax a little. “They don’t let you rent cars without drivers, and they charge a crazy amount of money. You can fly into Poland and rent a car there to drive to Ukraine, but that’s also expensive. The visas are complicated to get. It’s a mess,” he says. “You’re better off going to Paris or Berlin. Even Poland or Moldova are easier. Anywhere but Ukraine.”

“But I don’t want to go to Poland or Moldova or Paris,” I explain.

“Or Israel,” my mom interjects. “Birthright is free, and it’s two weeks long! And you can see your sister.”

“Isn’t it basically a dating service?” I ask my mom. “I heard it’s really for Jewish parents to have their kids meet other Jewish kids without actually setting them up. No thanks.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she tells me. “You’re too young for that anyway.”

“And I also heard they brainwash everyone into becoming Zionists.”

My mother gasps at this. “Where are you hearing things like that? In school?”

I shrug. “No, just… friends.”

“It sounds like you’re friends with anti-Semites! That’s what anti-Semites would say,” my mother exclaims, so aghast she’s reverted to her native tongue without realizing. Which I find a bit dramatic, if you ask me. I don’t really spend much time considering Israel or anti-Semitism, though, at least not in the present tense. It’s not like anyone has ever criticized my cultural origins to my face or anything. “Pavel, did you hear this?” she asks him, but my dad stays weirdly silent. So she turns back to me, her naturally pale face even paler. “They made this trip so kids like you can understand.”

“Understand what?” I say. “Religion? Religion is silly. No guy is sitting up in the clouds watching all of us and judging us. The Bible is a bunch of stories with a lot of plot holes.”

“Huh. So you know better than thousands of people who came before you, that’s what you’re saying?” my dad asks, chiming in.

“No…” Boy do I wish I had a rewind button. I would go back to that balcony and never open my mouth. Maybe I would go back to my apartment and never leave in the first place. I can’t help but wonder why they are speaking Russian again if they hate it there so much. How can you hate a thing and be mad at someone for wanting it, but also use it constantly? It’s so… hypocritical.

“Jewish people here for thousands of years,” my dad says, returning to his choppy English. “Other cultures—the Romans, the Babylonians—they larger and more successful, they vanished,” he says. “Why you think Jews still around? It’s not easy… 2,000 years of exile. The Spanish Inquisition, pogroms, Holocaust. Being kicked of every place in the world.”

“In the years after the Berlin Wall fell, eighty percent of the Jewish community left Ukraine,” my mom chimes in, also in English; hers is ten times better than my dad’s because she worked so long in customer service. “They lost a million in the Holocaust, then another half million because of Gorbachev. At last count, it was something like 80,000 Jews left. In less than a hundred years, Jews were forced out of Ukraine almost entirely, either by gas chamber or anti-Semitic policies.”

“And we still here,” my dad continues. “Just think about. Without stories, we have nothing. We a chapter in history book. You don’t think you have something to learn from that?”

“Sure. People can believe in very crazy ideas no matter what the century.”

“Judaism not just an idea. It self-corrects. Rabbis adapt rules,” my dad continues. “That’s what makes it great.”

“If it’s so great why have I never seen you go to a synagogue?” I ask, rolling my eyes. I stretch my legs out over the now-vacant backseat, where it still somehow smells like my grandpa.

“We almost moved to Israel, you know,” my mom says. She turns around to face me again, but I keep my glance on the road, which is getting closer and closer to my house. We pass a brick apartment building, followed by an endless array of vast duplexes with matching balconies.

“We were a week away from moving when we got our visas from America. Everything was packed and ready to go,” my mom is saying now.