I just found out I’m Ukrainian, and I have mixed feelings

I never knew I was Ukrainian until a mass email from my great-uncle arrived in my inbox just after the start of the Russian invasion in February. My eyes, weary from a lack of sleep, stared at the bright white light of the screen. The words “We are Ukrainian” blurred together.

Our family always had believed we were Russian – something I’d been struggling with recently as I watched the one-sided violence of the war in Ukraine unfold. I always thought that, being of Russian descent, I was part of the problem, but, in fact, my family is among the victims.

Ukraine is at the center of all news coverage these days and something most people are talking about. And it’s bringing up mixed feelings in me. My own great-grandfather fled Russia and landed in a South American community developed by a group of people fleeing a conflict or leaving for a better chance at making a living. Now, just as then, and a number of times since, [Ukraine and?] Russia will have a large group of emigrants after or during the war, according to Professor Joshua Tucker, a professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. Where they will wind up is yet to be determined, but he said expects many to flee the country, which has an economy ravaged by sanctions, and unstable leadership. 

“There may be a more permanent…migration out of Russia, and a particular kind of brain drain where you have young middle class professionals, people whose job opportunities have dried up because of the fact that foreign corporations have left,” he said.

I was always very proud to be 100 percent Eastern European (50 percent from Russia and 50 percent from Germany). That pride suddenly shifted to sadness as I learned about my actual heritage as people are suffering in Ukraine. Before that email from my great-uncle, I’d been feeling torn between being proud of my heritage and the terrible decisions of the Russian government.

My great-grandfather Samuel Slepack was born Joshua “Shia” Slepak 10 days before the turn of the 20th century, just outside of Kyiv in what was referred to then as “The Ukraine,” which was part of Russia at the time.He wasn’t schooled very much and grew up in a shtetl – a small Jewish town – within a sizeable non-Jewish community. When he was 16, his father died, and Samuel became responsible for his three younger sisters. He acquired a horse and wagon and began delivering linseed oil, something he later referred to as “being in the oil business,” according to his son, my great-uncle, Jerry.

Jerry described his father’s stories and life in his email: “A recurring theme in my father’s stories was the ever-presence of war throughout his lifetime,” he wrote.

Samuel was in Russia for only 20 years, but he experienced three wars in that short time. That was enough for him. He finally escaped when he and three of his friends could no longer evade the draft. They’d gotten out of conscription due to the fact that they were the only source of income for their families, but time was running out on that. The young men decided to leave the country rather than be conscripted to fight for Mother Russia.

His mother urged him to head to the United States, where her sister had emigrated years prior, but Samuel couldn’t get a ticket because it was too expensive. The group of young men wound up making their way to Argentina.. “By chance, they discovered that they could purchase steamship tickets for Argentina,” Jerry wrote. “My suspicion is that they had no clue where Argentina was, but since there were no other options, they set off on the adventure.” 

On their way to South America, they learned about bananas for the first time. “Never having seen bananas before, they were uncertain how to eat them,” he wrote.

“Patiently, they watched the other passengers and learned the art of peeling.”  

Jerry went on: “My impression of their arrival in Buenos Aires has always seemed like a staccato black-and-white silent film. A small group of young men clueless of the local language, approaching a large uniformed traffic officer at a busy intersection, asking for directions to the Jewish ghetto. The officer interpreted their pantomime as a request for money. They were rewarded with a few pesos from the policemen and directions to the surprisingly bustling Yiddish speaking ghetto.”

That ghetto was started in 1889 by a group of Ashkenazi immigrants fleeing Russian pogroms and poverty who were attracted to Argentina’s open-door immigration policy. By 1920, around when my great-grandfather arrived, there were 120,000 Jews living in Buenos Aires.

“Communication remained largely in Yiddish, though he often said that Spanish was easier to learn than English,” Jerry wrote. “His favorite Spanish expression was ‘con gusto!’” meaning “with pleasure.” 

Today, Argentina has the sixth-largest Jewish community in the world with 250,000 people. It’s also home to the only kosher McDonald’s outside of Israel.

There are three types of migration patterns, according to Tucker. Migration patterns by people seeking better economic opportunities, economic deprivation, and war, like my great-grandfather Sam, and the Ukrainians of today.

“They were the people who left because their towns were being decimated, blown up, attacked all these things than they feared for their safety,” he said.

The revelation of my family history has had me thinking, What will happen to the refugees of Ukraine? Where will they make a permanent community?

“I think right now, what we're looking at is a refugee situation,” he said. “Now, if you want to contrast that as to things like Afghan refugees and Syrian refugees…the Assad government is still in power many years later. So that refugee population does not have a return option.”

He continued: “They're going to places that are close to Ukraine. And again, I think that's because people don't see this as a permanent move.”

Two million Ukrainians have already fled to Poland. Many have escaped to Moldova, which is currently hosting the most refugees per capita, according to the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR. The 37-mile walk from the Ukrainian city of Odessa to the border at Moldova took 24 hours for some Ukrianian refugees to make according to the agency. There are currently a “growing number of unaccompanied and separated children,” Filippo Grandi, the UNHCR commissioner, told ABC News.

A child from Ukraine has become a refugee almost every single second of the war, according to Save the Children. But that doesn’t mean that Ukrainians will permanently remain wherever they’ve landed during this conflict. “My sense is is that most of the rest of the Ukrainian emigrate community will want to return at that point,” Professor Tucker said.

These Ukranians are temporarily moving, but the Russians are permanently moving. This is not all that different from those who fled Germany post World War II after the atrocities that Hitler thrust upon the willing country.

Though my great-grandfather Sam was not one of them, there were hundreds of thousands of Jews who fled Germany as the restrictions on Jews were beginning before the war.Many of those Jews fled to Switzerland or America or England in search of a new life, and permanently took up residence.

One of those Jews who fled after the war was my Great- Uncle Jules, a Holocaust survivor who could not stand to be in Germany any longer after suffering the loss of both his parents and his sisters induring their time at the concentration camps. He immigrated to America and started a new life and would go on to marry the eldest daughter of Samuel Slepack, another person scarred by war.

My great-grandfather never told stories about Mother Russia. Most people, including his children, didn’t even know he spoke anything other than Yiddish, but recognized Ukrainian words as they began to appear on the news in 2022 from his everyday vernacular.

The only thing I know about my great grandfather’s life in Russia – or Ukraine – is that he escaped. And he went back to visit his mother and sisters during the Soviet Union and said he would never go back. Instead, he sent them Levi’s jeans in packages for them to resell in Ukraine and turn a profit regularly.

In the 66 years he lived away from Ukraine, he only ever saw them that once.

He met my great-grandmother through her brother when he first arrived because they were from neighboring towns in Ukraine, became ingratiated with her family, and never looked back. But now, it’s time for his descendants to look back and study our history in this crisis.