Keep the tsars away, in Moscow or Mar-a-Lago

A great-grandfather on his mother’s side had a big mouth.

The trait seems to run in the family.

Ivan Grodzensky, his given name was Israel before he Russified it, lived a prosperous life in Moscow in 1914 when he was overheard in a restaurant denounce Tsar Nicholas II for involving Russia in World War I.

The Tsarist secret police imprisoned him, but he got out.

Four years later, Ivan was arrested again, this time at the hands of the Bolsheviks.

How come?

“He was not considered trustworthy,” my relative Gary Saretzky, a cousin who is our family’s unofficial historian, told me.

“Either they sent him to Siberia or they shot him immediately. He completely abandons the scene. “

Millions of other shady Russians would suffer the same fate in the decades to come.

Another great-grandfather, Barnet Ehrlich, this one from my father, had a frame shop in Kishinev, then a town in the Russian province of Bessarabia, now the capital of Moldova, when in April 1903 a violent pogrom spread to the Jewish quarter.

Gangs of gunmen ransacked Jewish shops, burned Jewish homes, raped Jewish women and killed nearly 50 people.

Barnet spent the pogrom standing behind his door with an ax to hit the attackers, but the house was saved.

The family quickly decided it was time to emigrate to the United States.

As for the Russian government, its ambassador to Washington, Count Arturo Cassini, described the pogrom as an example of the “peasant against the usurer and not of the Russians against the Jews”.

It’s a distribution textbook instance an anti-Semitic trope to deny an anti-Semitic fact.

I thought about my ancestors a few days ago while I was seeing the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrovgives an interview to Steve Rosenberg of the BBC.

I thought about them a few days later as I watched the scenes of a Russian missile attack on a shopping mall in the Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk, which resulted in the deaths of at least 18 people.

Lavrov’s interview was a perfecting lesson in what Joseph Conrad once called the “almost sublime contempt for the truth” of a Russian official.

The 2014 Maidan revolution, Lavrov said, was a “neo-Nazi revolt”.

The Bucha massacre was a “staged tragedy”.

Regarding the deaths of Ukrainian civilians:

“I tell you that the kyiv regime is bombing its own citizens.”

Later in the interview, Lavrov admits that “Russia is absolutely not clean” and “we are not ashamed to show who we are”.

The Russians deny they attacked the mall.

Lying is as unfathomable as cruelty; each strengthens the other.

After Ivan was kidnapped a second time, his wife, Xenia, found a way to escape Moscow with their four children and gold coins hidden in a seam of her dress.

They arrived in the Latvian port of Libau, moved west to Berlin in the 1920s and returned to Italy after the Nazis came to power.

Apart from the allied bombing of Milan, one of my mother’s earliest memories is that of being hidden under the robe of a nun for reasons he didn’t understand.

My mother and grandmother came to the United States after the war, penniless, as displaced persons.

With one exception, as far as I know, the relatives who remained in Latvia were murdered in the Holocaust.

Barnet and his family arrived on Ellis Island in 1906.

He got a job at the Brooklyn Navy Yard for $ 8 a week.

There would be no more pogroms for them.

Jews who didn’t get out of Kishinev in time wouldn’t be so lucky.

I tell these family stories not because they are unique but because They are common.

The exhausted faces you see on Ukrainian women and children crossing other parts of Europe; the dying faces of Ukrainians recovering from injuries sustained by Russian indiscriminate fire; the sunken faces of Ukrainians who survived Russian captivity in dirty cellars: these are not the faces of strangers.

For tens of millions of Americans with relatively recent immigrant backgrounds, they are the faces of our parents or grandparents.

This is true regardless of whether its roots reside Russia, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Iran or Venezuela.

US concern for Ukraine has now palpably vanished.

The war drags on, Kiev is not winning, and America is in turmoil over Supreme Court rulings, the January 6 committee hearings, inflation and a possible recession.

Problems: we have them.

But to understand what is at stake in this war, it helps to customize them.

Ukraine’s struggle is not just about its own freedom.

Borrowing a verse from “The Fiddler on the Roof”, it’s about keeping the Tsar “far from us”.

It is also a reminder of what we are struggling to keep at home.

A nation that welcomes immigrants, especially the poor.

A nation where it is safe to say what we think aloud.

A nation that supports the rule of law.

A nation whose leaders, current or past, simply cannot get away with an “almost sublime contempt for the truth”.

A nation that lives up to freedom fighters abroad.

A nation that will not stand still when freedoms run away from home.

Happy Fourth of July.

c.2022 The New York Times Company