Memories of Kiev; The Same Place
Danielle Levsky (2023)
Memories of Kyiv
Khreshchatyk street in 2012 rivals Paris’s grand boulevards,
neo-classical arches and filigreed apartment windows
encoated in copper, cigarettes smoked by blonde babes and
children shrieking in play, and corner stores playing
Hollaback Girl from the early aughts. In the fall, the trees match the copper red,
and in the spring, chestnut trees are in blossom.
Kashtani! my Mama crooned and reach towards the chestnut blooms
when we turned onto the main drag, her voice in harmony with cars honking,
laughter of teenagers, argumentative tones of Russian and Ukranian
intermingling amongst cafe discussions. Her best friend, Lena, stopped to
examine one of the flowers, waxing poetic on the creamy pearl color, the
same color of the ice cream I slurped at dessert.
My Mama and Lena took me to the places they had known:
their families’ apartment buildings on the outskirts of town (each apartment was boarded up and built up in disarray, materials and cracks in the foundations and walls);
a street where artists sold their wares (this is where Mama and Lena drank too much cognac and were suddenly teenagers again, with me as their chaperone);
the fountain in the beautiful park where my parents had first kissed (my Mama circled around the fountain for 10 minutes, remembering nighttime visits with friends, celebrations of birthdays, and walks with her mom, before she found the exact bench).
On our last night, we found a wine bar on Khreshchatyk; lined liked a wooden
cabin, and strewn across the walls were instruments and traditional clothes, adorned in
bright red, blue, and yellow folk patterns, depicting birds, flowers, and trees. I picked a
Georgian wine on my Mama’s recommendation, its sweetness and richness
warming my body and my spirit. We discussed the people we had met, the places
we had tried to find that now bore different names, the anger my older cousin felt for us ever choosing to leave, the way that even the cafetaria dumplings tasted so much richer.
In the morning, we took the metro to get to a small shuttle to take us to the airport, and
I looked at those sitting around, the street performers that boarded, too, and
felt a strange sense of familiarity, of relativity to the profiles, the braided hair,
the freckles, the knowing eyes around me. I closed my eyes and thought of my Babushka.
The Same Place
“Never in a milion years did we think bombs would drop on our Kyiv,” my Mama said to me over the phone.
As I stared out the window at the eucalyptus tree encoated in sunshine in California.
As she watched the royal palm tree on her drive down the neighborhood block in Florida.
All while Russian troops closed in around the chestnut trees, the 3 million people of the capital city. This is the same place where:
my family would retrace their roots from the shtetls and into sparkling Kyiv
my Mama had her first job in a chemical lab
my Dedushka scoured the city searching for a university that would take his Jewish daughter
my parents fell in love
my Babushka was told by Soviet authorities to “Figure it out yourself, you filthy Jew”
my Mama met and sang with her best friend
mass murder sites collected during the Holocaust
my parents would swim in the summers
education was heavily censored
people would drink fresh kvass from the barrel
kids would steal teachers’ attendance books to find out who in the class was Jewish, Roma, Muslim
delicious pies and dumplings were served piping hot from the stand
there were empty shelves and endless lines for bread in times of famine
the Jewish refugee officer wept at my grandma’s story of anti-semitism
my Papa repacked the suitcases the night before he would leave his home for the final time
Today, our family and friends who remained woke up
to the sights and sound of bombs exploding on their soil, in their streets.
“We could have been there,” I said back, “We could have stayed, and I could have been born, grown up on that soil, in those streets.”