I was born in Odessa Ukraine
How it feels when your homeland is attacked
I originally published this essay the morning after Russia invaded Ukraine — February 24, 2022.
It’s been 576 days since then.
I’m ashamed to say days, even weeks, go by without me thinking about it. News of the death and destruction becomes noise as we move onto something else, shiny and new. A new war is a tragedy, but an ongoing conflict — 6 million Ukrainians displaced across the world, another 5 million displaced within the country, and 10,000 civilian deaths in Ukraine — these are statistics that the mind cannot fathom and so, it simply doesn’t.
Here are the reported civilian casualties in Ukraine from Sept 1 to 10 of this year:
55 killed (29 men, 21 women, 1 girl, as well as 4 adults whose sex is not yet known), and
237 injured (101 men, 77 women, 7 boys, 2 girls, as well as 50 adults whose sex is not yet known).
That could be me. My parents. My wife. My son.
It IS someone’s parents. Someone’s husband. Someone’s son.
I hope re-sharing this piece can act as a small reminder of a war that is real, ongoing, and simply should not be.
To wake up every morning and worry about the little nothings of a day — that is a gift for which I am grateful, and a gift everyone deserves.
If you’d like to support Ukraine and its people, here’s a list of vetted charities to do so.
I was born in Odessa Ukraine
I was born in Odessa, Ukraine.
Yesterday morning, Odessa was invaded by Russian forces. As was the rest of Ukraine. An air strike killed six people and injured several more. If I was still in Ukraine, I could be dead.
Far more likely though, I would be alive, fearing for my life and that of my family. President Zelinsky has commanded all men age 18 to 60 to stay and fight. So I would be prepping to fight, or already on the battlefield. So would my dad. And all my friends.
But I am not there. I am here, safe in Los Angeles, watching as Putin’s forces invade the soil on which I was born. Luckily, we don’t have any family left in Ukraine - everyone has left for either America or Israel. Such is not the case, obviously, for the 44 million people who call Ukraine home today.
According to my dad, Odessa is the humor capital of the world. This fact hasn’t been corroborated by any sources besides the super unbiased odessareview.com. This proclamation, in and of itself, is a very good joke. A great bit, to call yourselves the humor capital of the world. The comedy of these people, of my people, runs deep. I wonder what jokes one can make right now to deal with the pain, the fear, the uncertainty that you will see tomorrow. If anyone can do it, its the people of Odessa.
Its day two of the invasion. I haven’t slept much, scrolling through the reports on the ground. The people of Ukraine are terrified yet resolute. They will not go quietly into the good night. Fuck Putin, fuck occupation, they say.
The world watches on, cynical and enraged. Everything is bad, all governments corrupt. Why isn’t Biden doing more? I have no idea.
I feel angry. Protective of my country. Of my home. I want to scream that people don’t understand what’s going on, that they all need to just shut up - that this is MY HOME they’re talking about.
But is it? What do I know about Ukraine. We left as Jewish refugees when I was seven years old. I spent the next 27 years trying to become as American as I could, inhaling pizza bagels and dino nuggets and toaster strudels by the thousands, and yet the Ukrainian Russian Jew in me never left. You can’t just Twinkie and 4 cans of Coca-Cola or Pepsi (depending on which was on sale) your way into being an American.
My mind spins through doomsday scenarios - is this the end of America as a superpower? Will Russia and China unite and try to take down the west? How many Ukrainians will die? How many Russians will die? I don’t know.
But I do know that I am safe in my home in Los Angeles, coffee in hand, as our baby sleeps, peaceful in his room. Well actually he’s crying now. He’s awake. Ready to greet the day and say hello to the six framed photos of baby animals in his room.
Good morning Peter the rabbit.
Good morning Frankie the fox.
Good morning Porky the porcupine.
Good morning Derek the deer.
Good morning Brownie the bear.
Good morning Rocky the raccoon.
What a fucking privilege it is to greet the baby animals without fear that the kindergarten next to your house will be bombed.
I think about how our baby has no idea what’s going on. And how, really, none of us do. We are not there. We are spectators of a brutal invasion in which actual human lives have been lost and will continue to be lost for days, weeks, months to come.
Tears well up. I just keep texting my wife that I love her, seesawing between gratitude and guilt, two halves of the human whole - to feel suffering and know that you are, for now at least, safe from it.
Its not even 6am here in LA and I call my parents, just to hear their voices, to say thank you for sacrificing all that they did to get us out, to get us free. They tell me what they’re hearing from friends in Ukraine, what they’re hearing on the news, but the details go over my head. I am just grateful to hear them speaking, to know that at least for now we are safe.
My dad says he can’t talk much about it too much longer without crying. That it hurts his stomach to see his homeland being invaded. And for what? For who?
My dad often reminds me that Americans don’t understand freedom because it is all we know. Like the David Foster Wallace speech about the two fish where one fish asks the other “morning boys, hows the water?” and the other fish says “what the hell is water??”.
In America, for better and for worse, our water is freedom.
Freedom, a gift wasted on the free.
I know this freedom is not evenly distributed in America. That so many Americans are discriminated against and face impossible hardship because of their skin color, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability, and more.
And yet, there is an important difference between life here in America and life in Russia, my dad would argue. I think he’s right.
I want to believe that you can feel grateful for a place while still criticizing it. In fact, that’s the whole point - in America we are free to criticize, free to speak, protest, etc, though again, some of us are far more than others. Can’t these truths can coexist? I don’t know.
I called this newsletter ‘both are true’ because I want to believe two truths can coexist, that two ideas are almost never truly mutually exclusive: a more perfect union, as they wrote in one of those early ass documents everyone references all the time. Or as the Zen monk Shrunryu Suzuki said: “Each of you is perfect the way you are ... and you can use a little improvement.”
Growing up, my parents always told me that I cannot fathom what life was like back in Ukraine. How impossibly hard everything was, how just going to get some bread became a hero’s journey. How we lived in an apartment building with four other families all sharing a single bathroom and one of the families would routinely steal our socks. My dad really didn’t like the sock stealing part - who steals socks?
And he was right - who steals socks? More importantly he and my mom were right: I didn’t understand.
Which was the whole point. They moved to America to give me the gift of not being able to understand them. To live in a place where I did not question my freedom, where I could look at my son’s dumb little curly haired face and know, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he would be okay come morning.
I recently learned that when we first moved here, we lived in a small one bedroom apartment. My parents let me sleep in the bedroom and they slept in a tiny bed in the closet. Which, now, I’m like - what the hell! I could have slept in the closet I was a tiny kid. But they didn’t want me to know what that felt like. They wanted me to know what it meant to sleep in a room, on your own.
A gift that, for too long, and by design, was wasted on me.
Today, for the first time, I feel like I understand the gravity and magnitude of that gift. Watching the missiles fly over Kiev, I understand why they left. I can feel it, not as an intellectual fact, but as a lived in experience. All of a sudden their voyage to America focuses into sharp relief - no longer a fairy tale I would hear and, I am embarrassed to say, thought they were exaggerating to seem harder than it was, but a terrifying, real life decision. They left everything behind - it must have been impossible to go and even more impossible not to - how did they manage? How did they make it all work?
My dad often tells me I’m his hero, but he’s got it wrong. He and my mom - they are my heroes.
I text them and tell them how grateful I am for them coming here. I want to say so much more. That I am so thankful. That I cannot imagine how hard it all was, coming here, and that I can never thank them enough. That I love them. And wish that we were in the same room so I could hug them and tell them all this in person.
We’ve had our fair share of fights throughout the years, my parents and I. And it’s funny how little all of those conflicts matter now. The very existence of all the arguments where I would argue, quite convincingly may I add, why I wanted to be an artist and not a lawyer and my mom would respond by saying ‘see, look how good you are at arguing - you should be a lawyer!” - those fights could only happen here. In America.
Last night, Before they went to sleep on the east coast, we did a Skype call so they could see their grandson. I watch him point to them and them point back to him. He won’t stop pointing, his new little obsession. Like he understands some deep truth and is trying to share it with me: “Dad - look. Look! These are real life superheroes. They saved you.” And I want to say back to him, “I know, dude, I know. They came here so your dad could be free and meet your mom and have you. without them, you wouldn’t be.” For those of you wondering - yes, I do want him to experience existential dread as early as possible.
I find myself becoming cynical, judging my own reaction to all this. Who am I, the privileged dude in California, to feel any certain way about this. What good is any of it?
But I refuse to be cynical, to be hopeless. That’s the worst mistake of all - to believe nothing good can come. That’s what the dickless Putins of the world want us to believe. That we are helpless, that nothing can change.
But that’s not true. Look at the people of Ukraine. Fighting for their country. Taking up arms. Refusing to surrender.
There is so much wrong with America, with the world, sure, but I cannot deny the many gifts and privileges afforded us in a moment like this.
I could be in Ukraine right now, ready to say goodbye to my wife and my child and die for my country. Or trying to flee with my family and die at the border. Or make it out alive and spend the rest of my life a refugee, struggling to ever feel safe, ever feel home again.
I am so fucking privileged, free to spend my days in a happy haze of the trivial, the mundane, the joyful moments of life you feel when you are safe. And then every once in a while come The Real Deal Things - poverty, cancer, war - the things that wake you up and go oh shit, none of this is a given, I am lucky, I am, dare I say, hashtag blessed.
This is one of those times. The door cracks open and for a second I see what life really is - fragile and beautiful and fucked and even more fragile and more beautiful as a result.
I stand in that crack of light, from afar, sending my love.
I stand with Ukraine. I will do whatever I can from here to help.
And i stand with people of Russia too. They don’t want this war - they do not want to attack their neighbor, their relative.
These are my people. The people whose soil I ran through for seven years, the people whose love and life and joy is a part of who I am and who my child will be.
And in the same breath I think about all of the people in all of the places for whom freedom is not a given, for whom war is all they know. They are not just numbers, not just stories to be bandied around at debates - they are people. They are in Iraq and Afghanistan and Palestine and Syria and Darfur and Congo and the Uyghur region of China and Yemen and Libya and so many other places. Too many other places, full of people who would much rather scroll through Twitter while drinking their coffee and watch from afar.
In every conflict like this, there are real people on the ground who lose their lives, entire countries destroyed by the whims of morons (many of whom are from the US, may I add). And then there are people like me who left that country and think of it as home.
All wars are about people fighting and people dying. And when that war isn’t about something I know personally well, I become a detached analyst trying to understand the rationale of all sides blah blah blah. But this isn’t a trolley problem. This is a real real, lived truth - people live there. People will die there.
And today I feel awake to that fact. Will that feeling fade? I sincerely hope it doesn’t. There’s a lot we can all do from afar. I’ll add a list of resources in the comment below.
Its so hard to talk about war and how awful it is without sounding like a cliche 1960s hippie love is all man sort of person. Like yea, that’s great and all but the reality of life is war. Yes there are the Steven Pinkers of the world who tell us that this is the safest time in history, but fuck that. A lower quantity of deaths doesn’t make a single death okay. It can’t.
So let me say, bellbottoms on and groovy long hair on my head, war sucks. Invasions suck. Putin sucks.
There is evil and darkness in the world, and there is also light. And most of all, there is also a self proclaimed humor capital of the world, the place where I am from. Odessa. A land of proud people, staying to fight. And there’s also an evil man in the Kremlin who has, as one tweet said, mortgaged the future of Russia for his legacy today. Fuck that guy. He will not win. He can’t.
I only pray when things get really rough, and this is one of those times. I pray for the people of Ukraine, the people of Russia, and for no more deaths in that region or anywhere else. Sure its a hopeless prayer, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying.
My son is about to wake up again, and I will give him a kiss and his smile will melt my heart and for a few seconds I will forget about all this as we say good morning to the baby animals on the wall.
Good morning Peter the rabbit.
Good morning Frankie the fox.
Good morning Porky the porcupine.
Good morning Derek the deer.
Good morning Brownie the bear.
Good morning Rocky the raccoon.
If you’d like to support Ukraine and its people, here’s a list of vetted charities.
Writing Both Are True is how I make a living. If you’d like to support and become a paid subscriber, you can do so here.
I’ll be donating 20% of all paid subscriptions from this post to the Ukraine relief efforts.
Comments
Open floor today - feel free to share any and all things, just don’t be an asshole.
Once again, thank you for sharing.
Pray for the Armenians of Artsakh as well. They are being ethnically cleansed by Azerbaijan and the west is silent: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/artsakh-christian-armenian-genocide-azerbaijan