THE LAST JEW IN STALINDORF

In college, I became close friends with a Russian girl named Anya Meksin. During our sophmore year, I spent Thanksgiving with her family in Columbus, Ohio, where I was impressed to see the whole Meksin clan taking shots of whiskey with their turkey.

In 1989 emigration from the Soviet Union was only half-permitted. Jews (or people who pretended to be Jews in order to emigrate) told authorities they were going to Israel, gave up their Soviet passports, and then went to Western Europe and applied for visas to a third country. The Meksins sold or gave away their possessions, including a precious library that they had been building for generations, and bought tickets to Austria with a loan from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

From Austria they took a train to Rome. During a two-week stay at a Roman monastery, Leeza and Anya saw a crucifix and a bidet for the first time. So this is the West, Leeza thought with bemusement; she hadn’t wanted to leave Moscow in the first place.

The family spent several off-season months in the seaside town of Santa Marinella as they applied for American refugee status, dressing up for periodic interviews in Rome. Leeza and Anya sold Russian souvenirs: nesting dolls, Lenin pins, wooden spoons, and embroidered linens. Even as they gave away all of their possessions, the Meksins had packed their bags full of tchotchkes, knowing they could generate precious income. The Italian ladies at the Santa Marinella market called Leeza “little gypsy girl,” and though they said it with condescension, she was happy to be mistaken for anything other than what she was—a little Jewish girl.

Anya’s memories of Russia were of the hazy, poetic early childhood variety. We both loved animals, and I was enchanted by a story she told me in college about sitting in a green field outside Moscow, watching a bunny eat a strawberry. I later found a gruesome parallel in a childhood memory of another Russian immigrant friend, Marina, who’d been sent to visit her relatives in the countryside near Chernobyl after the nuclear disaster. She spent the summer playing in the woods and fields, where she found berries the size of melons and bits of plastic that glowed in the dark. These fragmentary memories, lyrical and appalling, were glimpses of an alternate universe, tantalizingly close but completely inaccessible. No matter how much time I spent in Russia or Ukraine, no matter how well I learned to speak Russian, I could never go to the Soviet Union, because the Soviet Union no longer existed.

Years later, when I reminded Anya of the story about the bunny and the strawberry, she’d forgotten it, as if she had transferred some portion of her Soviet childhood to me, giving me possession of a tiny relic of a vanished world.

DURING MY FIRST SUMMER in Ukraine, Anya and Leeza came to meet me. Anya was in film school, and I’d gotten us a grant from my old employer, the Open Society Institute, to film a documentary about women and drugs in Ukraine, focusing on programs I’d worked with in Poltava, Odessa, and Dnipropetrovsk.

Though they were charmed by my interest in Russian, the Meksin parents hadn’t been pleased by Anya and Leeza’s decision to come with me to the old country; they’d had good reasons for leaving it, after all, and it hadn’t been easy to get out. But they shared what advice they could, urging Anya and Leeza to bring cartons of American cigarettes and ballpoint pens as gifts for new acquaintances.

Before we started work, we spent a few days in Kiev, having fun. We met up with Toporkestra, who were playing on Khreshchatyk Street, in front of McDonald’s, and Leeza banged joyously on their signature big red drum. That night Topor took us to a wedding in a wooded part of Kiev, near a lake where we went skinny-dipping, the musicians still playing their instruments in the water. Zakhar showed up in his worst form, drunk and belligerent, abusing his equally drunk sidekick, a diminutive artist named Tolik. In the car on the way back from the lake, as we drove along the highway, Zakhar pummeled poor Tolik, then tried to climb out the window onto the roof. This was too much for the Meksins, who were afraid the car would crash. They were perplexed by my fascination with post-Soviet punk delirium. To them, it seemed like nostalgie de la boue, unsavory and unreasonable. This world was something to be escaped, not explored. They were refugees, and I was a tourist.

IN POLTAVA, not far from Gogol’s birthplace, we filmed at a harm reduction organization called Light of Hope, run by an exceptionally talented man, exactly my age, named Maxim. Maxim had been a heavy drug user as a teenager. Like many drug users, he had been tortured by the police, who put a hood over his head and cut off his oxygen, attached electric circuits to his ears, and shocked him. (The police often cleared cases by torturing drug users into making false confessions.) When Maxim told me about his experience, I was horrified, of course, and also overwhelmed by a sense of cognitive dissonance; I knew him as a happy giant, blond, fresh-faced, and robust. Anya’s childhood was a dream world, mysterious and vague; Maxim’s adolescence was a dystopian nightmare.

Maxim had eventually joined Narcotics Anonymous; when I met him, he didn’t even drink coffee.

One of Light of Hope’s tasks was to greet people who’d just been released from prison. Many of them were drug users, likely to relapse as soon as they got out; Light of Hope tried to meet them right away and help them establish a new, sober life. One sunny afternoon we accompanied two Light of Hope social workers meeting a prisoner who would be released that day. The timing was never exact, so we loitered outside the local prison, eating ice cream bars and trying to film B-roll when the guards weren’t looking. This led to repeated scoldings and threats to confiscate the camera.

Finally we spotted the man we’d come to pick up. What was it like to walk through a door and be free again? As we drove him to his mother’s house, his eyes shone and he squirmed with excitement, staring out the window with a hungry look. It was a sultry day, and we passed a river where people were swimming.

“Girls! Girls in bathing suits!” he cried. “I haven’t seen a girl in so long! They’re all so beautiful!”

He asked us to stop so he could buy a cup of cold kvas, a malted, faintly alcoholic beverage beloved of the Slavs. He bought some from a barrel wagon painted with the word KVAS in yellow letters against a sky-blue background. We filmed him as he took his first sip in freedom; he looked delirious with happiness.

There were those, of course, who couldn’t be saved, even by someone as gifted and resolute as Maxim. We followed an outreach worker named Galya to the TB hospital for a meeting with Sveta, an old friend from her drug-using days.

IN ODESSA WE WENT with a social worker to meet a Roma woman, Anna, who was being released after three years in prison. As she came through the gates, Anna wept and shouted and clutched the skinny social worker in her muscular arms. The social worker greeted her kindly, embarrassed by her exuberance, and presented her with a bright yellow sequined shirt and a pair of stretch jeans studded with rhinestones—a new outfit for a new life. Crowing with happiness, Anna found a relatively deserted corner and changed right there, on the street, with our cameras rolling. She showed us her lacy green underwear, which, she explained, she had bought in prison with some of the money she earned sewing.

On the bus Anna cried some more, gulping in the scenery. We passed corner stores selling sausage, beer, and vodka; a green cemetery; a gray hospital; and kiosks selling spangled stretch tops and racy underwear. Everything was bigger, newer, and stranger than when she had gone inside, Anna said. The world had changed in her absence. She took out a stack of pictures of her little daughter, showing them to us, holding them up for the camera to record and admire. The child had been in prison with her mother until she turned three, according to Ukrainian prison policy, and had then been sent to the children’s home; that had been about a year ago.

Our first stop was not the kvas cart but the social services office, where Anna would try to do the paperwork to get her daughter back. With just enough money for bus fare to her hometown, Luhansk, she had to retrieve her daughter that day; she had no way of staying in Odessa for even one night.

“When can I have her?” Anna asked the bureaucrat who met us. Anna spoke too loudly and stood too close, shifting her weight from left to right, like a boxer getting ready for a match. She was short but sturdy and strong, even after years of a prisoner’s diet and four hours of sleep a night. She had served several years for robbery and assault.

“Don’t ask me! Fill out the paperwork, and then we can tell you,” the bureaucrat said curtly. She had thick calves and hair permed into brittle, ash-blond question marks.

“How long can you make me wait for my own baby? Fuck!” Anna yelled.

The social worker sighed and the bureaucrat retreated, glaring.

“Bitch,” Anna muttered under her breath.

“Please, wait here and don’t say anything else. I’ll go and find out what’s going on,” said the social worker, patting Anna on the shoulder.

“I should beat that bitch’s face,” Anna growled as we sat with her on the bench in the hallway, waiting. She bit her nails and pushed her damp hair from her forehead, slouched and slapped her knees.

When the social worker returned, she explained that Anna could have her daughter back only when she could show proof of legal employment. Legal employment was hard for anyone to find in Ukraine, but for a Roma ex-convict it was especially unlikely. There was no way Anna could take her daughter home that day. We left the social services office.

On the stiflingly hot bus to the children’s home, Anna saw an olive-skinned young woman with black hair pulled into a demure bun, her large purse pressed to her chest in spite of the heat. Anna shouted across the bus in Romani, calling out in recognition. The young woman obviously understood and looked up reflexively, but then she looked back down at her lap, pretending not to understand. She didn’t want to be exposed in front of a busload of people; nobody trusted a gypsy. But when Anna called out again, her voice hot with solicitude, the woman smiled reluctantly, nodded, and said a word or two in Romani. Satisfied, Anna turned back to us and continued telling us about her daughter.

By the time we arrived, we were all drenched in sweat, despite the Black Sea breeze that ruffled our hair. As we hurried down the street, afraid we would miss visiting hours, the social worker warned Anna to let her do the talking this time.

To my surprise, the children’s home was beautiful, new, and obviously well funded, with an enormous, fantastical playground, a swimming pool, and deck chairs where children lay in the sun napping. It had been the gift of a Ukrainian oligarch.

We explained ourselves to the management and sat on a bench by the gates, waiting for Anna’s daughter. Finally she arrived, tiny, with nut-brown hair carefully braided and tied with colorful ribbons.

Anna took her in her arms, crying with happiness, kissing her all over her face and shoulders, untying her hair, smoothing it impatiently and tying it back again. She clutched her to her breasts, asking over and over, “Do you remember me? Do you remember me, darling?”

The girl nodded, looking a little confused, and said yes.

After only half an hour, the visit ended. Anna’s daughter went back into the children’s home, and we took Anna to the bus station. We filmed her vowing to return.

AS WE FILMED, we had to answer a lot of questions ourselves. Three American women, no husbands, no children: we were a curiosity.

“So, you travel all over the world? You have no home, no husband?” one man asked me in Poltava. “Are you like... a sailor?” He looked awestruck. Sailor seemed like a nicer word than tourist, especially in its Russian feminine form, moryachka. I said yes.

The curiosity intensified when Leeza told people she was a lesbian. Although Ukraine wasn’t known for its tolerant attitude toward homosexuality, the reaction was almost entirely positive. Men blushed, and women congratulated her.

Leeza had recently broken up with her girlfriend and was eager to get back in the game. This wasn’t easy in Ukraine. After many attempts, I got the address of a Dnipropetrovsk gay bar from a friend of a friend in Kiev. We put on our high heels and makeup, glad for a break from our sweaty filming clothes, and took a taxi to the dark alley where the club was located.

The stout, crop-haired woman at the door raised her eyebrows and smirked. “Do you know where you are?” she asked, ready to laugh at us.

“The gay bar?” Anya said timidly.

“That’s right,” she answered, surprised.

In the center of the club, a young woman danced alone, wearing a leopard-print spandex body suit with cutouts that displayed a pendulous rhinestone belly button ring. Men were better represented. Some sat quietly at tables, but most were dancing in line in front of a mirrored wall, absorbed in elaborate solo performances. They vogued, undulated, and thrust. After a few minutes, the woman in the leopard-print body suit strutted through the line, taking a position closer to the mirror; she looked like a pop star performing with her backup dancers. Leeza (who didn’t find love that night) hypothesized that she was not a lesbian but a stripper on her night off, seeking refuge in the one place where she could avoid male advances.

In Dnipropetrovsk, we were filming at Virtus, an organization run by Olga Belyaeva, the woman who’d taught me about Men’s Day. We went with her outreach worker—a man named Sasha, whose mission in life was teaching sex workers karate—to a brothel, or “office,” in a pleasant new house on the outskirts of town. When I went in with the camera, a sex worker named Snezhana came out of her room smiling, with rumpled black hair, heavy blue eye shadow, black underwear, and a zebra-print bathrobe.

She put on her clothes and a wig, went downstairs, and started taking calls from the four phones on the kitchen table. She spoke to a prospective client in a conspiratorial tone, with a coy smile that made her voice sound friendly. “Two-fifty an hour, honey, but 500 for anal.... Yes, we have very small, thin girls with large chests.”

Snezhana told me that she had been sex-trafficked to Europe and found it to be not a bad experience, on the whole. Europe was a nice place.

While Anya was waiting for me outside, the man who drove the harm reduction outreach bus told her how much he wanted to be part of Russia again.

IN OUR SPARE TIME, we were investigating Anya and Leeza’s family origins. On our last day in Dnipropetrovsk, we wanted to find the village where Anya and Leeza’s grandmother had grown up before evacuating to Uzbekistan on the eve of the German invasion. All we had was a handwritten list of half-remembered names.

It was a bright day, leafy and forgiving, the kind that made Ukraine look more like France. Leeza went from car to car on a crowded street, asking drivers if they knew the town—once Stalindorf, now Zhovtnevoe. When they didn’t recognize the name, she explained that it had once been full of Jews. Before the war.

Finally, one driver called a Jewish friend for directions. He got them, and agreed to take us. “But there are no Jews there anymore,” he warned us, as if afraid we’d blame him for our disappointment.

“Are you girls Jewish?” he inquired cheerfully as we set out.

By now this was a familiar question. Before we’d even stowed our baggage in the trunk, our taxi driver at the Kiev airport had asked Anya and Leeza, who were blessed with strong features and dark beauty, whether they were Jewish. They bristled, waiting for signs of the anti-Semitism that had helped drive their family out of the Soviet Union.

“Why do you ask?” Anya said suspiciously.

The driver looked back at her in the windshield mirror, smiling fondly. “You recognize your own,” he said. “I had two Jewish grandmothers—I’ll give you a discount!”

“It shouldn’t be something you even notice,” Anya huffed when we got out of the taxi. “It shouldn’t be a topic of discussion.” Having never been to Boryspil airport before, or to Ukraine, for that matter, she was not impressed by our discount.

Two weeks later in Dnipropetrovsk, Anya and Leeza were used to it, and simply nodded. The driver informed us, predictably, that he had a Jewish grandmother.

As we drove toward the town once known as Stalindorf, our partly Jewish driver regaled us with all the war history he knew, then provided an analysis of the relative faults and merits of every ethnic group in Ukraine, alive or dead. We stared out the window at the flat yellow fields of rapeseed and the bright, equally flat blue sky.

Arriving in Stalindorf at last, we stopped at the central store. Leeza and I went inside to buy Cokes. When we emerged, we found Anya talking to a grinning, swaying man.

“I know the last Jew in town!” he was exclaiming happily. “I’ll take you to him!”

The man, whose name was Yury, led us down a muddy path, through a field of flowers, past a garden gate, and to the door of a dilapidated blue house. A surly old woman met us at the door and waved us toward the bedroom, then stamped back to the kitchen.

The last Jew in Stalindorf was lying in bed in his underwear. He wore thick bifocals and looked grumpy. On the table beside him were a fluorescent lamp and an insulin syringe.

“Excuse me, but I cannot get up,” he said. “I am old and sick.”

We explained our mission, and he searched for Anya and Leeza’s grandmother’s name in an ancient red address book sitting next to his bed. He didn’t know her but was happy to reminisce.

His real name was Abram, but he was called Mikhail—his Jewish name exchanged for a Russian one. He spoke of his classmates, about his mother and sister, about the beauty of the landscape and the richness of the land. From time to time he confirmed a name in his address book, peering down his nose and leafing through the brittle pages. He came from a family of farmers who had been sent to the region by the tsar, along with hundreds of other Jews; Stalindorf had once been the center of a Jewish region. Once upon a time the Jews and the Ukrainians and the Russians there had gotten along, more or less. Then Stalin starved them, and they had to eat prairie dogs, and then the Germans approached and Mikhail’s family fled. Like Anya and Leeza’s grandmother, they had received an early warning through army connections; most of the town’s Jews had not been so fortunate.

At fifteen, Mikhail had driven the family’s cows all the way to Kazakhstan, eating more prairie dogs and wading through rivers along the way. His sister was killed by a bomb as she walked beside him; his father, a soldier, was killed in the war, and he and his mother returned alone to their village. Even in peacetime, when the crops had grown back, they continued to eat prairie dogs, having grown fond of the taste. Now the prairie dogs were gone, and Mikhail’s legs were so swollen that he could no longer walk.

He picked up his cell phone and called his wife in the kitchen to ask her if it was time for his injection. This was our cue to leave.

What had happened to the Jews who hadn’t escaped in time? They were in the balka. We had already learned that in Ukraine the word balka, which literally means “ravine” or “gully,” functioned as an effective synonym for “place where Jews were killed.” With Yury as our guide, we headed there.

Fluffy, well-defined clouds drifted across the bright sky, and the faded grass was punctuated by trees the color of sage. We crossed a river and passed a pond. Birds swept over and into the clear water, their calls the only sound in the air. Plump gray rabbits appeared now and then, diving back into the grass as the car approached.

The land was perfectly flat, an endless procession of fields, until we reached the balka, which was now a small rise in the earth. We all got out and studied the plaque commemorating the deaths of “Soviet citizens” killed by the fascists. We thought about all the dead bodies lying in the burial mound beneath our feet.

By the time we were done taking pictures and looking around, I was worried that we were going to miss our train. Yury said he knew a shortcut, and guided our car into the margin of a field of sunflowers. Mud spattered the sides of the car and the front and back windows. It had become apparent that Yury was very drunk.

The tires spun uselessly, spraying mud everywhere. We got out, taking off our shoes. Ankle deep in mud, we pushed together as the driver tried to start the car. It didn’t move. Yury giggled.

The driver got out. “Can one of you girls drive?” he asked. “I’ll push.”

“I can,” Leeza answered. She got into the driver’s seat, wiping the globs of earth from her feet and calves. As we pushed from behind, she stepped on the gas. And that was how we escaped from Stalindorf.