Berdychiv

This is where we are from. Well, not this house exactly, but perhaps something like it. It's hard to say, because the Soviets bombed the whole town of Berdychiv to rubble in the 1920s. But this is the place. One drives through bread basket Ukraine for two hours to get here. Plains so flat they make Saskatchewan look muscular with contour. The earth is black. So black it seems to have been burned. And everything is growing in it. The highways is lined with birch, larch, poplar, maple and a kind of tall, red pine. Little stick racks line the road, where people place dried leaves of some kind -- a spring delicacy, perhaps, and pickled eggs in giant glass jars, and brooms made of saplings and twigs. Old men and women sit on stumps at the edge of the woods. I bet they pick a boatload of mushrooms in the fall. The road is straight as well, like in the prairies, and the crops of strawberries, canola, wheat and vegetables are just rising from the earth. The deciduous trees still have that new green; everything looks freshly shined.

It took two hours or so to reach this town from Kyiv. I rented a car from the airport and, suddenly mobile, flew toward the unknown. Are we prairie people? I thought, as I streamed along the highway. Were we farmers? My great grandfather Louis was apparently a furrier. But how to exist in such a vast, unpopulated landscape? And the main questions: how did they decide to leave, and what route did they take to a ship, and where did they sail, and why Detroit? And how would they have learned about that world at all? That's how remote it felt, driving into the middle of the flatland of Ukraine in a Chechnyan car, passing Russian Ladas every few kilometres, their tiny interiors always packed with babies with their faces pressed against the windows, and steam and shoulder-brushing adults in the front.

All we know is that Ida Nuchims was from Berdychiv, and that her mother and father, Mary and Louis, came over and had her in Detroit. We don't know her parents' brothers and sisters; we don't know the lines before that. We don't know if those who remained were killed during the Pogroms of the early 20th century, or whether they were shot, along with 30,000 other Jews, and pushed into pits at the edge of town, or whether they were buried in the centre of town cemetery. The Jewish population of Berdychiv, pre-Pogroms, numbered more than 60,000, with 62 houses of worship and a super-high literacy rate. By 2011 there were under 1000 left.

Here's what I can add to the story.

I took a room in Hotel Mirabella and walked to the cemetery on dirt roads with the most lovely little brick houses and tended gardens I've ever seen. Nowhere was there a lawn to be seen. Everyone had onion, cabbage, corn, strawberry or lettuce starts seeded across their front and back yards. Little paths criss-crossed the town through the back alleys and between the Soviet-era apartment blocks, whose courtyards had been turned into gardens.

The Jewish cemetery compares to the size of Paris' Père Lachaise. Dozens of acres. The stones are shaped like the ghost in Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away, long humps with a cloak-like front and a flat face on which to carve the Hebrew script. The site goes on and on. I've never seen anything like it. There are paths between the groupings of stones, where men walk home from work and women tend their chicken flocks. The ghost stones have been heaved by frost and perhaps mortar shells until they lie every which way. The script on most is indecipherable. Some, in larger plots, have obviously been tended, the writing blacked in, the letters refreshed. To look through all of them would take days.

I crept through, hoping for a Nuchims carved on a stone or two. Instead I found a giant passel of Israelis. "There are sometimes two busloads a day," Sasha, a local Jew, one of only 300 left today in the town, told me. He lost his restaurant job recently and I met him selling images of the crypt of Rabbi Levi Yitzchok, which lies in the centre of the cemetery and was the destination point for the sidelocked and kerchief'd Israelis. I asked him if this was where the 30,000 were buried and he said no, but that he would take me if I could wait five minutes. I could. I stepped into the hut that held the Rabbi's remains, feeling, as always, totally out of place, apologetic, and as if everyone could see that I've been to shul perhaps five times in my life, and have no idea how to take Kiddish. The books on the shelves were all in Hebrew. Women were taking Iphone photos of one another kissing the covering over the grave. Others were praying. The married ones wore head scarves. I recognized my face, my family's faces. But we didn't speak, aside from one older woman who told me this was a pilgrimage. I was glad I had missed the actual ceremony. Outside, three younger men begged for money from the Israelis. The vocal one, with blond sidelocks down to his chest and bare feet shoved into what looked like hotel slippers, told me he was from New York City, but lived here. I refrained from asking him how much his trust fund gave him every month.

Sasha drove me to the ravine where the 30,000 were shot in 1941 (12,000 in one day) and pushed into pits, where they died of suffocation or drowned in blood. The ravine was chlorophyl green with alder and sapling maple. Sasha's English wasn't good enough to answer when I asked whether the bodies were still there. Then he drove me to the synagogue, for another dose of instant discomfort, and disappeared into a reading group, showing me the women's room down below before he sat with a group of men. The shul looked like an old school. There were no identifying marks on the outside, though he said he has encountered not a single incident of anti-semitism since he arrived from Kyiv 17 years ago.

I found a taxi driver who looked so Russian he could have been mistaken for my friend Max in Mexico, all long, delicate fingers and chestnut skin. He took me to a pool hall, then a restaurant, and waited until he knew I could eat there. He pulled the bills from my wallet carefully and continued chattering in Russian until I felt like I could understand him just by his tone. I sat and drank tequila and smoked and ate the toppings off of a pizza until I was paralyzed enough, and then I walked back to the hotel with a giant beer.

This is the far side of our journey as Europeans to North America. To be here is to rest in the abandoned beginning of the story, with the unknown relatives, and the secular feeling that will not go away, and the incredulousness that anyone -- anyone -- could still kiss a shrine and not feel the need to laugh self-consciously at the absurdity and destructiveness of religion. My incredulity wears itself in silence and a lack of knowledge about any rituals except the arguing around the Passover table that I covet, and can't get enough of, and which have nothing to do, whatsoever, with belief in anything other than love and long meals and intelligence and ferocity. But these, too, are traditions of Judaism. So I take the one part and leave the other, not just in a gesture of eternal questioning, but one of something akin to aghast disbelief. My grandmother became a believer in Unions and Peace Marches and striking workers and passed her "a little to the left of Trotsky" views on to my father, and then on to his daughters. Meanwhile there's a city's worth of bones lying in the centre of town that bear witness, along with thousands of visitors, while the paths through their midst are worn bare. I'm sitting in this hotel which cost 16 dollars for a two-room suite. The Ukranian woman who gave it to me, like pretty much every other Ukrainian woman and man I've met on this trip, looked at me with affection and chagrin, and encouraged my six words of Russian, and took care that at least the body could be alright.