We almost died in Kyiv. It’s a funny anecdote, but as a person who has since experienced some moments in which my mortality pointed finger-guns at me and said, “Catch you later,” I know now how valid my opening sentence remains. Sometimes one’s present and future existence depends on the reflexes of a cab driver in a foreign city.

I love Kyiv, perhaps because I experienced one of my first glimpses of my own mortality there, and thus experienced my own love of life for one of the first times as an adult. I love Kyiv because it’s a beautiful city, and my memory of it is full of music. It is a treasured place in memory.

We went to a synagogue in Kyiv, my fellow Jews on this trip and me, a synagogue that was supposed to be closed as a place of worship when we were there in January 1989, as all places of worship were banned and even demolished in the Soviet Union. Another thing I love about the Kyiv I experienced: that synagogue in the heart of the city was open and its bakery was pumping out matzoh for the congregation. It was pumping out steam in the cold January afternoon even more. Ukraine’s independence a couple years later did not surprise me, as the Ukraine I experienced was already independent in many ways. I was surprised that day, though, by the sight of what I thought of as a Jewish bravery—the rabbi was dressed as a rabbi and many people bustled about in and outside the synagogue and nothing felt hidden, secret, or illegal/banned—a bravery that I never saw in Poughkeepsie, NY, because it was not required there, then.

Someone has a photo of me that winter day in my long black cloth coat and fur hat (fake fur, purchased from a Filene’s, of all places) with a thin slab of matzoh in my hand. It may be the most Jewish I have ever looked. I have a photo of a blonde crush with matzoh in her hand; she likely took the matching photo of me. In the photo, she makes the matzoh look foreign in her hands. I suppose I have the more photogenic shot than she has. When he saw the photo, my Jewish uncle called her the shiksa, which she was, and he joked about how I brought a pretty, blonde non-Jewish woman to a synagogue in Kyiv. All these years later, I do not know where she lives.

Last year, when Russia invaded Ukraine and launched aerial assaults on Kyiv itself, people took shelter in that synagogue. Photos appeared on social media, I looked at the photos I took in 1989, and I saw the same interior. The building sheltered everyone, not just Jews.

I felt my Jewishness on that trip to the USSR in 1989, which had not been an anticipated emotion. It was a new inner experience. I felt my Jewishness as something foreign to me yet within me, not “eternal” because “eternity” means nothing to me, but instead something somehow indelible and unchangeable like my brown eyes. It felt like something I did not choose but would choose if I could. Something that had nothing to do with me, and felt like a gift. Almost thirty-five years later, I suppose I would use those same words to describe my relationship with that half of my DNA. Agnostic, I nonetheless started to want to put a mezuzah on my doorframe here about a year ago. I grew up in a house with one, and I think because I feel at home here, that little object represents that home-y feeling as much as a Christmas tree does. (I purchased one of those a year ago.)

Perhaps readers understand that events in recent days, and events in Kyiv in the last eighteen months, have elicited these memories unbidden by my conscious mind. I have wanted to write about Ukraine since February 22, 2022, but I felt that I have nothing to contribute to the world’s knowledge about Ukraine. I still feel that way, but I almost died in Kyiv, after all, and life became more real and vivid for me there for the first time in my twenty years alive at that point instead. Thus, I write today.

We wandered around Kiev, and one of us named me noticed that it was now 4:00 p.m., that night had fallen (it was January), and that we had only thirty minutes to get back to our hotel to checkout and get to the train station. We hailed a cab and four of us piled in. I was in the front passenger seat. Kyiv has some steep, sloping streets, and I have looked at Google Earth’s street view to see if I can locate the street(s) that I remember, since I believe the visual part of the memory is seared into my brain, but I have not found the street. It was rush hour, it was night, and traffic was everywhere. At the crest of a hill, I heard a sound to my left: the cab driver was slamming his foot on the brake which was slapping against the floor of the car to no effect, as the car’s brakes were gone. In the distance, at the bottom of the slope, a traffic light changed from red to green and then to red again as we cruised at an ever-increasing speed toward several lanes of traffic that now had THEIR green light. We hit the bottom of the hill, bounced airborne briefly, the driver found a gap between cars to shoot through, and we made it across. We may have been airborne for all four lanes, in which case I should add this drive to my list of Aeroflot flights from that trip.

I do not remember if the cab’s brakes reengaged or if we simply coasted to a stop in front of the hotel. Members of our tour group had started to board the coach to the train station. “You’re late,” our Intourist minder barked. We went into the hotel to retrieve our suitcases.

Several days later, we were in Minsk. My mother’s grandparents came from near there, from Pinsk, in Byelorussia. I was aware that I wanted to burn into my memory any ancient buildings that I might see, because I thought that I might see something that my great-grandparents saw on their way out of the “Old Country.” A couple of us wandered around Minsk, found ourselves in a neighborhood of unpaved, muddy streets, mud so deep and thick that my boot got stuck in it a couple times, wood-frame homes that had paper windows. It was a poverty that I had not yet seen in my middle-class life. “Here is the ‘Old Country,'” I guess I thought.

The same small group of Jews in the tour learned of a synagogue in Minsk. It was a Friday evening, the Sabbath. Minsk was and is closer to Moscow and Moscow’s desires, thus, the existence of this synagogue was a secret. It was in an unmarked upstairs above a storefront. We walked through what one might think of as a bodega or a deli to the back and a narrow wooden staircase. Two floors up, a door opened to classroom-size space at the top of the building. It was full of middle-aged men in winter coats and hats. Some had removed their coats but not their hats, and their sleeves were rolled up. Several had numbers on their forearms.

The Kaddish was sung. Several stood. It was recited again, and others stood. Then again. Maybe it was sung more than once to accommodate the number of mourners, or it was recited more than once to acknowledge mourning present as well as mourning past, or maybe in my memory it echoes to timeless numbers of repetitions till this day. The Kaddish was recited in front of me by survivors, is sung today on another Sabbath, will be recited again next week and on into a future so full of loss and grief that one may think one never had anything at all to lose so much.

After all, the Kaddish can perhaps never be recited a number of times equal to the number of times it is needed. The depth of the request it makes renders all grief into perpetual grief as well as a perpetual thanksgiving, though: “Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored, adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, beyond all the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that are ever spoken in the world; and say, Amen.” It renders all grief ever felt by every human being into a thanksgiving for all humanity. However, in everyday life and in some exceptionally dark moments, humanity can be the first thing we humans lose, like a cab with no brakes. The light in front of us is red: “May there be abundant peace from heaven.” The light down there is red.

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Mark Aldrich is a journalist, award-winning humor columnist, and writer/performer with the Magnificent Glass Pelican radio comedy improv group, now in its thirty-second season:

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