A photographer reflects on her ancestral home in Izium, Ukraine

I was born in Moscow and grew up there until moving to the United States in 1994 at age 13. Before I moved to the United States, I would go to Izium every summer to spend time with our relatives. In 2010 — 18 years after my last visit to Ukraine — I returned to visit my grandmother. She moved back to Izium after my grandfather passed away.

At the time, I was about to go back to school to study photography. I decided to photograph my visit. So began my first serious photography project that continues to this day.

On four separate visits to both Moscow and Izium, between 2010 and 2020, working through powerful nostalgia, I searched with all my senses for present-day evidence of my childhood memories. While Moscow became less and less recognizable to me on each subsequent trip, time appeared to stand still in Izium. In the early years of the project, I felt consumed by nostalgia. Then, on my later visits, I began to feel more in the present with my family. I started to come to terms with aging, the passage of time and the difficulty of reconciling our lives on different continents. During each of my past two visits, I believed it would be the last time I would see my grandmother. Yet she surprised me and made it to 90, and then 91. Just before the pandemic halted international travel and family gatherings, I celebrated her 90th birthday with her in early March 2020. When she passed away just past 91, I did not go to her funeral in the second year of the pandemic.

After living my entire adult life in the United States, I have a better understanding of U.S. politics than that in Ukraine or Russia. What I know is each of my past visits to Izium has revealed the scars of history in the area.

During World War II, Izium was occupied twice by Axis forces. My grandma and her sister hid from bombs in a neighbor’s root cellar as young girls. During one of the occupations, an Axis officer was billeted in our house. World War II memorials speak to the battles that took place in the area and the loss of about 1 million people (on both sides). An hour and a half drive from Izium, on the outskirts of Kharkiv, is Drobytsky Yar, where more than 15,000 Jews were executed during the war. Suffering in the area predates World War II, however. On my latest trip, I visited the nearby town of Kupyansk. I came upon a memorial honoring the local victims of what is known as Holodomor, a famine that killed millions of Ukrainians between 1932 and 1933 and was later recognized by Ukraine as genocide committed by Joseph Stalin’s government.

During the latest conflict in eastern Ukraine against Russia-backed separatists Izium has remained firmly in the Ukrainian government’s control — first about 30 miles, and now about 200 miles, from the active conflict zone. Nonetheless, Izium has not been untouched. The town’s hospital took in many wounded at the height of the conflict in 2014. People fleeing the fighting have continued to settle in the town in the years that followed. Today, my family and the entire town are living in fear of the escalating conflict.

I asked my family in Ukraine during one of my visits if we are Ukrainian or Russian. Their answer perplexed me. They said they did not know. They speak primarily Russian at home but switch easily between Russian and Ukrainian, like most of the population in the region. The mix of Ukrainian and Russian spoken in the region even has its own name, Surzhyk. To me, this mix of languages sounds like the voice of loved ones, the comfort of home, the names of delicious foods prepared by my great-aunt, and the neighbors who somehow know when I’m arriving, in the place Where They Wait for Me.

My relatives tell me it has never mattered to ordinary people in Izium or in the region whether you are Ukrainian or Russian or which language you speak. The residents, who all have had either firsthand experience or intergenerational memories of wars past and present, agree that an imperfect peace is better than war. As I read the news of the escalating conflict on my phone in Los Angeles every morning, I only wish more suffering can be prevented and peace and healing can prevail for the people who have already seen far too much suffering.