The Secret-Police Files That Revealed My Family’s History
The French psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham that some of us are haunted by “the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.” Growing up as a Ukrainian American, I felt these gaps myself. My grandfather appeared in photographs of my mother as a child, but otherwise no one spoke of him. My middle name, Stephanie, is an homage to my mother’s eldest sister; she lives in Ukraine, but we usually just said she was . A photo of my grandmother’s brother, who died fighting with the Ukrainian nationalist movement after World War II, watched over us while we ate pierogies at her Cleveland home after church. When she talked about him, she cried. I couldn’t fully understand her grief; even as I grew older and learned about Ukrainian history, my family’s past felt somehow out of reach.
