“Ukraine my native land,” thus spoke my maternal grandfather Aron (Arkady) Polyak, who was born and grew up in Kamenets-Podolsk (Kamianets-Podilskyi) and moved to Moscow in his youth to obliterate his “bourgeois” status and then to attend university. Prior to entering the gymnasium, my paternal grandfather, Peysakh (Pyotr) Shrayer, who also grew up in Kamianets, spoke Ukrainian not as well as he did Yiddish, but much better than Russian. As a young man in the 1920s he moved to Leningrad to become a member of the new Soviet intelligentsia. After a lifetime of living in Leningrad, Grandfather Pyotr never forgot...