I don’t care about my family tree. Do you?

I so don’t care. Zero interest. I sometimes think it must be a gene — not caring about my previous generations.

My grandparents are as far as I will go in my love and appreciation of my predecessors. I knew them all closely and my grandmother on my father’s side is still alive. She and I have always had a close relationship. We haven’t seen each other, since I left Russia a decade ago, but we’re forever close. When I call her, it’s never a difficult conversation. She has the clearest of minds, despite being very fragile, as she approaches ninety.

I know my grandparents’ life journeys, and how they all ended up in Moscow, after roaming the vastness of the Soviet Union, for family reasons, for their relationships and careers, or because of historic events (my grandmother for example was separated from her parents during the war and spent her childhood with a Belarus family). My grandfather was from Ukraine and we still keep in close touch with his younger sister who lives in the city of Vinnytsia, one of the cities bombed by Russia in the war against Ukraine… Not the most relevant point for this particular story, but I couldn’t resist mentioning it. How it’d come to this — Russia killing its brothers and sisters, forcing millions to flee both Ukraine and Russia itself — still feels surreal. Talk about ancestry and life journeys — this past year millions of life journeys have been disrupted and rerouted. Decades and centuries later, when people explore the lives of the preceding generations, they will be seeing the…